Tuesday, August 19, 2003

By Chuck Finder, Post-Gazette Sports Writer

Steve Slayden bogeyed the final hole yesterday because of a lay-up shot that landed way short and left and in the rough down the slope from the 18th green.

One glance at that effort, and his father knew.

The brain surgery.

"It looked like it showed up on that last shot," Case Slayden told his son afterward.

To think, that bogey nudged the golfer only as far back as 1-over 71, tied for the third-lowest round at Oakmont Country Club's vexing version of the U.S. Amateur. Of the top 43 scores recorded on the tournament's first day, Steve Slayden's was one of five derived at Oakmont -- the rest were at the more-forgiving Pittsburgh Field Club. Not too shabby for a fellow whom doctors figured lost 10 percent of his motor coordination after surgery in 1990 to remove a malignant tumor.

"Angioma in the brain stem," Steve Slayden explained of the cancer in which blood or lymph vessels form a tumor. "It was on the right side of my brain and it affects my left side. It affects my golf a little bit, my left side."

He walks with a slight hitch on the left. He uses a club like a cane on the occasions when his balance falters.

Case Slayden still blesses his stars that at the time his son was dating the daughter of noted neurosurgeon Art Day, who performed the surgery at the University of Florida's Shands Hospital.

"I'm just lucky he's alive," Case Slayden said.

Steve Slayden, 37, is a former Cleveland Browns backup quarterback and Steve Spurrier pupil whose Duke passing records still rank among the all-time best in the Atlantic Coast Conference. He was on an NFL depth chart in the 1988 season behind Bernie Kosar and got cut just before the 1989 season. But any further chance of a football career ended in 1990 with the surgery.

"I couldn't play in the condition I'm in now," he said. "Now amateur golf is my only sport."

This from the man who hand-printed in his U.S. Golf Association bio about his most memorable golf experience or moment: "My left side has a motor coordination deficit so just playing golf at a high level is speial [sic]."

Two other words were started and scratched out.

This was the game he and brother Kevin -- a former Princeton golfer and football player -- grew up competing against a couple of other suburban Atlanta boys named Mark and Davis Love III. They went to Westminster High together.

Slayden, a real-estate broker from Charlotte, N.C., has won the Carolinas Amateur. He has beaten Oakmont's Sean Knapp in match play and finished as high as 11th in the U.S. Mid-Amateur. He has competed in a couple of British Amateur events. This marks his fourth U.S. Amateur in 10 tries, and he has yet to advance into match play.

Slayden, who is tied for 23rd after the first round of stroke play, will play the Field Club, which produced a dozen scores in the high-60s yesterday.

"I got to continue to hit it straight," Steve Slayden said.

He bogeyed the first and last holes at Oakmont, swinging those still-muscular shoulders and using that 6-foot-3 frame. It was a body that threw for 8,004 career yards at Duke, that set the ACC record for six touchdown passes in a game, that ranks third in all-time conference completions.

It was a body that is 10 percent less than what it once was before brain surgery.

"A lot of people thinks it affects my sense, but it doesn't," Steve Slayden said. "Nobody feels sorry for me."

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