Tales from Q School: Inside Golf's Fifth Major

by John Feinstein

  The leader was still Michael Allen, who added a 68 to his 64 in the first round and led the field by a whopping six shots at 12 under par. John Holmes was one of five players tied for second after a second straight 69, and Peter Tomasulo was one shot behind that group after a confident 70–69 start.

  Two players in the field were virtually guaranteed to spend the entire week with smiles on their faces. One was Jeff Martin, the club pro for whom making the finals was roughly the equivalent of playing in the last group of a major with Tiger Woods. He was at 153, tied for 157th place and enjoying every minute of the experience.

  The other player who couldn’t stop smiling was Bob May. He had played in the last group of a major with Tiger Woods and had come within an eyelash of beating him. That was in the 2000 PGA Championship, when May shot a final-round 66, including a 15-foot birdie putt on the 18th hole to force Woods into a three-hole play-off. The two men finished at 18 under par for the championship, which at the time was the all-time lowest score (to par) ever shot in a major.

  “My luck, I have the week of my life, and I’m head-to-head with the best player in the world,” May said, smiling. “Still, it’s a great memory. I know people were waiting for me to fold that last day, and I never did. I’ll always feel good about that.”

  In fact, Woods had to make a six-footer of his own on top of May’s birdie at the 18th to force the play-off. May went par–par–par in the play-off. Woods went birdie–par–par. “The good thing for me was that I could look back and honestly say Tiger won it,” he said. “I didn’t lose it, throw it away. He was just that much better than me. Doesn’t exactly make me the Lone Ranger.”

  Everyone knows that missing at Q School by one shot changes the next year of a player’s life. But the argument can be made that there is no difference in golf quite like that between first and second place in a major—especially if that player is unlikely ever to be in that position again. “You always think there will be another time,” May said. “But, obviously, there’s no guarantee.”

  In many cases, a close loss in a major proves to be a so-called journeyman player’s one moment in the sun. Ed Sneed bogeyed the last three holes of the 1979 Masters, lost to Fuzzy Zoeller in a play-off, and never contended in a major again. T. C. Chen’s double-hit at the 1985 U.S. Open led to his losing to Andy North by one shot and never again being a factor in an important tournament. Mike Donald lost a 19-hole play-off to Hale Irwin in the 1990 U.S. Open after leading the entire weekend and was back at Q School two years later. Jean Van de Velde led the British Open by three shots on the 72nd tee in 1999, made triple bogey, and lost to Paul Lawrie in a play-off. He also lost his playing privileges a couple of years later.

  May’s story wasn’t that different. He had been a phenom as a kid growing up in California, qualifying for the Los Angeles Open in 1985 at the age of sixteen. He went on to Oklahoma State where he was a three-time all-American, and then scuffled to get regular work on tour after turning pro in 1991. His breakthrough year was 2000, when he made more than $1.5 million and finished 29th on the money list.

  The highlight for May was that near miraculous weekend in Louisville when he matched Woods shot for shot until the very end. A week later, May was having dinner with some friends in Reno, the next tournament stop. When he asked for the check, he was told it had already been taken care of.

  A man named Tim Kissinger walked over to the table and introduced himself to May. “I just wanted to say thank you for the great show you put on last week,” he said. “It was good to see someone stand up to Tiger in the last round of a major.”

  May enjoyed the notoriety. “We all love recognition, especially for something good,” he said. “I think people enjoyed seeing me play that well under that kind of pressure. I just wish I had been able to build on it.”

  May played decently the next year, finishing 94th on the money list, but ended up back at Q School after dropping to 138th in 2002. He started 2003 solidly, making six of his first seven cuts, and had made nearly $135,000 when he arrived at the Byron Nelson Championship in May. He had a good week and came to the 18th tee on Sunday in 35th place. As he hit his drive, he felt a pain in his back.

  “At first I thought it was just a tweak,” he said. “I pulled something maybe. I figured I needed some rest.”

