Tales from Q School: Inside Golf's Fifth Major

by John Feinstein

  “I can still remember standing in front of the scoreboard and watching them move that scissors [used to denote the cut line] from one under to two under and feeling sick to my stomach,” Duval said. “I really thought I’d saved myself on the last few holes, and then I found myself heading down the highway.

  “As disappointing as that was—and I mean it was really disappointing—it might have been the best break I ever got. I think playing a year on the Nike Tour was good for me. I was under the radar, I learned how to win [he won twice in ’94], and when I came to the tour the next year, I was more mature and ready to handle what came next.”

  Furyk and Stricker were both ready for prime time in 1994. By 1996, Stricker had won twice and finished fourth on the money list. Furyk became one of the most consistent players in the game—a perennial Ryder Cupper—and won the 2003 U.S. Open. Stricker’s career has been more of a roller coaster. After his big year in 1996, he switched equipment companies because he was offered a lot of money, and he struggled for years to find a driver that he could consistently hit fairways with. He fell out of the top 100 on the money list in 1997, then rebounded to finish 14th and almost win the PGA Championship in 1998. He won the Match Play championship in 2001 but continued to struggle in 2004 and 2005. In ’05, he managed to get into twenty-one tournaments on his status as a past champion and as a good guy (a number of tournaments gave him sponsor exemptions) but he finished only 162nd on the money list, sending him back to second stage at the age of thirty-eight.

  “It’s been incredibly frustrating,” he said. “I feel as if I’m fighting my swing all the time. A lot of times I don’t know where the ball is going off the tee.” He smiled. “Right now, it doesn’t matter. I’ve got to figure out a way to get the ball in the hole for six days and then figure out something long-term. This isn’t the time or the place to be looking for a magic swing thought.”

  Or maybe it was. To some degree, everyone teeing it up on that first morning was looking for some kind of magic, whether it was in his swing or in his putter or in some luck provided by the golf gods. No one really cared how he would get to the finish line as one of the anointed thirty-plus; they just wanted to get there.

  “At Q School, the worst thing you can do is worry about the scoreboard every day,” said Tom Byrum, another veteran past winner on tour who was playing the finals for the ninth time. “This is the ultimate grind. You put your head down and hope when you pick your head up six days later, you’ve played well enough to be back on tour.”

  He smiled. “It’s all very simple when you think about it.”

  Of course not thinking about it was probably the key to their success.

  BEFORE THE END OF DAY ONE, the tournament had lost its first player.

  Pat Bates had thought seriously about withdrawing before he teed it up on Panther Lake that first morning. “I really didn’t want to play,” he said. “I think deep down, I thought it was wrong for me to play. But I had never quit anything in my life, especially in golf. I’ve shot 82 the first round of a tournament and kept going even though I knew I couldn’t make the cut. I’ve always thought quitting was wrong. But when I got out there, my heart just wasn’t in it. I realized that, in a way, I didn’t want to make it because I would have felt guilty all next year if I had.”

  Bates’s sense of guilt dated back to second stage in Panama City, Florida. Bates was not only a Q School veteran; he was a veteran of strange happenings in Q School. He had first played in 1991, shortly after graduating from the University of Florida. With his brother caddying for him, he shot 69 the first day. The next day, he shot 83.

  “Back then, I was very long and very wild,” he said. “When I started hitting it crooked, I really hit it crooked.”

  Thinking he was probably out of contention, Bates went back to his hotel room, planning to sulk. His brother would have none of it. “Come on,” he said. “We need to go back to the golf course and figure something out.”

  They went. What they figured out was that Pat was long enough with his one-iron that if he hit punched one-irons off every tee and left his driver in the bag, he could play the golf course quite well. Fifteen years later at Royal Liverpool, Tiger Woods used the same strategy, hitting one driver in four days while winning the British Open. Bates isn’t Woods, but he shot 70–68 the last two rounds with the driver safely tucked into his bag and made it through on the number.

