He went back to the Hooters for another year, won a tournament, and finished 10th on the money list. He decided to change his approach at the ’02 Q-School, signing up for second stage in California, at a very difficult course called Bayonet, which is located at Fort Ord.
“I’ve always done well on tough courses,” he said. “Plus, I’d tried the East Coast route twice and gotten nowhere. If nothing else, I thought it might change my luck.”
It did. He played solidly for four days and was comfortably inside the cut line the entire time. That put him in the finals at PGA West, along with Zach Johnson, who had also broken through for the first time.
Like a lot of first timers at the finals, Curtis arrived early. The weather in Ohio—surprise—was terrible in early December, so he and Candace (they had gotten engaged at the end of ’01) flew to Palm Springs on Friday night, dodging a snowstorm during a layover in Minneapolis to get there.
“I went out and practiced on Saturday and Sunday,” he remembered. “On Monday I was practicing again, and I remember thinking to myself, ‘This thing doesn’t even start until Wednesday.’ I needed to kind of back off and relax. If I hadn’t, I would have been exhausted before I hit a shot that mattered.”
Most of his family flew out for the week. His brother, Nick, who had caddied for him in both of his U.S. Amateurs, caddied again. During the fourth round on Saturday, Curtis holed out from 100 yards for an eagle on one of the par-fives. He was already playing well, but that really got him going. When he did it again on the 11th hole during the final round on Monday, he was almost certain he had clinched his card.
“That’s when the wheels almost fell off,” he said, shaking his head at the memory of Q-School terrors almost every player has felt. “The minute I thought ‘I’ve got it,’ I started to play scared. I bogeyed the next two holes. By the time I got to 17, I was pretty sure that two pars would do it, but two bogeys could get me into trouble. Nick was so nervous he was chewing on his nails, which didn’t help me. I made par at 17, but I snap hooked my drive on 18 because I was trying to stay away from the water. I laid up and then hit my wedge over the green and ended up making double.
“I was quaking a little coming off, but someone told me everyone was struggling because it was windy, and I should be okay. As it turned out, I made it by a couple of shots. All I could think was, ‘Thank God, you didn’t blow it.’ ”
The Curtis family went to a nearby hamburger place to eat when it was all over. Ben was so drained, he couldn’t think of anything else he wanted to do to celebrate. They flew home, where Ben proudly presented his PGA Tour card to his grandfather, who hadn’t been healthy enough to make the trip to California.
“We took a picture of the two of us holding the card,” Curtis said. “I’m very glad that we did that.”
Because he had finished tied for 26th at Q-School, Curtis didn’t get into the first few tournaments of his rookie year. He finally got in at Pebble Beach and missed the cut. He also missed the cut in San Diego and headed for Tucson, which was played opposite the World Golf Championships match play event, meaning there were lots of spots in the field for Q-School rookies.
He was playing a practice round in Tucson on Sunday afternoon (he had arrived early after missing the cut in San Diego) when he got a phone call. His grandfather, who had been dealing with heart problems for a while, had died. He flew home for the funeral and then, knowing his grandfather would have been very upset with him for not playing that week, flew back to Tucson to try to play.
Not surprisingly, he missed another cut. “It wasn’t as if it was a shock when he died; he’d been sick,” Curtis said. “And I was really glad that I’d been able to go home in December with the tour card, show it to him, and have our picture taken with it. But he spent all those years helping me with my game, right from the start, and he never got the chance to see me play on the tour in person. We would have been on the East Coast in a couple weeks, and he could have come.”
When the tour got to the East Coast, things started to get better for Curtis. He was third alternate at the Honda Classic and spent all day Wednesday and most of the day Thursday hanging around hoping for withdrawals that never happened. A week later, though, the IMG connection kicked in again. Since Arnold Palmer was IMG’s first client (he and the company’s founder, Mark McCormack, were best friends), IMG runs his tournament at Bay Hill and controls the sponsor exemptions. Not surprisingly, those sponsor exemptions go, almost without exception, to IMG clients.
