Moment of Glory

by John Feinstein

  “I’m not sure I knew who I was on with when it was happening,” Ben said. “Between the shock of winning, the jet lag, the exhaustion, and the whirlwind, I was lost.”

  The capper interview was to be with David Letterman. Before going to the studio, Ben and Candace and IMG agent Jay Danzi went to one of IMG’s New York offices to go over some plans for the coming weeks. Ben had gone into another room to do another radio interview, and Candace found herself alone with Danzi.

  “He was talking about all these different ‘opportunities’ Ben was going to have right away and in the future,” she said. “I got that. But I’m not sure I was listening all that closely. This wasn’t the time or the day to make any decisions when we were both so tired. Then I heard him say, ‘And of course we’re going to need to think about changing the wedding.’

  “I looked at him and said, ‘What?’ And he went on about needing to push the wedding back because there was going to be so much for Ben to do and he was going to be playing that weekend [in the World Golf Championships in Akron, not far from where the wedding was to be held], and we were just going to have to think about picking a new date.

  “I was so tired and so stunned that I just started to cry. I kept looking at him and saying, ‘Are you kidding me? I’ve been planning this for a year.’ A lot had been running through my mind about all the life changes we were going through almost from the minute he finished on 18 and they separated us. It was as if we’d lost control all of a sudden.

  “Now I was being told I had to reschedule my wedding? I just lost it right there.”

  Ben walked in moments later and found his fiancée in tears. “What happened?” he asked, looking at Candace and then at Danzi.

  “Jay wants us to change the wedding date.”

  “We aren’t going to do that,” Ben said, looking at Danzi. “We’re getting married on August 23rd. That’s the end of the discussion on that topic.”

  Candace was relieved. “He’s such a nice guy; he doesn’t like to disappoint people,” she said. “He did exactly what I wanted him to do when he walked into the room—just said, ‘No way; this is not an option.’ If he hadn’t reacted that way, I think I really would have lost it right there.”

  It was a seminal moment for both Ben and Candace. Even though the wedding date would not change, they both realized that nothing was the same anymore. Candace later remembered something that Peter Jacobsen said to the two of them in a family dining area at a tournament: “Don’t think anyone is looking out for you out here, because they’re not,” he said. “You have to look out for one another, because no one else is going to do that.”

  Almost at that moment, Candace made a decision. “I had to be the one to look out for us,” she said. “Ben’s job was to play golf. I didn’t want him to have to worry about the outside stuff anymore than he absolutely had to. I had to be more protective of him, of his time, and of our lives. I had to make sure people didn’t walk all over him, because he’s so gentle by nature. We were starting a new life before St. George’s happened. Now we were starting a new life in every possible way.”

  The Letterman appearance went well. The plan had been for Ben to hit chip shots off a New York City rooftop. That went fine, but then Letterman decided to ask a few questions, and Ben, who was clearly a little bit nervous, was asked (naturally) about Woods. Wanting to say that Woods had “an aura” about him, Ben instead said he had “an aroma” about him. If nothing else, that gave his buddies something to tease him about, British Open champion or not.

  After New York came a trip to Washington and a visit to the White House. Then it was time to play golf again. Getting back to playing was good for him. The congratulations from everyone in the locker room at the Buick Open were fun. He didn’t mind being asked, for the first time in his life, to come into the interview room to talk to the media before the tournament began. It was all good.

  Even so, it was still a bit of a shock when he stepped onto the tee on Thursday morning and heard the starter introducing, “The 2003 British Open champion…”

  Curtis looked around at the packed gallery. Then it occurred to him: the applause was for him. He was the 2003 British Open champion.

  As he stepped onto the tee, realizing that all eyes were on him, he knew that Curtis Strange had been right. His life had indeed changed forever. And there was no going back.