  At second stage that year, he was warming up before the third round on a frigid morning, hitting range balls that felt rock hard. “It isn’t like on tour, where you practice with new balls,” he said. “Finally, I hit a shot that went maybe 100 yards and then swerved straight left. Okay, no big deal. Next one goes 100 yards and swerves straight right. Now I know something is wrong. I looked at my driver and put my finger on it, and the entire face caved in.”

  In 2005, a caved-in driver wouldn’t have been that big a deal at second stage. There would have been at least one equipment manufacturer’s truck on-site, and at worst Bates could have borrowed a driver from one of them. In 1991, there were no trucks and no reps. Pat Burke, a longtime tour player, tried unsuccessfully to find an extra driver Bates could use.

  “Essentially, I was out of luck,” he said. “It wasn’t as if I couldn’t play without a driver. I’d done it at first stage. But this was a golf course where I needed the driver. Plus, it freaked me out.”

  He missed at that stage and spent two years playing in South Africa. In 1993 he made the finals for the first time, making a 50-foot putt on the last hole at second stage for birdie when he was trying to two-putt, thinking he needed par to make it on the number.

  He was third on the Nike Tour money list in 1994, which put him on the big tour in 1995. He had a miserable year there, finishing 206th on the money list, and found himself back at second stage in 1996, where he lost in an eight-for-five play-off to get to the finals.

  “I three-putted for bogey to knock myself out,” he said. “It was just about dark by then, and I had to walk back into the clubhouse from the second green. It might have been the longest, loneliest, most depressing walk I’ve ever made in my life.”

  The sudden turn in his career surprised Bates. He had been on an up escalator through 1995, and now he was in reverse. He had even had a shot at becoming a movie star during that year on tour. One of Bates’s talents is imitating other people’s golf swings. He can be Jack Nicklaus one minute, Corey Pavin the next, and Jim Furyk soon after that. Gary McCord, the CBS announcer, was impressed by Bates’s act. When McCord was hired as a consultant for the movie Tin Cup, starring Kevin Costner and Don Johnson, one of his assignments was to find a stand-in for Costner during the scenes in which he had to swing a golf club. Remembering Bates’s talent, McCord called him and asked if he’d like to be in the movie.

  “I asked him if I would have to cut my hair,” said Bates, who has always worn his light brown hair long. “He said yes. I figured it would be worth it to be in the movie.”

  Sadly, his movie career was never launched. Working with McCord, Costner was able to come up with a swing that looked good enough that there was no need for a stand-in. “It wouldn’t have worked for me anyway,” Bates said. “They were filming in November. By then, I was back at Q School.”

  He pieced his career together nicely after the downer of the lost play-off, finishing 20th on the Nike list in 1997 after starting the year with only conditional status as a past champion. Ironically, his game really began to improve after he had neck surgery in 1999 to correct a condition that had bothered him since college. Following the surgery, he was never able to hit the ball as long as he once had, which forced him to learn more about the subtleties of his game. Bates’s father-in-law, Doug Tewell, the very successful Champions Tour player, who was never a long hitter himself, explained to him that shorter didn’t necessarily mean not as good.

  “The surgery was really tough,” he said. “My vertebrae [were] actually too straight, and they went in to fuse [them] in such a way
that [they] would be more normal. But my spinal cord got damaged, and I woke up with no use of my left hand and unable to walk. To this day, my hand is only about 70 percent, and I can’t count to three with my fingers. When I first got well enough to play again, I was freaked-out because I couldn’t hit a ball more than 240 off the tee. That’s when Doug talked to me about learning the game and my game better. I became a smarter, straighter player, and it helped.”

  He returned to Q School in 2000 and, sure enough, was involved in another strange incident. He was back at Bear Lakes Country Club, the scene of his initial second-stage success in 1993, and he shot even par the first day. On the second day, he was three under and probably, he guessed, in the top five for the tournament when he got to the 15th tee.

  “I had four holes left, all downwind,” he said. “I was looking, I thought, at a very good day.”

