My Life in and out of the Rough
Page 5
And if you don’t get through Q-School? Before 1990, when the PGA Tour set up its own developmental tour, you didn’t have much choice but to hit the minitour circuit, where you’d hustle and scramble and grind your butt off for a year trying to cover expenses and trying to get your game ready for the next Q-School.
All that’s at stake in Q-School is your future in golf.
I thought I was ready that first time, but Rick Ross, my sort of unofficial guru/teacher since I was a teenager, knew better. He’d tried to warn me how tough it was going to be, and to get me prepared if I didn’t make it. You’ve got to be patient, John. You can’t let a bad hole or a bad shot get you down, John. You’ve got to keep your focus, John.
Much as I loved and respected Rick—still do—all that shit just went in one ear and out the other.
Funny, though, I wasn’t all that cut up. Surprised, shocked, disappointed—sure. But I didn’t beat up on myself. I’d played good in the three months since I turned pro. I had a few bucks in my pocket. I figured I’d just keep on doing what I’d been doing the past three months, make a little money, and get my game ready for the next Q-School in the fall of 1988.
Hell, I was only 22. I still thought life was going to be easy.
So in 1988 I hit the minitour circuit. The way the minitours worked back then, you paid $1,200 to join an outfit called the PG Tour. (PG stood for Professional Golfers.) That entitled you to pony up $600 and play in any event run by any minitour that operated under the PG Tour umbrella. There were also all sorts of splinter tours and stand-alone pro events and state opens and things—all part of the big scramble.
Essentially what you were doing was playing for your own money, which was a guaranteed way to keep your attention. It was a helluva hard way to make a living. To cover expenses, you needed to make extra bucks in the money games you could always find at local clubs. But it was also a helluva good way to find out if you had the game and the guts to make it as a pro golfer.
There’s nothing that focuses you more than playing to earn gas money for the trip to the next stop.
There’d been some great guys from South Africa on the golf team at Arkansas, and they told us how great it was playing over there on the Sunshine Tour, which ran from late December into early April. So when I missed the cut at Q-School again in 1988, I decided to go to South Africa and play the Sunshine Tour.
Problem was, it cost a bunch of money to get there, and then I’d need money to cover expenses until I won something, so I lined up a dozen people—my father-in-law and some friends of his—to kick in $1,000 apiece to keep me in water buffalo burgers, or whatever the hell they ate in South Africa that was the closest to Big Macs. The deal was that I would pay them back with interest from winnings.
It turned out to be a good deal for everybody concerned.
We played all over the country, which is almost twice the size of Texas. We played in Port Elizabeth, Durban, Johannesburg, and Cape Town, which is absolutely beautiful. That’s where Peter Van Der Riet, my caddy, comes from. The ocean there could be the prettiest water I’ve ever seen in my life.
Nissan was one of the major sponsors of the Sunshine Tour, and they gave each player a car to drive through the country. That was great, but I was lucky I didn’t kill myself because I wasn’t used to driving on the wrong side of the road and I was drinking pretty heavy while I was there. Wrong side of the road and a lot of booze—not a good combo.
I finished in the top 10 in my first tournament in South Africa, which made me enough money to keep on playing the rest of the season. I kept on playing good, and by the time I was done, I’d made about $23,000 in eight events—enough to repay my backers, with a little stash left over. Plus, I finished 11th on the Sunshine Tour’s Order of Merit, high enough so that I would be fully exempt in all their tournaments the following year if I wanted to come back.
I didn’t figure I’d have to come back, because I planned on cruising through Q-School that fall, earning my card, and spending 1990 on the PGA Tour. But hey, you never know.
I had wanted my first wife, Dale, to go with me. We’d been married less than a year, and I wanted South Africa to be our big, exotic honeymoon. Only she wouldn’t go. She’d gone with me to a few state opens and minitour events, but she hated the driving from one place to another, she hated walking around watching me play golf—who the hell did she think she’d married?—and she hated how much I was drinking. Plus, she hated the idea of being all the way across the world from her parents and friends. So she had stayed home.