  He didn’t hit any balls for the next two weeks. When he tried to, figuring he would play the following week in the Memorial, the pain was worse. That was when he got worried. The next year was filled with tests and rehab and rest—everything but golf. After all the testing, the doctors finally told May that if he wanted to play golf again, he would need surgery. The spinal nerve canal in his back was too narrow—a condition he was probably born with—and all the years of swinging a golf club had pinched it so much that it needed to be opened up for him to play again.

  “They said if I wasn’t a golfer, it wouldn’t be that big a deal,” he said. “But that’s what I am—a golfer. In the end, I felt I had no choice.”

  The surgery proved to be more difficult than the doctors had thought. It took more than three hours to complete the procedure. Before the operation, they had told May that he might need as much as four weeks of bed rest. That turned out to be wildly optimistic.

  “It was ten weeks,” May said. “I had to sleep in a special bed down on the floor because I couldn’t get in and out of a regular bed. I had to wake my wife up to roll me over at night. It was really a miserable experience. I spent a lot of nights lying awake, thinking, ‘I’m never going to play golf again. What am I going to do?’”

  His misery was exacerbated by the fact that his PGA Tour health insurance didn’t cover his surgery. The insurance company claimed that his back problem was a preexisting condition, and thus the company wasn’t liable. The Mays have two young children and had no idea when, or if, Bob would work again. May sued the insurance company on the grounds that the back condition never would have become as serious had he not been a professional golfer. At the end of 2005, he was hoping for some kind of resolution in 2006.

  In the meantime, he slowly progressed. The surgery was in April 2004. He started walking—gingerly—in midsummer and underwent extensive rehab. He couldn’t start hitting golf balls again until June of 2005. “The first time I went out with a club in my hands and hit a few balls was an amazing feeling,” he said. “I had honestly wondered if I would even make it that far back.”

  He began playing golf soon after that, but Q School was his first tournament since that day at the Byron Nelson more than two and a half years earlier, and it would be the first time since then that he had walked 18 holes. “Believe me, I thought about that as much as the actual playing,” he said.

  Because he had played in only seven tournaments in 2003, he would be able to play in at least fifteen tournaments—as a non-exempt player, since he had finished 138th on the money list in 2002—on a medical exemption in 2006. If he could make $353,000 in those fifteen tournaments, that money would be added to the $135,000 he had made before his injury in 2003 and give him enough money to equal the amount made by the 125th money winner, which would make him fully exempt again.

  May knew all those confusing numbers by heart, but he wasn’t really thinking about them when he arrived at Orange County National. He felt as if he had come home after a long trip in the wilderness. A lot of the older players knew he had been hurt, although they didn’t know the extent of his injury. Some of the younger players remembered the PGA play-off and wondered where he had been. Others had no idea who he was.

  “Which is fine,” he said, smiling. “A couple of the guys who live near me came and saw me while I was out,” he said. “John Solheim [the president of Ping] came and saw me and checked in with me constantly. But that was probably about it. Out here, you’re out of sight, you’re out of mind. I understand that.

  “All I can say is this: I may be the only guy in history to be thrilled to be at Q School. I’m savoring every minute.”

  May shot 75 in th
e first round, but he wasn’t unhappy, because the walk felt fine, his back felt fine, and his biggest complaint was his putter. He could live with that. The second day, he shot a bogey-free 69 to put himself in contention.

  “I’d love to get through here and not have to worry about making the money on the medical,” he said. “But I’m fine either way. I’m playing golf again. I have my college degree [in early childhood care and development], and I know if I had to, I’d find something else to do.

  “But I don’t want to do that. I’m a golfer. I want to play golf. I think I can honestly say there’s not a guy out here this week who appreciates the chance to play more than I do. If the worst thing that happens to me is a three-putt or a bad swing, believe me, I can live with that.”

  ONE OF THE OTHER COMEBACK STORIES on the second day belonged to Steve Wheatcroft. He was the twenty-seven-year-old mini-tour player who had played so well on the last day at Lake Jovita and then found himself besieged by caddies who had noticed he had no caddy while he played second stage.

