“I would never have done it, of course,” Furyk said with a laugh. “After all, I like to tell people how much it means to me knowing my name is going to be on the trophy forever. I had to be sure I was right when I said it.”
Furyk’s first hint that life had changed had come at the Exelon outing, but it really started to hit when he got to Westchester.
He had flown in late Tuesday night and had a morning tee time the next day for the pro-am. After he played his pro-am round he was brought into the press room, his first meeting with the media since his name had been not exactly engraved on the U.S. Open trophy.
“Usually, when I would do a pretournament press conference, they’d run around and round up ten guys to make sure when I walked in the room it wouldn’t be empty and everyone would feel embarrassed,” he said. “That day I remember walking in, and it was packed—there wasn’t a seat to be had or any place to stand. I remember thinking, ‘Okay, things are a little different now.’
“It even felt like people were listening to me more closely.” He smiled. “Of course, that could have been my imagination. But over the next few months, I noticed that I got a lot more questions—on a lot more subjects. All of a sudden people wanted my opinions on things that went beyond the condition of the golf course.
“But all that was okay. I think I was ready for it. It wasn’t as if I’d never been in an interview room or had media demands before. It just ramped things up. But not in a way that I didn’t think I could handle.”
Furyk was very happy to get home the week after Westchester, where he ended up finishing tied for 22nd place. After all, he needed to get to the mall to get that trophy engraved.
11
From Nowhere to St. George’s
THERE IS A FOUR-WEEK gap each year between the U.S. Open and the British Open. After Westchester, the PGA Tour moved on to Memphis, Chicago, and Milwaukee before those who had qualified headed across the Atlantic to Royal St. George’s in southern England for the 132nd playing of the British Open—or, as everyone in the world who doesn’t live in the United States calls it, “the Open Championship.”
The number of American players who make the trip each year has been the subject of a good deal of controversy for a long time. It has only been fifteen years since the British Open became an “official” tournament on the PGA Tour, meaning that money won in the event counts toward a player’s standing on the money list.
Even with that, many players opt to stay home because they don’t like the long flights, don’t like the food in Great Britain, don’t like adjusting their golf games to the vagaries of links play, don’t like the size of the hotel rooms, don’t like driving on the right-hand side of the road, and don’t like the relative lack of showers or how small they are when they can be found.
Sometimes life is really tough for golfers. One prominent player who makes the trip every year often does so without his wife. “She only comes the years when there’s a hotel with a spa at the course,” he said—completely serious.
In 2003 Royal St. George’s had no spa. It is in the town of Sandwich, a rural area a few miles from Dover and the famous white cliffs. There’s no spa, no Ritz, not even so much as a Fairfield Inn by Marriott in Sandwich. It is bed-and-breakfast country.
In 2004, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, which puts on the Open Championship, created a qualifying event in the United States to encourage American players to make the trip. Until then, very few Americans who were not exempt into the field flew over to play in the 36-hole qualifiers held at four different sites near the Open golf course. The American theory, generally speaking, was that no one wanted to make the flight to play 36 holes, perhaps not qualify, and then turn around and go home.
A handful of Americans did play qualifiers. Peter Jacobsen and Brad Faxon both played on several occasions. One year, Faxon failed in the qualifier, flew home on Tuesday, played in the B.C. Open, which then was held the same week as the British—and won. Faxon was adamant that Americans, especially those who were exempt, play in the British.
“To me, it’s probably the greatest golf tournament in the world,” Faxon said. “If you’re a golfer and you don’t love it, something is wrong. It’s the oldest championship there is, it’s played on great golf courses with great fans. Sure, it’s a different kind of challenge, but for one week a year there’s nothing wrong with that.”
In 1996 when Scott Hoch (who famously missed a three-foot putt that would have won the Masters in 1989) didn’t go to the British and called St. Andrews and other links courses little more than glorified cow pastures, Faxon lashed out, saying—among other things—that any American who was exempt into the British and didn’t play should not be allowed to play in the Ryder Cup. For his comments, Faxon was fined $500 by the PGA Tour for being publicly critical of another player. “I’d say it again and pay the fine again” was his response.
Ben Curtis didn’t have to worry at all about the British Open in 2003. His one and only concern as the tour moved into the summer months was to improve his game enough so that he could keep his playing privileges for 2004. When the tour reached the U.S. Open—generally considered the midway point of the season—Curtis, who had not qualified to play at Olympia Fields, had played in ten tournaments and had made five cuts in his rookie season. His highest finish had been a tie for thirty-first in Houston where he made $24,975. In all, he had made a little bit less than $73,000 in prize money for the year and stood 212th on the money list, a long, long way from the top 125.
“The last thing on my mind was the British Open,” he said, laughing.
Just the fact that Curtis was on the tour was something of a surprise to him and to others, since he had never even qualified for the Nationwide Tour prior to his trip to Q-School at the end of 2002. Like Mike Weir and so many others, he had hit the second-stage wall.
Curtis grew up in the rural northeast Ohio town of Franklin. His grandfather, Dwight Black, had built a nine-hole golf course there in 1973, on the farm where he lived. He built another nine holes four years later.
