It might be argued that no one on-site was more nervous heading into the weekend than Mac Fritz, the longtime Titleist rep who made many of the company’s decisions on whom to sign and for how much. Almost two years earlier, when Bill Haas graduated from Wake Forest, Fritz had won a bidding war for him and signed him to a five-year Titleist contract that guaranteed him $200,000 a year regardless of where he played his golf and at least $500,000 a year if he made it to the PGA Tour.
Haas had been close to making the tour almost since getting out of college, but he hadn’t quite made it yet. Titleist could live with one year on the Nationwide Tour—a lot of young players go through that—but a second year out there was almost unthinkable for Fritz and, more important, for his boss, Wally Uihlein. They wanted him on the PGA Tour, even though it cost them $300,000 more a year, because the payback of the added exposure would more than compensate for the extra money spent up front.
Haas had started well, with a solid first-round 68, but the next two rounds, 72–73, had not been as good. He had dropped into a tie for 48th place at three under par, two shots outside the PGA tour cut number, which was now at five under, with a total of thirty-five players at five under or better.
Jay Haas would arrive the next day to take over as the designated parent for the rest of the tournament. No doubt he would be nervous watching his son play—almost as nervous, perhaps, as Mac Fritz.
THE SCORES WERE, AS EXPECTED, lower on Friday in the relatively benign conditions. Both golf courses played to scoring averages that were under par, and no fewer than forty-two players broke 70. Michael Allen wasn’t one of them, shooting 71, but he still had a three-shot lead on the rest of the field.
The low round of the day was produced by Joe Alfieri, the mini-tour player from Tampa who had come through with a 68 on the last day at Lake Jovita. Alfieri shot 64, the kind of number Steve Wheatcroft had thought himself capable of at one point during the day, and made the jump from a tie for 54th to a tie for 5th.
It was also a good day for the ’06 Walker Cup team: John Holmes shot his third straight round in the 60s (68) and was tied for second place at 10 under par; Jeff Overton shot 69 and was two shots farther back; and Nick Thompson also shot 69 to move up to a tie for 19th at six under par.
A number of the veteran players appeared to be stuck in neutral. Steve Stricker and Dan Forsman both added 73s to their 72–72 starts and headed for the range looking for something to get going. Bob May couldn’t continue the momentum after his 69 and also shot 73, the same score produced by David Sutherland. Brian Henninger might have been the most frustrated of the veterans after shooting a 71 that he was convinced should have been three or four strokes better.
“I’m sure there are fifty guys saying exactly the same thing tonight,” Henninger said. “The golf courses were there to be taken today, and a lot of guys took advantage. Those of us who didn’t have to feel like we missed a big chance. The days are starting to run out for those of us who are behind. You can only say ‘Tomorrow is the day’ for so long before there aren’t any tomorrows left.”
One player who was feeling no frustration and not worrying about time running out was Peter Tomasulo. He had played steady golf for three days—70–70–69—not spectacular, but good enough to put him inside the cut number, with no reason to believe he wasn’t going to play even better the last three rounds.
Getting better had been Tomasulo’s history as a golfer, dating back to his boyhood, when he first played the game with his three older brothers and his dad, Joe, a pathologist at Long Beach (California) Memorial Medical Center. Joe Tomasulo was never a great player, about a 13 handicapper, but he loved to play, and he taught his sons to love golf, too.
“He was a very laid-back guy,” Peter said. “About the only time I saw him angry [was] when [my brother] Nick and I would get upset on the golf course or with each other—which happened. We were both pretty hot-tempered and competitive. When we did lose it, that was the end of the day for us. I can remember some long walks back to the clubhouse after I’d lost it. Dad just wouldn’t tolerate that kind of behavior.”
Nick and Peter were the two brothers who got truly hooked on the sport. Peter was also a gifted soccer player, playing both sports through high school. He was a good enough winger to be recruited by colleges for soccer as well as for golf. He was also a good student—something expected of all six Tomasulo children— with a solid grade point average and a combined SAT score of 1,350. A lot of his drive, both in the classroom and in sports, came from one thing: he wanted to make his dad proud.
