“That was another really cool moment,” Micheel said. “It all felt so great that night. It still hadn’t occurred to me how much my life was going to change. Looking back now, it was a little bit like what my dad said after I made it through Q-School in ’93, that I had jumped higher than I expected to jump and the landing might be hard. All I’d wanted to do was win a tournament. The thought of how winning a major would affect my life had never crossed my mind.”
All their plans had changed. Because he was now the PGA champion, Micheel had qualified for the World Golf Championship event the following week in Akron. That meant the house hunting would have to be postponed. They flew home on Monday—Micheel’s friend let him fly the plane most of the way—and did laundry.
“I’d been away for most of four weeks,” Micheel said. “It actually felt good to do something mundane and normal.”
But there wasn’t much mundane and normal about the next few days. While Micheel was doing the laundry, his cell phone rang. It was Paul Stanley, the lead guitarist for the rock group KISS. Micheel had been a KISS fan since boyhood and had met members of the band once during a tournament in Greensboro. He had become friendly with some of the band members, and since the band’s manager was a big golf fan, they had exchanged numbers.
Stanley wanted to know if Micheel wanted to come to their concert in Columbus on Tuesday night. Since Micheel was going to be a couple of hours down the road in Akron, he said absolutely. When the folks at PGA Tour Productions, who were trying to line up a show segment with Micheel, found out, they asked if they could film Micheel hanging out with the band. Sure, come on ahead, was the response.
In a matter of forty-eight hours Micheel had gone from being the 169th-ranked golfer in the world to a major champion hanging out backstage with the members of his all-time favorite band.
He played reasonably well in Akron, finishing tied for 23rd. Three of the four newly minted major champions finished within a shot of one another: Micheel and Weir both shot 281 (one over par), and Ben Curtis ended up one stroke in back of them, a pretty good performance considering he spent Saturday evening getting married. Jim Furyk, who almost never finished out of the top 10 any week, tied for sixth.
It was in Akron that the changes in Micheel’s life began to hit him. His agent, Richard Gralitzer, had flown in to talk about all the new opportunities that were suddenly showing up on his radar. He was as much a friend as he was an agent, an accountant by trade who also handled Micheel’s business for him. Until the seven-iron landed on the 18th green at Oak Hill, that hadn’t been too difficult a job. Now, Gralitzer’s life had changed too.
“We were in my car talking about everything that was going on, and all of a sudden Richard started to lose it,” Micheel said. “He’s a guy with a family who had never traveled much as my representative because, to be honest, there wasn’t much need for it. Now, all of a sudden, people want a meeting here one week, there another week, and his phone won’t stop ringing. He just said, ‘Shaun, I honestly don’t know if I can do this. It may just be too much to handle.’ ”
“I felt bad for him because I knew he wanted to do the right thing and do what was best for me. But I don’t think he ever expected to be in this situation—representing someone who had won a major championship. It occurred to me in the car that my life had changed and the lives of a lot of other people had changed because of what happened at Oak Hill. Up until then, I’d been vaguely aware of it, but I was kind of joyriding.
“You know, hang out with KISS—cool. Have people want to talk to you in the media room—great. Sign more autographs than ever—fine. But this was different. This was sort of real life starting to kick in. I mean, the fact that people now wanted to pay me to do a lot more things was, obviously, a good thing. But it began to occur to me that it wasn’t quite as simple as it might have looked when I was watching other guys go through it.”
One guy who was going through it but on a different level was Furyk. He had already been considered an elite player before he won the U.S. Open, but he remembered what it had been like to come close to winning majors early in his career, even though he hadn’t won one then.
“I know this sounds strange, but I almost felt sorry for Ben [Curtis] and Shaun,” Furyk said. “I mean, that’s such a huge jump from never having won, especially for Ben as a rookie, to being a major champion. It’s like trying to jump up ten steps on a ladder by skipping the first nine. I can only imagine how overwhelming it was for them.”