Curtis was able to take advantage of the free pass, making the cut and finishing in a tie for 42nd place, earning his first PGA Tour check. It was worth $14,130. That gave him a bit of a confidence boost, and he made his next four cuts in a row, his best finish coming at Houston where he made $24,975 for finishing in a tie for 31st.
“I wasn’t exactly tearing things up,” he said. “But at least I was playing on weekends and making a little bit of money.” He missed his next two cuts—including at the Memorial where he got an exemption from Nicklaus as a local kid—and then failed to qualify for the U.S. Open. He was still way down the money list after making $10,300 at Westchester.
A week later at Memphis, he made another cut and appeared headed for another relatively small check when he shot an even-par 71 on Saturday. The TPC at Southwind, where the Memphis event is played each year, is one of those golf courses where an even-par round will usually cause you to lose ground. Curtis had managed a 67 on Friday to get him comfortably inside the cut line, but the 71 left him in a tie for 58th place. On Sunday, though, he got on a roll and shot the lowest round of his brief tour career, a six-under-par 65. That allowed him to pass thirty-one players and move up to a tie for 27th, earning him his biggest check of the year: $33,300.
“What was more important was that it reminded me I could go low at times,” he said. “For a while I was wondering if I would ever shoot a low round. The golf courses we were playing were a long way from the Hooters Tour.”
It also jumped him, for the first time, into the top 200 on the money list, moving him up to 141st place. That was still a lot of progress, especially given where he had been a year earlier on the Hooters.
In fact, many players who make the jump from either college (rare these days) or the Hooters to the PGA Tour without playing on the Nationwide Tour will tell you that the toughest adjustment is the quality of the golf courses. The greens are considerably faster, the rough a lot deeper in most places. Mistakes almost always cost you.
Curtis was getting the kind of on-the-job training that usually lands a player back in Q-School, but after his hot Sunday at Memphis, he jumped up on the money list, heading to Chicago for the Western Open. Cog Hill Golf and Country Club, where the Western Open was held until the tour did away with the event in a corporate big bucks shake-up in 2007, was one of the most respected venues on tour—a public golf course that many players thought was good enough and tough enough to someday host a major championship. The golf course was so respected by the pros that the Western was one of the few events Tiger Woods regularly played, strictly because he liked the golf course, with none of his corporate deals involved. That was the kind of course where Curtis had historically thrived, not unlike Bayonet, where he had broken through the second-stage wall six months earlier.
He made the cut with a shot to spare and then pieced together a three-under-par 69 on Saturday to move past a number of players into contention, and perhaps, he thought, to have his first top-25 finish.
“That’s all I was thinking about,” he said. “I wanted to play well, finish as high as I could, and get myself into the top 100 maybe on the money list. I had two weeks off coming up—I wasn’t playing in Milwaukee or at B.C. [the event opposite the British Open], so I was looking forward to a break. I was tired because the weather had been hot and humid out there all week.”
In fact, the tournament had been delayed a couple of times by thunderstorms, and with more in the forecast for Sunday, the players went out in threesome
s, instead of the traditional weekend twosomes, to try to speed play. Curtis was paired with Fredrik Jacobson, an outgoing Swede he liked, and Vijay Singh, who was anything but outgoing but not a bad pairing for Curtis.
“[Vijay] was actually really good to play with,” Curtis said. “He just kept saying, ‘Keep it up, bro.’ Freddy was great too. In fact, we became pretty good friends after playing together that day.”
Play was stopped twice because of thunderstorms. The second time, Curtis was on the 16th green with a good round going. He was four under par and had moved into the top 20. As soon as the horn sounded, the players were carted back to the clubhouse where everyone sat and waited, hoping the tournament could finish before dark. There wasn’t any doubt about who was going to win—Woods had a five-shot lead on Rich Beem—but there was more at stake than that.
