Tales from Q School: Inside Golf's Fifth Major

by John Feinstein

  Tomasulo bogeyed the next two holes but managed to right himself long enough to squeeze out a couple of tough pars and then birdie the 16th hole. He was at 10 under, convinced like everyone else that was probably one off the number. “But I had 18 left,” he said. “A downwind, downhill par-five that I could easily reach in two. I knew I just had to get off the 17th with a par and then go after birdie on the 18th.”

  Maybe it was the twenty-minute wait on the tee—there is nothing in the world slower than the last round at Q School—or maybe it was the gusty wind or the difficult pin placement on the small back shelf of the water-protected green. Or maybe it was just nerves. Tomasulo selected an eight-iron, not wanting to come up short. Then he watched in horror as the ball drifted left of where he had aimed, took one big hop, and spun into a back bunker. “When I saw it go in there, my knees just about buckled,” he said. “I’d seen other guys play out of there during the week, and I knew how tough a shot it was. But I had to try and get it close.”

  Trying to hit a perfect second shot to give himself a chance to save par, Tomasulo instead squirted the ball out of the bunker, and it ran straight across the green, almost rolling into the water. From there he made a double-bogey five and walked off the green knowing he wasn’t going to be on the PGA Tour in 2006. “As I was watching my second shot run across the green, the thought went through my head, ‘Oh, my God, you aren’t making it. Oh, my God, you aren’t making it!’” Tomasulo said. “It was a hollow feeling that went right to my knees. I just couldn’t believe it.”

  The toughest part may have been having to play the 18th hole knowing that he had no chance—unless he could somehow hole out from the fairway for a miraculous double-eagle two. The two men he was playing with, Brett Wetterich and B. J. Staten, had managed to hang on to finish at 11 under, meaning they would be going to the PGA Tour, while Tomasulo went back to the Nationwide. “The worst part of the whole day was probably shaking hands with them on the 18th green and telling them congratulations,” Tomasulo said. “Not because they weren’t good guys, but because they had done what I couldn’t do, and it hurt—it just really hurt.”

  He smiled. “I have no memory at all of what I said. I just hope I wasn’t rude.”

  Tomasulo wasn’t rude. Staten remembers him saying congratulations, but he also remembers the look on his face. “It may have been the happiest moment of my life,” he said. “But shaking hands with Peter, I felt awful. I knew just how close I’d come to being exactly where he was.”

  Even if Tomasulo had been rude, chances are good neither Staten nor Wetterich would have noticed or cared at that moment. Tomasulo was in shock; they were in ecstasy. The three of them had spent more than five hours that day grinding toward the same goal. In the end, Wetterich and Staten had been able to lunge across the finish line. Tomasulo had come up a few steps short.

  Because Staten had never made it to the tour before and was one of ten players who had survived all three stages to get his tour card, he was surrounded by both well-wishers and media after he signed his scorecard. Tomasulo stood a few yards away with his caddy. He appeared to be staring at Staten, as if torturing himself by watching the celebration. “It wasn’t anything like that at all,” he said. “I know I stood there for a while, because I didn’t have the energy to walk back to the clubhouse. It was as if all the life had drained out of my body. But I don’t remember anything about it. I don’t even remember seeing B. J. or anyone around him. I didn’t see anything. I didn’t hear anything.”

  Staten’s memory of those few moments isn’t much better than Tomasulo’s. “I know I was happy, and I remember a lot of people being there,” he said. “But if you ask me any details—who said what to me, what I said to anyone—I don’t remember much at all. It’s all very hazy.”

  That’s what Q School does to people. It leaves them dazed— with joy; with utter dejection. A small cadre are invited to a PGA Tour–sponsored party that night to welcome them to the tour. The rest go back to hotel rooms to pack their bags and wait till next year. If, by some chance, one of the nonqualifiers were to wander into the party for the qualifiers—perhaps to congratulate a friend—a tour official would very politely but firmly ask him to leave.

  When Q School is over, you are either invited to the party or not. There is no in between.

  2

  Forty Years Ago . . .

  THE ARGUMENT CAN BE MADE that there are more legendary tales attached to the PGA Tour’s Qualifying School than to any other event in golf. This may explain why players refer to it as the fifth major.

