Golf’s Loss Is Charity’s Comic Gain

Comedian Tim Conway was just your average amateur golfer, trying to make his mark in the game.

“I did all the usual things,” he said. “I played twice a day, slept with a golf club, and tied my legs together to make sure they wouldn’t move when I swung.”

Conway, fellow comedian Harvey Korman and several others played every Monday at the Braemar Country Club in Tarzana with a revolving trophy as the weekly prize.

“The winning score varied,” he recalled, “anywhere from 140 to 210.”

Then one day, it all ended. Tragically.

“I hit the ball,” he said, “and it went backward, through my legs, and hit the guy behind me. I turned to him and said, ‘Excuse me, do you play golf? If so, please take these.’ And I gave him my clubs.”

Whether it happened exactly that way, that dark day in Conway’s athletic career was not his final day on a golf course.

And for that, an awful lot of young people afflicted with cerebral palsy are thankful.

Conway, 53, spends much of his time on the golf course these days behind a microphone.

And for that, an awful lot of golfers are thankful.

Conway will be back behind the mike Sunday, just as he has been each year for nearly two decades, taking his verbal swings at the golfing game of others as part of the Tim Conway Celebrity Golf Tournament.

It’s all for a good cause. Proceeds from the Conway event, which begins at the North Ranch Country Club in Westlake Village at 10 a.m. today, go to the United Cerebral Palsy/Spastic Childrens Foundation. About $200,000 is expected to be raised, which will bring the total pot in the 20-year-old event to nearly $4 million.

The contributions have come from spectators, golfers and the City of Thousand Oaks. There also have been grants from the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development and the Thousand Oaks Redevelopment Agency, plus a $1 million land donation from the Prudential Insurance Co.

The result: eight apartments specifically built and maintained for 130 young adults who are so severely affected by cerebral palsy that they are unable to live at home or care for themselves.

“What really attracted me to this,” Conway said in a rare moment of seriousness, “is that this disease is not too attractive. Not that any disease is attractive, but these kids were kept in the closet for so long. No one knew they were alive. There was nowhere they could go for someone to care for them. Nobody wanted to be bothered with them. When you see somebody who has braces on because of polio, they at least still have their mental faculties. But these poor kids, when they want to do something or say something, they can’t quite put it together. It must be really frustrating to want to do something simple like pick up a spoon and you just can’t.”

Actor William Demarest was the initial host of the tournament, but other commitments forced him to bow out after the first year. Conway, an Encino resident, was asked to step in.

“I was doing about 30 benefits a year,” Conway said, “but I was looking for one to stick to. You know, you steal a lot in this business and you always try to give a little back.”

At first, there were about 100 golfers paying $30 each to play a round of golf and endure Conway insults for their efforts. That first tournament raised about $3,500. This year, 180 golfers will pay $375 each.

The list of participants is always glamorous, and this year’s will be no different. Jack Lemmon, Frankie Avalon, Bruce Jenner, Bob Boone, Morgan Brittany, Rick Dempsey, Happy Hairston, Dennis James, Harvey Korman, Rod Laver, Trini Lopez, Ed Marinaro, Leslie Nielsen, Betty Thomas and many others are expected to participate.

And as always, Conway, helped now by radio personality Roger Barkley, will sit at a table behind the first tee and insult each and every golfer.

Nothing is sacred. Everything from the golfers’ swing (“That’s a great shot you made and if they ever build a hole over there in that underbrush, you’ll be first in line to putt”) to their clothes (“What do you call those shorts, your flood pants? At least you know you’ll never get your cuffs wet,” or “You must have gotten up so early your wife didn’t have time to dress you”) to their weight (“Well, you’ve licked anorexia. Now it looks like you’re in direct competition with Orca the whale”) is spotlighted.

“What we try to do is to start talking at the top of their backswing,” said Conway, who used to carry on this marathon tournament monologue for five hours before he enlisted Barkley to help him several years ago. “In the 20 years, we’ve only had one guy who said he wasn’t going to play anymore because he was so irritated by me.

“Some guys now bring their own material and try to be funny, which is great because they usually stink. They’re horrible so we make even more fun of them.”

Spectators are charged $2 a ticket. The event usually draws a gallery of anywhere from 7,000 to 10,000, with a new car featured as a raffle prize.

“We use a shotgun start,” Conway said. “We’ve tried other things. One year, we actually shot a guy, but that didn’t go over too well. Another year, we had the Blue Angels flying team come over, but they wound up breaking every window in Westlake, so we figured that wouldn’t work. The next year, we tried releasing 1,000 pigeons, but everyone wound up going to the cleaners.”

But it’s not all drudgery and hard work, putting together such innovative formats. Conway has even found time to return to the course and put together his own shattered game.

Not to mention helping others.

Conway, a four-time Emmy Award winner who has done everything from television to movies to the nightclub circuit, has put out an instructional golf video “guaranteed to add 30 strokes to your game.”

And Conway has even returned to his own weekly torture chamber at Braemar, playing with as much dedication as ever.

“I was out one day,” Conway said, “with Harvey Korman and announcer Ernie Anderson. Ernie likes to look for balls in the brush and this time, leaning over a bush, he got a thorn right in the corner of his eye.

“Now he comes over and asks us to take him to the hospital. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘but we’re playing golf here.’

“We finally flipped a coin and Harvey and I lost. So we had to let him have the cart to drive back.”