  13

  Glory’s Last Shot

  THERE WAS ONE MAJOR championship left in 2003. It would be played three weeks after the British Open, with the tour making stops in Hartford, Connecticut (Greater Hartford Open), Grand Blanc, Michigan (Buick Open), and Castle Rock (outside Denver; the International) before almost all of the top 136 players in the world headed for Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester, New York, for the PGA Championship.

  The reason that most of the top 136 players were in the field and not 156 was because the PGA of America, which runs the championship, still reserves twenty spots for club pros—men who spend much of the year giving hackers lessons and selling clothing and golf equipment out of their pro shops. When someone in golf wants to put down a club pro, the phrase frequently used is “sweater stacker.”

  Once upon a time, all golf pros were club pros in some way, shape, or form. Not until Arnold Palmer brought big money into the game in the 1960s did those good enough to play on tour no longer feel the need to work as a club pro part of the year. The PGA Tour’s qualifying tournament is still referred to as “Q-School” because when it first began there was a classroom element to the event, as those training to play golf for a living also needed to train to run a small business.

  It was the PGA of America that ran the tour until 1968, when the touring pros broke off and formed the PGA Tour. To this day, many people do not understand how different the two organizations are. Members of the PGA Tour are focused on one thing almost all the time: improving their golf games. Members of the PGA of America almost never get the chance to work on their golf games because they spend so much time working on the golf games of those who aspire to someday break 100.

  But the PGA of America still controls one of the four major championships (and the Ryder Cup), and that’s why twenty club pros get to tee it up with the stars once a year. This galls many tour players because, inevitably, a number of good players don’t get to play in the PGA Championship.

  For a long time the presence of the club pros was the least of the PGA Championship’s ongoing issues. Even though it had a glamorous list of past champions, from Walter Hagen and Gene Sarazen and Byron Nelson and Sam Snead to Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player and Tiger Woods, it had always been the fourth of the four majors.

  “Hey, that’s life,” David Duval once said. “If you’ve got four majors, one of them has to be number four.”

  Unless you are in danger of no longer being number four. During the 1980s, there was actually talk that the PGA Championship might cease to be a major. Those running the tour were constantly insisting that the Players Championship had become more important than the PGA because it “belonged” to the players and had a stronger field. When Jack Nicklaus launched the Memorial Tournament in 1970, it was clear that he intended it to be considered a major championship eventually. That was why he modeled so much of the tournament and its trappings on the Masters.

  As recently as 1990, the possibility that the PGA Championship might cease to be a major lingered. In 1987, the tournament was played at PGA National in Palm Beach in brutally hot conditions on greens that completely baked out in the heat and the humidity. Jim Awtrey, who was then the PGA of America’s CEO, frequently told the story about standing near the 18th green and seeing someone rowing a woman in a raincoat out to the scoreboard that floated in the lake to the right of the 18th green. As soon as the woman got out of the boat, Awtrey understood what was going on: one of the local sponsors had hired her to put up scores—in a bikini.

  “I knew at that moment,” Awtrey said, “that this was a championship that was in trouble
.”

  It got worse three years later when the PGA Championship was scheduled to be played at Shoal Creek Country Club in Birmingham, Alabama. The PGA was always searching for new and different venues because it didn’t want to copycat sites chosen by the USGA for the U.S. Open. Shoal Creek was one of those relatively new courses. The golf course had gotten good reviews when it had hosted the event in 1984—helped by the fact that Lee Trevino won—so the PGA decided to go back just six years later.

  Not long before the tournament, Hall Thompson, the club president, was asked in an interview what would happen if an African American ever applied for membership at Shoal Creek. That would never happen in Birmingham, Thompson responded.

  A firestorm ensued. There was talk of boycotts, of moving the championship, even of canceling it. Eventually, a local African American businessman was recruited to become an instant member at Shoal Creek, and the tournament was held, but the memories lingered.