  The Q School’s history isn’t very long, dating back only to 1965. That was 105 years after the first British Open—or, as it is known in Europe, the Open Championship—was played and 70 years after the first U.S. Open was held. The PGA Championship was first played in 1916, and the Masters, the baby among the four majors, began in 1934. Each of them has had more than its share of memorable moments, and most of those moments have been chronicled in print, on film or tape, or orally. Golf fans have heard so much about Gene Sarazen’s double eagle at the 15th hole in the 1935 Masters that most of them are probably convinced they witnessed it. Is there anyone who has ever touched a golf club—looked at a golf club—who hasn’t seen the video of Tom Watson’s chip-in at Pebble Beach in 1982, Larry Mize’s miracle at Augusta in 1987, Tiger Woods’s chip-in on the 16th green at the Masters in 2005, or Jack Nicklaus’s march up the 18th fairway at St. Andrews during his last British Open, also in 2005?

  That’s just a small sampling, of course.

  “The difference between moments like that and Q School is that when golfers get together—pros, I mean—they tell Q School stories,” said Steve Pate, a six-time PGA Tour winner and recent Q School returnee. “You don’t sit around and talk about Watson or Mize; you sit around and talk about Joe Daley’s putt popping up out of the cup at PGA West or Cliff Kresge stepping backward to line up a putt and falling into the water. Or you tell your own stories, because everyone—I mean everyone—has them. If you’re a golfer, you have a Q School story, with very few exceptions.”

  Tiger Woods is one of those exceptions. He won in his fourth tournament as a pro and has been exempt ever since. Phil Mickelson won a tournament while still in college, so he was already exempt when he turned pro in 1992 and never had to deal with Q School. Justin Leonard and Ryan Moore each earned enough money playing on sponsor exemptions (in 1994 and 2004, respectively) after graduating from college to avoid having to go to Q School to earn playing privileges. A number of top foreign players earned playing privileges in the United States through their success overseas: Greg Norman, Nick Price, Nick Faldo, and Vijay Singh, to name a few. Everyone else who has joined the tour since 1965 has been through Q School. Most have been more than once. All describe it as a difficult, if not torturous, experience. And yet all of them say that they’re glad they did it—at least once.

  “It’s a rite of passage if you’re a professional golfer,” said Tom Watson, who finished fifth in the 1971 Q School and never looked back. “I’m not going to go so far as saying that I feel sorry for Tiger or Phil or Justin or anyone else who skips Q School completely. But I will say that I think they missed something. My memories of that week are as vivid as anything I’ve ever done in golf, including the majors that I’ve won. I remember every round, and I remember going back to the hotel every night, eating dinner by myself, and thinking about what I had to do the next day. I remember thinking I was in great shape the last day and then double-bogeying the 10th hole and having a panic attack for a moment, thinking, ‘Oh, my God, am I going to blow this?’ And I remember the incredible feeling of satisfaction when it was over, when I’d made it. It was thirty-five years ago, but all those feelings are still tangible now.”

  Very few people claim to enjoy Q School, although younger players approach it far more optimistically than older ones do. “I remember the first time I went to Q School, I was excited about it,” said Dan Forsman, who first made it to the tour
in 1982, the same year he turned pro. “When I had to go back twenty-two years later, I was bummed—and a little bit scared. The quality of player was so much higher than when I was a kid, it was almost intimidating at first. I had to remind myself that I was still a pretty good player. It wasn’t all that easy.”

  But regardless of how difficult it may be or how disappointing it can be just to have to be there, most are like Watson. They see Q School as part of the journey. For some it is a continuing part of the journey. In 2006 Michael Allen played in the finals for the thirteenth time in eighteen years and was successful for the ninth time in getting back to the tour. Allen, who is now forty-eight, has never won on the tour and has succeeded only twice in keeping his playing status for consecutive years without a return to Q School. “I just put it on my calendar as if it’s another tournament,” he said, laughing. “I try to look at it as a golfing vacation.”

