Tales from Q School: Inside Golf's Fifth Major

by John Feinstein

  Gangluff’s demons were still chasing him throughout the third round. He started the morning at three over par, just three shots outside the number, but he couldn’t get his swing under control. “I never gave myself any kind of real chance the whole round,” he said after shooting 75. Like most players, Gangluff had ducked inside the clubhouse to cool off during the break between rounds. He sat in an armchair in the lobby staring into space, clearly baffled and upset, knowing that he now had no chance—barring a 59 the last 18 holes—to advance.

  The third round is the one where a lot of dreams go up in smoke. If you shoot 75 and go from three shots outside the number to nine shots out, you know you’re a dead man walking those last 18 holes. Vince Covello didn’t even want to play the last round after shooting 75 in the third. He had gone from nine under par after his first round to seven over par, meaning that even another 62 probably wouldn’t be good enough to advance. Like everyone else, he was hot, tired, and frustrated. He told Dillard Pruitt he wanted to withdraw and go home.

  “Are you injured?” Pruitt asked.

  “No.”

  “Are you sick, I mean physically sick, not sick about your golf?”

  “No.”

  “Then I really think you owe it to yourself and to the event to finish. You signed up to play 72 holes. Unless there’s a reason you can’t, you should at least be able to say you finished. You might feel worse about it now, but when it’s over, you’ll be glad you posted a score, regardless of what it is.”

  Covello listened, nodded his head, and walked to the range to get ready to play the last round.

  As the players headed back to the tees shortly after two o’clock, the tension was apparent. Steve Carman calls Q School “the quietest event in golf. Someone can make a hole in one, and you’ll barely hear a whoop or a holler.”

  Having already played 18 holes in the heat and knowing they were going to play one of the most important rounds of their lives, the players weren’t up for much chatter. One of the few with a smile on his face was Garrett Frank.

  Frank was one of those second-stage perennials, someone who always seemed to survive first stage but not second. For two days, it had appeared that he might not survive first stage this time around. He had started horrendously. Through 33 holes, he was six over par and felt as if he was running in quicksand. “Just couldn’t get anything going at all,” he said. “I kept telling myself that I just needed a couple of good holes to get going.”

  Actually, he needed only one good hole—one shot, in fact—to get going. Playing the 16th hole in the second round, a relatively short par-five, Frank found himself 230 yards from the hole after a good drive down the left side. He took out a “rescue club,” a wood (all woods are metal these days, of course, but most golfers still call them woods) that can be used in the rough, in the fairway, and for almost any kind of shot. “There was wind from the left, so I aimed for the left side of the green,” Frank said. “When I hit it, I knew I’d hit a really good shot. My swing felt perfect. I saw the wind taking the ball right just as I thought it would. The ball hit and went over a knob on the green and disappeared. Joey Whitaker had walked up toward the green because he had laid up, and I saw his arms go up in the air in the touchdown signal. That’s when I knew it had gone in.”

  It was the first double eagle Frank had ever made. “Heck, it was the first one I’ve ever witnessed,” he said. A double eagle is the rarest shot in golf, far more unusual than a hole in one because it almost always involves a much longer shot than the tee shot on a par-three.

  Buoyed by his sudden change of fortune, Frank parred his last two holes and then, filled with confidence, shot 66 in the third round to jump to two under for the tournament. That put him right on the number beginning the last round. “Now I’m confident,” he said, relaxing in the locker room to get out of the heat. “For 33 holes, I had nothing going on. One shot turned me right around. Amazing game, isn’t it?”

  Most players weren’t quite as buoyant. A few appeared to be in very strong positions. Alex Rocha was the leader at 11 under par, meaning if he could finish 18 holes standing, he was likely to make the top 19. A number of players were bunched between two under par and seven under par, with everyone else trying to catch up. Pruitt had told everyone that when they heard three blasts from his siren, that was it for the day. A player could finish the hole he was playing or stop right there and mark his ball, if he preferred.

