AUBURN – Bob Darling swears he’s not thinner.

“I’ve been at about 210 now for about three years,” Darling said in a ‘Why-do-people-keep-asking-me’ tone.

“Maybe it’s this?”

He ran the fingers of his left hand through a graying blonde tuft of hair growing from his chin and smiled as he twirled an iron with his right.

The sun reflected brightly off his dark-lensed glasses, which he tucked deep underneath the brim of his navy blue cap. All that was missing was his cigar, though the scent of a fresh-burning stogie caught the wind, suggesting it wasn’t far away.

The goatee was new, yes. And so is the gray that has slowly seeped into his golden locks.

Perhaps he’s just trying to fit in.

Darling, the head professional and director of golf at Fox Ridge Golf Club in Auburn, will tee off this week with the world’s best senior golfers at the Senior PGA Championship in Rochester, N.Y.

Not just along for the ride

Darling will rub elbows with golfing elite, from Tom Watson and Ben Crenshaw, to Gary Player, Fred Couples and Fuzzy Zoeller.

And he’s going to do his best to try and beat them.

“You have these guys coming up, ‘Hey, if you play with Gary Player, can you get me an autograph?'” Darling said. “Certainly it would be a treat to play with him or with any of those guys, but I will treat them like another player, and an older player, for that matter.”

At 51, Darling will be among the younger players walking around Oak Hill Country Club this week. Golfers are not eligible for senior events until they turn 50.

“I’m a little younger than some of those guys,” Darling said. “Granted, I don’t play as much as they do, as much tournament golf, but the golf courses are a little bit shorter, too.”

Oak Hill is a shade more than 7,000 yards and plays to a par-70, with two par-5s and four par-3s

“I guess it’s a little tight out there,” Darling said. “They’ll treat it like a championship, of course, and I imagine the greens will get quick, but they don’t like to get them too fast for those guys.”

Besides, Darling pointed out, people don’t want to see scores in the mid-70s, rather in the upper-60s, even at big tournaments.

Getting ready

Darling qualified for the Senior PGA Championship with a tied-for-10th finish at last year’s Senior PGA Professional National Championship at the PGA Golf Club in Port St. Lucie, Fla., five shots behind winner William Loeffler of Colorado.

For his efforts, Darling earned $5,150, but more importantly, he earned exemptions into a couple of much bigger tournaments. The low 35 finishers qualified for the 2008 Senior PGA Championship.

On his annual retreat to a warmer climate this winter, Darling worked primarily on his short game.

“I spent more time on that this winter than anything else,” Darling said. “My short game was good. I struggled off the tee a little bit. Some of it is an equipment change (he has a lighter shaft on his driver), but it’s the person hanging onto the end of it, too, I think. I’d go to the range after struggling with it on the course and pop them right out there like it was nothing.”

Future implications

A solid showing at this tournament could mean future gigs for Darling.

“If you can get into the top 15 or top 20 or whatever, you can get exempted into the following event,” Darling said. “If you make enough money in that one, then somehow down the road this summer, you get into another one, and then you accumulate that money, they might bring you in again.”

But that might be as far as it goes. He admitted that he has a pretty good setup right where he is.

“I could try to go to tour school, and I think I could probably get one of those top-30 spots,” Darling said, “but all of the top-30 have to go to the Monday qualifiers, where they only take five or six or seven spots, whatever it is. Number one, I don’t have the money to be chasing that around, and number two, you have guys who don’t need to play golf anymore who still have status on the senior tour and they want to keep on playing, and I can’t blame them.”

Some of those golfers Darling referred to include some familiar names which brought a chuckle out from behind the new beard.

“My goal, number one, is to make the cut,” Darling said, “but I also want to beat Fred Funk and Jeff Sluman. I played a lot of golf with those guys way back. I know I can hit it further than those guys, but that isn’t the name of the game. The name of the game is getting it in the hole, and they’ve done a pretty good job of that over the years.”

Darling went to school with Funk at Maryland, and battled Sluman, who went to Florida State, in ACC tournaments.

All kidding aside, though, Darling is just hoping for a solid showing.

“I don’t want to get excited to the point that it causes the nerves to be more than what they need to be,” Darling said. “I want to just go out and play golf.”