Moment of Glory

by John Feinstein

  “But I didn’t get into the game much until I was about twelve. I played everything else. My brother was a very good cricketer, good enough to play at the state level, though not good enough to be a test cricketer. I liked golf, but I knew it wasn’t considered cool. I remember when I started high school, people would give me a hard time about playing golf. They’d say, ‘Why do you want to play golf?’

  “It wasn’t until [Greg] Norman became a big star in America that people changed. After that, golf started to get cool.”

  By the time Leaney reached high school, he was hooked. He would get on his bike after school and travel the seven miles to Busselton Golf Club so he could play and practice until dusk. Once he started to play regularly, he saw rapid improvement. By the time he was seventeen, he was a solid five handicap, but he was hardly looked at by people as a future pro.

  “I was a pretty good country player, that was it,” he said. “But I had this crazy dream that I could go to America someday and play on the PGA Tour. If you think about it now, it made no sense. I wasn’t even one of the better players in my state.”

  In spite of that, Leaney convinced his parents to let him move to Perth when he graduated from high school to get a job and work on his golf game. The plan was to give it five years to see what happened.

  “They were always very supportive of my brother and me when it came to sports. When I was in high school, there were clinics in Perth, sometimes on the weekend, sometimes for a couple of hours on a weekday. Without ever complaining, one of them would get in the car with me and drive to Perth—about three hours each way. On the weekends, we’d stay in a hotel Friday night so I could be there first thing Saturday morning.”

  The first thing Leaney needed in Perth was a job. As luck would have it, the president of Busselton Golf Club was friends with the president of Royal Perth Golf Club. He made a call that got Leaney a job as a printer and a place to practice—Royal Perth.

  “I wasn’t making very much money, and, at first, I had daytime hours at the printer’s,” he said. “I would get through at three o’clock and go straight to the golf course and play until dark. After about two years, when I started to show some potential, they gave me night hours, which meant I got off at midnight, went home and slept, and then played and practiced until I had to get back to work at four.

  “I never went out—I mean never. For one thing, I didn’t have much money, but for another I would always think, ‘Do I want to stay out late and not be able to get up to play, or do I want to get up to play?’ The answer always was that I wanted to get up to play.

  “I was homesick a lot. I didn’t go home much because that took time and cost money. After the second year, I started to see some progress. I started winning amateur tournaments within the state. Even then, I wasn’t the best player in the state by any means.”

  Leaney’s progress was steady but hardly meteoric. By year three, he began playing well in amateur events around Australia and was picked to play on several national teams. He became friends with Stuart Appleby and Robert Allenby, contemporaries who also dreamed of playing, as the Aussies say, “in America” someday.

  In 1991, during year four of his five-year plan, Leaney broke through, winning a pro tournament—the Western Australian Open—as one of a handful of amateurs in the field. That same year, Allenby and Appleby also won tournaments as amateurs. Allenby turned pro at the end of that year after finishing second in the Australian Open against an elite field. Leaney decided he wasn’t quite ready.

  “By then I’d gotten good enough that I was working only four hours a day at the printing plant, and my boss was paying me as if I was working eight hours,” he said. “I thought I was ready to turn pro, but I decided to wait until the end of ’92 because I still wasn’t sure if I was ready. Being from the country, I’d always had that mentality that the city kids were better than the country kids at things. I guess I felt the same way about turning pro.”

  When he did turn pro at the end of ’92 he easily made it through Q-School for the Australian Tour—in part because one hundred players made it. “If you showed up and signed for the right score, you probably made it,” he said. “I think I finished seventh or eighth.”

  The catch was that making it onto the tour didn’t mean you were in tournaments. The Australians were still using the prequalifying system that the U.S. Tour had used until the early 1980s. A few players were exempt into the tournaments. Everyone else played in a Monday qualifier for the remaining spots. Leaney didn’t make it to Thursday for a couple of months, but when he finally broke through he not only made the cut, guaranteeing himself a spot in the following week’s event, he finished high enough to make $20,000.