  The three sharp blasts came at 6:48 p.m. with dusk rapidly closing in. The player in the field who least wanted to stop was Marc Turnesa. He had played better in the third round, shooting 70, but that still had left him way outside the number at six over for three rounds. Knowing he had to go low—or, as the players say, “go deep”—on the last 18 holes, he was doing exactly that. “Third round I wasn’t close to making a bogey,” he said. “Honestly, 70 was the highest score I could have shot. I didn’t make a putt longer than five feet.”

  Playing in one of the later groups off the back nine, Turnesa began dropping birdie putts from all over. He didn’t miss a fairway, and the putts that hadn’t dropped in the third round were now dropping. When the horn went off, he had finished 14 holes and was eight under par for the round, meaning he was now two under par for the tournament. “I didn’t want to stop,” he said. “I’d have kept playing in pitch dark at that point if they’d let me. I was in such a zone, the kind you only get into once in a while. I knew it was going to be very hard to keep that kind of momentum going in the morning, and I was guessing I still wasn’t inside the number, that I needed to make at least one more birdie, maybe two, to make it.”

  That’s what everyone was doing on Thursday night—guessing. The consensus was that the number was going to be three under, perhaps four. The weather report for the morning was hot without wind, the kind of weather that had led to the saying “the calm before the storm.”

  A handful of players finished their rounds on Thursday. One of them, Chang Hong, playing in the first group, had rallied after an opening 74 to shoot 70–68–70. But he had come to his last hole, the ninth, almost convinced that two under par wouldn’t be good enough. His second shot had stopped just short of the green, and he’d had a 60-foot chip, which he almost holed. The ball curled to a stop about two inches from the hole. Hong’s shoulders slumped.

  “Last year I was nine under par with nine holes to play and shot six over the last nine to miss by one,” he said. “I think I may have just missed by one again.”

  He wouldn’t know until the next day. Some players took the suspense out of their last rounds early. Nicholas Thompson, who had graduated from Georgia Tech in the spring and had played on the U.S. Walker Cup team before turning pro in August, shot 65–63 the last two rounds to finish at twelve under par. That tied him with Rocha. Colby Beckstrom, a twenty-two-year-old who had left Texas Christian after his junior year, was one shot behind them. Mike Grob put his experience to work during the final round, shooting 66 to finish at nine under par, and went off to hire a caddy for second stage. Garrett Frank tagged a 67 onto his third-round 66 and was comfortably in at six under par.

  It wasn’t as easy for most of the others. Jamie Neher, the two-time TPC Tampa Bay king, had one hole left when play was stopped. He came out tight and nervous on Friday morning, hit a ball into the water on the 18th, and made double bogey, dropping him from a comfortable-feeling five under to a not nearly as comfortable three under. Since Neher’s group was the first of the day to finish, he knew it would be a long wait before he would know whether he was in or out.

  “I can’t do this,” he said to his caddy. “I can’t just stand here and watch these scores go up. I’m heading home. Call me in the car.”

  Josh McCumber also had a nervous finish. He had played superbly in the afternoon round and was five under for 12 holes and six under for the tournament when play was called. “I felt like I was inside the number at that point,” he said. “I think I came out playing too carefully in the morning. I wasn’t t
rying to make birdies anymore.”

  He made no birdies in his last six holes but did make two bogeys. “The first one was just a bad break. I had mud on my ball off the tee at 14,” he said. He smiled. “The second one was probably some nerves.”

  McCumber flew the green with his second shot at 18, then chipped carefully to 10 feet and missed the par putt. “I didn’t want to do anything crazy at 18,” he said. “I figured I would still be okay at four, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t make worse than bogey.”

  He signed his card and walked to the scoreboard, where the crowd was growing as more and more groups finished. When he saw the number of players at five under or better, with several of the leaders still on the course, his heart skipped at least half a beat. “I hadn’t expected to see that many guys ahead of me,” he said. “But then I heard that some of the guys in the late groups were struggling, so it made me feel a little better.”

  It is one of the mysteries of Q School just how word gets out that a player is going deep or has it in reverse. Perhaps a relative walks on ahead and mentions to someone following another group that the player has just made three straight bogeys or hit a ball out-of-bounds. Somehow, word gets out.

