TIANT

Luis Tiant doesn’t putt the way he pitched.

While he seemed to look everywhere but at home plate when he was on the mound, he actually looks at the hole when he’s on the green.

The results, it should be noted, are similar — in both sports, the ball usually winds up where Luis intended.

Speaking of windups . . .

“I liked to show my number to the hitter,” said El Tiante, who would turn his back to the plate, as if in utter disdain of the batter, at the start of his convoluted but highly effective delivery.

“I’d look out to center field. I’d look up at the sky. I’d check out any good-looking women I could see in the stands. Then I’d throw the ball.”

For 19 seasons — 8 of them with the Boston Red Sox — there were few pitchers in baseball who threw the ball as well as Tiant.

Although he says his best year was 1968, when he was 21-9 for the Indians with an ERA of 1.60 — he would probably have won the Cy Young Award that year had Denny McLain not won 30 games for the World Series-champion Tigers — Tiant averaged 17 wins a season for the Sox from 1972 through ’78.

The numbers he compiled seem even more impressive now, in these days of pampered pitchers who almost never finish what they start.

In 1973, when Tiant was 20-13, he pitched 23 complete games. He was even better the following year, when he was 22-13 with 25 complete games. He won 18 games in ’75, when Boston won the pennant, then added two more wins in that unforgettable World Series against the Reds: pitching complete-game victories in Games One and Four.

El Tiante threw a five-hit shutout in the Series opener, then came back and won again in Game Four, 5-4, when he threw a mind-boggling 164 pitches. Thanks to some bad weather, he was on the mound again in Game Six, but left the game in the eighth with Boston trailing, 6-3. The Sox rallied to tie the game on Bernie Carbo’s three-run homer in the bottom of the eighth, and won it in the 11th on Carlton Fisk’s famous home run just inside the left-field foul pole at Fenway.

Tiant also won 21 games for Boston in 1976, but it wasn’t merely his outstanding pitching performances that endeared him to Red Sox fans: it was the obvious joy he took in practicing his craft.

“I always had fun being on the mound,” Tiant said Tuesday, when he’d just come off the golf course at Carnegie Abbey, in Portsmouth.

He had teamed with his good friend Stan Abrams, a two-time R.I. Amateur champion and the Journal’s Honor Roll Boy at Pawtucket West High in 1960 before going on to play football and captain the golf team at Harvard, as well as congenial Barrington businessman Paul Vartanian and a local journalist with a penchant for bogeys and clichés in a tournament to benefit Button Hole.

“Striking out guys,” said El Tiante, “making them look bad at the plate — that’s what I loved to do.”

He now enjoys playing golf — participating, he estimated, in more than 40 such events a year. He hones his game at Granite Links, Abrams’ outstanding new course in Quincy, Mass., with dramatic views of the downtown Boston skyline.

“Golf’s harder than baseball,” Tiant said while standing on the tee of the 18th hole at the Abbey, where the tee shot must cross the waters of Narragansett Bay and a rocky shingle of shoreline in order to land in the fairway in front of the elegantly old-fashioned, weathered-shingle clubhouse.

“You have to think about so many things when you play golf,” said El Tiante, shifting an ever-present cigar to the corner of his mouth, which is somewhat obscured by a bushy, Fu Manchu mustache. “Your brain gets fried.”

His comment brought to mind a comment once made by baseball sage Lawrence Peter Berra: “I can’t think and hit at the same time.”

Abrams, who spent a great deal of time with the late Sam Snead, one of golf’s all-time greats, recalled a comment that Swingin’ Sam once made to the Splendid Splinter, Ted Williams.

When the Red Sox slugger insisted that it was harder to hit a baseball than a golf ball, Snead replied: “In baseball, you don’t have to hit your foul balls.”

It was hard to hit even a foul ball off Tiant, who, as a young pitcher in Cleveland, threw his fastball in the high 90s and also had a devastating curveball. As he got older, he added guile to a dazzling, and batter-baffling, array of “stuff.”

So it was no wonder that he was a popular participant at Tuesday’s event to raise money for Button Hole, the short course and teaching center near Olneyville that introduces the game to many youngsters who otherwise might never have a chance to play.

This was the third year that Brian O’Neill, chairman of the company that owns Carnegie Abbey, has hosted the event. His company, O’Neill Properties Group, also makes a sizable financial contribution in support of Button Hole, which last year helped nearly 2,000 kids become better acquainted with the game of golf.

“We’re thrilled to be involved with Button Hole,” said Stephen M. Downes, the CEO and general manager of the Carnegie Abbey Club. “Giving something back to the game through kids is an important thing for Brian.”

As a kid growing up in Cuba, Tiant learned the game from his father, Luis Sr., a talented lefty who pitched in America for more than 20 years, mostly for the New York Cubans in the Negro Leagues.

Young Luis left Cuba as a teenager to play for the Mexico City Tigers, where he was signed by the Indians. He was 15-1 for Portland of the Triple-A Pacific Coast League in 1964 when he was called up to Cleveland, where he debuted by pitching a complete-game, 4-hit, 11-strikeout victory over the American League-champion Yankees.

Tiant now is in the cigar business with his sons, selling high-class stogies handmade in Nicaragua that are adorned with a wrapper featuring him in full windup, wearing a Red Sox uniform and with his number, 23, clearly visible.

It’s been 30 years since he pitched for Boston, but Tiant remains a fan favorite. He’s also a favorite on the celebrity golf circuit — in part because of shots like he hit on the par-3 11th yesterday.

After admiring the breathtaking view of Narragansett Bay from the elevated tee, El Tiante proceeded to hit a 6-iron to within a foot of the hole, nearly 185 downhill yards away. When he tapped in for birdie, one of his partners chanted: “Loo-ie! Loo-ie! Loo-ie!”

It was like Fenway by the fairway.

jdonalds@projo.com