Would I have had a better time if she’d gone? I don’t know. Ordinarily, I really want my family to be with me when I’m on the road playing golf. That’s one of the reasons I have my bus now. After I play and go through all the stuff associated with a tournament, like meeting with my sponsors and going to receptions and stuff like that, I like to go off to someplace where I feel at home, with my family around me. If I was by myself, I was a helluva lot more likely to spend the time partying and getting myself into trouble. Today, when I’m alone, I’m a lot more likely to go looking for a casino. (Thank God, gambling’s not legal everywhere we play.)
But with me and Dale, I think we both figured out pretty quick that getting married was a mistake. I’m not sure I felt exactly relieved that she didn’t go with me to South Africa, but I know I didn’t miss her as much as I thought I would. And I’m pretty damned sure she didn’t miss me. We separated soon after I returned home.
That first South African trip gave me just the dose of confidence I needed, not to mention a little financial cushion. In 1989 I made the cut at the U.S. Open in Rochester. Later that summer, I got into the Federal Express–St. Jude Classic in Memphis and the Chattanooga Classic on sponsors’ exemptions, made the cut both places, and cashed checks for about $11,000 combined. I was feeling pretty damned good about my prospects again.
Right after Chattanooga, I got up at three in the morning to drive to Texarkana to play in a Monday event called the Insurance Youth Golf Classic. It was a one-day, four-ball event, with 20 pros, all young and green like me, and 60 junior golfers from all over the country. They paired us up in foursomes, one pro and three juniors. In my group there was this scrawny 13-year-old kid with a funny first name: Eldrick.
Yeah, that Eldrick.
The kid kicked my ass on the front nine, making the turn at three under while I shot one over. Wait a minute, who’s the goddamned pro here, anyway? So I bore down on the back nine and he stumbled a little. I made four birdies, he made three bogeys, and I beat him by two strokes.
After it was over, I told the handful of local reporters covering the event that “this kid is great. I had heard a lot of good things about him but he’s better than I’d heard.” Tiger was still pissed about those three bogeys, I think, because he gave the pro in his foursome a little shot: “He didn’t play a very smart game. He’d take a driver and go over trees and he’d hit hard sand wedges to par 5 greens.”
(Yep, that was me back then. Now, too, for that matter.)
In 1990, when I went over to play the Sunshine Tour—yes, I missed the Q-School cut again—I took along one of my best buddies, Blake Allison, to caddy for me. We had us a helluva good time. We were out drinking and gambling and hell-raising just about every night. I mean, we were both in our early 20s, in a foreign country, seeing new places and people, and everything was an adventure.
I did some crazy things, some silly things. Once, a bunch of us were having dinner in this place with a giant buffet. Ronnie McCann, who I met there in South Africa and who’s since become one of my best friends, happened to mention that it was his girlfriend’s birthday. Hey, let’s celebrate! I went over to the buffet line, and I picked up this big-ass chocolate cake and brought it back over to our table. Everybody started singing “Happy Birthday,” but we didn’t have any candles, so I poured a full glass of bourbon over the cake and just buried my face in it. I can’t tell you why I did that—except maybe that I’ve always liked chocolate,
especially Mom’s chocolate gravy. And because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Whatever, people all around just laughed their ass off.
One night I’d been drinking really hard—and back then, that could have been just about any night—and I was pissed off about something. Me and Jimmy McGovern and a couple of other guys were going home late from some bar. He was riding shotgun, and I ran this red light, and then another one, and pretty soon I’m like, fuck it, and I just kept on going. The guys said later I ran through 17 straight reds before they could get me to pull over so somebody else could drive.
Later, I told that story to Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated, and he said I set a new record for failed suicide attempts. Funny line. But if I did set the record, it’s one I’m sure not proud of.
Anyway, I played even better this time and made some good money. And with that Nissan they let me use, me and Blake spent a lot of time just driving around. Hey, we were a couple of Arkansas bumpkins, not much more than kids, and South Africa felt like some big old playground to us.