Ben and Candace did hold their wedding as planned on August 23 in spite of all the “opportunities” IMG had to turn down on their behalf as a result. But Ben’s new notoriety forced them to make changes. Everyone who was invited was sent a note asking them to please bring their invitations because they thought crashers were not only possible but likely—especially paparazzi.
On the way from the church to the reception, Candace looked up and saw a local news helicopter hovering above them. “We had to have the limo go around the block to a back entrance so we could avoid the photographers,” she said. “A month earlier, no one had heard of Ben. Now it seemed as if everyone wanted a piece of him. It was really hard. We’re two quiet kids from the Midwest. We aren’t stars. We just wanted to enjoy the day with our friends.”
In the meantime, IMG had convinced Curtis that he should try to play on both the PGA Tour and the European Tour in 2004. As a British Open winner, he was exempt on both tours, and European tournaments were allowed to pay appearance fees. Sure, it would mean a lot of travel, but Curtis could now afford to fly first class, and seeing Europe would be fun.
“It wasn’t a decision that was all bad,” Curtis said. “I think Candace and I did enjoy a lot of the traveling and the sightseeing. We didn’t have kids yet, so it was fun. But it probably wasn’t very good for my golf.”
All four major winners were adapting to new lives as 2003 wound down and, for the most part, enjoying themselves. Each had had the best year of his life on the golf course, thanks in large part to his major victory.
Furyk finished the year fourth on the PGA Tour money list with more than $5.1 million in earnings. He won again—at the Buick Open—in July to, he felt, kind of back up his Open win. That victory was his ninth on the PGA Tour and put him in a position, at age thirty-three, where thinking he could rack up the kind of numbers that would make him a candidate for the Hall of Fame someday was certainly not unreasonable.
Weir finished one spot behind Furyk on the money list, winning just under $5 million. He didn’t win again after the Masters, but adding a tie for third at the Open and a tie for seventh at the PGA made him a legitimate candidate for Player of the Year. He would have been a lock winner if he had been able to catch Micheel on the last day of the PGA.
The voters went instead with—surprise—Tiger Woods, who won five times in spite of playing (for him) poorly in the majors. One year after going 1, 1, T-28, 2 in the four majors, Woods went T-15, T-20, T-4, T-39. In truth, Woods probably would have traded his year for Weir’s year in an instant, because one of Weir’s three wins was a major. But the voters went with quantity—and the Woods name—over quality and gave Woods the award for a fifth straight year.
Curtis finished 46th on the money list with $1.4 million, $1.1 million of that coming from the British Open. He had always had a reputation as a player who was very good when at his best, and there was no better example of that than the week at Royal St. George’s.
Micheel won a little more than $1.8 million for the year and finished 32nd on the money list, by far his highest finish ever. For him, the fall was truly a joyride because he didn’t have to sweat out making enough money to keep his card for the next year. All four players were exempt through 2008 thanks to their major victories. (Once upon a time, the exemption for winning a major had been ten years, but the tour had cut it in half because a lot of players believed that major winners sometimes lost their incentive when given such a long exemption.)
All four gathered in Hawaii in early December
for an event called the “Grand Slam of Golf.” It was a 36-hole event put on by the PGA of America for the four major champions each year. Of course in 2001 Woods had won three of the majors, and in 2002 he had won two of them. A points system based on performance in the majors by nonwinners determines the other participants in years like that.
The Grand Slam was held on the island of Kauai, Hawaii, at a resort golf course. Furyk, who owned a home on Maui, brought his family. Weir did too. Ben and Candace Curtis came, but Micheel came without Stephanie. Dade had been born two weeks earlier, and it was too early for Stephanie and the baby to travel.
“I really had mixed feelings about being there,” Micheel said. “We were in this gorgeous place, and I had a spectacular room. When I walked in, I called Stephanie and, without thinking, started telling her how beautiful it all was. She said, ‘You know, I really don’t want to hear how beautiful it is there.’
