Tales from Q School: Inside Golf's Fifth Major

by John Feinstein

  There may be no one on tour who is more about following the rules to a T than Brendle. He is a former pro—he and fellow rules official Mark Russell were both pros at the Disney World golf courses for several years—whose respect for the game, its traditions, and doing things the right way knows no bounds. Brendle has been known to lecture players at length for misbehaving on the golf course because he feels they damage the game when they act out in public.

  Now Brendle told Bates he was being too hard on himself. “Sonny [born and bred in North Carolina, Brendle calls all good friends Sonny], you don’t know if the coin moved. If you’re playing by the rules, they say—not me, not you—the rules say you are supposed to give yourself the benefit of the doubt if you simply can’t be sure.”

  Bates understood what Brendle was saying, and he knew that if Brendle believed he had been wrong, he would tell him. But it was all too much for him. He asked Brendle to officially withdraw him from the field and decided to pack and go home.

  “It was as hard as anything I’ve ever done in golf,” he said later. “But as soon as I did it, I started sleeping again.”

  On a different level, Bates’s story is similar to one involving Davis Love III in 1994. Playing the second round of the Western Open, Love was paired with Tom Watson and Mike Reid. On the 13th hole, Watson asked Love to move his ball mark because it was in his line. Love moved his mark, Watson putted, and then Love putted out to finish the hole. Walking to the next tee, it occurred to Love that he couldn’t remember if he had moved his ball back to the original spot. He asked Watson and Reid if they had seen him move it back, and neither was sure if he had or hadn’t.

  Love was torn. He honestly couldn’t remember. He decided to give himself the one-shot penalty required for failing to move his ball back. As a result, he missed the cut by one shot.

  At the end of the year, Love was 33rd on the money list—less than $5,000 out of 30th place. In those days, the top 30 on the money list automatically qualified for the Masters. (It is now the top 40.) If Love had made the cut at the Western, he would have made enough money to make the top 30 even if he had finished dead last. Instead, he began 1995 needing to win a tournament before April to qualify.

  At one point that winter, a friend asked him how he would feel if he ended up sitting out the Masters because he had called a penalty that he might not have deserved. His answer was immediate. “How would I feel if I got in the Masters and won it and then had to wonder the rest of my life if I cheated to get in?”

  The golf gods took care of Love. He won in New Orleans the week before the Masters, finished second to Ben Crenshaw, and slept soundly when it was over. Pat Bates would now sleep soundly, too. One could only hope that at some point, the golf gods would treat him as well as they had treated Love.

  13

  “This Isn’t a Sprint”

  PAT BATES’S 81 TIED FOR HIGH ROUND of the day with Mike Perez, the twenty-six-year-old younger brother of PGA Tour member Pat Perez, a talented player known more for his temper than his play, even though his play was often exemplary. In two years on the Nationwide Tour, Mike Perez had never finished higher than 35th in a tournament and had made only a little more than $8,000.

  The day-one leader was forty-six-year-old Michael Allen, the man who always scheduled his vacations around appearing at Q School. Playing Panther Lake, which actually played a full stroke harder than Crooked Cat on the first day (most players said it was because of the wind), Allen shot an eight-under-par 64 to lead everyone in the field by two shots. Several other veterans were at 66: Greg Kraft, who had been plagued by injuries throughout his career; South African Gavin Coles; and Franklin Langham, who had been back and forth between the two tours for fifteen years. The only player in the 66 group who hadn’t been on the tour before was Ryan Hietala, a thirty-two-year-old who had once worked on an oil rig. Hietala, who was 6 feet 5 and 230 pounds, could hit the ball for miles. He had finished 34th on the Nationwide money list and was in the finals for the fifth time.

  “Maybe I’m more relaxed because I know I have a job next year,” Hietala said, referring to the Nationwide. “I’m not protecting anything. All I can do here is improve myself by getting to the tour.”

