Tales from Q School: Inside Golf's Fifth Major

by John Feinstein

  Being at Q School, playing 18 holes on a sun-drenched day on a gorgeous, scenic golf course, almost felt strange to Gibson after what he had seen the previous eleven weeks. “Part of it is Katrina, but part of it is just being old,” he said, laughing. “I remember playing Q School back in the late ’80s. It was entirely different than now. You would never be at a golf course this nice, especially at second stage. There weren’t nearly as many good players then as now. I remember in ’89 I played with a guy the first day who got sick on the golf course, twice, because his nerves were so bad. The young guys now, they’ve played so much tournament golf before they get to this level, I don’t think they’re as nervous. I don’t think you see as much choking as you used to. And it felt more private back then. I liked it that way. You’re a golfer. Part of you is a performer—but in certain settings.

  “To be honest, I don’t like the fact that the Golf Channel televises the finals. I understand it, but I don’t like it. If you’re in a tournament and you’re inside the ropes and there are crowds and you’re playing well and you see a TV camera, that’s okay. You aren’t on camera unless you’re playing well, so you want to show off. But if you’re at Q School, it’s because on some level you’re struggling. You want the quiet. You want to feel as if you’re alone, and a lot of the time, you can feel that way. You get out on that golf course, most of the time it’s you and the other two players and the caddies. Period.

  “A couple years ago on the last day of the finals at La Quinta, I made a big run. I was way back, and all of a sudden I started making birdies. Next thing I know, I’m eight under par for the day, and I know I’m right around the number. I’m playing my last hole, thinking I need one more birdie. I’m in the middle of the fairway waiting to hit, and all of a sudden I see a guy with a camera running right at me down the fairway. It just kind of stopped me. I was in a zone at that moment, totally focused, just hitting good golf shots, and then I see the guy with the camera, and I think, ‘Oh, my God, the whole world has noticed I’m making this run. I’m either right on the number or one off it.’ In an instant, everything changed for me out there. The rhythm I’d had wasn’t there anymore. I flinched just a little. I ended up hitting a lousy second shot, made a par, and, sure enough, missed by one. I just walked straight to my car, got in, and sat there and cried. I had been so wound up, and it all came out.

  “I know the tour isn’t going to tell the Golf Channel to go away. I just wish there was a way to make them understand when they’re out there that this isn’t the same as a regular tournament. You have to be inside a player’s head to really understand how different it feels. You never feel more alone than when you’re playing Q School. You succeed, you get all the credit. You fail, you get all the blame. That’s golf. You don’t have any teammates who can carry you through on an off day or in an off year. When you get it going right, you don’t want anything to change that feeling. At Q School, you look up and see cameras and it feels wrong. I’ll never forget the feeling in the pit of my stomach that day when all the work turned out to be for nothing. Every golfer has had that feeling at some point. But when you’re one shot short with the next year of your life riding on the result, it makes you want to cry.”

  He smiled. “Which, on that day, is exactly what I did.”

  BECAUSE GIBSON HAD NEVER WON on the PGA Tour, he didn’t have the luxury that the thirty-six players taking part in second stage who had won tournaments did: status on the tour.

  Once you have won a PGA Tour event, you have lifetime status as a past champion. That means that each year you can get into a handful of tournaments because enough players ahead of you in the pecking order (the fully exempt 125, tournament winners from the previous two years, players with medical exemptions, the top 20 on the Nationwide list from the year before, those who make it through Q School, and those who finish between 126th and 150th on the money list) choose to skip them. The tournaments that players with past champion status get into are some of the tour’s least glamorous events—midsummer tournaments like Milwaukee and Quad Cities, and fall tournaments that come after the major championship season is over and the stars have gone home to rest.

  “That’s not exactly what any of us are looking for,” Donnie Hammond said, cooling off after a lengthy postround session on Lake Jovita’s range. “I want to choose the tournaments I play in, not have them choose me because the guys who can choose have stayed home. I’m not that far from fifty. I’d like to go back and play Memorial again, play Riviera [Los Angeles] again, play Colonial again. Going through this is the only way I’m going to have that chance.”