  As it turned out, Shoal Creek was a turning point for the PGA. A decision had been made after 1987 to seek out more classic venues. In 1991, John Daly made his Cinderella out-of-nowhere run from ninth alternate to PGA champion at Crooked Stick. Two years later, playing at Inverness—a past U.S. Open venue—Paul Azinger outdueled Nick Faldo and Greg Norman down the stretch, beating Norman in a playoff to win his long overdue first major title.

  Nick Price won at Southern Hills a year later, and Davis Love III won at Winged Foot in 1997—both had been U.S. Open courses. Woods won dramatically in 1999 and 2000. By then, all the talk about the PGA Championship being supplanted as a major had quieted down. It was still number four, but it was, without doubt, number four. The PGA Tour began trying to sell the notion that the Players Championship was now the “fifth major.”

  This led to a classic quote from 1988 PGA champion Jeff Sluman: “There are only four items on the Grand Slam breakfast at Denny’s,” he said. “Not five.”

  Oak Hill was where Sluman, a Rochester, New York, native, had grown up and had learned the game. His pro then and the pro at Oak Hill in 2003 was Craig Harmon, one of the four teaching Harmon brothers who were the sons of Claude Harmon, the pro at Winged Foot in 1948—the year he won the Masters.

  Oak Hill had plenty of history. It was designed by the Scottish master designer Donald Ross and was usually talked about in hushed, reverential tones by those in golf. It had hosted three U.S. Opens (1956, 1968, and 1989) and a PGA—1980 when Jack Nicklaus won the last of his five championships. It had also hosted the Ryder Cup in 1995. It was considered a classic golf course, greatly respected by the pros and, in a sense, a respite from two relatively untraditional sites: Olympia Fields, which had produced almost embarrassingly low scores for three rounds during the Open in June, and Royal St. George’s, one of the least popular British Open sites among the players.

  Oak Hill was not a golf course anyone was likely to complain about, although in 2003 the weather was surprisingly hot and humid in mid-August when the players began arriving to play practice rounds and get ready for their last major of the year—or, as the CBS marketing people had come to call it, “Glory’s Last Shot.”

  It was, without question, Tiger Woods’s last chance to salvage his year. He had finished tied for fourth at the British Open, easily his best performance in a major championship in 2003. He was still in the midst of his swing change and was working more and more with Hank Haney. There hadn’t yet been a formal announcement, but everyone in golf, including Butch Harmon, knew the two were working together.

  “I knew they’d been working together when Tiger told me we were done at Muirfield in ’02,” Harmon said. “I could tell just by looking at his swing.”

  In his previous six years on tour, Woods had failed to win at least one major only once—in 1998 when he was going through his first major swing change while still working with Harmon. He then had won the PGA in 1999; the U.S. Open (by 15 shots); the British Open (by eight); and the PGA again in 2000. He had started 2001 by winning the Masters, and then had started 2002 by winning the Masters and the U.S. Open.

  Going into the 2003 PGA, Woods had gone five straight majors without a win. The only “drought” he’d had that had lasted longer had been after his win at the ’97 Masters, when he had gone ten straight majors without a win.

  Because Woods had played well at Royal St. George’s, the consensus during the pretournament run-up was that he was now ready to win again. He had finished second to Rich Beem in the 2002 PGA, and most people believed he would turn a bad year (for him—he had still won four tournaments) into a good one by winning the PGA.

  One person who arrived in Rochester without any such expectation was Shaun Micheel. He was, as the cliché goes, just happy to be there. He was thirty-four years old and had been on and off the tour since first getting through Q-School in 1993. His two biggest wins at that moment were the 1998 Singapore Open and the 1999 Nike Greensboro Open. He had played in exactly two major championships in his life: the 1999 U.S. Open at Pinehurst, where he had missed the cut, and the 2001 Open at Southern Hills, where he had tied for 40th place. His highest finish on the PGA Tour had been a tie for third in 2002 at the B.C. Open.

  “Should have won that,” Micheel said. “I had a three-shot lead on Sunday and finished bogey-bogey. That hurt.”