  “There was one guy who called me every day,” he said, laughing. “These guys are pretty smart. I don’t know how he got my cell, but he kept calling it. I finally told him I had someone. He still called a couple more times just to make sure the guy hadn’t fallen through. I told him I had a friend who was going to do it for me, but if something happened I’d call him. I can’t imagine what it might be like if I somehow get through here.”

  Not surprisingly, Wheatcroft had played a nervous first round, shooting 77. But he had put his nerves behind him to bounce back with a 69 in the second round.

  “It’s still a little bit hard for me to get used to the idea that I’m actually playing here,” he said. “I still catch myself staring at some of these guys, because I’ve seen them on TV. I’ve really had to work to tell myself, ‘Don’t just be happy you’re here.’ Realistically, I know I’ll be happy if I leave here with full status on the Nationwide. But I know I need to go all out to try to get a spot on the tour. That has to be my attitude.”

  Wheatcroft was one of those unlikely golf stories. He had learned to play mostly because he grew bored on visits to his grandparents’ house watching the grownups play cards. “There were clubs, so I just went out in the backyard and slapped the ball around,” he said. “For a long time, my baseball swing was better than my golf swing.”

  His golf game was good enough in high school that he was recruited by a number of small, nonscholarship schools. “All D-3 and NAIA,” he said. “Nothing D-1. But I visited Indiana, just to see the school, and fell in love with the place. I decided, one way or the other, I was going to go there.”

  He sent an e-mail to Indiana golf coach Sam Carmichael asking if he could walk onto the team in the fall of 1996. When he didn’t hear back, he wrote Carmichael repeatedly—eleven times by his count—and still heard nothing. Since he lived in Washington, Pennsylvania, Wheatcroft decided to drive to Ohio State one weekend when Indiana was there to play in a tournament. Carmichael was apparently impressed with Wheatcroft’s doggedness. He told him if he got into school, he could try out for the team as a walk-on. Wheatcroft got in and, after being redshirted for a year, ended up as the number one player on the team his last three years.

  “By my last couple of years, I was starting to beat guys who were turning pro,” he said. “It made me think if I could keep getting better, I might have a chance.”

  He played mini-tour golf after graduating, but his game didn’t take off until he decided to give up the draw he had played for years and learn to hit a cut off the tee, the thought being that he would have more control over where the ball was going. He had injury woes—a broken finger and a popped disc in his neck—that slowed him down.

  But in 2005 things began to come together. He made $108,000 playing the Grey Goose Gateway Tour in Florida, and, for the first time, he cruised through first stage. He played well enough at Lake Jovita that, even with his hands shaking on the 18th green, he qualified for his first finals.

  Like everyone else in the field, Wheatcroft woke up on Friday morning and knew the chance to go low was going to be there for the third round. The weather had warmed considerably, and Thursday’s biting wind had turned into a comfortable breeze. There was little doubt that anyone shooting even par on a day like this was going to lose ground.

  The players were re-paired after the first two rounds, just as they would be in a regular tournament, the difference being that no one was cut and the pairings would stand for the next two rounds, with everyone again switching golf courses after the third round. Wheatcroft had jumped from a tie for 152nd after the first round to a tie for 105th following the second, putting him well within shouting distance of 80th (which would make him fully exempt on the Nationwide) and only five shots outside the PGA Tour cut line. Granted, there were a lot of players to climb over, but there was also a lot of golf left to play.

  Wheatcroft was in the second-to-last group off the first tee at Panther Lake, meaning the conditions were just about perfect by the time he, Keoke Cotner, and Brett Bingham arrived for their 10 a.m. tee time. From the beginning, Wheatcroft felt as if he was in one of those zones golfers occasionally get to where he simply couldn’t hit a bad shot. Every drive found a fairway; every iron found a green.

  “It’s the oldest lament in golf,” he said later. “If I could have only made a few putts.”

  Even not making putts, his ball-striking was so good that he was three under par through 10 holes. As he made the long walk from the 10th green to the 11th tee, Wheatcroft caught himself wondering if he might be able to put up a low number and really make a move on the field.