“He never pushed any of us—neither of my parents did,” he said. “That’s why he would get upset when Nick and I lost our tempers. His attitude was, if you couldn’t enjoy yourself on the golf course, you shouldn’t be on the golf course.”
During Peter’s junior year in high school, Joe Tomasulo started to feel sick. The doctors ran a battery of tests. The results were shocking: Never a smoker, he had lung cancer.
“I remember being very scared when he told us,” Peter said. “He went through all sorts of treatment—chemo, radiation, some experimental stuff at UCLA. He and my mom didn’t really talk to us that much about what was happening, but we could see it was bad.”
None of the treatments helped. Just before Christmas in 1998, during Peter’s senior year of high school, Joe died. Seven years later, Peter readily admitted that he thought about his father every day.
“I’ve tried to use his absence to make me better at what I do,” he said. “I always wanted him to be proud of me, and now I feel even more strongly that way. I was lucky there were other people to push me and help me along the way, but I definitely feel his absence all the time. I’d like for him to see what I’ve done.”
Peter didn’t think that he was good enough to be recruited by a big-time golf school. But a friend of his named Han Lee, who was on the team at the University of California, Berkeley, convinced Steve Desimone, the golf coach there, to take a look at the slender kid with the determined face. Based on Lee’s recommendation, Tomasulo’s attitude, and his grades and SAT scores, Desimone offered him a partial scholarship (books only), which he quickly accepted.
In his first college tournament, Tomasulo finished fifth, which shocked him and his coach. By the end of his freshman year, he made honorable mention Pacific-10. During the next summer, he first thought he might have a chance to be a pro when he qualified for the Long Beach Open as an amateur and found himself in the last group after two days.
“I was surprised to be there,” he said. “A lot of guys who have played on the tour play in that event every year. I was nineteen years old, and here I was competing with guys who were a lot better than the college players I’d been playing against.”
He hung in through the weekend and finished fourth. (Doug Garwood, who won the tournament, landed on the PGA Tour in 2005.) From that point forward, Tomasulo was focused on turning pro when he graduated from college. He was a first-team all-American as a senior, then decided to remain amateur through the summer of 2004 to represent the United States in a team match against Japan and to play in the U.S. Amateur.
“It was at Winged Foot, and I really wanted to play there,” Tomasulo said. “Plus, I know that doing well in the Amateur gets you noticed by equipment companies and sponsors, and I thought it was a great chance to get myself noticed.”
He laughed. “There was just one problem. I was awful. It was the worst tournament I played in three years. I just tried too hard, which rarely works well in golf. I wanted to go out with a bang as an amateur, and I wanted to get people’s attention. Instead, I just went out.”
Tomasulo failed to survive the 36 holes of stroke play that led to sixty-four players advancing to match play. He turned pro after the tournament was over, but did so without any of the sponsor endorsements he had hoped for.
He went to first stage at PGA West in Palm Springs and promptly shot 78 the first round. “I was clueless about the whole thing,” he said, shaki
ng his head. “I had serious doubts about whether I belonged, and I was shaking with nerves at the start. Everyone who had been through it told me, ‘Just don’t make any big mistakes.’ So I tripled the fifth hole. I really thought I’d shot myself out of the thing on the first day.”
He was fortunate that the conditions were tough—lots of wind—and the scores high. The next day, under similar conditions, he shot one under par and passed a lot of people. When the week was over, he had made it through—on the number.
“Big confidence boost,” he said. “The problem was, because I was one of the last guys in, I didn’t get to go to second stage where I wanted to in California.”
Instead, he was sent to Kingwood, Texas, where the golf course had been saturated with so much rain that the rules officials were forced to play three holes from the 150-yard markers to the greens because the rest of the fairways were under water. That made the course into a par-68 and left the players feeling as if they were in some kind of miniature golf event. The only thing lacking was a windmill.