  Hammond has the distinction of winning by the largest margin (14 shots) in Q School finals history. He accomplished that feat playing the TPC Sawgrass in 1982, the first year when getting through Q School got you into every tournament the following year without dealing with Monday qualifying—the dawn of the so-called all-exempt tour. Hammond had just turned twenty-five when he made it to the tour, and for the next fifteen years he pieced together a solid career that included victories at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic in 1986 and the Texas Open in 1989. But he seemed to hit a wall when he turned forty and had struggled since then, never finishing higher than 165th on the money list after 1997. He had been fully exempt in 2003 after getting through Q School in 2002, but other than that year, he had lived in the netherworld of the “partly exempt” player, waiting for his number to come up as a past champion while spending some time on the Nationwide Tour.

  “Not exactly the ideal life when you’ve got four kids,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s funny how your attitude toward the game seems to change when you’re in your forties. I’m not sure if it’s having kids or feeling different physically or just being at a different point in your life where it’s harder to just keep your head down, play golf, and not worry about anything else. Nowadays, there are more guys playing well into their forties because of better conditioning, but with 97 percent of us, you do start to see the slippage as your forties move along.”

  Hammond had plenty of Q School experience. His first one had been in 1982, when everything had seemed so easy. During the last eight years of his career, he had been forced back on a regular basis. He had successfully negotiated his way through the finals on four different occasions. “Getting through in 2002 at PGA West was, without question, one of my top three days in golf,” he said. “If I’d ended up missing, it would have been one of my worst. That’s what makes this so tough. For most guys, the difference between success and failure is extremely narrow—a shot here or there, a made putt or two, catching one lucky break or not catching it. You really feel it at second stage because there’s no gray area at all. If you don’t make it, you can’t walk away saying, ‘Well, I’ve got the Nationwide.’ You’ve got nothing—unless you’re a past winner, in which case you might get ten or twelve starts the next year. How many guys in this field are past winners? Everyone else is playing for their lives.”

  He smiled and waved a hand around the driving range, where he was sitting on a hill, a few yards behind a line of players pounding balls in the late-afternoon heat. “Listen to how quiet this range is. At a regular tournament, the range in the afternoon is like a bar after work—guys talking, joking, standing around in groups. You don’t see that at Q School. There’s too much at stake. You do your work, and you go home. The pressure here is so intense, I think the birds and the squirrels hide out. All the Q Schools I’ve played, I don’t remember ever feeling comfortable while I was awake—-and I don’t sleep very well either.”

  He sighed. “You know what this is like? A really big four-day funeral. In the end, there are nineteen survivors. The rest of the bodies just get carted away.”

  The seven men at Lake Jovita who were guaranteed past champion status were a decidedly mixed bag. At forty-eight, Hammond was the oldest in the group. “I feel like I’m ready to move on to the Champions Tour,” he said. “I played with a kid named Matt Davidson today who was plenty young enough to be
my son. I think I’ve figured it out: I’d rather try to compete against Charles Coody [the 1971 Masters champion, who was sixty-eight] than Charles Howell III [who was twenty-six and averaged just under 300 yards off the tee, according to official tour statistics].”

  David Gossett, at twenty-six, was the youngest of the past champions. Mike Hulbert was forty-seven, Blaine McCallister was forty-six, Grant Waite and Guy Boros were forty-one, and Matt Kuchar was twenty-seven. Gossett and Kuchar had come to the tour in their early twenties labeled as can’t-miss stars.

  Kuchar had burst into the public’s consciousness with spectacular performances at the 1998 Masters and U.S. Open. Still a Georgia Tech undergraduate, he won the 1997 U.S. Amateur, which gained him automatic entry to those two events and the British Open. Playing the first two rounds at Augusta with defending champion Tiger Woods, he made the cut and went on to finish in a tie for 21st place—which not only made him low amateur but also earned him a trip back in 1999, since he had finished in the top 24. He did even better at the Open, finishing in a tie for 14th, which got him a spot in the ’99 Open (the top 15 automatically qualify for the next year).

