Moment of Glory

by John Feinstein

  That spring Micheel was playing in a local tournament in Memphis the same week that a major college tournament was being played nearby. Indiana was in the tournament, and IU Coach Bob Fitch came over to watch the juniors. After seeing Micheel play, he invited him to visit Indiana.

  Micheel agreed. There were no basketball games being played, but he loved the school anyway. And he knew Indiana played pretty good basketball too since the Hoosiers had beaten the UNLV team he had seen on his winter visit to Kentucky and had gone on to win the 1987 national championship.

  “The only reason I hesitated at all was that I was really interested in aviation, in flying,” Micheel said. “I had already gotten my pilot’s license my senior year in high school, and I knew Illinois had a really good golf team too, and they had an aviation major. I asked Coach Fitch about it, and he said, ‘Oh, well we have aviation here too.’ ‘Perfect,’ I thought. So I signed to go there.”

  As it turned out, Indiana did have an aviation program: it was called ROTC. That summer, Micheel won a major national junior tournament. His phone started ringing off the hook with scholarship offers. But he had already signed with Indiana and had no intention of reneging on that commitment.

  “Going to IU was one of the best decisions I ever made,” he said. “It wasn’t all smooth sailing, but it was definitely a great experience.”

  He was good enough to play right away, and he did well academically, although finding a major wasn’t easy. At first he wanted economics but ran into a problem many athletes run into: a professor who wouldn’t reschedule tests that were missed to travel to an away game or, in this case, a golf tournament. The same thing happened in biology, so he finally settled on general studies, where he could pick and choose courses that fit with his golf schedule.

  “It was important to me to get my degree,” he said. “That’s why I went back in the fall of ’91 to finish up. I knew I wanted to play golf for a living, but I had no idea if I would be good enough. Doing well in college is a lot different than doing well on tour or even making it to the tour. A lot of very successful college golfers never even make it to the tour.”

  Fitch retired after Micheel’s sophomore year and was replaced by Sam Carmichael, who was the Indiana women’s coach and a good friend of Bob Knight. Carmichael brought a lot of Knight’s intensity to his coaching, which was a lot different from Fitch, who often sent the players out in carts to practice and figured those who wanted to play would be those who put in the most time.

  “Sam was a lot like Coach Knight,” Micheel said. “It was his way or the highway, no doubt about that. He knew what he was doing, and we eventually became good friends. But it wasn’t easy at the start.”

  In fact, Micheel came very close to quitting the team his junior year. Indiana was playing in a tournament outside Baton Rouge, and Micheel called Stephanie Abbott to see if she wanted to come to have dinner before the tournament began. Abbott had also grown up in a house at Colonial (her family lived on the 16th hole), and she and Shaun had known each other as kids. She was now a freshman at LSU, and she and Shaun dated occasionally. This seemed like a good chance to spend some time together.

  Stephanie drove up with one of her friends and arrived at the team’s hotel a little earlier than expected. “I was in the shower getting ready,” Micheel remembered. “So the guys let her and her friend in so they could wait until I was ready. They were sitting there, and Sam walked by. The curtains were open—no one was trying to hide anything—and he saw these two girls sitting in the room.

  “He went ballistic. He came in and started screaming at Stephanie and her friend for being in the room. Then he screamed at me, basically accused me of trying to sneak girls into the room. I said to him, ‘Coach, you don’t know me very well if you think I’d do that,’ and we really went at it. I was angry because he was questioning my integrity. He was just angry.”

  Micheel’s teammates talked him out of doing anything rash, and he figured out how to deal with Carmichael’s intensity and temper. “The problem was I had a temper too,” Micheel said. “Sometimes it was an oil and water mix. But I did play well those two years.”

  He was the Big Ten champion as a senior and a first-team All American. He got his degree in December 1991 and headed straight to South Africa to play for a couple of months. “Fascinating trip,” he said. “Talk about a culture shock. It was right at the end of apartheid, but the way they still treated blacks at times was just awful.