  The 11th is a par-three that can play as long as 228 yards. On this day, the rules staff had moved the tee up so the hole was playing 193 yards. Wheatcroft wasn’t sure whether to hit a four or a five-iron, but with the pin on the front right of the green and the wind apt to blow the ball to the right, he decided on the five. As soon as the ball was in the air, he knew he had hit a good shot—he just didn’t know if he’d picked the right club. When he saw the ball land eight feet from the hole and begin rolling right at the flag, he heard himself shouting, “Go in! Go in!”

  The ball listened. Wheatcroft saw it disappear into the hole and threw his arms into the air. At that moment, his threesome had a gallery of zero. Thus, as Steve Carman often notes, a hole in one at Q School was greeted by total silence, except for the high-fives Wheatcroft received from Cotner and Bingham and from the caddies.

  Wheatcroft was now five under par for the day and, having once been five-over for the tournament on the first day, was three under for the tournament—and straddling the PGA Tour cut line. Visions of courtesy cars and corporate sponsors danced briefly in his head.

  At the 12th, a long par-four, he hit a near perfect second shot to within eight feet and had a good chance to get to six under for the day. “Right then, I was just trying to stay in the moment, as they say,” he said. “I told myself, ‘Don’t think beyond getting to six under. If you get there, then try to get to seven under.’”

  He didn’t get to six under on 12, missing an eminently makeable putt. As the three players walked to the 13th tee, they noticed their gallery had swelled—to one: a man Wheatcroft didn’t recognize but knew instantly had to be an agent, because he was wearing a suit. No one who wasn’t an agent was going to be caught dead walking the golf course in a suit on a day this hot and sunny.

  “That guy an agent or something?” he casually asked the other players, both of whom were more experienced than he.

  “You bet,” came the answer.

  At second stage, when a new face pops up, the caddies swarm. At the finals, the cache ratchets up: agents and equipment reps begin appearing.

  Wheatcroft hit the 13th green in regulation—he had now hit all 13 greens—and missed another birdie putt to stay at five under for the day.

  “I think I can honestly say I wasn’t nervous at that point,” he said later. “I was hitting the
ball so well, I felt great after the hole in one. Maybe, in the back of my mind, I understood what kind of an opportunity I had. I was a little bit baffled, because usually putting is my strength.”

  Wheatcroft finally missed a green on the 14th, which led to his first bogey of the day. Then he bogeyed 15 before calming down to par the 16th. He was still in good shape, especially with the par-five 18th still left to play. A par and a birdie would put him in at 68 and move him past quite a few people. On the tough over-water par-three 17th, he hit his tee shot onto the green but left himself a long birdie putt. “Four putts later, I tapped in for a double bogey,” he said later, forcing a smile.

  Angry with himself, he bogeyed the 18th, meaning he had played the last five holes at five over par, wiping out everything he had accomplished in the first 13 holes, including the hole in one. By the time he holed out on 18, the lurking agent was nowhere in sight.

  “It’s frustrating,” he said. “Talk about a missed opportunity. I had a chance to go really low today—maybe seven or eight under—and instead I finish at even, spinning my wheels.”

  He shook his head. “It’s easy to say, ‘Well, I’ll get ’em tomorrow. That’s not the way the sport is. Whatever I had going today might be there tomorrow—or it might not be. There’s no way to know.”

  On a day when Wheatcroft had thought he was going to pass at least half the field, he dropped from a tie for 105th to a tie for 111th. He walked directly from the scorer’s trailer to the putting green. He didn’t feel much like eating right at that moment.

  IT WASN’T A COINCIDENCE that an agent showed up to stalk Wheatcroft when he made his early move on Friday. It is on Friday afternoon that agents, equipment reps, and teachers start to show up. They leave their offices on Friday, bring their cell phones with them, and head to the finals—in part to check on investments already made, in part to look for new blood (like Wheatcroft) that may pop up on the radar.

  Most players who make the finals already have an agent and have some deals in place. Many deals are what are called “split” deals—if you make it to the PGA Tour, you get paid a lot more money for the next year than if you play on the Nationwide. This is due partly to the galleries you will be playing in front of if you make the PGA Tour, but more to the potential you have to show up on network TV (as opposed to the Golf Channel, which televises the Nationwide Tour).