  Just as McCumber was carefully finishing at 18 with a bogey, Marc Turnesa was finishing at nine, also with a bogey, but for entirely different reasons. His concern about finding the magic that had been in his clubs on Thursday afternoon had been justified. He had parred the sixth, seventh, and eighth holes and came to nine, a 425-yard par-four, thinking he had to make one more birdie to have a legitimate chance to get to the number.

  “All week we had talked about three under or four under making it,” he said. “I’d heard it was four under last year, but this year the scores had been a little higher because it had been windy on Wednesday. I knew the conditions were calm but nerves would come into play. I’d have loved to get to four under, but I thought three under would have a chance. I figured at two under I was dead.”

  Standing in the middle of the ninth fairway after a perfect drive, his white shirt already soaking wet at nine thirty in the morning, Turnesa had 165 yards to the hole. He took a seven-iron and, as the ball left his club, thought he had hit it “absolutely perfect.”

  But there was just a hint of a breeze, and the ball wasn’t flying in the direction of the pin, tucked over a knob in the green, the way Turnesa had thought it would. “Be right,” he hissed with the ball in the air, a golfer’s reference not to wanting the ball to go to the right but to the club selection being correct. When the ball landed just in front of the green and skidded to a halt instead of bounding toward the hole, Turnesa’s heart sank. When he got to his ball, he still had 84 feet to the hole and knew he needed a miraculous shot.

  “I went for the chip,” he said. “I figured I had no choice.”

  He hit a good shot, right at the flag, but the ball slid by the hole and stopped six feet behind it. Disheartened, he missed the par putt, finishing with 64, which he knew was going to be too little, too late. He signed for a four-round score of 283—one under par—and dragged himself over to the scoreboard to join the others who were watching Karen Widener do her work. At that moment, he wasn’t officially dead, but he knew there were too many players on the course for his score to hold up.

  “I might as well stand here and watch,” he said. “I like dying a slow, painful death.”

  It didn’t take long for him to die. Before long, those at two under were gone, and those at three under—including Jamie Neher, somewhere in his car en route to Hobe Sound—were in serious jeopardy. Stephen Gangluff, who had finally shaken his demons to shoot a last-round 67, which still left him nowhere near the cut line, paused for a brief look before heading for the parking lot. “Back to the drawing board,” he said quietly.

  The word about players in reverse had proven to be true. While young Colby Beckstrom was cruising to a final-round 65, the two men playing with him, Ted Potter Jr. and George McNeill, were struggling. McNeill had lost much of his cushion with a third-round 74, but Potter had appeared more than comfortable starting the last 18 holes at six under par.

  “I wanted to shout at him [Potter], ‘Put your driver away, dude!’” Beckstrom said. “He kept hitting his driver and getting into more and more trouble. I really felt for the guy because you could see by the look on his face that he knew it was slipping away, but he didn’t know how to stop the slide.”

  By the time he got to the 18th hole, Potter was six over par for his last round and had no chance. McNeill stood on the tee at three under, thinking he might need a birdie, but a par might be good enough. He was an experienced player, who had played his college golf at Florida State and had been to second stage several times. He had also qualified for the U.S. Open in the past, so he had been in pressure situations. But, after opening with a 66 in the first round, the rest of the week had been a struggle. Now he was just trying to hang on.

  He couldn’t. His second shot missed the green left, and he chipped to 12 feet. Knowing he almost certainly had to make the putt, he watched it die an inch—one inch—to the right. That was the difference between making it to second stage and not making it. He finished at two under par along with Chang Hong, whose prediction that he would miss by a shot had proven true. Marc Turnesa was another shot back, tied for 27th. His gut feeling that he needed one more birdie had been exactly right.

  Jamie Neher was an hour down the road when he got the call telling him that he had finished tied for 19th along with Barry Roof and Bryan Clarke.