  It had rained a lot that fall, and the tees at Bear Lakes were sandy and slippery. Bates teed his ball up at 15, but as he took the club back and began his downswing, the ball began slipping off the tee.

  “I don’t even know for sure if I noticed it or not,” he said. “Either way, I was committed to the swing, and I probably would have hurt myself if I stopped. The ball fell off the tee; I swung through and completely missed the ball. Meantime, the ball plopped into a little hole on the tee box.”

  Bates looked at the other players in the group for help. One of them, Mathias Gronberg, another veteran who was also back at Q School in 2005, suggested they call a rules official. “I remember Mathias saying, ‘I can’t imagine you can’t re-tee, but we better be sure.’”

  Normally, of course, if a ball falls off the tee, even if a player is addressing it at the time, he simply re-tees, since the ball isn’t in play until the player has actually taken a swing at it. That, as it turned out, was Bates’s problem. Mickey Bradley, a Nike Tour rules official, drove up when called and asked Bates to describe what had happened.

  “Well, the rule book defines a swing as swinging through the ball with the intent of hitting it,” Bradley said. “Pat, did you swing through with the intent of hitting the ball?”

  “Yes, I did,” Bates said.

  “Pat, I’m really sorry,” Bradley said. “But the ball’s in play.”

  Already lying one and now playing out a hole, Bates ended up making double bogey. Still in shock, he bogeyed the next hole and ended up shooting even par again. “I never recovered,” he said. “I missed by two shots. All the years I’ve played golf, watched golf, I’ve never seen anything like that happen—not before, not since. It’s the kind of thing that you know will only happen at Q School. And the karma was perfect: I made double bogey, and I missed by two. That’s Q School in a nutshell.”

  Bates not only recovered from that flukish incident, but he exploded in 2001, winning three times on what was then the Buy.com Tour to earn an instant promotion to the PGA Tour. He kept his card the next two years—finishing 123rd on the money list both times—but dropped to 168th and back to the Nationwide Tour in 2005. With his neck troubling him again (a bulging disc this time), he didn’t play very well in 2005 and found himself back at second stage (“where most of my weird stuff has happened in the past”) in Panama City.

  He arrived feeling healthy, having worked with a chiropractor who had cracked his neck and alleviated a good deal of the pain, and began the last round in a fairly comfortable position—a couple of shots inside the cut line at three under par. That comfort level went away on the second hole when he hit his second shot into the water and made triple bogey. Then he three-putted the third hole to be four over par for the day after only three holes. Experience kicked in. He calmed himself down and holed an eight-iron at the sixth hole for an eagle to get himself back on track and back in contention. He was now, he guessed, right on the cut line.

  “I just needed to play steady and confident from that point on,” he said. “I didn’t need to be spectacular. I just didn’t need to make any more mistakes.”

  He parred the next four holes and hit his second shot at the 12th to 25 feet. His birdie putt was about three feet short, and he walked up to mark his ball. As he picked up the ball after putting down his coin, the ball slipped out of his hand and landed squarely on the coin.

  “I saw the coin shudder,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if it moved a tiny bit or didn’t move at all. I was confused. The guys I was playing with didn’t see it happen, so I wondered if I should call for some kind of ruling. But I knew if I did, we’d back up the whole golf course waiting for someone to get there and then get the ruling. I wish now that I had just known the rule. I’ve never liked gray areas in the rules. I don’t think I’m a fanatic or anything, but if I think it’s gray, I’m usually going to lean toward penalizing myself. For some reason, at that moment, I didn’t do it. I put the ball down, putted out, and kept playing.”

  Bates birdied 16 and 17 to remove any doubt about whether he would be going to the finals. He ended up tied for 10th place, two shots inside the number. “At the time, I was relieved that I’d come back from four over the first three holes to finish the day even and move on,” he said. “But when I got home, the more I thought about what had happened, the more it bothered me.”

