Tales from Q School: Inside Golf's Fifth Major Read online

  In 2005 the tour had about 400 players in its noncompetitive file. That, along with the growing number of entrants despite the higher entry fee, led Carman to create the preliminary stage. It was planned for two sites in September, and Carman expected between 100 and 150 players to participate. As it turned out, though, there were fewer than 50 entries, and the preliminary stage was put on hold until 2006.

  “We’ve tried a lot of things to make sure that we don’t have guys who simply don’t belong,” Carman said. “Most of the guys in first stage these days are good players, guys who have a legitimate chance, if they play well, to at least make second stage. But we still run into the occasional player who has somehow faked his way in or, in some cases, might have been a reasonably good player once upon a time but just isn’t good enough now. We figured by adding the preliminary stage, we might scare some guys off. I guess, based on the entries, we did—at least for one year.”

  In 2005 a total of 1,205 players entered the PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament. Forty-two of those players met at least one of the six criteria that allowed them to go straight to the finals.

  1. Any player who had finished between 126th and 150th on the 2005 PGA Tour money list.

  2. Any nonmembers who had earned enough money to finish at least 150th on the money list. (This category rarely came into play. When it did, it usually involved someone who had graduated from college in the spring, turned pro, and, playing on special exemptions, made as much money as the 150th player on the money list but not as much as the 125th player. If a player made as much as the 125th player on the list, he went straight to the PGA Tour. In 2005 Ryan Moore, the 2004 U.S. Amateur champion, made it straight to the 2006 tour by earning $686,250 in twelve events after turning pro. That would have placed him 117th on the money list if he had been a tour member and put him $60,000 clear of Nick Price, who finished 125th on the list.)

  3. Any player on a medical exemption whose earnings in 2004 (assuming he was healthy at the time) would have put him between 126th and 150th on the money list.

  4. Any player who had finished between 22nd and 36th on the 2005 Nationwide Tour money list.

  5. Any player who had finished in the top ten on the money list of a major foreign tour (e.g., the European, Australasia, or Japan tour).

  6. Any player in the top 50 of the World Golf Ranking. (It is highly unlikely that any such player would need to go to Q School. The only time it might occur would be if someone who played strictly on an overseas tour decided he wanted to play full-time in the United States.)

  Among those who were exempt into the finals were past tournament winners Notah Begay (who had won four times on tour), Neal Lancaster, J. P. Hayes, David Peoples, Tom Scherrer, Ian Leggatt, Frank Lickliter, and Garrett Willis. Also on that list was Bob May, who had never won on the tour but was vividly remembered by most golf fans because of his final-day duel with Tiger Woods in the 2000 PGA Championship, which Woods finally won in a play-off. May had undergone major back surgery in 2004, and Q School would be his first tournament since the surgery. Other notable names who would go straight to the finals were Bill Haas (the twenty-three-year-old son of longtime tour star Jay Haas), who had finished 23rd on the Nationwide money list, and Joe Daley, who had not made it back to the PGA Tour since his two-footer had somehow bounced out of the hole in Palm Springs. Daley, who hadn’t turned pro until he was thirty-two (he’d worked as a credit manager in a bank until then), was forty-five and running out of time. He had finished 24th on the Nationwide money list.

  There were nine ways to get out of playing first stage.

  1. Any member of the PGA Tour in 2005.

  2. Any player who had won a tournament on the Nationwide Tour since 2000.

  3. The top ten finishers in the PGA Club Professional Championship who chose to enter Q School (down to a floor of 25th place). (Most didn’t have time to leave their jobs to do so.)

  4. Any player who had made a cut at one of the four major championships or the Players Championship. (The PGA Tour is clearly trying to put the Players in the same category as the four majors.)

  5. Any player from a major foreign tour who had finished between 4th and 10th among those entered from his tour.

  6. Any player who had made at least fifty cuts on the PGA Tour.

  7. Any player who had finished 37th through 71st on the 2005 Nationwide money list.

  8. Any player ranked 51st through 100th in the World Golf Ranking.

  9. The top two players from any secondary foreign tours (e.g., Canadian, South Africa, or Asian)—which is different from Australasian, for those keeping score at home).

