SBC CLASSIC NOTEBOOK: LIETZKE READY TO SHOULDER LOAD.

Byline: Dave Shelburne Staff Writer

SANTA CLARITA - All golfers endure the occasional cold streak. Reigning U.S. Senior Open champion Bruce Lietzke is trying to cope with a ``frozen shoulder.''

Lietzke, who won seven of 54 starts in his first three years on the Champions Tour, has spent much of his fourth season thawing out from the most unusual physical setback he has ever experienced.

Aches, pain and injuries - nagging and serious - often are the norm on this tour for professional golfers aged 50 and over.

But Lietzke never had heard of the condition that felled him almost suddenly with one fateful practice swing in early December.

``I tried to swing a golf club out in my garage - I was up at my lake house in Oklahoma - and that's when my club stopped halfway back, and I had terrific pain.''

What he also had, he would find out later, was ``a thing called frozen shoulder,'' which has left him mostly an observer for the first two months of the 2004 tour season.

``It's a perfectly healthy shoulder that has no injuries of any kind, no arthritis of any kind,'' Lietzke said. ``And the body ... detects or thinks there's something in there, and the body's immune system shuts it down, clamps down on all the ligaments, and it almost freezes.''

It turned out to be a good-news, bad-news scenario for Lietzke, who has managed a 1-over-par 145 in the first two rounds of the SBC Classic at Valencia Country Club, where he is essentially playing more to regain competitive shape than for any hope of contending.

The bad news is he lost as much as four club's worth of distance because of the condition, during which his golf swing was reduced by as much as 50 percent in January, when ``my 4-iron was going 145 yards.''

The good news: ``When it's over, it will be 100-percent healthy again,'' said Lietzke, who found that out when he finally went to a doctor after a week of popping pills to reduce the increasing pain of what he thought was a pulled muscle.

An X-ray showed nothing. An MRI showed nothing.

``That's when the doctor came to me - and I'm in really bad pain trying to swing a golf club - and he said, 'Bruce, you have a perfectly healthy shoulder.' ''

The medical term is adhesive capsulitis.

``They have the facts and figures,'' Lietzke said. ``It happens to women more than men ... and it will never come back in this (right) shoulder again. I've got a 15 percent chance I'll get it in my left shoulder someday.''

Lietzke said his shoulder was ``90 to 95 percent'' this week in terms of flexibility, but the shoulder is not strong enough to challenge on a course he calls made to order for his left-to-right ball flight.

``It's pretty unfortunate,'' he said. ``This is a course that really favors a guy that fades the ball.''

--Best shots: Ron Cherney, a two-time El Caballero Country Club of Tarzana champion who was first alternate for last year's U.S. Senior Amateur, is at Valencia this weekend to promote a book that might interest plenty of golfers.

``Greatest Shots,'' written by Cherney and Michael Arkush and published by Harper Collins, is a collection of letters and hand-written notes from some of the world's most famous golfers. Tom Watson, Jack Nicklaus and dozens of others - including current SBC Classic participant Chi Chi Rodriguez - describe what they consider their finest shots.

Dave Shelburne, [phone]

dave.shelburne(at)dailynews.com