  “I felt like I’d won the lottery,” he said. “The most I’d made in a year working as a printer was probably about $8,000. I felt rich. I went out and bought myself new blue jeans to celebrate.”

  He played steadily better after that and qualified for tournaments on the Australasian tour, one big step up from the Australian Tour. He was playing in a tournament in Malaysia when he developed a bad cough. Thinking he had a cold or perhaps the flu, he came home to play in the Victorian Open in Adelaide.

  “I was sharing a room for the week with Greg Chalmers and Steve Collins,” he said. “We were paying thirty bucks apiece. I woke up one morning, and my right arm was completely swollen. I had no idea what it was. I went to see a doctor who sent me right to a specialist. He said, ‘You’ve got a blood clot; we have to get you to the hospital right away.’

  “Next thing I know, I’m in intensive care with tubes and needles all over the place, and they’re telling me I could die if the clot went to my heart. That’s why I was in intensive care. It took a week for them to get the clot down. Obviously, I missed the tournament. They charged me $700 a night while I was in the hospital, and it wasn’t covered by insurance.”

  He smiled. “When I got out, I heard straight away from Chalmers and Collins. They wanted to be sure I knew that I still owed them for the room.”

  Doctors told Leaney there were two ways to ensure that he wouldn’t clot on the other side of his body: take blood thinners for the rest of his life or have surgery to remove parts of two ribs that would open up blood passages to keep a clot from happening again. He opted for the surgery.

  “The doctor came in and told me, ‘You’ll probably not play golf again,” he said. “He seemed to think it would be too painful. I was shattered when he said that. I’d just been starting to get close to becoming a player and now this.”

  Leaney was pleasantly surprised by how quickly he recovered from the surgery. He was playing golf again—pain free—within a few months. But he still hadn’t recovered mentally. “In a sense, I was lucky it happened when I was very young because I had time to recover and didn’t really believe my career was over,” he said. “But, even though the doctors told me it was very unlikely, I kept worrying it was going to happen again. Even after I started to play well, I still worried.”

  He won the Western Australian Open for a second time at the end of ’94 and then won the Victorian Open—the tournament he never got to play for his $30 a night—at the end of ’95.

  “That was when I felt like I was back,” he said. “It had been two years since the attack, and more than eighteen months since the surgery. I felt like I was ready to go forward from that point.”

  A year later, after winning the Victorian Open again, he decided he was ready for the next step: Europe. “Back then, there were still only a handful of Australians on the U.S. Tour,” he said. “Norman was obviously a star, and Finchey [Ian Baker-Finch] had done well, and Stuey [Appleby] went over there and played the Nike [now Nationwide] Tour before he made it. But most Aussies went to Europe first. It was as if we all thought you had to take a step before going to America to prove yourself worthy. I know I felt that way.”

  He didn’t make it through European Tour School in 1996 but was invited to play in Challenge Tour events there (the equival
ent of the Nationwide Tour) in 1997. He decided to take a shot, even though he was making good money playing Australasia during the early part of the year and the Canadian Tour during the summer months—Australian winter. He played well enough on the Challenge Tour to earn his card for the big tour in Europe in 1998 without going back to Q-School.

  “I remember I played thirteen tournaments in a row at the end of the year to make sure I made enough money to get my card,” he said, smiling at the memory. “It was exhausting. The travel was tough, the golf courses weren’t great, and we were playing for purses that totaled about 50,000 pounds a week. I think I made 25,000 pounds for the year and finished 10th on the money list.”

  That trial by fire—and exhaustion—made him into a much better player. He began his rookie year on the European Tour by winning in Morocco. That allowed him to relax a little since he was exempt for the next two years. He won again a few months later in Holland and moved up high enough in the world rankings to get into the PGA Championship, which was in Sahalee, Washington (outside Seattle) that year.

  “It was my first trip to America,” he said. “I’d played in Canada a couple of times but never the U.S. I was overwhelmed by it all. The golf course was very tough, and every time I turned around on the range or [in] the locker room there was Tiger [Woods] or Phil [Mickelson] or Vijay [Singh] or some other big star. I was intimidated.”