  Some of the best Q School stories appear to be apocryphal. Almost everyone tells the one about the guy who walked onto the first tee on the first day, heard the starter call his name, and raced off the tee so he could get sick in the bushes nearby. No one can name the player or the year, but everyone swears it happened. In 2000 Joe Daley did tap in a two-foot putt on the 17th hole at PGA West on the fourth day of the six-day competition. He then watched in horror as the ball somehow bounced back out of the cup. Naturally, he ended up missing his card by one shot. Cliff Kresge did step off an island green and into a lake while trying to line up a putt.

  Peter Jacobsen, who won his first event on the tour in 1980 and his last in 2003, had to go to Q School only once, in the fall of 1976. Like everyone else, he remembers the pressure and the nerves, and the feeling of relief when he wobbled home on a frigid final day in Brownsville, Texas, to get his card on the number. He also remembers the guy who threatened to shoot him.

  “I don’t even know his name, because it turned out he was using an assumed name,” Jacobsen said, beginning the story that he always starts by saying, “I’m not making this up.”

  “The first two days I was paired with this guy who simply could not play dead. He was awful, clearly someone who shouldn’t have been allowed to play but had somehow gotten in under the radar. This was before they had stage qualifying. It was just one stage, so there was no way for him to have been weeded out earlier. Well, I don’t think the guy broke 90 the first day. If he did, it was only because he cheated. I mean, really cheated—moving balls in the rough, things like that. When the day was over, I just had to say something to the rules guys, because I thought the guy was dangerous—to me, to everyone—plus he was cheating. I guess they went and did a little homework, because the next morning they walk up to the guy and say, ‘You’re going to have to leave.’ He asks why, and they say, ‘Well, for one thing, we found out you played last year under a different name, and we sent you a letter saying you couldn’t come back this year because you were noncompetitive. For another, your fellow competitors caught you cheating out there yesterday on more than one occasion. So we’re disqualifying you.’

  “I’m standing there watching all this. The guy looks at the officials, then looks at me and says, ‘Okay, then, I believe I’m just going to go out to my pickup and get my shotgun.’ He wasn’t smiling when he said it. I don’t know if the officials called the police, but I spent the next couple of days looking over my shoulder a lot.”

  There are plenty of Q School stories about guys who couldn’t play, which is one reason the rules for getting into even first stage are far stricter now than they once were. A player has to be a professional and has to show some evidence that he has played competitive golf someplace in order for his application to be accepted. “A truly bad player can make life miserable for the guys he’s paired with,” explained Steve Carman, the Q School’s tournament director for the past seven years. “It really isn’t fair to ask someone who has paid $4,500 to play for his life to play with someone who can’t break 90. It doesn’t happen nearly as often as it used to, but we still get one or two every year who slip through the cracks.”

  Most of the time, the horror stories are self-inflicted—the kind of stories that make players cringe rather than laugh. Many involve guys who simply couldn’t make it to the clubhouse on the final day or had one awful moment—à la Tommy Tolles or Peter Tomasulo—on the last few holes. Some are funny because they have happy endings, such as the time in 1983 when Jeff Sluman’s caddy showed up on the first tee with the wrong golf bag, or the moment years later when Shaun Micheel thought he had made the tour by tying with nine others for 37th place. Micheel thought that the low forty players and ties made the tour. So when he heard the announcement, “All players at six under par please report to the 10th tee for the play-off,” he panicked, thinking he had to play off to get onto the tour. Micheel was the most relieved man on earth when he learned that the play-off was simply to determine in what order the ten players would be ranked when they began playing on the tour in January. “I was so relieved, I birdied the first hole and got number 37,” he remembered, laughing.

  The story that everyone knows but almost no one wants to bring up involves Jaxon Brigman. In 1999, after five years on the Nike Tour (now the Nationwide Tour), it looked as if Brigman’s time had finally come. On the last day of the finals, played that year at Doral Golf and Country Club in Miami, Brigman played the round of his life, shooting 65, to make the tour right on the number. Elated, he walked into the scorer’s tent, signed his scorecard, and left to join friends and family and let the celebration begin. He was standing near the scoreboard, with the widest smile of his life on his face, when Steve Carman approached. “Of all the things I’ve ever done in golf as a rules official, this had to be the toughest,” Carman said.