  Allen was as close to laid-back as anyone could be under the circumstances. “Maybe because I’ve been through it so many times, I’m better at preparing,” he said. “This is the only event I play in where I actually write down what I’m going to do each day: how long I’ll putt, how long I’ll hit balls, what time I want to get to the golf course.” He smiled. “Maybe if I tried that on tour, I wouldn’t have to come back here anymore.”

  Tom Byrum, another Q School veteran, also started well, shooting 67. “I don’t even want to know where I stand until the last day,” he said, sounding weary with five rounds left to play. “This isn’t a sprint. You just keep your head down and see where you are at the finish.”

  Byrum was forty-five and had won one tournament in twenty-one years on tour, the 1989 Kemper Open. As luck would have it, that was also the year that his older brother, Curt, had his only win on tour (the Hardee’s Golf Classic), making them the first pair of brothers to win on tour in the same year since Dave and Mike Hill did it in 1972. Curt had been plagued by injuries that forced him to retire by the time he turned forty. He was also at Q School, but his view was a lot more comfortable than his brother’s: he was on the Golf Channel TV tower, working as an analyst.

  Bill Haas started solidly, shooting a 68 that left him in a tie for ninth place. His mom, Jan, walked every step of the way with him. She and her husband, Jay, had made a deal that she would take the first three days and he would take the last three so neither of them would have to endure all six. “I think Mom probably called him from the course about a dozen times today,” Bill said with a smile.

  Joe Alfieri, whose late rally at Lake Jovita had left his father in tears, was in the group at 69, along with John B. Holmes, the ex–University of Kentucky player who had played on the Walker Cup team during the summer of 2005 along with two other finalists, Nick Thompson and Jeff Overton.

  The name John Holmes is one that almost invariably makes anyone over the age of thirty smirk. Twenty years ago, there was a porn star named Johnny “Wad” Holmes, the nickname existing for reasons that were obvious to anyone who had seen him perform. Holmes had died of AIDS at the age of forty-three in 1988 but remained a semilegendary figure, especially since his life was the basis for the movie Boogie Nights.

  The fact that John B. Holmes hit the ball about as far as anyone on or off the tour had led to all sorts of jokes about his “length.” During an interview early in the week, Rich Lerner, the normally straitlaced Golf Channel reporter, asked Holmes, “Has anyone tried to give you a nickname yet?” All of this would lead Holmes to a new name early in 2006, J. B. Holmes, after CBS analyst Gary McCord gently suggested it would make his life easier to be known just by his initials.

  THERE IS AN OLD ADAGE among tour players that one cannot win a golf tournament during the first round, but one can lose a golf tournament during the first round. At Q School, that wasn’t really true, because there was so much time to rally from a poor start. There were twenty-eight players at three under par or better after the first round and another twenty-one who were tied at two under. If it had been day six, the tour would have awarded forty-nine cards, but everyone knew the field would spread itself out as the tournament moved on.

  Garrett Willis, Mike Hulbert’s caddy at Lake Jovita, was among those at 70, as were veterans Bill Glasson, Neal Lancaster, and Esteban Toledo. Peter Tomasulo, the youngster out of the University of California who had played his way onto the Nationwide Tour during 2005, also was at 70.

  Ron Whittaker, the newly expectant father, was one shot further back at 71, along with Tommy Tolles, Blaine McCallister, and many others. B. J. Staten, who had been convinced he had knocked himself out of the finals with his quadruple-bogey/bogey finish in Houston, was in the group at 72, as was Larry Mize, who had
to be the most watched man in the finals.

  Everyone in golf knows Larry Mize. Anyone who has paid attention to the sport for more than fifteen minutes has seen a replay of Mize’s remarkable 140-foot chip-in on the 11th hole at Augusta in 1987. That shot beat Greg Norman on the second hole of a play-off when it looked as if Norman, safely on the green in two, was about to win. The fact that Norman had never won the Masters made the moment that much more significant to golf historians and fans.

  Mize was twenty-eight at the time, and the shot, the replays, and the aura of being a Masters champion—who had actually grown up in Augusta and had worked a Masters scoreboard as a teenager—made him a star. He didn’t win again for six years, then won twice in 1993 and almost won a second Masters in 1994 before finishing third behind José María Olazábal and Tom Lehman. Mize was a model of consistency, if not greatness. He finished sixth on the money list after his Masters victory and had four other years when he was in the top 20.