  He managed to make the cut and thought he might make that year’s Presidents Cup team since his world ranking had climbed to number 60. But captain Peter Thomson chose Frank Nobilo and Greg Turner, two players who hadn’t played as well as Leaney that year but had far more international experience.

  “Looking back, Peter was probably right,” he said. “I’d probably have taken one look at the Americans and been so awestruck I wouldn’t have been able to hit a ball. By then, I’d played with Norman and with Seve [Ballesteros] in Europe, but, to me, the Americans were a completely different story.”

  Leaney’s pairing with Norman had happened fairly early in his pro career in a tournament in Australia. “That was scary,” he said. “I mean the guy had been my hero for years. First hole, there was water down the left, it was windy, and I hit my tee shot right into the water. I hadn’t slept. I was a mess.

  “But when we got to the 14th hole, Greg hit, I want to say, three balls in the water. It was almost like the ending of Tin Cup. I think he was hitting a one-iron off a downhill lie into the wind. Impossible shot, but he kept trying it. When he finally got the ball on the green, it was the loudest roar I think I’d ever heard. I think he made an 11.”

  Leaney won a third tournament at the end of 1998 at Royal Queensland. During the course of that year, he had noticed an attractive young woman named Tracey Camporelae, who worked for Bob Tuohey, the man in charge of a number of tournaments on the Australian Tour.

  Leaney was too shy to ask Camporelae out. Sensing that, she decided to ask him out at the end of the tournament at Royal Queensland. “But then I won, and she was afraid I’d think she was some kind of gold digger,” he said, laughing. “So she didn’t ask.”

  The following spring, Leaney decided it was time to ask Camporelae out. So, he sent the head rules official from the Australian Tour to ask on his behalf. “I just couldn’t do it myself,” he said. “I told him to just say I was too shy. Fortunately, she thought that was sweet, I guess, because she said yes.”

  They dated briefly, and Camporelae traveled to Pinehurst for the U.S. Open that year. They broke up for a time while he was back in Europe playing that summer, but then got back together for good the following year. They were married in 2001.

  At the end of 1998, not long after his first date with Camporelae, Leaney had taken his first swipe at U.S. Tour school and didn’t come close. The difference in the golf courses affected him, and he was never in serious contention to get a card. He returned to Europe and didn’t play as well in ’99. His play in Europe the previous year got him into the U.S. Open (Pinehurst), the British Open (Carnoustie), and the PGA (Medinah). He missed the cut in all three and decided not to bother with U.S. Q-School at the end of the year because he wasn’t playing well enough to make it worth the effort.

  He also qualified for the Match Play Championships that year at La Costa and had to play David Duval in the first round. Duval was coming off a win at the Bob Hope Desert Classic in which he had shot 59 in the last round. On the day before the match, ESPN’s Jimmy Roberts interviewed Leaney.

  “Isn’t it an awfully long flight [from Sydney] to here to play one round of golf?” Roberts asked, echoing what most people were thinking.

  “I didn’t come here to play just one match,” Leaney answered, insulted by the question.

  As it turned out, they were both right. Leaney did only play one match, but Duval had to make a long birdie putt on the 17th hole to beat him two and one. The loss was disappointing. Staying that close to Duval—who was ranked number one in the world at the time—told Leaney that he could play against Americans.

  He bounced back in 2000, winning in Holland again. As before, though, he couldn’t handle Q-School in Palm Springs.

  “I was beginning to think I was going to spend my career in Europe,” he said. “That wasn’t a bad thing. I was making a good living there, and I wasn’t at all unhappy. I was thirty-one, and it was beginning to look like the U.S. tour just wasn’t going to happen for me. What made it hard was seeing Rob [Allenby] and Stuey [Appleby], who were my contemporaries and my friends, guys I’d come up with who I thought I was comparable to as a player, doing so well in the U.S. I was happy for them, of course, but a bit jealous.”

  He decided to give Q-School one last shot in 2002 after he had won the German Masters—which is a European Tour major, meaning he had a five-year exemption—figuring he had nothing to lose. All week he was right around the qualifying number, and he went into the sixth and final round at eight under par, which at that moment was right on the qualifying number.