  At Q School, everyone has a story to tell—one way or the other. George McNeill’s one-inch tap-in for bogey at the 18th hole had been the last shot of the week. It had come at 10:31 a.m., giving people time to head home and prepare for the hurricane. A number of players went straight to their cars, flinging clubs into the trunk and changing shoes right there before heading down the highway. Others lingered by the scoreboard. Some knew it would be at least another year before they competed at this level again. Others knew it might be longer than that.

  Chris Wall, who had finished four shots outside the number at one over par, stood with his bag slung across his shoulder and shook his head. “I wish I could have played nine more holes,” he said, echoing a familiar refrain.

  Joey Whitaker, who had witnessed Garrett Frank’s double eagle, had deferred graduate school for a year to take another shot at Q School. He had worked on a golf course maintenance crew on the early-morning shift so he could have the rest of the day to practice. As the scores went up on the board, his father, who had caddied for him, stood and watched sadly. His son had shot 306, 22 over par, and had finished second to last. “A week ago, he played in a tournament and shot 65–67 and won,” Joe Whitaker Sr. said. “I don’t know what happened to him this week. I’ve never seen him play like this. All the time and all the work, and this is how it ends.”

  The one player who had finished behind Whitaker was Toddy Brown, who had shot 311. He was delighted. “I just wanted to see what this would feel like,” he said. “This was a chance to get my feet wet against players at this level.”

  Brown was a businessman from Greensboro, North Carolina. He played college golf at Wake Forest and decided at the age of forty-seven that he wanted to take a crack at the Champions Tour when he turned fifty. He had taken time off from his job to work on his golf, and this was the first time he had tested himself. Clearly, he had a long way to go, which was no surprise to him. “This golf course was just too long for my game,” he said. “I knew that would be the case. My nerves held up, though, and that’s a good sign.”

  Those who had survived lingered longer than most of those who hadn’t. They talked about where they were going for second stage. There were two Florida sites, and most had signed up for one of them. Younger players like Nicholas Thompson and Colby Beckstrom were all smiles. For them, first stage had been a successful adventure. Most were just glad it was over.

  “There’s a little bit of a double-edged sword to thi
s,” Garrett Frank said, watching the last scores get posted, knowing he was safely inside the number. “If you want to play big-time golf, this is a week you have to deal with, have to survive. But when you walk away from it, you understand you still haven’t done anything yet. This is the first hill. Second stage is the mountain.”

  And what are the finals? “I don’t know,” Frank said. “But I’d sure like to find out.”

  6

  On to November

  IN ALL, 294 PLAYERS had advanced from the fourteen first stages, an average of 21 players per site. That was slightly more than the ideal number of 20 per site that Steve Carman hoped for, but it wasn’t anything that couldn’t be handled. Second stage was scheduled for the second and third weeks of November, three sites each week. With cooler weather approaching, there would be two sites in California, two in Texas, and two in Florida.

  A number of players with familiar names had taken part in first stage with varying success. Scott Ford, the grandson of 1957 Masters champion Doug Ford (he had caddied for his grandfather once at Augusta as a teenager), had made it through at the Florence, South Carolina, site on the number—which was eight over par, in large part because the weather was frigid the entire week. Codie Mudd, the son of Jodie Mudd, who won the Players Championship in 1990, wasn’t nearly as fortunate in Florence, shooting 20 over par—12 shots outside the cut. Patrick Damron, the younger brother of tour player Robert Damron, cruised through in Lakeland, Florida, finishing tied for third. One brother team advanced: Ron Whittaker got through in Cypress, Texas; his brother John made it through at Tampa Bay. Warren Schutte, best known for beating Phil Mickelson to win the NCAA championship in 1991, finished tied for eighth at the Kannapolis, North Carolina, site. Ricky Barnes, the 2002 U.S. Amateur champion, who had gotten a lot of attention by outplaying Tiger Woods while paired with him at the 2003 Masters, finished tied for second at Rio Rico, Arizona. Jeff Curl, the son of Rod Curl, the only full-blooded Native American to have won on the PGA Tour (Colonial, 1974) finished tied for fourth in Spring, Texas, and reached second stage for a third straight year.