Tales from Q School: Inside Golf's Fifth Major

by John Feinstein

  By the time the all-exempt tour was born, Q School had gone through many incarnations. In the fall of 1968, there were two Q Schools—one run, like the first three, by the PGA of America, and the other put on by the Association of Professional Golfers (the category then used within the PGA to describe tour players). That was at the height of the battle between the PGA of America and the tour players for control of the tour. Eventually, the players were allowed to break off and form the PGA Tour. Until then, those who wanted to play on the tour had to go through the same testing as teaching pros who were members of the PGA of America (all pros were PGA members). The late 1960s were not that far removed from the days when most tour players also worked as club pros. As late as 1955, Jack Fleck, a club pro by trade, won the U.S. Open, beating Ben Hogan in a play-off. For most of his career, Hogan was the pro at La Quinta Country Club in Palm Springs, California (although one suspects he didn’t do a lot of teaching or spend a lot of time doing inventory).

  The split between the PGA of America and the PGA Tour— to this day, people frequently refer incorrectly to the PGA Tour as the PGA—made perfect sense because the lifestyle of a pro on tour could not be more different than that of a pro working in a golf shop: a touring pro’s life is consumed by trying to improve his golf game; a teaching pro’s life is consumed by trying to improve others’ golf games. For many years, however, Q School contained a classroom element. In the early years, when it was still an eight-round event, the classroom portion came smack in the middle of Q School. In the later years, it came after the golf had been played and was required only for those who qualified for tour cards.

  From 1969 to 1971, there were two Q Schools a year, the thought being that players shouldn’t have to wait a full year to try to qualify for the tour. There was more flexibility in terms of handing out cards in those days, because a card only gave a player rabbit status—the ability to enter Monday qualifiers. The holy grail was making the top 60 on the money list, because it got you out of the Monday qualifiers. Those who didn’t make the top 60 had to earn at least $5,000 in prize money each year to avoid going back to Q School. That wasn’t an overwhelming amount of money, but it wasn’t as easy as it might sound. Purses were a fraction of what they are now, and making the cut didn’t guarantee a player a check. Seventy players and ties made the cut each week, then as now, but only between forty-five and sixty actually got paid. Some players perfected the dubious skill of making it through the Monday qualifier and through the cut, but then failed to cash a check. That meant they had played five rounds of golf (plus a practice round), had paid their expenses for the week, and yet hadn’t earned a nickel. Today’s players would find that totally unacceptable.

  Tom Watson played well in his rookie year, 1972, when he was a rabbit, making $30,413 in thirty-two tournaments. That was good enough for 74th on the money list. (In 2005, just for comparison purposes, J. L. Lewis finished 74th on the money list and made $1,031,159.) It kept him safely away from Q School but meant he had to start 1973 still playing on Mondays. Watson was the son of a successful Kansas City insurance agent and had a degree in psychology from Stanford. “I remember telling my dad when I was a senior that I wanted to at least try the tour because I wanted to find out if I was good enough to play out there,” he said. “In the back of my mind, I was going to give it two or three years, and if I hadn’t established myself by then, I’d go back to Kansas City and probably go to work with my dad.”

  To Watson, establishing himself meant getting out of Mondays. By the end of 1973, he had done that by finishing 35th on the money list. From there, he never looked back, going on to become the number one player in the world while winning eight majors.

  Watson’s approach—make it or go home—was fairly typical in the 1960s and 1970s. That’s because there really wasn’t any viable fallback position. The PGA Tour did establish a satellite tour in the mid-’70s, and there were some semi-organized mini-tours where players could play, but there really was no way to make a living playing golf unless you were on the PGA Tour. Overseas tours were just starting to pay decent purses, but the idea of going overseas to play golf rarely occurred to players. Most were like Watson: two or three years of the PGA Tour or bust. And if it was bust, go look for a job.

  Now it’s entirely different. Although the money on the Nationwide Tour is a fraction of the money on the PGA Tour, it is both a way to make a reasonable living (fifty-six players earned more than $100,000 in 2005) and a potential route to the PGA Tour. There are now tours all over the world that pay players well, and there are mini-tours all over the United States that pay well enough to allow a player to hang on to the dream for a few more years. “You don’t get rich, that’s for sure,” said Garrett Frank, who has been playing mini-tours for close to a decade. “But you can make enough to live on and keep playing golf.”

  In many ways, Frank is symbolic of how different golf is today than when Q School was launched. He grew up in Ohio, a good athlete who played all sports well. “In some ways, I was too good for my own good because I never worked all that hard,” he said. “I actually worked harder at basketball than golf, because golf came easily to me.”

  Frank played for four years at the University of Akron, still not taking the sport all that seriously. His father had made a good living selling hearing aids, and Frank got his master’s degree in audiology. He worked for a year as an audiologist, then decided this wasn’t meant to be his life’s work. “I just didn’t think I wanted to spend forty or fifty years digging wax out of old people’s ears,” he said. “I’m not putting it down, and I know it’s important work. It just wasn’t for me.”