  A total of 190 players were exempt into second stage. Some of those who were exempt to second stage but not to the finals were eye-popping. Larry Mize, who had won the 1987 Masters, would play second stage. So would past tour winners Steve Stricker (who had won the Match Play title in 2001 and had finished second to Vijay Singh in the 1998 PGA Championship), Bill Glasson (seven tour wins), Dan Forsman (five), Blaine McCallister, Mike Hulbert, Donnie Hammond, Guy Boros, Brian Henninger, Tom Byrum, Matt Gogel, Jim McGovern, Rick Fehr, Mike Springer, and Grant Waite. There were others who’d had significant success on the tour but were now back playing second stage, such as Tommy Tolles and Skip Kendall, who had finished second on four different occasions and had been in the top 50 on the money list (with a high of 32nd) from 1999 to 2001.

  In all, 232 players were exempt from first stage. They would also save a little money on the entry fee: those exempt to the finals paid $3,500; those exempt to second stage paid $4,000; and everyone else, 973 players in all, paid $4,500 and headed for first stage, knowing that the chances that they would tee it up in golf nirvana, the 2006 PGA Tour, were slim. But they also knew that in 2004, nine players had started at first stage and ended up on the tour. In addition, 19 players had made it from first stage to the finals and had played on the Nationwide Tour. Each of them was convinced that he was going to be among the handful of players who would beat the odds.

  Most of them would, of course, be wrong.

  ONE OF THE FEW PLAYERS who wasn’t thinking he was going to beat the odds was Casey Martin.

  It hadn’t been that long since Martin had been one of the best-known golfers in the world. At the 1998 U.S. Open, the only player in the field with a larger gallery was his onetime Stanford teammate Tiger Woods. Back then, everyone who followed golf—and many who didn’t—knew who Martin was. He was the talented, bright, outgoing kid who had something called Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber syndrome, a degenerative disease in his right leg. He had been born with the disease, which caused him to walk with a noticeable limp and made walking golf courses for a living close to impossible, especially as he got older and his leg got worse.

  In 1997 Martin petitioned the PGA Tour to allow him to use a golf cart. The tour’s rules were clear: everyone walked. The only exception had been during Q School, when players were allowed to ride because it was a six-day tournament and frequently the only caddy a player could afford was his wife or girlfriend. Some players didn’t use a caddy at all. But that loophole had been closed in 1996, and Martin was told that if he wanted to play in the Q School finals in 1997, he would have to walk.

  That was the first time Martin took the tour to court, and he won. He got a court order saying that the tour had to let him use a cart based on the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). He used a cart during the Q School finals in 1997, and although he missed qualifying for the PGA Tour (by two shots), he did play well enough to gain full status on the Nike Tour. Still using a cart, he won his first Nike Tour tournament early in 1998. That was when the attention—and the controversy—started to build.

  The tour decided to take a hard line against allowing Martin to use a cart. Commissioner Tim Finchem and many top players took the position that walking was part of the game and allowing someone to ride could give him a competitive advantage (since riding isn’t as tiring as walking). Martin’s position was twofold. Legally, he said, the ADA
gave him the right to a cart the same way a disabled person who bought a ticket to a golf tournament was allowed to use a cart while a healthy person could not. Logically, he added, watch me walk from my cart onto the tees or the greens or into a bunker, and see if you think I’m not going to be tired at the end of a round.

  Martin wasn’t even on the PGA Tour when the controversy began making news. But after he qualified for the U.S. Open on a searingly hot day in Cincinnati, riding 36 holes while everyone else in the field walked, he arrived in San Francisco for the Open as the most talked about player in the tournament other than his old friend Tiger Woods. “I remember feeling incredible pressure both that week and that year because I was under the microscope all the time,” Martin said. “The interesting thing is, I probably played my best golf during that period. I seemed to thrive on the attention and on the pressure.”

