Tales from Q School: Inside Golf's Fifth Major

by John Feinstein

  “I know you probably don’t want to hear this right now, but I’m going to tell you anyway,” he said. “The other players, the guys who have seen you play, are all saying the same thing over there: ‘No way Colby Beckstrom shot 78. He’s too good. He’ll definitely be back.’”

  J. J. paused for a moment, then threw his arms around his little brother. “I’m damn proud of you,” he said softly.

  Beckstrom felt a little better. “I loved him for saying what he said,” he remembered later. “But it occurred to me that I had just missed the absolute worst cut you can miss in golf, and I’d missed it very painfully. I wasn’t on the bubble starting the day. I was way inside the bubble. There were a lot of other guys with more reason to be nervous than me who played well. That was the part that was tough to take.”

  One other thought unnerved him a little, then and later. “They say it can happen to anyone,” he said. “Of course they’re right. But here’s the worst part: there’s absolutely no guarantee for any of us that it won’t happen again.”

  BECKSTROM WASN’T THE ONLY ONE fighting final-day nerves. Grant Waite, seasoned veteran that he was, played the first 11 holes almost as badly as Beckstrom played the first five and found himself six over par for the day—and back to three under for the week. Just when he was becoming convinced he had blown it, he found his game, and, unlike Beckstrom, he made three birdie putts coming down the stretch to salvage a 75 and finish at six under.

  Steve Wheatcroft, like Beckstrom trying to make the finals for the first time, managed to keep his golf ball under control the entire day, steadily making pars. At 18 he was even par for the day and still six under for the week. He was convinced that six under was a lock to make it but five under was not. He managed to get his second shot onto the green, about 30 feet behind the flag, then, with his hands starting to shake, putted to within three feet. He practically ran after the ball as it rolled toward the hole.

  “I said to the guys I was playing with [veterans Kevin Johnson and Tripp Isenhour], ‘I hope you don’t mind if I finish right now, because if I have to wait a couple minutes, I don’t know if I’ll be able to grip the club, much less draw it back,” he said. “They were great about it. I walked up and tried not to even think about what was at stake on the putt, and just managed to shove it into the hole.”

  Wheatcroft was one of a handful of players working with no caddy during the week, dragging his clubs around on a pull cart. As soon as his name went up on the scoreboard as a qualifier, a number of caddies who had shown up for the last day began searching for him.

  “All of a sudden, I had these new friends,” he said. “I just took their phone numbers and told them if I needed them, I’d be in touch.”

  Wheatcroft spent a lot of time at the scoreboard after he finished, just enjoying the moment. “I’ve dreamed of this my whole life,” he said. “There’s a part of me that can’t believe it’s true. I just keep staring at my name to make sure it’s really me that finished six under.”

  Bob Heintz also headed straight for the scoreboard as soon as he signed his scorecard, but it wasn’t to celebrate. He had shot 71, which put him at five under, and he knew that five under was very much on the bubble. “I hate to stand here and root against anyone,” he said. “But I need some guys to go backward.”

  Some players can’t bear to stand and watch scores go up when they know they’re going to be a shot in or a shot out. Heintz couldn’t bring himself to leave. “It makes no sense at all,” he said. “But I feel like I’ll miss something.”

  Others had no need to hang around. Matt Kuchar, the 1997 U.S. Amateur champion who had become such a hero with his play at the Masters and the U.S. Open the following year, could do no better than 73, leaving him at four under for the week. Mike Hulbert had a similar experience, also shooting 73. He came to the 18th hole at three under for the tournament, thinking that if he could make a birdie and get to four under, he might still have a chance. He hit a nine-iron to 12 feet, but missed the putt and walked off the green shaking his head.

  “I still think I learned something this week,” he said. “I’ve still got a little turd left in me. I’m not ready to give it up yet.”