“When I played it growing up, it was 6,300 yards with flat, round greens,” Curtis said, laughing. “It was the perfect golf course for a kid starting out, because you could shoot pretty low scores and build your confidence.”
Curtis’s parents, Bob and Janet, grew up in towns that were ten miles apart—Radnor and Ostrander—and had both attended Buckeye Valley High School. Bob Curtis played baseball and basketball in high school; Janet Black was a cheerleader. They graduated in 1974 and were married not long after that. Bob worked on a farm for a while, but after his father-in-law opened the golf course he went to work there, and eventually he and Janet moved onto the property. Ben was born in 1977, and his brother Nick came along twenty months later.
“Our house was right behind the 18th hole,” Ben said. “My dad basically taught me a grip and a stance when I was a kid, and then I’d go practice on the range, which was about 150 yards away. I never really took lessons. My dad and my grandpa would just watch me sometimes when I hit balls. When I was a kid, Nick and I and some of our friends would go out at about six o’clock and play 18 holes before dark. We’d each get our own cart, fly around, and play for pizzas.”
He was good at golf from the start but also played baseball and basketball. He stuck with basketball through high school and was a starter as a junior and a senior. “I was a starter,” he said, “but we were never very good. We won seven games in two years, and six were when I was a senior. We had a new coach, and we got better.”
Even though he played other sports, Ben was hooked on golf at a young age. His father’s maintenance shop was right next to the putting green, and his parents often found him chipping and putting after dark, using the light from the maintenance shop so he could see. By the time he was ten, his father and grandfather began taking Ben to the Memorial Tournament, which was played just outside Columbus.
“Growing up in Ohio, Jack [Nicklaus] was a huge deal for me,” he said. “O
ne of my first golf memories is watching him win the Masters in ’86. Back then, they used to have this Skins Game on Tuesdays at the Memorial, and because my dad worked at a golf course we were able to get in, even though they limited the crowd to like five thousand people. I remember one year it was Jack and Fuzzy [Zoeller] and [Lee] Trevino. I was right up against the ropes. It was very laid back and very cool.
“By the time I was in high school, I was going to the tournament itself. In the back of my mind was the idea that I wanted to be a pro someday, because I was starting to have a lot of success in junior events and high-school tournaments. But my dad and my grandfather would always say to me, ‘It may look easy, but it’s really hard to be good enough to get out there.’ My grandfather was always on me. I would shoot eight under or something, and he’d find a couple of flaws in what I was doing. It wasn’t so much to be critical as to remind me not to think I was all that good just because I was doing well against other juniors.”
Curtis won state titles as a junior and a senior and was recruited by a lot of good golf schools, notably Oklahoma State, as well as places like Georgia Tech, Ohio State, Minnesota, Florida Southern (a Division 2 power), and his local school, Kent State. He was interested in Oklahoma State for a while but became discouraged when legendary coach Mike Holder told him what he thought of his game.
“He said, ‘You’ve got the talent to come and play for us, but we’re going to have to overhaul your entire game to get you to the next level.’ I wasn’t up for that. I liked Georgia Tech, but I didn’t have the grades to get in. I wasn’t a great student because I didn’t work that hard and my ACTs were pretty mediocre.”
He ended up taking four official visits: to Ohio State, Minnesota, Kent State, and Florida Southern. He eventually crossed Florida Southern off his list because, unlike a lot of golfers, he didn’t want to go someplace where he could play twelve months a year. “I was used to putting the clubs up in the winter,” he said. “I kind of liked the break. It kept the game fresh for me.”
He was tempted by Ohio State. The coach, Jim Brown—not the Jim Brown (of the Cleveland Browns)—had started recruiting him when he was very young because he knew his grandfather. But Ohio State was a national power in the mid-90s and was just coming off a fourth-place finish in the NCAA Championships. “They wanted me to come and walk on the team at first,” he said. “I didn’t really want to do that. I wanted to go someplace and play as a freshman.”
That someplace turned out to be Kent State. A number of players he had grown up with were there or were going there, and he liked the coach, Herb Page, a stocky Canadian who walked a little bit like a penguin according to his players. He had been a placekicker at Kent State when Hall of Fame linebacker Jack Lambert had played there, and Curtis felt comfortable with Page from the beginning. So, he traveled across the state to enroll.
From the get-go, Curtis knew he’d made the right decision. Page held a two-week qualifiying tournament to determine places on the team, and Curtis won easily. “I finished second or third in my first tournament and kind of went from there,” he said. “I was comfortable right from the start.”
Most surprising was his academic performance. His first semester GPA was 3.8. “A lot of it was the weather,” he said, laughing. “By the end of October, we weren’t playing any golf, so I could concentrate on my classes. I figured it was important to do well in college. I had no idea if I was going to be good enough to make it as a pro, so I put some effort into it.”
Curtis is one of those people who is sneaky smart. He’s quiet, not the kind of guy who lights up a room with one-liners or stories when he walks into it. But when he has time to think about something, he usually figures it out and makes smart decisions. Unlike a lot of college golfers who put all their eggs into the “I’m going to be a millionaire pro golfer” basket, Curtis realized he had better work in the direction of a degree in case professional golf didn’t work out, as it doesn’t for so many college golfers.