  Most people expected Kuchar to turn pro once he had played in the British Open. He was a hot commodity and would have made a lot of money in endorsements at that moment. He had an endearing smile, and the only criticism anyone had of him was his father’s performance as his caddy in the majors. Not being a professional, Tom Kuchar was a bit overenthusiastic about his son’s play, and he upset a number of players and caddies—notably, Justin Leonard, who was paired with Kuchar for the last round of the Masters and the first two rounds of the Open. Everyone liked the kid; the father was the issue. Once he got on tour on his own, he would do fine.

  Except Kuchar decided not to turn pro. He was the rare athlete who meant it when he said he wanted to finish college. He graduated in the spring of 2000 and, even more surprisingly, opted not to turn pro then either, deciding to go into finance. That notion lasted about six months, and he finally turned pro at the end of 2000. Playing on sponsor exemptions in 2001—he was still a popular name among tournament directors, who remembered his hot play in 1998—he earned more than $572,000, enough to make him exempt for 2002. When he won the Honda Classic early in 2002 and finished the year 49th on the money list with $1,237,000 in earnings, he seemed to be on his way to stardom.

  But things don’t always work out the way people expect. Kuchar struggled the next three years and lost his fully exempt status for 2005 after finishing 139th on the money list in 2004. He dropped to 159th in ’05 and found himself back at second stage, trying to find the magic again.

  Gossett’s drop-off had been even more precipitous. Coming out of the University of Texas in the spring of 2000, he had been labeled one of the “young guns” (along with Kuchar, Howell, Luke Donald, and Adam Scott, all early twentysomethings who hit the ball a long way and appeared to be exceptionally mature) likely to challenge Tiger Woods over the next few years. Gossett was the son of a pilot—his dad had flown F-4 Air Force phantoms before retiring to fly for Fed Ex—and had grown up in Memphis after spending four years in Germany while his father was stationed there.

  Gossett starred at Texas, being chosen a first-team all-American as both a freshman and a sophomore before deciding to turn pro after his second year of college. He breezed through the first two stages of Q School that fall and came to Palm Springs for the finals as one of the players being closely watched. For three days, he played mediocre golf, failing to break 70 and falling back in the pack.

  After the third round, his mother arrived in town, and they went and had an early dinner at Macaroni Grill. Gossett remembers telling her that he’d left a lot of shots on the golf course the first three days. “I know I need to relax,” he said. “But that’s easier said than done.”

  He started the next day on the 10th hole at the Jack Nicklaus Tournament Course at PGA West and promptly knocked his tee shot into a bunker. But he got a seven-iron to within 15 feet of the hole and made the putt for birdie. He can recite every shot and every thought he had for the rest of the round. He missed a birdie putt on the 18th hole (his ninth hole of the day) and walked off the green “hacked off” because he had shot 30 on his first nine holes and he’d never had a 29. He birdied the first hole, making a 15-foot putt, then knocked an eight-iron into the cup at the par-three second hole for a hole in one. All of a sudden, he was nine under par after 11 holes. “The amazing thing about that day is, I parred two par-fives,” he said, “and still shot what I shot.”

  What he shot was 59—the first person in history to do it in competition on a par-72 course. He birdied the last four holes, hitting his second shot at number nine to five feet and making the putt to make history. It was the first time—and is still the only time—anyone had broken 60 at any stage of Q School. “I remember standing on the eighth tee with Mike Smith after I had birdied seven,” Gossett said. “Rick Fehr was supposed to be the third guy in our group, but he’d withdrawn, and it was just the two of us. Mike said to me, ‘Well, David, we’re a combined 11 under par so far today.’ He was even. That was when it first dawned on me that 59 was possible.”

  The 59 caused a sensation and made Gossett the center of attention for the remaining two days of Q School. But he couldn’t recapture the magic of that day, shooting 74–72 the last two days to finish in a tie for 68th place—three shots outside the number he needed to make the tour. Remarkably, he never shot a round in the 60s that week—he had five rounds in the 70s and a 59.