  Donnie Hammond and Kelly Gibson ended up playing all four rounds with each other. They were both two under par after the first two rounds, and they were still at two under after third-round 72s. Hammond won their mini-tournament by one shot, shooting 71 the last day, but it left him tied with Hulbert at three under. Jeff Curl managed to shoot 70—one of the better rounds on a day when only seven players broke 70—but he still came up short at four under. Josh McCumber couldn’t recover from his third-round 76. Shooting 72 the last day, he finished four shots outside the number. “Next year,” his father said. “He’s still got work to do, but he understands that.”

  Garrett Frank’s 71 left him two shots farther back and wondering if there would be a next year. David Gossett (72) and Ty Tryon (73) walked away shaking their heads, wondering how what had once been so easy had become so difficult.

  The saddest ending of the afternoon belonged to thirty-six-year-old Ken Duke, who could aptly be described as a golf journeyman. He had played one year on the PGA Tour (2004), had played the Nationwide on and off dating back to 1995, had played mini-tours in the United States, and had played on the South American and Australasia tours. He had finished 47th on the Nationwide list in 2005, so his only Q School goal was to get back to the PGA Tour.

  He stood in the middle of the 18th fairway at six under par, having hit a perfect drive. But he pulled his nine-iron into deep rough behind the green, chunked his first chip, chipped to 10 feet and missed the bogey putt. The double bogey dropped him to four under and punched his ticket back to the Nationwide for 2006.

  There were also some success stories. Joe Alfieri II, who had been born on the July day in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked on the moon, shot 68 to go from just outside the number at four under to well inside it at eight under. His father, who had introduced him to the game as a child, caddied for him, using a pull cart in the midday heat. While Joe II went to sign his scorecard, Joe I collapsed in the arms of a friend and wept—partly from joy, partly from exhaustion, but mostly from relief.

  As the late players came in, it began to look as if there might be eighteen players at six under par. The tour had sent word earlier in the week that only eighteen and ties would advance from Lake Jovita because there had been some withdrawals and because of larger fields at some other sites.

  Bob Heintz was staring the scoreboard down when word began to circulate that someone in the late groups had gone backward. It was one of those rumors that had started someplace on the back nine and made it into the clubhouse as the later players began finishing.

  The last group wasn’t in any trouble. Tommy Tolles shot 71 to finish at 18-under-par 270. Bubba Dickerson shot 69 to finish two shots back. And Hiroshi Matsuo, fighting a case of need-to-make-it-through-second-stage nerves, produced a 72, which left him comfortably 10 under par at 278.

  It was only when the second-to-last group—Parel, Pappas, and Beckstrom—arrived at 18 that people knew it was Beckstrom who had gone in reverse. The looks on the faces of his family were a dead giveaway. When Beckstrom’s score went up, Heintz tried not to smile behind the sunglasses he was wearing, but he knew he had survived. When Tolles’s, Dickerson’s, and Matsuo’s scores were added, there would be seventeen players at six under or better. That meant that Heintz, Tripp Isenhour, and Ryan Howison, who had finished at five under, were in.

  Heintz let out a sigh of relief. “I feel sorry for the kid,” he said. “But this is what happens at Q School. There’s always someone with a sad story to tell. I hope for his sake there comes a time when he can look back on this day and tell people how this disappointment gave him inspiration to become a great player.”

  Someday, Beckstrom might do that. On that windy Saturday afternoon at Lake Jovita, he wasn’t thinking about what might come someday, only abo
ut what could have come that day. Heintz, Howison, and Isenhour would play fifty miles up the road in Orlando in three more weeks. It would be two months before Colby Beckstrom could walk onto a golf course without feeling sick to his stomach.

  10

  What Is, Is

  IN FIVE OTHER LOCATIONS around the country during the second and third weeks of November, several hundred golfers were fighting their way through second stage. The names that most golf fans would know were spread out around the country: Larry Mize was in Panama City, Florida, dealing with the fact that there were players in the field who had not been born when he first made it through Q School in 1981. Ken Green, a five-time tour winner who was best known for his frequent criticisms of tour policy, also was there. Bill Glasson, Steve Stricker, and Dan Forsman, all big money earners in the past, were in Kingwood, Texas, just outside Houston. Matt Gogel, perhaps best known for being the victim of an amazing Tiger Woods comeback at Pebble Beach in 2001 (Woods had come from seven shots down the last day to beat him) but better remembered by his fellow pros for bouncing back from that disappointment to win at Pebble Beach the next year, was in Beaumont, California, along with Steve Pate, Rick Fehr, Dennis Paulson, and Duffy Waldorf, all multiple winners on tour. Beaumont was also where T. C. Chen showed up.

