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Tales from Q School: Inside Golf's Fifth Major Page 6
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He sighed. “Maybe I just couldn’t live up to people’s expectations. When I was uncertain about whether I was going to be able to keep the cart, I was just thankful to be playing golf. I know I felt pressure, but it was different. When the Court ruled for me, it felt like expectations just exploded. I remember people saying to me, ‘Dude, you’re going to tear it up now.’ But I didn’t. I kept grinding, kept trying, but I couldn’t play the way I wanted to—or the way people expected me to. It’s disappointing.”
Martin became a Q School regular after the ruling, but he never made it back to the PGA Tour. “I’ve thought about Q School a lot,” he said. “It’s interesting how my attitude toward it changed through the years. At first it was exciting; it was an opportunity. As the years went by, I began to feel as if I was taking golf’s version of the bar exam—except that [I] didn’t just take it once; I took it over and over.” He laughed. “It’s almost as if you’re working in a law firm, and if you don’t bill enough hours, they make you go take the bar again. And if you don’t pass, you spend the next year working in the law firm—as a janitor.
“It is like a final exam, because you can’t rationalize or fool yourself or anyone else. If you aren’t good enough, you can’t say, ‘But I’m getting better’ or ‘I’ll do better next week or the week after.’ You’re either prepared and you come through or you don’t.
“Before I played on the tour, it was like an adventure. But afterward, it was different. I felt like I had worked hard to get to the tour, very hard, and it became a part of my identity—one that I wanted. So when I ended up back at Q School, I felt like I was playing for my identity. Part of it was the perks and the money, but it was more than that; it was my identity. When I was young and first played Q School, I thought I felt pressure. But I didn’t, certainly not compared to the pressure I felt when I had to go back. I’ve heard guys who have won on tour and had to go back talking about how tough that is, but at least they know they have some kind of status if they don’t make it, as past champions. Guys like me have nothing if we don’t play well.
“It’s tough sometimes to explain what has happened to your life to people who aren’t golf knowledgeable. They tend to think because they’ve seen you on TV that you’re a big star, that you have it made forever. Of course, that isn’t even close to being true. When you first come out of college, if you don’t make it, you don’t feel as if you’ve lost anything—because you’ve never had it. When you go back, though, there is a feeling of loss—something you once had is gone.”
After the Court ruling, Martin never again finished in the top 100 on the Nationwide money list. He played less and less, partly because he didn’t have full status, but more because he knew his game wasn’t there. He could have applied for sponsor exemptions and probably gotten them because, especially on the Nationwide, his name would still sell some tickets. But he thought it pointless to take a spot in the field from someone else when he was likely to miss the cut.
In the summer of 2005, he made a decision: he would work hard at his golf game one more time to try to prepare for Q School. He would have to go back to first stage, but that was okay. “I figured if I wasn’t good enough to get out of first stage, there was a message there,” he said.
He had quietly been told by people at the University of Oregon that there would likely be a coaching change for the school’s golf team in the spring of 2006, and if he was interested, he would be a prime candidate for the job. That was nice to know, but he wanted to take one more crack at Q School. Most golfers don’t quit the first time they think about it. They go back and forth. On the one hand, they know they aren’t playing well enough to compete. On the other hand, playing golf is all they know, and they still love the game. And, the last few times out, if a few more putts had fallen . . .
Martin had already played the back-and-forth game. “My approach going in was PGA Tour or bust,” he said.
He signed up to play first stage and spent a lot of time on the range looking to find his swing. When he got to his first-stage site, he was struck by two things: “I felt kind of old being there at thirty-three,” he said. “It was hard to believe it had been ten years since I’d been one of those kids just out of college so excited and eager to tee it up. The other thing was the overall quality of play. Even ten years ago, you would go to first stage, and probably half the field simply had no chance. You didn’t really feel as if you had to beat seventy or eighty guys; you had to beat maybe forty. Now you go to first stage, and there are a lot of good players.”
Martin had chosen San Juan Oaks Golf Club in Hollister, California, for first stage. He wanted to play at San Juan Oaks in part because it wasn’t that far from Eugene, but also because he believed it was a golf course where the scores wouldn’t be that low. A player who is a good ball-striker but not that good a putter usually wants a golf course where hitting fairways and greens isn’t that easy, because he doesn’t want to find himself in a putting contest.
San Juan Oaks wasn’t a pushover, but the scores were lower than Martin had anticipated. Two days in, having shot 72–71, he knew he was going to have to come up with a low round to make it into the top 20 and ties who would advance to second stage. “It wasn’t all that different than the kind of golf I’d been playing for a while,” he said. “I was hitting the ball well but not scoring well—sort of the story of my golf game the last five years.”
Martin knew that, barring a radical change in weather conditions, the number was probably going to be somewhere in the vicinity of five under par. Starting the third round at one under, he was certainly in the hunt, but he knew that another round around even par would put him in a hole going into the last round. Needing to make a move, he did—backwards. “I just couldn’t make a putt all day,” he said, remembering the disastrous 75 he shot in the third round. “I think because I wasn’t making putts, I tried to be too precise with my shotmaking, and I ended up hitting the ball worse. I found myself starting to think, ‘I’m not going to spend my entire life being a struggling golfer.’”