  “I had a lot of mixed emotions when the week was over,” he said. “On the one hand, I didn’t meet my goal—making the tour—and that was very disappointing. On the other hand, I’d played one amazing round and had a piece of history to show for it. When I got away for a while and thought about it, I was able to focus on the positive side of it. I had to be a good player to shoot a round like that. I decided I needed to go out and build on what I had accomplished.”

  He did, finishing second in a tournament in Australia while waiting for the Buy.com Tour schedule to begin. He top-tenned in four straight Buy.com events. “What was disappointing about that was I had a chance to win each of those weeks but didn’t,” he said. “I had to tell myself to stay positive and good things would happen.”

  Gossett received a sponsor exemption for the John Deere Classic in July 2001. He was still considered a rising star, and the second-tier PGA Tour events were eager to have him. He took the lead after 36 holes and never lost it. He hung on to win by one, and just like that, he was a fully exempt player on the tour through 2004 (thanks to the two-year winner’s exemption). He was the first player to win a tournament playing on a sponsor exemption since a twenty-year-old kid named Tiger Woods had won in Las Vegas in 1996. His young gun status was fully restored.

  “Actually, I was the first of the group to win,” he said. “Kooch [Kuchar] won the next year, and Luke and Charlie and Adam have all won since, but at that point, they hadn’t won. I felt great. I had played well in the clutch, and I had done something I’d been building to for a while.”

  He had just turned twenty-two, and it looked as if he was on the road to stardom. Only it didn’t happen.

  “I had always wondered if expectations could be a burden,” he said. “Looking back now, I’d have to say yes, they can be. You hear a lot of stories about guys changing things to try to get better and ending up getting worse. I’m one of those stories.”

  He changed teachers, going from Jonathan Yarwood (who also taught Michael Campbell) to David Leadbetter. For all the success Leadbetter has had helping good players become great (Nick Faldo and Nick Price come to mind), he is not for everyone. He is very exact and methodical in his teaching, something that some players find difficult. Gossett was one of those players who wasn’t cut out to be a Leadbetter pupil. “I do not want anyone to think I blame David in any way for my last couple of years,” he said. “He’s a good man and a great teacher, and I have absolutely no issues wit
h him. It just wasn’t right for me, and I learned that the hard way. No sour grapes, though. Whatever went wrong, that’s on me, not on David.”

  Gossett played decently in 2002 and 2003, finishing 100th and 84th on the money list, but he plummeted to 245th in 2004. He arrived at Lake Jovita with Yarwood in tow and a belief that he was headed back in the right direction.

  “The proof is in the pudding,” he said, his Texas cap firmly in place after an opening-round 70. “I hit 16 greens today and shot 70. I have to believe if I keep hitting the ball like this, there are lower numbers to be shot. I feel confident I can get this done.” He smiled. “Three days from now, I’ll know whether I’m right.”

  7

  Lake Jovita Blues

  LAKE JOVITA WAS AN EXAMPLE of the kind of golf course Steve Carman was looking to add to the second-stage rota. It was a relatively new club, having opened in 1998, and it had two golf courses, which made it easier to convince the membership to give up one course for a week to the tour. It was also located off the beaten path, on back roads between Tampa and Orlando. Tim Petrovic, who had won his first PGA Tour event in 2005 (New Orleans), lived at Lake Jovita. So did Garrett Willis, who had won his first event as a rookie on tour at Tucson in 2001 but had since fallen back to the Nationwide Tour. Willis was exempt to the finals based on having finished 33rd on the Nationwide money list in 2005 and had volunteered to caddy for Mike Hulbert at Lake Jovita.

  Willis had not been the most popular guy on tour after his victory at Tucson. Some found him cocky; others found him immature. One of the locker room stories told about him dated to the first year of the Wachovia Championship in Charlotte 2003. The people running the tournament had made a deal with one of their sponsors, Mercedes, to supply each player with a courtesy car during the week. Willis arrived to pick up his car at the same time as Nick Price. When he was handed the keys to his Mercedes—a smaller model than the one being given to Price, a former world number one player who had won three majors in his career—he demanded, “Why does he get a bigger car than I get?” To which the Mercedes rep replied, “Because he’s Nick Price, and you’re not.”