At the start of 2002, in another attempt to get more American players—or at least players on the U.S. Tour—to play in the British Open, the Royal and Ancient had left eight extra exempt spots available specifically for the Western Open. The top eight finishers in the Western who were not already exempt into the British Open were instantly exempt.
With his play on Sunday, Curtis had played himself into the top eight among nonexempt players. As he walked into the clubhouse during the rain delay, he was blithely unaware of the fact that he had a chance to make the British Open.
“I had no clue at all,” he said. “It was the furthest thing from my mind. A bunch of us were sitting around during the delay—Vijay was there, Freddy, and Stephen Ames was there too. Candace came walking in and said, ‘You know, if you can par in, you’ll make the British.’
“I had no idea what she was talking about. The other guys had to explain it to me. All of a sudden, I was nervous. When we went back out, the 17th [a par-four] was playing into a howling wind. I managed to get a five-iron on the green and make par there. On 18, I hit a three-iron that missed the green on my second shot and chipped it to four feet.
“When I got over the par putt, I was really nervous. I hadn’t even thought about playing in the British, and now I’m thinking that if I make this I might actually get to go. I managed to shake it in, but I still didn’t know if it was good enough because there were guys still on the course.”
Curtis went into the locker room, packed up his things, and then went back to the players’ dining area to wait for everyone else to finish. If he did make the British, there would be a lot to do, including figuring out a way to get Candace a passport since she didn’t have one. The wait lasted about an hour. Finally, a tour official who worked in the scoring trailer came in and told him that he had actually finished seventh (13th overall) among the players not exempt for the British. He was in.
“Wow,” Curtis said. “That’s really cool.”
Cool as it was, it meant changing plans—and making plans—very quickly.
Rather than fly home, Ben and Candace stayed in Chicago and spent most of the day at the passport office explaining why she needed a passport right away. They finally found someone sympathetic to their situation and got that done. They made a plane reservation for Thursday, figuring if they were going to make the trip, they might as well go over early and enjoy the experience.
“I figured it would be an adventure,” Curtis said. “I thought we’d go early and do some sightseeing. I had no expectations. I had never played in a major, and I’d never played links golf. I thought, ‘If we go over and have a good time, that’ll be great. If I make the cut, that’s a bonus.’ ”
He had no idea exactly what kind of adventure was about to unfold.
12
Miracle at St. George’s
BEN AND CANDACE ARRIVED in London on Friday morning and made the two-hour drive to the town of Deal in the south of England—Ben keeping the car on the road in spite of having to drive on the right side—where they found the mom-and-pop bed-and-breakfast where they were staying. (Deal is one town over from Sandwich, the tiny village where Royal St. George’s [the site for the 2003 Open] is located.) There was also the matter of finding a caddy. Danny Stahl, a teammate of Ben’s from Kent State, had been caddying for him, but Stahl couldn’t make the trip. Plus, it made sense for Curtis to try to find someone who had experience on links golf courses, since he had never seen one in his life.
Curtis called IMG. As luck would have it, one of their European clients, Andrew Coltart, hadn’t qualified for the Open. His caddy, Andy Sutton, was available for the week. Curtis made plans to meet Sutton at Royal St. George’s to play a practice round on Sunday.
“We slept most of the day Friday after we got there,” Curtis said. “I had been in Europe once before for the World Amateur in Germany. Candace had never been there. The jet lag hit us both pretty hard.”
On Saturday they decided to go to the golf course and at least find out what Ben would be getting into the following week.
The first time an American sees a links golf course can be a shock. It looks nothing like the lush, green, tree-lined courses Americans are used to seeing and playing. In fact, if you aren’t looking carefully, it is easy to drive by a links course without even realizing it’s a golf course. Most can pass for cow pastures, unless you happen to notice the flagsticks on the greens, which aren’t terribly green under any circumstances.