  “I remember we went to one club to play, and we asked about getting caddies. They took us over to a pen where they had them all locked up and let a couple of them out to work for us that day. I almost got sick when I saw that.”

  He came home and played minitours in Florida for the rest of 1992, rooming with Doug Barron, a boyhood friend, who would also make it to the tour. Micheel won his first tournament by winning a nine-hole playoff. “I remember it was just about pitch dark when we finished,” he said. “They’d already told us this would be the last hole we played. I won $3,000. Felt like I’d struck it rich.”

  His first chance at Q-School came that fall when he went to the Country Club of Indiana for first stage.

  “I don’t remember the exact details because I’ve blocked it from my mind,” Micheel said. “But I think I bogeyed the last three holes to miss by one. That really hurt. Up until then, I still felt invulnerable. I was just climbing up this ladder step-by-step to get where I wanted to go, and then all of a sudden I took a hard fall. It took me a little while to get over that one.”

  The following year he decided to play on what was then the T.C. Jordan Tour. (Today it is the Hooters Tour.) The money wasn’t much, but the T.C. Jordan did have the advantage of feeling like a real golf tour. The events were 72 holes, and the players traveled—almost always by car—from small town to small town, learning about life on the road and how to prepare to tee it up every Thursday.

  Micheel’s dad had put together a group of sponsors for his son among his pilot friends in Memphis; they were floating about $25,000 for Shaun to live on, which made another year of playing for relatively small purses both possible and bearable.

  The highlight of that year had nothing to do with golf. Micheel and Barron were playing in a tournament in New Bern, North Carolina. On Tuesday morning, they were walking to their cars in the hotel parking lot, when they became aware of an out-of-control car hurtling past them on the road near the hotel.

  “I’m not sure what drew our attention to it, but there was this loud noise,” Micheel said. “I looked up and saw this car go by and then literally become airborne. I knew that the road there dead-ended at the Neuse River, so I took off running right away. I’m not sure if I heard the splash or not, but when I got there, the car was in the water and clearly starting to sink.

  “Someone else who worked at a gas station that was right there had either heard the noise or seen the car and had come running too. We both just looked at each other for a second and then started to take off our clothes. I took off everything but my boxers and dove in. It wasn’t something I thought about; it was just something I did.

  “We got to the car and the windows were open—I guess they didn’t have air conditioning; it was August and very hot. There was a woman in the front seat and a man in the backseat. The other guy started working to get the woman out, and I went to get the man.

  “I remember that he couldn’t swim and he was panicked, so I kind of had to fight him at first. Fortunately, the water wasn’t very deep—maybe six feet—so once I got him out of the car, I was pretty sure we were going to be okay. By the time we got to shore, a bunch of people were there to help.”

  The two people in the car were an elderly couple who had apparently been on the way home from the grocery store. Micheel never actually spoke to them because they were both taken away in an ambulance even though they checked out just fine.

  “From what I gathered later, they were on their way back from the grocery store and missed the turn just before
the dead end. I guess when the lady who was driving saw the barrier, she tried to hit the brake but somehow hit the accelerator, and that’s why they were going so fast when they got to the water.”

  When the story made the local paper in New Bern, Micheel instantly became a local hero. The T.C. Jordan Tour didn’t draw big galleries, but many of those who did come out made a point of finding him to tell him how proud he should be of what he had done.

  “I remember playing well that week,” he said. “I had a chance to win on Sunday but didn’t. I never thought of myself as heroic. I’m proud that at a moment like that, I responded in what turned out to be the correct way. I didn’t panic, and I didn’t freeze. I think most people would want to do the right thing at a moment like that, and I’m glad that I did. But I never thought of myself as a hero.”