  “Cart-gate” divided the locker room. Some players were adamant that no one should be allowed to play from a cart. Veterans with their own physical problems, like Fred Couples and Scott Verplank, said that they would apply for carts, too, if Martin was granted one. Legends like Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer said that the traditions of the game would be violated if players were allowed to play in carts. Others saw it differently. The late Payne Stewart argued that there was a clear difference between something that caused discomfort (such as Couples’s sore back) and a degenerative disease that made one legally disabled. “We should give the kid the cart,” Stewart said. “It makes us [the tour and the players] look bad to be fighting him on this. You take one look at him trying to walk, and there’s no doubt he’s hurting.”

  What’s more, those who met Martin almost immediately jumped on board (or on cart) with him. He is bright and has a disarming, self-deprecating sense of humor. The players who knew him best, notably Woods and Notah Begay, another Stanford teammate, were adamantly in his corner. “If you had seen Casey try to walk 18 holes on a regular basis like we did at Stanford, you would feel differently,” Woods told doubters. “Plus, he’s a guy who would be great for golf.”

  No one doubted that. Martin’s is the kind of story the tour would have latched onto and publicized if not for the cart issue. He grew up in Eugene, Oregon, and never thought he would be good enough or strong enough to play even college golf. But he blossomed as a high school player and was recruited by all the national golf powers. He chose Stanford and was part of a national championship team in 1995, when he was a senior. Although his leg hurt when he walked, he was able to handle it. But he knew the leg was getting worse. Doctors had told him there was a chance that, at some point in his life, he would face amputation.

  Martin turned pro after graduating with a degree in economics and sailed through the first stage of Q School. But he missed making it through second stage by two shots and was devastated. “It meant I had no status at all for ’96,” he said. “I wasn’t even focused on making the PGA Tour that year. I just wanted to get to the finals and get on the Nike Tour. I thought I was good enough to at least do that, and I didn’t. It was definitely a setback.”

  He ended up playing most of his golf the next two years on the NGA/Hooters Tour, with some mini-tour events thrown in. The Hooters Tour (named for the restaurant chain famous for scantily clad waitresses and mediocre food) is at least a level down from the Nationwide (then Nike) Tour. For one thing, as on mini-tours, players have to pay fairly substantial entry fees each week. The purses are less than half of what they are on the Nike Tour, and the golf courses and locales are second-rate as well.

  “It is not a fun way to live,” Martin said. “After a while, you get sick of the towns and the hotels and the places you go to eat. It’s a lonely life, and it certainly isn’t a lucrative life, even if you play well. By the summer of my second year out there, I was sick and tired of the whole thing, and my leg was getting worse. I quit midway through the summer to rest my leg. I figured I’d take one more shot at Q School, and if I couldn’t at least make the finals, I’d be done. I’d go get a job.”

  This time, he sailed through first stage and in second stage went into the last round at the Bayonet Course at Fort Ord, California (considered one of the toughest Q School courses) right on the cut line. “I knew I needed a good round to get through,” Martin said. “I shot 69, one of the best rounds of my life under pressure. I was thrilled. After the round, I started talking to one of the tour officials about needing a cart to get through six rounds at the finals. The guy had just been telling me how happy he was for me, and when I brought up the cart, his face just turned to stone. ‘There’s no way,’ he told me. ‘Don’t even bother applying.’ It really took me aback.”

  As it turned out, the official was right. Martin’s request for a cart was immediately rejected, despite the facts that players had been allowed to use carts in the finals for many years and carts had been allowed during the first two stages that year.

  “When the court ruled in my favor and gave me the cart for the finals, that’s when my life changed,” Martin said with a laugh. “You know, all kidding aside, the PGA Tour made me. If not for them making such a big deal out of the cart, no one would ever have heard of me. I probably wouldn’t have gotten the endorsements I got, the attention I got, and I certainly never would have seen the inside of the Supreme Court.”

  PGA Tour v. Martin ended up in the Supreme Court after one lower court ruled for Martin and another ruled for the tour. The Martin case became front-page news, one of those stories that the nonsports media latched onto. It had just about everything you could want in a story: a young athlete taking on what appeared to be a heartless bureaucracy; political implications; and superstar athletes divided over a kid whom they never would have known anything about if not for his bad leg and his golf cart.