  If Micheel hadn’t been a golfer, he probably would have been a pilot like his dad, Buck. Many of his boyhood memories are of his father leaving on trips that would take him to three continents in a week.

  “The good news was that when he was home, it was usually for a long time,” he said. “That gave us a chance to spend time together.”

  A lot of that time was spent on the golf course. The Micheels lived near the fourth hole of the Colonial Country Club, which in those days was the host course for the annual PGA Tour event played in Memphis. “I grew up with the PGA Tour literally in my backyard once a year,” Micheel said. “I couldn’t get enough of hanging around during tournament week. I was never into autographs; I just wanted to be around for the golf.”

  Micheel’s parents had grown up in Nebraska, and his father had been in the Air Force as a code breaker. “I like to tell people he was a spy,” Micheel said, laughing.

  After retiring from the air force, Buck Micheel worked first for a company that flew in and out of places like Vietnam and Laos—during the Vietnam War. He moved to a company called Shawnee Air and settled in Orlando in the late 1960s.

  That was where Shaun was born, in 1969. His sister, Shannon, came along two years later. Not long after that, a new company called Federal Express, which had a start-up fleet of three airplanes, was looking for pilots. Buck Micheel was hired as one of the company’s first pilots. Soon after that, the family moved to Memphis, and Buck and Donna Micheel bought the house at Colonial and settled in with their two young children. In those days, the tour stop in Memphis was known as the Danny Thomas Memphis Classic. Although the Micheels didn’t belong to Colonial, Shaun played part of the course almost every evening once he got hooked on golf.

  “When I was little, my dad would take me with him a lot when he went to play,” he said. “I always thought he did it because he felt bad about being on the road so much flying. Now that I have my own kids, I know he did it because he liked the time with me. I loved being there right away, although when I was little it was mostly about driving the cart.”

  Buck Micheel was a very good player, a low single-digit handicapper, and he won a membership in a club across the street from Colonial during a member-guest tournament drawing. Later he joined a club in nearby Germantown because a lot of his pilot buddies lived up there and were members. Often, he would take Shaun to play with them.

  “I loved that,” he said. “I probably played more with my dad and his friends when I was young than with other kids because not that many of my friends played. I’d play with him when he was home, but when he wasn’t I’d go out on the course at Colonial late in the day and play my own little course. I’d start on the fifth tee and
then play two, three, and four. That way I never encountered any members because no one teed off that late, and I never got hassled about being out there. I’d usually come in at dark when my mom or my dad came out in the backyard and called for me.”

  By the time he was thirteen, Micheel was becoming a very good junior player. His handicap dropped nine strokes that summer. “I can’t remember if it was from 12 to three or from 10 to one,” he said, laughing. “But I do remember I became a good player.”

  At fifteen, he gave up playing high school basketball, even though he loved it, because he knew golf was what he wanted to do, in terms of both college and a career. He enjoyed competing, and he also enjoyed playing on his own at Colonial. “I liked playing in competition a lot,” he said. “But I also enjoyed being off by myself and playing or practicing. I liked the solitude.

  “Once I got a good look at the pros and what they could do, I was hooked. Every year I’d spend the week of the tournament hanging around at the club, watching everything the pros did. I knew then I wanted to be a part of what they were doing, even though it seemed like a million miles away from me at that point. I’d like to think that I had other interests then and I have other interests now, but golf is what I’ve loved doing and being a part of for as long as I can remember.”

  He was an outstanding junior player while in high school and was recruited by many of the top college programs. He almost went to Kentucky because he enjoyed his visit to the school so much. Steve Flesch, to this day a good friend on tour, was his host and took Micheel to a basketball game between Kentucky and then top-ranked University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

  “I thought the whole thing was great,” he said. “I knew that was where I wanted to go, and they were offering me a full ride. So, I committed. A few months later, I got a call from the coach saying that a player on the team who he had thought was going to flunk out had actually stayed eligible. He didn’t have a full scholarship to offer. So, he offered me a half ride instead.”