  Still a very good amateur player, he turned pro at the end of 1999 and gave himself five years to work at his game and make it to the PGA Tour. He moved to Florida, made some money by investing in real estate, and began playing mini-tours. He failed to make it through the first stage of Q School at the end of 2000, then made it successfully through first stage each of the next four years. In 2003 he was paired the last day of second stage with Gary Nicklaus, with whom he had played on the mini-tours. One of those mini-tours was the Golden Bear Tour, named for Gary’s father, Jack, and sponsored by his company.

  “I’d never really played in front of a gallery before,” Frank said. “We had about a hundred people following us. It was different, but it was a lot of fun.” Among the spectators were Jack Nicklaus and his wife, Barbara.

  “That’s the closest I’ve come to getting through,” Frank said. “I played well that day. I think I shot three under for the round, and I had good looks at three putts coming in. If I’d been able to make them, I’d have gotten through. Burned the edge on all of them and finished one over. The number was one under, so I missed by two. Somehow, Jack thought I’d finished one under and made it. He came over and congratulated me and told me he really liked the way I played. I was thrilled he said that, but a little embarrassed I had to tell him I hadn’t made it. I could tell he felt badly about the mistake.”

  Frank went back to the mini-tours. He was still playing there in 2006, even though his self-imposed five-year deadline had passed. He had gone home at the end of 2004 intending to work with his father. By New Year’s, though, the itch was back. “I knew my friends were down there in Florida playing,” he said. “The weather was awful. I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do. I still wanted to play golf. I had made decent money in ’04 [about $50,000, offset by $18,000 in entry fees], and I still thought I could get better.”

  He made a little bit less money in ’05 but still put up the $4,500 entry fee for the 2005 Q School, to give it one more go. “I’m thirty-three,” he said, stretching in the locker room before starting his final round of first stage. “I know I can’t keep trying forever, but it’s hard to walk away.”

  ONCE THE PGA OF AMERICA and the PGA Tour split, Q School continued to evolve. After three years of biannual qualifiers with twenty-five spots open in each, the tour decided to go back to an annual event with fifty spots.
That lasted until 1976, when the decision was made to go back to two qualifiers a year. In the spring of 1977, the qualifier at Pinehurst had 408 entrants. That was when the regional qualifiers were begun, or what is now known as second stage. In 1982, when the all-exempt tour was created, the tour went back to an annual qualifying event, which has been the case ever since. In 1986, with the number of entrants continuing to grow, first stage was established, making it a three-step process to get to the tour for those with no prior status.

  The birth of the Ben Hogan (now Nationwide) Tour in 1990 changed the face of golf for those going up and down the ladder of the game. The new tour gave players who made it to the final stage but didn’t get a PGA Tour card a place to play for the next year, with prize money that began with purses of $100,000 a week and has now risen to an average of $550,000 a week. No one gets rich on the Nationwide Tour, but players can make a living while keeping their dreams of playing on the PGA Tour alive. Fifty players and ties come out of Q School each year with fully exempt status on the Nationwide Tour. The remaining players—usually about half the field—have what is called conditional status, meaning they get into tournaments on a space-available basis. Most will get into enough tournaments during the year to have a chance to make a mark.

  What that means, quite simply, is that getting to the finals nowadays means you have some kind of job playing golf for the next twelve months. That’s why, for most players, second stage has become as much of a crucible as the finals were prior to 1990. “It isn’t as if you feel relaxed playing in the finals,” said David Sutherland, who has played on both the PGA Tour and the Nationwide Tour during the past fifteen years. “But you do know there’s a safety net there if you don’t make it to the big tour. I think there are some younger guys who, their first or second time in the finals, they aren’t even thinking that much about making the PGA Tour. They just want to be sure they get a good number on the Nationwide Tour.” He smiled. “Some of those guys are probably the ones who play well because they don’t feel the kind of pressure we older guys [Sutherland is forty] feel. Second stage is a completely different deal. There, almost everybody is playing for a job. No one wants to go back to mini-tours, paying to play, just trying to keep your head above water for another year so you can get another shot at Q School.”

  Of course, Q School is no longer the only route to the tour now that the top 20 on the Nationwide money list go straight to the PGA Tour. In fact, that is now considered the better way to get to the tour, because it is a reward for playing well for an entire year as opposed to playing well for one week. Every year, after the last round of the Nationwide Tour Championship, when the money list is finalized, there is a card presentation ceremony in which PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem presents the new “class” with their PGA Tour cards for the next year. There is no such ceremony on the last day of Q School.

  Q School does have the feel of a tournament now, especially the finals, which have been televised by the Golf Channel since 1996. There is roping around the golf courses to give the players some distance from the handful of spectators who come out to watch, and the leaders each day are usually asked to do some postround interviews. There’s prize money, although not enough to make it really matter.