“I shot one under the first day, and all my buddies back home were saying, ‘Hey, 67, great score,’” Tomasulo said. “And I had to tell them it wasn’t that great. The next day, I shot three or four over, and that really wasn’t great.”
He thought he had rallied on the third day when he posted an early 63 (five under), only to watch helplessly as another round of storms swept in and drowned the course completely, forcing officials to call off the rest of the tournament and declare the 36-hole scores final.
“That left me out,” Tomasulo said. “Now I had to figure out where to play in ’05.”
The easiest route would have been a mini-tour; California is rife with them. But an old college friend, Tim Hewitt, who had gone to work for TaylorMade, recommended that he try to qualify for the Canadian Tour, even though the money wasn’t as good as some mini-tours or the Hooters Tour. Hewitt told Tomasulo that most of the Canadian events were played on good golf courses that were set up to be difficult, which would be good experience for him. What’s more, the travel had the feel of a real golf tour, which also would help him down the road.
Before he went to the Canadian Q School in Texas in February, Tomasulo qualified for the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. (The players call this “four-spotting,” since there are four spots available during a Monday qualifier prior to every tour event. They also call it “Mondaying,” as in “I Mondayed at Pebble Beach.”) He made the cut and played on Sunday with Steve Pate, Matt Kuchar, and Jason Bohn—all experienced PGA Tour players.
“We teed off on the 10th, which is a tough hole under any conditions,” Tomasulo said. “It was early in the morning, and the wind was blowing. All three guys made birdie. As we walked to the next tee, Jamie [Mulligan, his teacher in Long Beach, who was caddying for him] said to me, ‘Welcome to the NFL, kid.’”
Tomasulo didn’t shrink from the big-league experience, finishing 50th. He tied for first in the Canadian Q School and was third on the Canadian money list when he Mondayed for a Nationwide event in Wisconsin. He took a week off from the Canadian tour to win the Long Beach Open, beating his pal John Merrick down the stretch, and then got into the Alberta Classic on the Nationwide Tour because of his ranking on the Canadian money list. He shot 61 in the second round and held on down the stretch to win by a stroke.
Suddenly, he had gone from no place to play at the beginning of the year to a full exemption on the Nationwide Tour. “It all happened so fast,” he said. “I almost wasn’t paying attention to what was going on. I was just playing really good golf, having a good time, and starting to make some money.”
He got into his second PGA Tour event of the year at the Canadian Open and finished tied for 24th. By the end of the Nationwide season, even playing in only nine events, he was 35th on the money list.
“Getting into the top 35 was a big deal,” he said. “Instead of going to second stage and trying to grind through it, I got invited to the Callaway event and had four days that was nothing but fun.”
The Callaway event, a year-ending exhibition event, is held at Pebble Beach—which was where Tomasulo had started his year ten months earlier. He had come a long way to return to the same place. A month later, he arrived in Florida full of confidence, convinced that the finals were just another step toward the spot on the 2006 PGA Tour he was destined to fill.
The only seed of doubt he had was his putting. Since the Miami tournament had been canceled because of Hurricane Wilma, he hadn’t putted on the Bermuda grass greens prevalent in Florida—and at Orange County National—all year. Bermuda greens feel different than bent grass greens, especially to pros who notice subtleties that other golfers don’t. Still, he arrived early, spent a lot of time on the putting green, and teed it up on Wednesday not even thinking about what the number might be. Whatever the number was, he was convinced that he would be inside it. After three days, sitting two shots inside the cut line, he felt exactly the same way. His swing felt great, and he was feeling a little more comfortable on the greens each day. It would be fun, he thought, to open the season at the Sony Open in Hawaii—a long way from the qualifier for the Canadian Tour in Texas.