“It hit me that she was missing out on something really cool, and I wished she could have been there. The timing just didn’t work out.”
Furyk won the event easily, beating Weir by eight shots, Micheel by 10, and Curtis by 11. No one was terribly concerned about the quality of their golf that week. It was all just another reward for what each had accomplished earlier in the year. For Furyk, there was one other piece of good news: when they gave him the trophy, no one told him that he had to have it engraved himself.
It was the perfect end—or close to it—to what had felt like a perfect year for all four men. Their futures had never seemed brighter.
“All I could think at the end of that year was ‘I can’t wait for next year,’ ” Weir remembered. “I really wanted to see if I could do it again. When you’ve done it once and had that feeling, you really want it again. I had every reason to believe I was capable of doing it again. I’m sure all four of us felt that way.”
17
Still Champions
IT WAS A WARM September night in Atlanta, the humidity still hanging in the air even after the sun had set. Shaun Micheel stood outside a downtown steak house looking relaxed in blue jeans, checking in at home with Stephanie to see how the kids were doing. He would have some dinner, then get to bed at a reasonable hour because he had an early tee time in the morning.
The 2009 Tour Championship was being played a few miles east of downtown Atlanta, at East Lake Golf Course, a wonderful old layout that had once been a favorite haunt of Bobby Jones. Throughout the old-style, rebuilt clubhouse were pictures and photos of Jones during his heyday as the world’s greatest player in the 1920s.
The closest Micheel would be to East Lake during the Tour Championship had come earlier in the day when his plane had flown almost directly over the golf course as it landed at Hartsfield International Airport. Down below, the top-30 players in the FedEx Cup points standings for the year were playing the first round of the Tour Championship on a course soggied by torrential rainstorms earlier in the week.
Micheel had played in sixteen tournaments in ’09 and had earned $257,590. That put him in 169th place on the FedEx points list, meaning he was nowhere close to making the newly invented (as of 2007) playoffs that the top 125 point/money winners qualified for. He was also in no position even to compete for a spot among the thirty players who made the Tour Championship—the last of the four tournaments that the tour was now calling “the playoffs.”
There were some pretty good reasons for Micheel’s limited play and—by tour standards—limited earnings for the year. To begin with, he hadn’t played in his first tournament until March, because he was rehabbing after major shoulder surgery the previous June. He had held off on the surgery repeatedly, hoping the pain in his shoulder would subside. It hadn’t, though, and by the time spring rolled around, other players could literally hear his shoulder snap, crackle, and pop when he swung the golf club. He hung on until the tour came to Memphis, gritting his teeth and missing the cut by one shot, then had the surgery on June 10.
“Looking back, I wasn’t very smart,” Micheel said on that warm night in Atlanta. “I kept playing when I really couldn’t play. Every tournament I played, I was giving up a tournament that I could play in when I was healthy after the surgery.”
Once injuries shut a player down for the year, the tour gives him a medical extension whenever he returns, which allows him to, in essence, combine two years into one year. Micheel had played in sixteen tournaments before shutting down in 2008 and had earned $157,828, making only six cuts. At year’s end, Martin Laird had finished 125th on the money list, earning $857,752, making him the last player off the money list to be fully exempt. So when Micheel returned in 2009, he was allotted thirteen tournaments—since when healthy in 2007 he had played in a total of twenty-nine—to make up the difference between Laird’s money and the money he had made before his surgery in order to remain fully exempt.
“The timing couldn’t have been worse,” Micheel said, shaking his head. “I’m going into the last year of the exemption I got [five years] for winning the PGA. I asked the tour if I could just roll that year over to 2009 if I didn’t play. The answer was no. It was also the last year I was exempt into the Masters, the [U.S.] Open, and the British [Open]. I wanted to play in them. But I missed the cut at the Masters and couldn’t play in the other two. Then, when I did come back, I could feel the clock ticking. Thirteen tournaments to make enough money, then twelve, then eleven.”