  The cart controversy not only changed Martin’s life; it also changed his outlook on life. “I grew up a dyed-in-the-wool conservative Republican,” he said. “Heck, if it had been someone else in my shoes and I was just an observer, I’d have probably been one of those guys saying, ‘He can’t have a cart. If he can’t walk, get him out of there.’ But I wasn’t. I was the guy living it. That made me rethink a lot of things, like, just as an example, how I felt about welfare. I couldn’t help but wonder if I was the one living that life, I might feel differently on that subject, too. I found myself looking at things through a different lens.

  “To tell the truth, the Republicans really disappointed me. I’ll be completely honest and tell you I was appalled by the positions taken by Justice [Antonin] Scalia and Justice [Clarence] Thomas. I just think they’re completely heartless. Bob Dole was the exception, but his experience was like mine—he’d been through it, knew what it felt like to be handicapped. I remember going on Bill O’Reilly’s show and walking away thinking, ‘This guy is a complete schmuck.’ It pains me to say it, but most of the people who showed compassion for me, who seemed to want to help out someone who was downtrodden, were Democrats. I came away from the experience with a lot of different feelings on a lot of different subjects.”

  The case was heard by the Supreme Court on January 17, 2001. Martin remembers most of that experience as being thrilling. “Not that many people get to have a case tried in the Supreme Court with their name on it and [that] doesn’t involve life or death,” he said. “That was an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experience to sit there. I came away with so much respect for the lawyers on both sides. I mean, arguing before the Supreme Court is the Super Bowl or the Masters for them. They’re getting grilled from all directions, and they better be right when they answer a question. Eight of those nine judges were intimidating and impressive, regardless of which side they came down on. Watching the whole thing just made my jaw drop.”

  The one justice who wasn’t intimidating or impressive was Thomas. He never asked a question. In fact, throughout most of the arguments, he sat back in his chair with his eyes closed. “My lawyer had warned me about that before we went in,” Martin said. “He told me, ‘Don’t be shocked if
you see Judge Thomas napping. He does that.’ Even so, it was shocking to see.”

  Martin had finished 29th on the Nike Tour money list in 1998, fading down the stretch when he’d had a chance to make the top 15 and earn a trip to the PGA Tour in 1999. (In those days, the top 15 made the tour.) A year later, while his case was still winding its way through the courts, he put together a more consistent year and finished 14th on the Nike money list. His ticket to the PGA Tour was punched for 2000. He was twenty-seven years old, and now he had his chance. He didn’t play horribly on the tour. He had some good rounds and some tournaments where he went into Sunday with a chance for a big check. But it never quite came together for him. He made fourteen cuts in twenty-nine events with only one top-25 finish (tied for 17th in Tucson). That left him 179th on the money list, sending him back to Q School and then to what had now become the Buy.com Tour.

  On May 29, 2001, four days before Martin’s twenty-ninth birthday, the Supreme Court ruled 7–2 in his favor, his friends Scalia and Thomas dissenting. He no longer had to worry about losing his cart. In his dissent, Scalia accused the majority of looking at the ADA far too liberally, saying that the law was intended for “no such ridiculous thing” as Martin’s case. By then, just about everyone in golf had accepted Martin and his cart as part of the scenery, and even players who had come out against him in the past congratulated him on his victory. In the movies, he would have won the U.S. Open shortly thereafter. In real life, his golf game went south.

  “I wish I could figure out why, but the fact is, my golf has sucked since the Court ruled for me,” he said. “I’ve thought about it a lot, and I honestly don’t have any answers as to why. Has my leg gotten worse? Yes. There are times when I make a swing that I know is good and the teachers I’m working with say is good, and I feel pain. When I make a swing that’s completely pain-free, it isn’t a good golf swing. So most of the time when I swing a club I feel pain—mental or physical. But I don’t think that’s why I haven’t played better. With me, [the problem] has always been my putter. When I was playing my best golf, my strength was my ball-striking. If I could make some putts, I played very well. The last couple of years, my ball-striking hasn’t been as good as it was when I was younger, but it’s still good enough—if I can make putts. I haven’t made putts, and that has nothing to do with my leg.”