  “Put it this way, if you have a chance to play for that prize money or stay home that week and watch, you’d much rather stay home and watch,” said Brian Henninger, a two-time winner on the PGA Tour who has been forced to go back to Q School in recent years and has played the Nationwide Tour for most of the past four years. “But there’s no question the tour has tried to make you feel more comfortable, at least when you make the finals. It does feel more like a real golf tournament than when I first started playing in the early ’90s.”

  A lot of that can be traced to Arvin Ginn, a veteran rules official who was put in charge of Q School in the late 1980s. Ginn didn’t think it was right that Q School was treated almost as a punishment for players. As if going back to Q School wasn’t purgatory enough, players also had to deal with second-rate golf courses in fourth-rate shape and no amenities at all. Ginn pressed the tour to try harder to find good golf courses for all stages and to have the tour assign as many of its full-time rules officials to the events as possible. In the past, prior to the finals, almost all the officials working Q School were local officials supplied by the PGA of America and local PGAs. Ginn also came up with the idea of making the final week a qualifier for both the PGA Tour and the Nationwide Tour. He thought it would be cruel and unfair to require those who didn’t make the PGA Tour to go through yet another qualifier for the Nationwide.

  When Ginn retired as a full-time official in 1999, the Q School mantle was passed to Steve Carman, a computer whiz who had worked in a hospital setting up computer systems before being hired to do a similar job at the tour. He had decided he didn’t want to sit around an office programming computers and had gone through all the various tests required to become a rules official. He had worked with Ginn on Q School and had come to respect its importance for everyone involved. Since Q School finals are always held the week after Thanksgiving, Carman spends the holiday at the finals site making sure everything is in place for the players, many of whom will show up on the weekend to begin playing practice rounds before the start of play the following Wednesday.

  “You know how tough a week it’s going to be for everyone,” Carman said. “You know most guys are going to walk away disappointed. I just want to be sure they don’t have any hassles to deal with beyond what they have to go through by being in the event.”

  Carman and his staff do everything they can to have the golf courses in the best possible shape and to handle all the logistics for the players: there are plenty of range balls to go around, the pin placements are fair, and any question can be answered in an instant. But there’s only so much you can do.

  Donnie Hammond still holds the record for the greatest margin of victory at the Q School finals: he won by 14 shots in 1982, the first year players were qualifying for spots on the all-exempt tour. Hammond won twice on the PGA Tour and became eligible for the Champions Tour in April 2007, when he turned fifty. He went back to Q School in 2005 because he wanted to have full status during his last full year on the PGA Tour. “I want to pick and choose my spots,” he said during a second stage held at Lake Jovita Golf and Country Club in Dade City, Florida. “I don’t want to be waiting around finding out which eight or ten or twelve tournaments I might get into. There are some events, like the Memorial and the Colonial, I’d like to go back to once more.”

  Still, the pressure on Hammond at second stage wasn’t anywhere close to what it was on those who had no status, right? Hammond laughed. “There isn’t a minute during Q School that you’re awake that you don’t feel uncomfortable,” he said. “And you don’t sleep very well either.”

  As Kelly Gibson, another tour veteran back at second stage, put it, “I’ve seen the pressures of Q School make a grown man cry.”

  Who have you seen cry at Q School? Gibson was asked.

  Gibson smiled. “Me,” he said. “And I’m not making it up.”

  Indeed, very few Q School stories are made up. There’s really no need.

  3

  In the Beginning

  T O MOST OF THE GOLFING PUBLIC, Q School is something that takes place each year in December over a six-day period in either Florida or California. Some may know that there’s a second stage that takes place in November, although very few people understand that those second-stage events take place at six different sites around the country. Even fewer know that Q School actually begins in October with first-stage qualifiers at fourteen different sites over a period of three weeks. In fact, in 2005 Steve Carman decided to add a fourth stage—tentatively called the preliminary stage—that was meant to be a prequalifier for players who could not show evidence that they were qualified to play in the first stage.

  According to the entry form, a player had to play in the preliminary stage if he hadn’t taken
part in Q School for the past three years and couldn’t provide evidence that he had played “successfully” in at least two tournaments—either sanctioned by the PGA of America or a recognized mini-tour or state open—that were at least 36 holes long. If a player was an amateur, he had to show that he had played reasonably well in two college events, two tournaments sanctioned by the U.S. Golf Association (USGA), or two state, regional, or metropolitan championships. The tournaments had to be stroke play, and being club champion or having won a member-guest somewhere didn’t do the player any good.

  A player also had to take part in the preliminary stage if he received a “noncompetitive” letter from any tour around the world or any national federation. Such a letter is sent to any player who participates in Q School and plays, well, noncompetitively. “Generally speaking, if someone plays four rounds and doesn’t come close to breaking 80, they’re going to get a letter,” Carman said. “They can certainly write back with an explanation of some kind, but in all likelihood they’re going to have to show proof that their play was an aberration before they can enter first stage again.”