The comeback actually began well. On a sparkling Thursday morning in Palm Beach, Micheel teed it up at the Honda Classic. He had joked with friends that he couldn’t understand why his return to the tour hadn’t received quite as much publicity as Tiger Woods’s return from knee surgery the week before in Tucson.
“I think Golf Channel is doing a special on my comeback too,” he said, laughing. “It’s going to air at three o’clock in the morning on New Year’s Eve.”
He was touched by the number of players who went out of their way to welcome him back but a little bit surprised when several said, “Shaun, where’ve you been? We haven’t seen you for a while.”
“Okay, I’m not exactly Tiger Woods,” Micheel said. “But all the golf publications did mention that I was having shoulder surgery when I had it done and that I’d be out for the rest of the year.” He shook his head. “I guess it proves the old adage out here about life on tour: if you shoot 75, half the guys are happy and the other half wish you’d shot 76.”
Micheel’s first competitive round of golf in nine months began as well as he could possibly have hoped. He walked onto the first tee shortly after eight o’clock in the morning along with Joe Ogilvie and Jonathan Byrd. “Two guys I really like,” he said later. “A great first-day-back pairing for me because I knew I’d be relaxed playing with them. I didn’t want to be in one of the glamour groups. I wasn’t ready for that.”
Even with two players he was comfortable with and no more than a dozen people watching (Stephanie among them), Micheel could feel his heart pounding as he was introduced. “I think I was more nervous right there than on the first tee on Sunday at the PGA,” he said. “I just had no idea what was going to happen or what kind of golf I was going to play.”
His opening tee shot faded into a fairway bunker, but from there he hit a gorgeous six-iron to six feet and made the putt for birdie. That got a lot of the butterflies out. Then he birdied the next two holes and was actually at the top of the leaderboard less than an hour into the beginning of his comeback.
“You know, if you make 72 straight birdies you’re going to win the tournament by about 66 shots,” Ogilvie joked as they walked onto the fourth tee. “You’re making this look way too easy.”
Of course it was never going to be that easy. Micheel managed to hang on to shoot an even-par 70 that day, making a nice up and down from a back bunker on 18. He shot 71 the next day, but made the cut—PGA National, where the Honda is held, is one of the tour’s tougher courses—at one over par. The weekend was routine: nothing great happened; nothing horrible happened. Ogil
vie’s call that 72 straight birdies would win the tournament by 66 shots proved spot-on—Y. E. Yang, who would go on to make a major name for himself later in the year, was the winner at nine under par. Micheel finished in a tie for 52nd place at four over par.
“It’s a start,” Micheel said. “There were times last year both before and after the surgery when I questioned whether I even wanted to play golf again. I felt worn out, tired—tired really of not playing well—and I was getting ready to turn forty [January ’09]. I just thought to myself, ‘I’m a college graduate; I’m a pretty smart guy. There must be something else I can do.’
“I even started to write a book. I sat down when I was on vacation with my family right after the surgery and tried writing for a few days. Then I looked at what I’d written and thought, ‘Why would anyone want to read this?’ Then a few days later, I started thinking, ‘Your life’s been pretty interesting; maybe you should give it another shot?’ But I didn’t. I’ve just been all over the map.
“I know I do love golf, and I love competing. So this is where I belong. The question now is, can I stay out here? Time will tell I guess.”
Micheel paused and leaned back in his chair. “One thing I can tell you for sure,” he said. “That day at Oak Hill, the feeling I had walking up on the 18th green and seeing my ball right next to the cup, feels like it was about a million years ago.”
THE SAME COULD BE said, for varying reasons, about all eight men who either won major championships in 2003 or came achingly close.
None of them has won a major since that year. Jim Furyk twice had chances to win a second U.S. Open title. In 2006 at Winged Foot, he had a five-foot par putt at the 18th hole that ultimately would have landed him in a playoff with Geoff Ogilvy had he made it. He looked at the putt from every possible angle, stepped up to it, backed off (as he always did in his routine), stepped up again, and then backed off again.
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