  One player in Panama City had a special place in golf lore— albeit one that no one would wish on his worst enemy. Jaxon Brigman had been knocking around between the Nationwide Tour and mini-tours since his graduation from Oklahoma State in 1994. Playing at OSU had been a dream come true for Brigman. He had grown up in Abilene, Texas, the son of a CPA who bought a house right on a golf course. Brigman never took any formal golf lessons, but his parents had a golf cart to get around the golf club, and he and his friends would go out on the golf course after school and play. “By the time I was eleven, I was starting to get pretty good,” he said. “That’s when I started playing in tournaments a little bit.”

  Soon after that, Brigman and his friends went to watch an amateur tournament called the LaJet Classic. The best group of players in the event came from Oklahoma State, led then by Scott Verplank and Willie Wood, both future PGA Tour winners. “All I remember is they all had these orange golf bags, and they were the first team to have the stand-up bags, which I thought were really cool. Mike Holder was the coach, and he was kind of an icon even back then. My goal from that moment on was to somehow get good enough to go play there.”

  Brigman got good enough, winning a number of prestigious junior tournaments, which led to the phone call from Holder offering him a scholarship to OSU. “I’d been recruited by some other schools,” he said. “But once Coach Holder called, that was pretty much it.”

  If Brigman had any doubts about wanting to play for Holder and OSU, they disappeared after Holder’s first question to him: “Do you want to play on the PGA Tour?”

  Brigman had started to dream that dream as a high school freshman. “Absolutely,” he answered.

  “Good,” Holder said. “Because the only guys I want in my program are players who want to play on the tour.”

  “I was absolutely sold when I heard that,” Brigman said.

  He was on good teams at OSU, playing with future PGA Tour players Bob May, Chris Tidland, Kevin Wentworth, Kris Cox, and Bo Van Pelt. But the experience wasn’t what he had hoped for. “To be honest, I was intimidated by Coach Holder,” Brigman said. “He’s kind of an in-your-face guy, and I don’t think I responded well to that. If he told me I was terrible, I believed I was terrible. My confidence got shaken. Finally, my junior year, I went in and told Coach that I didn’t think I was doing a very good job responding to what he was telling me; that it wasn’t his fault at all, but that I’d lost my confidence. He kind of eased up on me after that, and I had a great year and a great summer. Going into my senior year, I remember we had a team meeting. We had finished thirteenth in the national championships the previous spring, and Coach wasn’t happy about that at all. He said, ‘The only guy on this team who has a guaranteed spot is Jaxon Brigman.’ That made me feel good.”

  It didn’t last long. By the time Holder selected the team that would go to the Big Eight and NCAA championships, Brigman was first alternate. “I didn’t even get to play in the big tournaments as a senior,” he said. “It was definitely time for me to move on and try to start over.”

  His pro career began well. He made it to Q School finals and earned a Nationwide card in three of his first four years, although he never really got close to making the PGA Tour. “The good news was that I was good enough to make the finals, but I couldn’t really get anything going on the Nationwide. The years I didn’t make the finals and played mini-tours I think helped me, because I did well and it helped my confidence.”

  He made it back to the finals in ’99 after a year on the mini-tours. “I actually missed at first stage in ’98,” he said. “That was the first time that had happened. But I managed to make a little money playing mini-tours in ’99, so I actually felt a little better about myself going into Q School.”

  That was Steve Carman’s first year running Q School and the year the finals were played at Doral—not the famous Blue Course, but the Gold and Silver courses. “It was a logistical nightmare,” Carman remembered. “We had to shuttle guys forever to get them out to the 10th tee or back in from the ninth green when they finished. There was construction in Miami right nearby, and the noise was deafening sometimes. Plus, there was all sorts of other play at other courses at the resort, so the whole thing had the feel of a giant outing. It was really tough on the guys, especially given what was at stake for all of them.”