  He remained exempt for twenty straight years until a horseback riding accident at the end of 2001, in which he suffered a concussion and injured his shoulder, changed the arc of his career. Since then he had struggled. He had gotten into eighteen tournaments in 2005 as a past champion and had finished 193rd on the money list. He had gone twenty-three years—from 1981 to 2004—without going to Q School. In 2004, he had gone back to second stage and missed. This year, he had easily made it through second stage, finishing second in Panama City.

  “There was one embarrassing moment there,” he said. “I’ve almost gotten used to hearing ‘Mr. Mize’ and ‘yes sir,’ because I’m forty-seven and [have] been around a while. But after the last round, Gary Christian [one of his competitors] said to me, ‘Mr. Mize, if I go home without your autograph, I’ll never forgive myself.’ I was glad he waited until we were finished playing.”

  Mize had taken his fall from golfing grace with the kind of good humor that anyone who knew him would have expected. He didn’t complain (Larry Mize never complains) or bemoan the injury that had clearly affected his game. He still rode horses, following the proverbial “get right back on” rule, and never acted as if Q School was somehow beneath him because of his status as a Masters champion. A lot of players who have won majors and then lose their status later in their careers refuse to go back to Q School, choosing instead to rely on sponsor exemptions given to them because of who they had once been.

  “I’ve done all right with that, getting some extra tournaments,” Mize said. “This year, I wrote to every tournament director where I figured not to get in off my [past champion’s] number, and I got six sponsor exemptions. Next year, who knows, it might not be as many. I don’t want to have to rely on it. I want to have full status and make my schedule at the start of the year without having to beg people to give me spots.”

  Mize remembered playing with one young player the previous year at Q School who had said to him, “Mr. Mize, it just isn’t right for you to be here. You should play on tour for as long as you want to.” Mize laughed, remembering his reply: “That’s not the way it works in golf. If you want to keep playing, you have to earn it.”

  He admitted that filling out the Q School application had been difficult. “I guess I never really thought I’d have to do it again,” he said. “I know there are guys who don’t want to do it, and I understand why. In a perfect world, I wouldn’t be here. I asked Bonnie [his wife] what she thought, and she said I should do it.”

  He smiled. “It’s different,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I changed my shoes out of the trunk of my car because I don’t have an assigned locker in a locker room. Golf’s a humbling game. You have to accept that, or there’s no point in being here. Coming here and complaining doesn’t do anyone any good.”

  Mize knew his presence in the finals would make him a media target. He knew he would be asked to talk every day. He was fine with it. “I haven’t done that much talking the last few years,” he said. “Every time someone interviews me, they ask me about the chip-in and then apologize for asking again. I say, ‘Don’t apologize. That’s one thing I’m very happy to talk about.’”

  Mize sometimes wonders what his life would have been like if he had been able to win a second Masters in 1994. But he also understands how fortunate he is to have won in 1987. “To this day, winning that tournament has a positive effect on my life,” he said. “It affects me financially, it affects the way people look at me, and, to some extent I think, [it affects] the way they treat me.

  “For a long time, I worried about whether I was worthy of being a Masters champion. I’m not sure I completely got past that until ’94, when I almost won it again. I remember being at Turnberry [the British Open] that year and thinking to myself, ‘Do you need to prove that victory?’ The answer was no.”

  He looked up and down the range and waved a club at the other players practicing around him. “I’ve gotten an awful lot out of the game,” he said. “I still want more, but I consider myself very lucky. For this week, I’m no different than anyone else out here. I’m trying to accomplish the same thing they’re trying to accomplish, and all of us know it won’t be easy.”

