North vacates analyst chair to play at Mitsubishi Classic

“It’s hard to make yourself go practice and do the stuff you’ve always done if you don’t have any reason to go do it. So I go months at a time without hitting a ball — which is wonderful.”

Some wonderful advice: You may not want to play Andy North this week in your Champions Tour fantasy league (there’s got to be one, right?).

A certain level of honesty is required of a fellow who makes his living dissecting golfers in public, especially when the subject is himself. Last week North was up the road in Augusta, working the Masters for the four-letter network. And after ESPN finishes documenting Kobe Bryant’s every muscle twitch, there will be more work for North this year come the Players Championship and the British Open.

This week, the 66-year-old North is at TPC Sugarloaf in Duluth making a rare competitive appearance on the over-50 Champions Tour at the Mitsubishi Electric Classic.

And, no, as of Wednesday, he said he hasn’t spoken with Lanny Wadkins or Bob Papa or anyone else on the Golf Channel broadcast crew about taking it easy on him as a courtesy to a media colleague.

Teeing it up here is sort of a wake-up call for North, who needs to shake the dust off his clubs before his annual pairing with Tom Watson in the two-man, best ball Champions event next week in Missouri. They have a track record together in that one, having won one version or another of it four times, the last in 2008.

There remain enough embers of competitive fire that when asked about his expectations for this week, North’s first words were, “I expect to play decent.”

And then came the quick disclaimer, “That’s probably stupid. But you hope you can figure something out and go out and make some putts and do whatever you need to do to shoot some decent scores.”

And yet he retains enough realism to realize that you can’t fall out of bed and break par when for the past several years you have played less golf than the President. Between North’s work schedule, his accumulated pains that have increasingly limited his ability to hit balls and his charity work with hospitals in his native Wisconsin and South Dakota, who can play? Muscle memory will have to do.

In fact, falling out of bed might have been less painful than what met North Wednesday, after a little time on the practice range the day before.

“I can’t hit a lot of balls. I probably did too much yesterday and I woke up this morning and I could hardly get out of bed,” he said, with nary a trace of wistfulness.

North’s appearance here is a nice reminder of fact that the guy who has been on TV since 1993, the last decade as lead analyst, used to swat it around a little, too. There is a generation of golf followers who only know North as the calm dispenser of measured opinion on the ESPN set.

He’s the same guy who also possesses one of the quirkier professional bodies of work — three PGA Tour career titles with two of them being the regal U.S. Open. That’s two more U.S. Open titles than you, Sam Snead, Phil Mickelson and Sir Nick Faldo combined.

North is past the age of Champions Tour glory. From age 50 to 53, he played regularly, managing a good string of top 10 finishes but no victories. “I never played out here anywhere near as well as I could have because I was still trying to do 20 weeks of TV, too,” he said. Back problems, the golfer’s bane, took care of him from there.

Asked to analyze this week’s Mitsubishi Classic field, North likes those young pups, those players between 50 and 55. Four of the five Champions Tour winners so far this year fall into that range.

North’s take on the TPC Sugarloaf course also favors the young: “This is a very difficult course for us older guys. It’s exceptionally long and hilly.”

As to his own key to three days of competition, beginning Friday, that is measured by the dose.

“Depends on how the Advil holds up,” he said.