He went to bed that night knowing he would have to go low—way low—to have any chance on the last day. The thought also occurred to him that he might be about to play the last meaningful round of his professional career. “I wasn’t terribly emotional about it,” he said. “It wasn’t as if it crossed my mind for the first time then; it had been there for a while. But I did want to go out and give the round everything I had. I figured if I could shoot five or six under, maybe get to four under, I might have a shot.”
Martin would have needed to shoot a seven-under-par 65 to get to the number, which turned out to be five under par. The last day was a lot like the many days before it: a lot of birdie chances, very few putts going in the hole. “With about four or five holes to play, I was even par for the day, and I realized it just wasn’t going to happen,” Martin said. “Even if I birdied in at that point, I knew it wasn’t going to be enough. The conditions were perfect. I knew people were going to score; they weren’t going to be coming back. Those last few holes, I just kind of took everything in. I wasn’t so much emotional as I was numb.”
He signed for a 72—even par—which left him at two-over-par 290 for the week, tied for 46th place in the seventy-one-man field. That left him seven shots behind the four players who tied for 20th place. One of them was another ex–tour player, Joel Kribel. Mark Wurtz, another player who had once been on tour, didn’t do much better than Martin, finishing in a tie for 33rd place. Martin knew it was time to go home and stay home.
“At that point, it wasn’t that tough a decision to make,” he said. “The farther I get from it, the more I think about some of the heartbreak and how close I came to really making it. But I also think how lucky I was to do the things I did, to be involved in the things I was involved in. Part of me wakes up in the morning and thinks ‘comeback.’ Fortunately, there’s a bigger part of me that knows better.”
The coaching job at Oregon became a reality in May 2006—
a big story in Eugene, a couple of paragraphs in most newspapers around the country. Most of the stories began something like this: “Casey Martin, the handicapped golfer who took the PGA Tour to the Supreme Court and won . . . ”
Which is true. “I wish people would remember me for more than just that,” Martin said. “I would rather be remembered as a U.S. Open champion or something like that.”
Perhaps. But there is no doubt golf people will remember Casey Martin not just as the guy who beat the tour inside the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court, but as someone who dealt with adversity—real adversity, not the kind that comes because of a wayward tee shot—with dignity and grace.
4
Nine Hundred and Seventy-three Dreamers
THERE WERE TWELVE first-stage Q School sites in 2005 after Steve Carman decided to make the two preliminary-stage sites into first-stage sites. A total of 973 players were required to play first stage. Since the weather in October is still relatively mild almost anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line, the tour spreads the sites out across the South. The farthest north it ventured was Kannapolis, North Carolina. There were three sites in Florida, three in Texas, two in California, and one each in Georgia, Arizona, and South Carolina. Most players chose their sites based on geographical convenience, although some were willing to travel a long distance to play a specific course they knew, liked, or had had luck on before. Some wanted to stay west to play on Bermuda grass greens; others wanted to stay east to play on bent grass greens.
Some of the courses are almost always part of the Q School rota. In recent years, Carman has made an effort to find new sites in an attempt to improve the quality of the courses. Also, the event has become old hat to the locals in some places that have hosted it for a long time, making it tougher to find volunteers to help out during the week.
“It isn’t that easy to go to a club and ask them to give up their golf course and a lot of their facilities for a week,” Carman said. “In all, we need nineteen sites [twelve for first stage, six for second stage, and one for finals], so it isn’t as if we can pay them a ransom in rental. They make money, but the more high-end the club, the less likely that kind of money is going to make the members eager to have their course taken over—especially at a time of year when the weather is usually nice for playing. You go to new places where it’s a novelty and say ‘PGA Tour’ and you’re more likely to get a positive response.”
One place that has become a traditional first-stage site was the TPC Tampa Bay, which has the advantage of being owned and operated by the tour. It is also one of only eight courses within the twenty-nine-course TPC system that isn’t fully private. Technically, it is a public course, although the club sells memberships for $1,600 annually to people, which allows them to play unlimited golf and receive advantageous tee times. Still, TPC Tampa Bay is not a place where angry members are going to walk in and wonder what the heck all these guys are doing inside their locker room.
To say that the TPC Tampa Bay is located off the beaten path is something of an understatement. It is a twenty-minute drive north of Tampa, through numerous stoplights, to a turn that takes you another three miles down a two-lane road filled with nearly identical homes before the PGA Tour’s logo comes into view. The clubhouse is unimposing—one story, with a small dining room and equally small locker rooms. It is anything but pretentious, although there are photos throughout the building of players like Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, and Hale Irwin. That’s because the TPC Tampa Bay annually hosts a Champions Tour event, and those men have taken part in the past. Nicklaus won the tournament in 1996; Irwin was the champion in 2005.
The TPC Tampa Bay is also home to a very good golf course. It has become a popular first-stage site for just that reason. “It’s very straightforward,” said rules official Dillard Pruitt. “There are no tricks. It’s all out in front of you, and it’s fair. The players like that, especially under this kind of pressure. They don’t like surprises.”