He majored in recreation management, thinking he might someday run a hotel or a restaurant or a day-care center—or a golf course. He also minored in marketing, thinking that was an area that could be helpful to him no matter where he ended up after college.
Curtis had completed all his course requirements to graduate by spring of 2000 but had not yet completed the requisite thesis. By then he had won the Mid-American Conference tournament as a senior and been a two-time second team All American. After his junior year (1999), he made it to the semifinals of the U.S. Amateur, which was played at Pebble Beach, before losing on the 17th hole to eventual champion David Gossett—a can’t-miss future star at that point.
“That tournament was when all the agents really started showing up,” Curtis said, smiling at the memory. “I’d had some good results before that, but at the Amateur everyone is there and everyone is watching. I think what was important about it for me wasn’t so much that agents wanted to sign me, but that I figured these guys had to know something about judging talent, and if they thought I was worth pursuing, I must have some ability.”
If nothing else, his performance in the Amateur and the ardor of the agents convinced Curtis to at least take a shot playing on tour when he was finished at Kent State. He had planned to get his degree in the fall, so he wrote the thesis in the fall and sent it to his professor. “He either never got it or lost it,” Curtis said. “Either way, I got a notice saying I wasn’t getting my degree because I hadn’t completed the thesis.”
But by then he had turned pro and signed with IMG, the Yankees of management companies. It made sense for several reasons: IMG is a Cleveland-based company, so it felt right for an Ohio boy to sign with them. More important, IMG’s tentacles are everywhere in the golf world. Frequently they are able to use their power to get their young players into tournaments on sponsor exemptions, and soon after signing with IMG, Curtis got a sponsor’s exemption into the Buick Southern Open.
“Missed the cut,” he said. “But it was good experience.”
He made it through the first stage of Q-School in the fall of 2000 but missed at second stage. “The whole time I was a couple of shots outside the number,” he said. “I just couldn’t find a way to make a move.”
He wasn’t that disappointed, especially when he saw the number of quality players he had competed against in college who had also failed second stage. Since he hadn’t made the Q-School finals, he had no status on either the PGA Tour or the Nationwide Tour (even IMG can’t get that done). He was forced to go one level down to the Hooters Tour, getting through that tour’s Q-School in January.
By then Curtis had started dating Candace Beatty. They had met on the golf course at Kent State when she had successfully walked on the women’s team during his senior year. She was two years younger than he was and still in school when he came back in the fall to try to finish his degree work. So, Curtis headed out on the Hooters Tour—to places like Conover, North Carolina; Dothan, Alabama; Rogers, Arkansas; and Miami, Oklahoma—on his own.
“The Hooters tour was actually fun at the beginning,” he said. “It was a lot of staying in Super 8s and Hampton Inns—that was upscale for us—in small towns, but I met a lot of good guys. We’d often stay three in a room to save some money and go out and find whatever chain restaurant was around to eat in at night.”
The Hooters is actually a throwback to the early days of the PGA Tour—players driving from town to town, sharing rooms and cars and chasing a dream. One of Curtis’s good friends starting in ’01 was future Masters champion Zach Johnson, who had graduated from Drake in 1998 and was also trying to get his career started in golf’s minor leagues.
The two were similar players and people, and they hit it off right away. “Ben and I both play what I call boring golf,” Johnson said. “When we’re on, we just hit fairways and greens, nothing very exciting. We’re both grinders. But even though he was pretty quiet, I could see he had a lot of confidence. He was the kind of guy who could really go low when he was
in contention because the pressure of the hunt didn’t get to him. You could even see that in practice rounds.”
It took Curtis a little while to adjust to life on the road. By midyear he began to find his comfort level on the tour, consistently finishing in the top 10 while making more than $40,000—good enough to finish 18th on the money list. He went back to Q-School in the fall of ’01, thinking he was ready to break through and at least make it to the finals.
Once again he cruised through first stage and headed for second stage in Stonebridge, Georgia. The weather was awful all week, the players dealing with rain and mud and standing water every day. There was so much water that the rules officials allowed players to lift, clean, and place their balls in waste areas around the course; usually lift, clean, and place is limited to fairways in wet conditions. Curtis and the other two players in his group—one of them being Gary Hallberg, who had been on tour for a number of years—thought the lift, clean, and place was allowed in the bunkers, which were also underwater.
“They called us in with a few holes to play on the third day because it was just too wet to play,” he said. “That night a bunch of us were sitting around talking, and somehow the subject came up about how tough it was to play out of the bunkers. I can still remember my heart sinking. I went to a couple of friends who were playing who were also from Kent State and asked them, and they told me it was okay [to lift, clean, and place] in waste areas but not the bunkers. I went to Gary and said, ‘I think we screwed up.’
“The next morning we went and told the rules guys. They said, ‘We’re really sorry, fellas; we have to DQ you.’ I was right on the number at the time. I can still remember Gary screaming at the guys for not making it clear what the deal was, but the fact was everyone else playing got it right and we got it wrong. That one was tough to take. I really felt as if I was going to make it.”
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