THREE MORE PLAYERS DROPPED OUT of the tournament after the third round: Tom Scherrer, Jim Carter, and Joe Daley. Not coincidentally, all three were near the bottom of the field, and all three already had some status for 2006. Scherrer was a past champion on the PGA Tour and had finished 22nd on the Nationwide list in 2005—one spot from reclaiming a place on the big tour. Carter was a part-time golfer at the age of forty-four and still retained his status because he had won on the PGA Tour. Daley had finished 24th on the Nationwide list in 2005, so he would have full status there in 2006. He was 13 over par and had, according to the tour, reaggravated a neck injury.
Daley, of course, would always have an unfortunate place in Q School lore because of his two-foot putt on the 17th hole at PGA West in 2000, which somehow bounced out of the cup. Two days later, he missed making it back to the tour by one shot. Now he was forty-five. An unusual golf story, he had quit his job as a credit manager at the age of thirty-two to take a shot at making it to the tour. He had made it to the PGA Tour for two years in the late ’90s and had been a solid Nationwide player since then.
The end of the third day is when players begin to pay attention to where they are on the leader board. Those at the top claim they have no idea where they are, but they do. Everyone makes a mental note of where the cut line is and begins to calculate where it might fall at the finish. Three days in, the number was five under. The weather report for the next three days was hot and breezy, which meant that the number was likely to fall somewhere between 10 and 12 under: double the five under, take off another stroke a day if the conditions remain relatively calm, and you get 13 under.
“But you have to take into account the choke factor,” said David Sutherland as he stared at the scores on Friday afternoon, as if doing so might change his 73–218 (two over par, tied for 111th) into a better number. “Monday afternoon, there will be guys who are going to have trouble drawing the club back because they’ll know they’re close to the number and they’re scared to death.”
He smiled. “Boy, would I love to be one of those guys.”
15
Beginning of the End
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, Hiroshi Matsuo sat inside the clubhouse relaxing before he went out to the range to warm up. His relatively late tee time—9:40 on Crooked Cat—had been pushed back even further because a frost delay had moved the first tee times from 8 to 8:30.
“Right now is when this tournament really starts to be a grind for everyone,” he said. “We’re all conditioned to play four rounds of tournament golf. Today we’re playing the fourth round, but we’ve still got two days to go when we’re done. And you can make the argument that you need to be at your freshest and best on the sixth day, because that’s when everything is ultimately decided.”
Matsuo was in that large group of players who knew the
time to say “There’s plenty of time” had passed. At two over par with 54 holes to play, he wasn’t by any means out of contention for a PGA Tour card, sitting seven shots outside the number. But he also knew that he probably needed to go low at least twice to have a chance.
“There’s a part of you that says you can’t change your mind-set—the goal is a PGA Tour card,” he said. “I look at the younger players out here, how prepared and serious they are, and I wonder sometimes what kind of player I’d have become if I’d been that prepared coming out of college eleven years ago. Who knows? Maybe I’d have burned out if I’d taken that approach, and I wouldn’t be playing now.
“I know the younger guys who are sitting where I am are all thinking they’re going to shoot 65 today. I would certainly like to shoot 65 today, but realistically, I have to start thinking that, at worst, I want to be totally exempt on the Nationwide. For me, that would be a step in the right direction, because this time I’d be ready, I think, to handle the travel and the life. The first time [in 2000], I wasn’t ready for any of it.”
Matsuo has had what would best be described as a love-hate relationship with golf for as long as he can remember. When he was a child, his father, who immigrated to the United States after attending college in Japan, was an assistant pro at Westchester Country Club. Since his mother also worked and the family couldn’t afford a babysitter, young Hiroshi began going to the golf course with his father on a regular basis before he was three.
Later, when the family moved to Florida, Matsuo played baseball, football, and golf before figuring out that golf was his best route to college—which turned out to be Auburn. “I spent a lot more time working on enjoying myself than on my golf in college,” he said. “When I graduated, I really didn’t have any particular desire to try the tour. I played some mini-tour golf, had no luck at Q School, and decided in 1996 it was time to move on. For one thing, I didn’t think I was good enough. For another, I had my father’s restaurant business as a fallback.”
Tales from Q School: Inside Golf's Fifth Major Page 25