  Brigman had sailed through the first two stages that year. He had arrived at Doral feeling as confident as he had ever felt going into the finals. “A lot of guys—and I’m one of them—the first couple of times they make the finals, they feel like their job is done just by getting there. Even if you finish dead last, you’ve got some kind of status on the Nationwide—you can make some kind of living out there if you play decent—so there’s a feeling that you have a safety net.

  “After a couple times, though, you don’t feel that way anymore. For me especially, since I never played that well on the Nationwide and never made all that much money. The funny thing is, some people have said my game is better suited for the PGA Tour because I’m not a bomber, so I’m not that likely to make six, seven, eight birdies on a given day, and you almost have to do that to cash a big check on the Nationwide. On the PGA Tour, length sure helps, but getting it up and down matters a lot more—or so it would seem.”

  After five days at Doral, Brigman found himself several shots outside the number, but still with a chance to make the tour if he could go low in the last round. He played the back nine first at the Gold Course and was quite relieved when he parred the 18th hole—an island green par-four that required a nerve-wracking second shot. Several players, desperately needing either a birdie or par to have a shot at getting their cards, would find water there late in the day. With the 18th behind him, Brigman got on a roll. He wasn’t even sure where he was or exactly what the number was going to be—“I’d never been that close before, so I didn’t have a strong sense of what it was”—but he knew coming to his last hole that he was seven under par for the day. His parents and his girlfriend, Amy (now his wife), were walking with him, and he glanced over while walking down the eighth fairway and saw his father talking to a rules official.

  “I figured he was trying to find out what the number was,” he said. “I knew I was right around it.”

  He hit a good second shot to about six feet at the ninth, then got nervous for the first time all day. When he missed the putt, he looked over at his parents and Amy to see their reactions. “I figured if I was in good shape, they’d give me a thumbs-up or something. If I wasn’t, I thought they’d look down or shake their heads. But I couldn’t read them. It was nerve-wracking. When I went in to sign my card, I was kind of a wreck.”

  Because he had finished at the
ninth hole, the scorer’s tent was miles from the scoreboard, and the scorer—a volunteer— said he had no idea what the number was going to be, especially since there were a number of groups still on the course. Brigman went through his card, noting the seven circles that Jay Hobby, another Nationwide player, had made to indicate each of his birdies. He knew he hadn’t made any bogeys, so the seven circles added up to a seven-under-par 65.

  “I was completely whacked-out in there,” he said. “I was confused, I was nervous, and I was having trouble focusing. I remember saying to the guy, ‘Would you give me a check?’ before I signed the card. He said, ‘Yup, 65.’ What I should have done was make the walking scorer check me, because she had been marking it down hole by hole and wasn’t just reading my scorecard. The only thing I can figure is that the guy taking the scores just counted the circles, too. I signed my card, and then we had about a ten-minute van ride back to where the scoreboard was. My parents and Amy didn’t know if I’d made it or not either, which was why they hadn’t signaled me before I went into the scoring tent.”

  When they arrived at the scoreboard, his score still hadn’t been posted, and it was tough to tell what the number was going to be. A few minutes later, though, his 65 went up, and a nearby television showing the Golf Channel feed had the number at 15 under par—which was exactly where the 65 had put him. He saw his name go up on the screen among those who had made it on the number. Soon after, people were telling him it was official: he was on the PGA Tour.

  “I remember all sorts of crazy thoughts running through my head,” Brigman said. “For a minute or two, I was kind of scared. I was thinking, ‘Oh, my God, I have to go out on that tour and play with those guys?’ That was kind of spooky. Then I started thinking, ‘Man alive, I made the PGA Tour. How about that?’ I remember a guy from Callaway came by and congratulated me and said, ‘We’ll be in touch. We’ll work out a deal with you.’ By now, it was starting to become a celebration. I was getting all sorts of congratulations from my friends, from strangers—it was just a great feeling.”