  “Jaxon,” Carman said softly. “I need you to look at this card for me.”

  Carman still remembers the look on Brigman’s face—even before he said another word. Brigman looked at the card and, an instant later, was prone on the ground, crying. At all golf tournaments, a player’s official scorecard is kept by another player in his group. Nowadays, there is also a walking scorer who keeps track of all scores in the group as a backup, and each player keeps his own score unofficially. That day, Brigman’s card was kept by Jay Hobby, who had made certain to circle each birdie so that it would be easier for Brigman to track how far under par he was: seven circles and no squares (for bogeys) would make it pretty clear that he was seven under par. Most players make some kind of mark on the scorecard to make clear any score that isn’t a par.

  Hobby had circled all of Brigman’s birdies, including the one he had made at the par-four 13th hole. The problem was, he had written down a 4 and circled it instead of recording a 3. Especially in the crucible of the last day of Q School, it isn’t surprising that someone could make that kind of mistake. When Brigman had gone into the scorer’s tent, he had simply counted the seven circles and written down 65 as his score—which was what he had shot, even though the hole-by-hole numbers added up to 66. Then he had signed his card without asking the walking scorer to go through her card and confirm his score. When the scorekeeper at the scoreboard went through the card, he noticed the discrepancy and took the card to Carman. When Carman added up the numbers Brigman had signed for, he felt sick to his stomach, but he knew he had no choice but to take the card to Brigman.

  “The only sliver of good in the whole thing was that he initially thought he was completely disqualified—which would have meant he didn’t even have a spot on the Nationwide the next year,” Carman said. “That would only have happened if he had signed for a score lower than his actual score. I told him that he wasn’t disqualified but that his official score had to be the 66 that the numbers added up to on the scorecard.”

  That left him one shot above the cut line for the tour. It meant returning to the Nationwide Tour for a fifth year instead of being a rookie on the PGA Tour. It also meant becoming the poster child for sad-but-true Q School tales.

  A year later, force
d to play second stage, Brigman was in a four-way tie for the final three spots. Today, all four players would have advanced to the finals; there are no play-offs for a final qualifying position at first or second stage. Back then, however, they played off. Brigman made a bogey and was the one player among the four who didn’t advance. “After seeing that, I decided it was time to get rid of the play-offs,” Carman said. “If you shoot the number over four days, you should move on. We have the flexibility to handle a few extra players—whether it’s at second stage or at finals. I just hated the idea that a player could go 72 holes and then be in a position where one poor swing—or, even worse, a lucky shot by someone else—made him wait another year for his next chance.”

  Q School has changed a lot since 1965. At the first School, forty-nine players showed up in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, to play the PGA National Golf Club. They didn’t even know how many spots they were playing for, because the event was brand-new. As it turned out, seventeen players qualified for the 1966 tour. “Qualifying” had a very different meaning then than it does now. At that time, only the top 60 money winners at the end of each year were guaranteed spots in every tournament during the next twelve months. Everyone else had to take part in Monday qualifiers, which filled out each week’s tournament field. Players who had to qualify were known as “rabbits,” because they were constantly hopping from city to city hoping to get into the next week’s field. For the rabbits, making the cut on Friday was critical because everyone who made the cut was automatically in the next week’s field without having to qualify.

  That system, referred to now as “the non-exempt tour,” remained in place until 1982, when Commissioner Deane Beman, pushed by the rank and file players on tour, created the “all-exempt tour.” Now, the top 125 players on the money list are exempt for the following year, along with any tournament winners from the previous year who failed to make the top 125 and a number of players who received medical exemptions because of injuries. The Nationwide Tour, which was created in 1990 as a developmental tour, now sends its top 20 money winners to the PGA Tour the following year. Because the number of players who make the tour off the Nationwide list has grown (it was originally only five), the number of players who make the tour out of Q School—once as high as fifty players and ties—has shrunk to the current thirty and ties. Ranking on both the Nationwide list and the Q School list is important because players from both groups fall below the top 125 money winners, the tournament winners, and the medically exempt players in the pecking order for spots in tournaments. Early in the year, when everyone wants to play and tournament fields are smaller, the bottom half of the Q Schoolers frequently have trouble getting to play.