One of the best times was when we went to this giant game park. It’s like a million square miles of nothing but protected wild game. And we were driving along, real slow, and we came on this pack of orangutans. They looked a little scrawny, so Blake rolls down his window and throws a big handful of popcorn out. Next thing you know there are about a dozen of them all around the car and on the hood, pressing their faces up against the windows, flashing their big old fangs and gibbering and jabbering. And they just kept coming out of the bushes. In less than a minute, we had 20 or 30 of these hairy bastards—shit, it seemed like 200—crawling all over the car trying to get inside and get at that popcorn.
It would have been funny as hell if we hadn’t been scared shitless. They weren’t gorillas or anything, but they weren’t cute little monkeys either. And up close, slobbering all over the windows and banging on the car, they looked huge. Finally, I just started driving away, real slow, and they started jumping off.
The lesson me and Blake learned right there was that when the sign as you enter a game park says “Do Not Feed the Animals,” it means Do…NOT…Feed…the…Fucking Animals.
We saw a big herd of elephants. We saw hippos. We saw water buffaloes. We saw zebras and antelopes and giraffes.
We were like, this is like something out of a dream. It was like being in the middle of some big-ass zoo, only without cages or bars.
Then we came across a herd of lions. Actually, it’s called a “pride” of lions, and now I understand why. We parked and watched them for almost three hours. There were probably 10 to 12 of them. One was just absolutely humongous. His mane was huge, and he had this big tuft of hair on his tail. This guy was definitely the boss of this outfit. So big, so beautiful. You got to remember, I’d never seen a lion before except in movies and picture books. I was just blown away.
It made me proud that my high school nickname was The Lion.
Me and Blake also saved a guy’s life while we were in South Africa. Or at least we saved him from getting beat within an inch of his life. He was a caddy named Jumbo, who we’d gotten to know a little bit in tournaments. He had a regular bag, but the guy dropped off the tour with an injury, and Jumbo decided to go to the next stop—Pretoria, I think it was—and try to hook up with somebody.
Now, among caddies on the Sunshine Tour back then, that was a big no-no. It was okay to come to a tournament with the guy you were carrying for. It was not okay to come into town solo because if you did manage to get a bag, it would take away a job from one of the local guys who otherwise might have picked up that bag. The usual punishment for trying to poach like that, we discovered later, was for the caddies without bags to get together and beat the shit out of the poacher. You can sort of understand why: a professional tournament was the only chance local guys had all year to make a big paycheck.
Anyway, two days before the tournament was scheduled to begin, me and Blake had just pulled into the parking lot, which was near the first tee, and we were getting our gear out of the trunk when we spotted Jumbo running down the first fairway. Now, Jumbo came by his name honestly, but he was running like a fucking sprinter, no doubt because five or six other caddies with clubs in their hands were chasing his fat butt.
“Let’s go!” I said to Blake. He dropped my clubs and we ran back to the parking lot, hopped in the Nissan, and headed off down the fairway in what state troopers back home would call “high-speed pursuit.” Guys were playing practice rounds, mind you, and this was an automobile, not a golf cart, steaming down the fairway. We passed the pack when they were about 10 yards behind Jumbo, and as we pulled alongside him, Blake opened the back door and hollered, “Jump in!”
We were fucking heroes, at least in our own minds—and Jumbo’s.
The golf my second season on the Sunshine Tour was pretty sweet, too. People remembered me from the year before and cheered me. I had a couple of top 10s. And I won a tournament in Johannesburg and got a big check: $16,000. Me and Blake then went up to Swaziland. When we arrived, I got word that my divorce from Dale was final. Although we’d split up a year earlier, I guess hearing it was final hit me pretty hard. Or maybe I was just relieved. I don’t know.
Either way, I shot 66 in the first round, but then went to the casino and pissed away most of my money—something like $25,000. In other words, what I’d just won at Johannesburg plus a big chunk of what I’d made the whole month before. I was pissed, royally pissed. Wouldn’t you be? And drunk as hell, too. And probably, deep down inside, hurting because my marriage had gone belly-up.