  The local branch of the Sons of Confederate Veterans felt differently. The following year, they awarded Micheel their Award for Bravery at their annual dinner. “All I remember about that night is that they all showed up in their uniforms,” Stephanie Micheel recalled. “I was proud of Shaun for what he did, but that night was, let’s say, different.”

  Shaun and Stephanie still joke about the episode and the dinner. “Like I said, I’m very proud of what Shaun did,” Stephanie said. “But it does crack me up sometimes when they put his name up on the scoreboard. Today [the Honda Classic in 2009] he’s playing with Joe Ogilvie and Jonathan Byrd. Joe’s name comes up and his bio says, ‘Won his first tour event in Milwaukee in 2007.’ Then for Jonathan it says, ‘Three-time winner on tour, three-time All American at Clemson.’ Up comes Shaun, and it says, ‘Winner of 1994 Sons of Confederate Veterans Award for Bravery.’ It’s as if he never played golf. I don’t mind it; I just find it kind of funny.”

  Shaun and Stephanie started dating again in the fall of 1993, soon after Shaun’s heroics in New Bern, this time on a serious basis. “We’d known each other so long and we’d dated on and off, but it had never been serious because it had always been long distance,” he said. “But at some point, I guess we decided we really liked each other.”

  He made it through the first two stages of Q-School that fall, meaning he would at the very least have a chance to play on the Nike Tour in 1994. The Q-School finals were in Palm Springs that December. His parents and sister came to watch him play. On the sixth and final day, Micheel played his best round of the week and shot 67 to move up from well outside to right on the qualifying number.

  When his score went up, people came up and congratulated him. Micheel knew that the low 40 players and ties made it to the PGA Tour. He had moved into a tie for 37th place with nine other golfers. “I was so excited because I’d made it,” he said. “Then I heard someone say, ‘The playoff for all players tied for 37th place will begin on the 10th tee in fifteen minutes.’ I was like, ‘Playoff, playoff? I thought I was in, I thought I’d made the tour. We have to play off?’ ”

  He was working himself into a panic when someone told him the playoff was just to determine the players’ rankings. They were all on the tour, but as the last guys in from Q-School, they wouldn’t know week to week (especially on the West Coast) if they were high enough on the exempt list to get into tournaments. Thus, figuring out who was number 37 as opposed to who was number 46 was significant.

  “At that moment, it didn’t matter to me at all,” Micheel said. “All I knew was I had made the PGA Tour. I was so loose when we played the 10th hole that I hit two perfect shots, made the putt for birdie, and got the 37th spot. After everything I’d been through, that seemed easy.”

  The family was so exhausted and drained that the postround victory celebration took place at a Wendy’s. “None of us had the strength to do anything else,” Micheel said.

  Back home, Stephanie was just starting law school and told her friends that the guy she was dating had made it to the PGA Tour. “A few months into the season, some of my friends told me that everyone thought I was lying because no one could find his name in the results,” she said. “No one knew how to spell Micheel.”

  The results they would have found had they known how to spell Micheel were not especially encouraging. Like a lot of tour rookies, Micheel was completely overwhelmed by life on the tour.

  “I think it’s something almost every young guy goes through,” he said. “I wasn’t yet twenty-five when I got out there, and I knew absolutely no one. I never felt like I belonged. I can remember walking onto the range and seeing Nick Price and Greg Norman and thinking, ‘What in the world am I doing out here with these guys?’ I remember I hit the ball pretty well at times that year, but I could never make anything happen scoringwise. I just felt as if I was out of my league.”

  One reason Micheel didn’t know anyone was that very few of the players with whom he had played junior golf, college golf, or minitour golf had made it to the tour. “Phil [Mickelson] was there, but I barely knew him. We had roomed together once at an event, but we just didn’t travel in the same circles. When he came on the tour, he had already won an event while he was in college, so he was playing in the tournament winners category right from the beginning. I played in the last group of the day a lot.