  Bates pulled out a rule book. The only reference he could find to what had happened was a notation that said if a player’s coin moves “while [he is] in the process of marking his ball,” there is no penalty. But was he still in the process of marking? He could find no reference in the rules to what had happened to him. He wondered if the coin had, in fact, moved. He went so far as to go on a putting green and re-create what had happened. “The coin moved seven times out of ten,” he said. “I wasn’t thrilled with those odds.”

  Although he doesn’t talk about it unless asked, Bates is deeply religious and a regular attendee at the weekly Bible studies that take place on both tours. He was extremely disturbed by the notion that his desire to make it back to the finals might have overshadowed his desire to do the right thing. As soon as he arrived at Orange County National, he sought out Brian Claar, someone he had played with on both tours through the years, who had now become a rules official.

  Claar had been a solid player on the tour for many years. Although he had never won, he had finished second three times and had kept his tour card for twelve consecutive years before slipping into the golf netherworld in the last few years of his career. He was a professional pilot, who frequently flew his own plane from one tournament to another. In fact, he had been in the air, flying from his home in Houston to a tournament in Tampa, on the morning of September 11, 2001.

  “We were somewhere over Kentucky when I suddenly got a call from one of the towers telling me I had to land the plane immediately,” Claar said. “I was with Mike Heinen [another pro who lived in Houston], and we were baffled. I asked the tower what the problem was, if there was weather ahead we didn’t know about or some other problem. The guy just came back and said, ‘I’m ordering you to land right now. Do not ask any more questions.’ To say it freaked us out is a major understatement.”

  Of course, when Claar and Heinen landed, all their questions were answered as soon as they saw a TV inside the terminal.

  Bates found Claar working on the setup of the golf course during one of the practice rounds. He had become a rules official three years earlier, even though he still had full status on the Nationwide Tour. “I was in the finals in 2002 and decided not to go,” he said. “It was time, and I wanted to convince the rules guys I was serious about not playing anymore. They weren’t going to hire me if they thought I was going to run back and try and play midway through the year.”

  Bates told Claar what had happened to him in Panama City. Claar gave him good news and bad news in his response. The good news was that both the rules of golf and the thick book filled with rules-based decisions always said that when in doubt, the player should be given the benefit of the doubt. So, if there was doubt in Bates’s mind about whether the coin had moved, he was enti
tled not to call the penalty on himself.

  The bad news was that although the rules did not specifically address what had happened to Bates, there was a decision based on the specific instance that Bates had been involved in. The decision said that if a player accidentally drops his ball on his coin after marking and the coin moves, he must penalize himself one shot.

  Bates was crushed. He didn’t know for sure that his coin had moved, but there was a good chance that it had. That meant he should have penalized himself, and by not doing so, he had signed for an incorrect score on the last day of second stage. To him, the “benefit of the doubt” notion was very shaky grounds on which to hang his hat. “At best it was gray area,” he said. “Like I said, that doesn’t work for me.”

  His instinct was to withdraw immediately. The results for second stage were now official, and nothing could be done to change them. Bates believed, based on what Claar had said, that he should have been disqualified because he had signed for a 72 in the last round when, in fact, he should have penalized himself and signed for a 73. The fact that a 73 would still have been good enough to make it to the finals was meaningless to him.

  “What bothered me the most was the way I handled it at the time,” he said. “I asked myself why I didn’t tell someone right then, why I didn’t get a ruling. I could rationalize not asking right away by saying I didn’t want to hold up play, but what about when I finished? I knew, deep down, I should have checked with someone before I signed my card. Did I get carried away by the moment, by the pressure, by wanting to get through so bad? I don’t honestly know. What I do know is that I don’t think I could have lived with myself on tour during ’06 if I felt there was [any] doubt as to whether I had gotten there fairly and squarely. I don’t think I would have slept at night.”

  Bates decided not to make a decision while he was still upset. But during the first round, he simply couldn’t focus on playing good golf. It was almost as if he wanted to play himself out of the tournament. After he finished his 81, he found rules official Jon Brendle, a good friend who also attended the tour’s Bible study sessions. Bates told him he was withdrawing and why.