  “You’re always guessing at Q-School because there are no scoreboards,” he said. “The conditions were mild that day, and I figured the number would come down one more shot to nine under. I didn’t think it would be 10 because last-day nerves would be involved, but I was fairly certain it would be nine.”

  Leaney arrived on the ninth tee at PGA West (his 18th hole of the day) still at eight under par, convinced he needed a birdie to ensure his card. “I had just missed a four-foot birdie putt on the 8th and really thought I had to make one more birdie,” he said. “I drove the ball into the rough and had to wedge out. I hit my third shot to about 20 feet and missed the par putt. I thought I’d missed it by two at that point, and then, when I got in the scoring tent, they told me the number was going to be eight. All I’d needed to do was play conservative off the tee with an iron and make par, and I’d have been fine.”

  When he realized what had happened, Leaney was devastated. “I was thirty-two; I really thought it was my last chance,” he said. “I couldn’t believe the number had stayed at eight. Tracey and I went back to the hotel room and cried for a long time. Going back home to Australia for Christmas after missing like that was so hard. I didn’t want to play, I didn’t want to practice. I’d never been that down about golf in my life.”

  Leaney finally went to see Neil MacLean, who had been his sports psychologist for years. They had a long talk. Leaney was still in the 60s in the world rankings, meaning if he played well in the first tournament of the year on the European Tour, he could qualify to return to San Diego for the World Match Play to see if he could stick around for more than one round of golf.

  “That was my incentive,” Leaney said. “Neil said I had to tell myself every time I dropped a shot, I was one more shot away from making the match play. When I made a birdie, I was a shot closer. It worked. I finished second to Ernie [Els]. I shot 19 under par, which is a pretty good score until you realize that Ernie was 29 under.”

  Second was second, regardless of margin, and Leaney found himself b
ack at La Costa as the 48th seed in the sixty-four-man field. He drew Bob Estes—the 17th seed—in the first round and beat him two and one. Then he played Justin Leonard—a past major champion who was seeded 16th—and crushed him, six and five. That put him in the round of 16 against the number one seed—Tiger Woods.

  “Actually I wasn’t as nervous as the first time I’d played with Norman,” he said. “I only wish the first time I played with [Tiger] it had been in stroke play, because you can kind of slip along not being measured against him on every hole. In match play, they call out who won the hole on every green. I went out there hoping not to get my ass kicked—and got my ass kicked.”

  Woods, who would go on to win the tournament, was having one of his superhuman days. In 13 holes, he made two eagles and six birdies. If he hadn’t won the match seven and six and had played all 18 holes, he might have broken 60.

  Even after that defeat, Leaney was encouraged. He had beaten two good players to get to the match with Woods, and he wasn’t the first person to get his ass kicked by Woods. A few years later, after making the mistake of saying that Woods might have slipped a little, Stephen Ames played him in the first round of the match play and lost nine and eight.

  Leaney was invited back to the U.S. to play in Jack Nicklaus’s Memorial Tournament two weeks before the Open. He played well there, even though he only finished tied for 34th. “I was hitting the ball very well,” he said. “I just didn’t make anything happen on the greens, but I felt really well about my game. I was finding every fairway, it seemed, and I knew how important that was at an Open.”

  Rather than flying back to London for a week, he and Tracey opted to spend the week in Chicago, relaxing and doing some sightseeing. On Saturday, Leaney decided to drive out to Olympia Fields to get an early look at the golf course. He figured it would be a lot less crowded than on Monday, when most of the players in the field would arrive.

  His first look at the golf course was something of a shock. “I remember thinking, ‘This is really playable,’ ” he said. “My first Open, at Pinehurst, had been a disappointment in a way. I mean, I’d been watching Opens on TV since the mid-80s, and to me the Open was always about really high rough and narrow fairways. At Pinehurst, the rough wasn’t high at all. Of course, that was because the shape of the greens protected the course so the rough didn’t have to be all that high.