  Actually, Mize wasn’t exactly the same as everyone else. As he talked, Jeff Martin, a club pro from Rhode Island, stood a few yards away hitting balls. Martin had gotten into second stage by virtue of finishing 10th at the PGA Club Professional Championship. The top 20 finishers in the event qualified for the PGA Championship and got a pass to second stage. Martin had played well at second stage and was thrilled to be in the finals, even though he knew he had almost no chance to make it to the tour. He had shot a respectable first-round 74, which left him in a tie for 118th place.

  When Mize paused, Martin walked over, hand extended. “Mr. Mize, I just want to say hello,” he said. “I was in the seventh grade when you chipped in. I still remember it like yesterday. It’s a thrill just to be able to hit balls next to you.”

  Mize shook Martin’s hand and thanked him for bringing up his happiest golf memory. The two men chatted—as equals, guys who had just finished the first round at Q School—for a couple of minutes.

  For Mize, it was a pleasant reprise, something he had done before and would do again. For Martin, it was a moment he would tell all his friends about when he got home. Maybe he would even get a picture taken with Mize: Q School companions.

  One a club pro. One a Masters champion. Peers for a week.

  GIVEN THAT SEVENTY-ONE PLAYERS had broken par and ninety had shot even par or better, those who had failed to do so weren’t feeling very happy with themselves. It was way too soon to panic or even be overly concerned. It just meant some extra time on the range and, perhaps, the smallest bit of self-doubt. Younger players might find a bad opening round disturbing; older ones tend to roll with it.

  Brian Henninger had been to seven finals. He had gotten through one year when the last round had been washed out by rain and he was sitting on the number after five rounds. He had missed another year after shooting 65 the last day to get to what he thought was the number, only to see it go one shot lower late in the day. “I still get an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach when I think about that one,” he said.

  Opening with a 74 wasn’t going to freak him out. “The golf course is going to give up some low rounds,” Henninger said, hammering balls on the range late in the afternoon. “I’m capable of going low; I always have been. I just have to find a way to make some putts.”

  Henninger had played full-time or part-time on the PGA Tour since 1993. In 1992 he was the first player in the history of the Hogan Tour to win three times in the same year, but that was before the creation of the so-called battlefield promotion, which would have moved him straight to the tour.

  He had won twice on tour—both times on the same golf course outside Jackson, Mississippi: in 1994 the tournament was called the Deposit Guaranty Golf Classic; in 1999 it was called the Southern Farm Bureau Classic. He had been in the two-tour netherworld for several years
and had only started to come to grips with that status in 2005.

  “This year was the first time I started going out of my way to shake hands with guys on the Nationwide,” Henninger said. “I spent a lot of time thinking I was too good to be on that tour and there was no reason to get to know anyone, because I wasn’t going to be around that much. This year it occurred to me that, like it or not, this is where I’m playing most of my golf, so I might as well try to enjoy it and get to know the guys I was playing with there.

  “The interesting thing is, when you’ve been on the PGA Tour for a while, guys on the Nationwide are a little bit intimidated by you—not on the golf course, but in the clubhouse or on the range. They sort of wait for you to make the first move. This year I finally started to make the first move. I’m sure it made them more comfortable, and it made me more comfortable, too.”

  Henninger was forty-three with three kids, but at 5 feet 8 and 150 pounds, and with a classic baby face, he might have been mistaken for someone’s kid brother tagging along to watch. He went to Southern California as a tennis player and ended up walking onto the golf team. In spite of his size, he had always been an excellent ball-striker. The issue with him had been putting. When he made putts, he was as good as just about anyone. The problem was finding a way to make them consistently.

  “I must have a hundred putters in my basement,” he said. “I’m always fooling around, looking for one that will work. I’d probably be better off if I stuck with one and just tried to build some confidence in my putting stroke.”

  In 1994, on the day before the BellSouth Classic, Henninger’s good friend Paul Goydos had given him a putting lesson, urging him to keep his back straighter when standing over the ball. Henninger practiced in front of the mirror in his hotel room that night and finished second to John Daly in the tournament, rolling in an eagle putt on the 72nd hole to make enough money to get himself back on tour full-time. Eleven years later, he was trying Goydos’s tip again, searching for the magic of that long-ago week in Atlanta.