So I went back up to my hotel room and beat the shit out of it. Trashed it pretty good, the kind of thing I’ve done too many times in my life when I’ve lost control. This time, though, I put my fist through a TV set and damned near ended my career before it got started.
They took me to the hospital, where a doctor patched me up. I’d cracked a bone or two, and cut myself up pretty bad. The doctor who worked on me said that with a thing like that, a combination of impact and the glass, I could have destroyed some tendons and shit and pretty much fucked up my hand forever. He told me I was lucky. And he also told me to withdraw from the tournament. He said I shouldn’t touch a golf club until my hand healed.
Fuck that. I was at the top of the leaderboard, I’d been playing great golf, and I sure as hell needed the money after blowing my bankroll at the casino the night before. Blake had to leave me in the hospital to go back to the hotel to deal with the shit storm I’d unleashed, and I told him as he left, don’t worry, son—I’m going to go out there and win this sonofabitch.
And I did.
(Funny thing, I had to do it without Blake on my bag. He got spooked about having to deal with the hotel people and maybe cops in a foreign country, so he went straight from the hospital back to Johannesburg. I had to scrounge up a caddy at the golf course. Don’t think I didn’t give Blake some serious shit for being such a wuss when we hooked up back in Johannesburg.)
Another $16,000 winner’s check brought me back almost to where I started the weekend, and I had enough to cover the $1,000 or so the hotel charged me for busting the TV and wrecking the room. All in all, not a bad topper for my second swing on the Sunshine Tour.
South Africa took some of the pressure off of trying to survive those two years. I had some good times there, made some good money, saw another part of the world, met some people who are still good friends—and I didn’t die of alcohol poisoning that time in Swaziland, didn’t get myself thrown out of the country for busting up that hotel room, didn’t wreck my hand permanently, and didn’t get eaten up by those big apes.
All in all, a great success.
That spring, just after I got back from South Africa, I headed out to play the new Hogan Tour that the PGA Tour had launched in 1990 as its own, official version of a minitour—or, as they preferred to call it, a “developmental tour.” I had qualified for it by finishing high enough up in the 1989 Q-School.
The
Hogan Tour had bigger purses, stronger fields, and a longer schedule than any of the minis. They sold it as one of those “stars of tomorrow” things and as a “stepping-stone” to the PGA Tour, and in some of the smaller towns it went into, the Hogan Tour actually drew some galleries. That was nice: on your average minitour stop, the only people watching you play would be wives and girlfriends.
The Hogan later became the Nike Tour for a while; today it’s called the Nationwide Tour. And it’s one of the best things the PGA Tour ever did for improving the quality of the game.
I thought I’d take the Hogan Tour by storm. I know that sounds arrogant, but I was coming off a strong season in South Africa, where I’d won twice, and I just thought, okay, it’s finally coming together, I’m finally going to play my way onto the PGA Tour. Only early on, it didn’t go exactly the way I’d figured. I played some decent golf, and some not so decent. I’d struggled with my game from time to time before, but this time I hadn’t expected to have to struggle, and I got down on myself pretty bad.
So one day in the early part of the summer, between tournaments, I dropped by the Bay Ridge Golf Club in Dardanelle to talk to Dandy Cline. (He’d been Mr. Don Cline when I was a teenager, but now that I was “all grown up”—never mind that I didn’t always act like it—I called him Dandy, after Dandy Don Meredith.) He’d always been there for me and my brother. He was as much a father to me as my own father was when I was a teenager, and I knew I could level with him.
I told Dandy I was thinking of not finishing out the summer on the Hogan Tour. There was some long hauls coming up, first to Amarillo way out in West Texas, then north and west all the way up to Utah. I told Dandy I was unhappy with my game, that maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought I was, and that maybe I should start looking around for a club job and settle down. I’d been divorced from Dale for a while by then, and I was just flat-out lonely. I was drinking pretty hard, of course—I didn’t tell Dandy that, but I didn’t have to. And I was just generally feeling like a worthless piece of shit.