Pruitt knows how players feel about Q School golf courses because he played in six Q Schools during his professional career, which lasted from 1984 to 1996 and included a victory in Chattanooga in 1991 and a tie for 13th in the Masters in 1992. He first made it to the tour in 1988 after playing in Europe for a couple of years. “I played horribly that year,” he said. “I missed at Q School at the end of the year and took a job as an assistant pro and played some mini-tours. I qualified for the [U.S.] Open in ’89, got my confidence back, and made it through Q School again in ’89. After that I played well enough that I never had to go back.”
Pruitt retired in 1996 because, at thirty-five, he didn’t think he was ever going to putt the ball well enough to be a consistent winner on tour. “I bounced around a couple years, because when you quit young, no one really believes you’re retired,” he said. “They think you’re going to go back. I was lucky the rules guys gave me a chance.” In 1998 he became a rules official, and even though he now has enough seniority that he doesn’t have to work Q School, he chose to work it in 2005 because he thought it was important. A lot of rules officials who are ex-players work Q School because they remember what it was like for them as players, and they want to make it as painless as possible for the current players. “There are a lot of guys playing here this week who have stories pretty similar to mine,” Pruitt said, riding around in his cart on a muggy Tuesday morning. “I can relate to their struggle.”
Most of the sixty-eight players arriving in Tampa for the week would be delighted to have their careers follow the same path as Pruitt’s. To reach the PGA Tour at all would be a major victory. Two players in the field had accomplished that goal: Mike Grob, an easygoing forty-one-year-old from Billings, Montana, and Stephen Gangluff, a not-so-easygoing thirty-one-year-old who lived in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, headquarters of the PGA Tour. Even though he was an ex–tour player, he had no access to the TPC Sawgrass, the tour’s home club, not even to practice.
“I guess if they let every guy who ever played the tour practice there, they’d be overrun,” Gangluff said. “I understand.”
Gangluff has loved golf since he was little. As a boy, he played a municipal golf course in Marysville, Ohio, with his father, an assistant prison warden, and his friends. He played as much as he could and watched the tour on TV all the time. Being from Ohio, he had to be a Jack Nicklaus fan, but he also admired Payne Stewart. “I liked his style, the way he dressed, the way he acted, but most of all the way he played,” Gangluff said. “I remember saying to myself, ‘Someday, maybe I’ll be good enough to wear plus fours on the golf course.’”
He was a good enough player to get a scholarship to Ohio State, but left after three years to try mini-tours, thinking that playing golf full-time would better prepare him to make a run at the PGA Tour. The problem was, when he thought he was ready, he hadn’t saved enough money to pay the entry fee, and he couldn’t find any sponsors to step up and pay it for him. So he spent a year working as a cart boy at Wintergreen Resort in Virginia and saved enough money to play Q School at the end of 2001. Remarkably, he made it through all three stages and found himself on tour in 2002—a long way from jockeying carts at Wintergreen a year earlier.
“Just to be out there was an amazing experience,” he said. “What a life! I mean, the whole thing—the courtesy cars, the phones in the locker room, the food, and the golf courses. Once you’ve seen what that’s like, you don’t want to go back and play anyplace else. But you have to earn the right to stay out there.”
Gangluff made a little more than $187,000 and finished 176th on the money list in 2002, went back to Q School, and missed getting back on the tour by two shots at the finals. That was disappointing, but he didn’t think a year on the Nationwide Tour would necessarily hurt him. He was wrong. “Bomber’s paradise,” he said with a laugh. “They play a lot of short, outmoded courses, and a lot of the young guys can hit it nine miles. Even if they miss the fairway, they’ve got a wedge in their hands. I just couldn’t make enough
birdies out there.” He finished 90th on the Nationwide list, then didn’t make it back through second stage at the end of 2003.
“Now,” he said, “I was in full reverse. I’d gone from the tour in 2002 to the Nationwide in 2003 to nowhere in 2004.” He played mini-tours in 2004 and then decided, on the advice of some friends, to try the Canadian Tour in ’05. “Better golf courses, decent money, and it feels like a real tour,” he said. “The only problem was, I needed a place to practice during the winter, and I needed to make some money because I didn’t have any.”
He had moved to Ponte Vedra Beach at the end of 2003, thinking at the very least he would have access to places to play and practice. When the tour told him he couldn’t play at Sawgrass, he made a deal with Ponte Vedra Golf and Country Club: he’d go back to jockeying carts but would have complete access to play and practice when he wasn’t working. “I had to swallow my pride,” he said. “Most of the members had no idea I’d been on the tour, but a few recognized the name. I had to deal with it because it was my best chance to get through the winter and get back to playing.”
He had played reasonably well on the Canadian Tour, finishing ninth on their money list, making about $37,000. His standing on the Canadian money list had gotten him into the Nationwide event in Calgary, and he’d finished fifth, a boost to his confidence. The top-ten finish there had gotten him into the following week’s event in Utah, but he missed the cut.