Royal St. George’s was virtually empty when Ben and Candace got there. Since Sutton wasn’t due to arrive until Sunday, Ben took a pull cart, and they ventured onto the course together. More than any other course in the British Open rota, St. George’s is famous for blind shots, one reason a lot of players don’t like it. When Jack Nicklaus first saw the course in 1981, his comment was, “It’s not that tough, as long as you pick the right church steeple or barn to aim at on most holes.”
Curtis was aware of this, so, on most holes, Candace walked ahead of him as forecaddy to give him a line on where to hit the ball. “A lot of times she would stand on a spot, and I’d say, ‘There ain’t no way I should be hitting it there,’ ” he said. “But she was right. If she hadn’t been with me, God only knows where I would have hit most of my shots.”
The only other golfer Ben and Candace encountered all day was Australian Craig Parry, who was out playing by himself. The rest of the golf course was empty, which was fun and meant Curtis could linger, hitting extra shots when he wanted to in order to get more comfortable with links play—bouncing balls into greens, watching out for knolls and swales all the way around.
“I liked it,” he said. “It wasn’t that windy, and I figured it would be a lot tougher when the wind blew. It helped a little that the World Amateur I had played in had been on a linksey sort of course, but it was nothing like this was.”
The next day Ben and Candace slept in, walked into town for a late English breakfast, and then met Sutton at St. George’s. This time Candace took the afternoon off, and player and caddy set out to familiarize themselves with the golf course and one another. Curtis played 18 holes again, and he and Sutton walked onto the 18th green at about 5:15 p.m. The place was completely empty, and Sutton pointed at the clock behind the green as he handed Curtis his putter.
“If we can walk on this green at about this time a week from today, we’ll both be very happy,” Sutton said.
Curtis laughed. The thought of playing on Sunday still didn’t seem all that likely to him. And the thought of being in one of the last groups—and arriving on the green late in the afternoon—had never even crossed his mind. Still, as he holed out and told Sutton that he and Candace were heading to London the next day to go sightseeing, he felt pretty good about where he was at that moment.
“I was playing well,” Curtis said. “My swing felt good, and I thought I had adapted pretty well to links golf, even though it had only been two days. I liked it. I didn’t feel as if I was going to be overwhelmed when Thursday came around. I thought, at the very least, I had a chance to play well.”
BEN AND CANDACE WENT sightseeing as planned on Monday, Curtis feeling comfortable alr
eady having two practice rounds under his belt. They saw Big Ben, Parliament, and Buckingham Palace, then drove back. Curtis played 18 holes on Tuesday with Cliff Kresge, another American, and a third player Curtis had never met, who was from the European Tour.
“All I remember about the guy is that he hit a spectator in the head on one of the par-fives,” Curtis said. “It was a fan. The guy took about three more steps, as if he hadn’t even noticed, and then he went down like he’d been shot. Fortunately, he was okay, or it wouldn’t have been too funny.”
On Wednesday, Chris Smith invited Curtis to play with him and Joe Durant, a veteran who was known as one of the tour’s best ball strikers. Smith was Curtis’s rookie mentor; every year the tour assigns an older player to each rookie so he has someone to go to with questions or problems. Smith, realizing that Curtis didn’t know many tour players, made a point of asking him to play a practice round whenever he could.
Durant had never met Curtis before, but he was impressed with him. “He was very quiet, which isn’t that unusual in a young player,” Durant said. “But I noticed he looked very comfortable playing the golf course, and he had a very solid golf swing. There was no doubt he was talented.”
Did the thought cross Durant’s mind that Curtis might contend that week? He smiled. “Absolutely not.”
They actually quit after nine holes, in part because the pace of play was so slow—the day before a major is almost impossible because players want to putt from every imaginable angle on each green—and in part because Curtis, having played 63 holes already, felt he knew the golf course as well as he was going to.
“I felt very comfortable,” he said. “The golf course wasn’t that long, which was good for me. The weather was warmer than usual. I remembered watching at Muirfield the year before when it looked like they were playing in a hurricane a lot of the time. I heard some guys complaining in the locker room about the course and all the blind shots, but it didn’t really bother me.”
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