  “It wasn’t as if people weren’t nice to me; they were. I’m just not the kind of guy who can walk into a room and start making friends. I’ve always been more of an observer: walk into a room and watch people. That’s just me. If I’d been more outgoing, it might have been easier.”

  From his spot as the number 37 player coming out of Q-School, Micheel ended up getting into nineteen tournaments that year. He made only four cuts, and his highest finish was a tie for 26th at the Deposit Guaranty Classic, an event that was held opposite the British Open back then, meaning that most of the top players weren’t entered. Of the last eleven tournaments he played, that was the only one in which he made it to the weekend. His highest finish in a full-field tournament was in Houston, where he ended up tied for 55th.

  “I remember when I made it through Q-School, my dad saying to me that as excited as he was and as proud as he was, he wasn’t sure that a year on the Nike Tour to get experience wouldn’t be better for me at that point. I remember that same year David Duval didn’t make it through Q-School, and he went on and had a great year on the Nike and later said it was an important learning experience for him at that point in his career.

  “My attitude then was that I wanted to play against the best, and I thought the best way to learn was by being up close with the best, week in and week out. But after a while, when you just feel overwhelmed, I’m not so sure it’s still a learning experience.”

  Micheel ended up making $12,252 in prize money that year, which landed him in 247th place on the money list, a long way from the top 125. He went back to the second stage of Q-School and, still staggered by what had happened during the year, didn’t make it to the finals. That sent him back to the minitours for 1995.

  “That may have been the most discouraging year of my golf career,” Micheel said. “Those first couple of years playing on the minitours, it was all fun. I was up and coming and still learning. But the old saying about, ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,’ is true. It was very hard to be back playing on that level after I’d been on the PGA Tour, regardless of how I’d done when I was on the tour. You get used to that lifestyle pretty fast. One minute I’m teeing it up against the best guys on the best golf courses, the next I’m back playing minitour events, driving from place to place in a Honda Accord my parents had bought for me.

  “It was tough. I was down on myself. It didn’t get to a point where I thought about quitting, but I remember thinking, ‘This isn’t what I signed up for when I turned pro.’ ”

  He managed to make it back to the Q-School finals at the end of that year, and, even though he didn’t make it back to the tour, he did secure a spot on the Nike Tour. “That was important,” Micheel said. “I needed to at least feel like I was making progress. And, even though I didn’t exactly tear it up out there
the next year, at least I felt as if I could compete.”

  He finished 82nd on the Nike money list that year, went back to Q-School, and this time cruised back to the tour. That was the year the sixth round was rained out in California, leaving a lot of players angry and upset because they didn’t get a chance to play their way inside the number on that final day.

  “I remember one of the guys who was outside the number sitting around while it rained, saying how unfair it was because he had worked so hard to get to where he was,” Micheel said. “I understood his frustration. But all of us who were inside the number at that point had probably worked just as hard. The rain wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

  Micheel went back to the tour in 1997 convinced that things would be different than in ’94, that he was more mature and more experienced and, as a result, a better player. He knew more guys than the first time around, and he did feel more comfortable. But he didn’t play that much better. He made five cuts in twenty-one tournaments, his highest finish a tie for 49th place at the Buick Open. Even though he made a little more money than in ’94 ($14,519), he actually finished three spots lower on the money list. Then, to make sure the year ended on the same down note as ’94, he again failed to make it through the second stage of Q-School.

  He was beginning to feel like a hamster on a wheel, going round and round and always ending up back in the same place—a place he didn’t want to be.

  He and Stephanie had been living together for a couple of years by then and had made the decision to get married in November 1998. She had graduated from law school and was practicing law in Memphis, and they agreed it was time to take the next step.

  “I could have gone back to [what had become] the Hooters, I suppose,” Micheel said. “But I didn’t want to do that. Even though it was a tough time to do it, I decided to take a shot and go to Asia. I knew the competition was decent over there, and the money was better than the Hooters. I just wanted to try something different.”