“It was a very tough decision for him,” Kristen said. “I know he believes he can still compete on the PGA Tour, and to have weeks where he knew he could get into a PGA Tour event and turn those spots down to play the Nationwide was going to be hard for him. But he made a commitment to give it a shot and see what would happen.”
Mattiace actually began the year playing at Pebble Beach, almost as a warm-up for the Nationwide, which didn’t start until two weeks later. He got into Pebble Beach as a past champion (because four golf courses are used, 180 players get into the field), and he finished in a tie for 22nd place. That was his highest finish on tour since the tie for 12th in 2005 at Westchester.
Given that confidence boost, Mattiace headed off to Panama for the opening of the Nationwide Tour season. In order to increase the number of events on the tour, the Nationwide now opens the year with four overseas events—one in Panama, followed by two in New Zealand, and one in Australia. Having made the decision to play the Nationwide, Mattiace decided to play all four overseas events.
His start was encouraging. Coming off his solid play at Pebble Beach, he finished tied for sixth in Panama, earning $19,425 to start the year. But he couldn’t keep up that pace. He missed three of his next six cuts, and his highest finish over the next nine weeks was a tie for 24th in Athens. Still, he arrived at Woodmore in reasonable position on the money list—45th place—with lots of golf still to be played.
“I think making the mental commitment to play on this tour is the hardest thing for anyone who has been on the PGA Tour for a while the way I have,” Mattiace said. “But once I decided to do it, I’ve been okay. It’s golf, I’m competing, and I really enjoy that. The only thing that’s been tough has been spending time away from the family.”
In fact, Woodmore was the beginning of a four-week stretch when he would be driving from tournament to tournament. Kristen and the kids had flown in to Washington to spend the week with him but were heading home after that.
The week at Woodmore turned out to be the kind every pro dreads. A thunderstorm swept through the area on Thursday afternoon with half the field still on the golf course, Mattiace among them. On Friday, no one hit a ball all day as the course was drenched by more rain. That meant the players who hadn’t finished their first rounds had to tee it up at 7:30 on Saturday morning, complete their first rounds, then immediately head out to play their second rounds. Everyone who made the cut then had to play 36 holes in hot, humid conditions on Sunday.
Mattiace played well enough the first two rounds, shooting 70–70 to make the cut but ran out of gas the last two rounds, shooting 76–74 to finish in a tie for 65th place. The next morning he was in his car heading for Knoxville, hoping for better things.
While the memories of Augusta still remained too painful to recount in detail, Mattiace remained friendly and open to anyone he encountered—as long as the subject of conversation didn’t turn to the 2003 Masters.
“The one thing he doesn’t do is ‘What if…,’ ” Kristen said. “I’ve never heard him say, ‘Everything would be different if I’d parred 18’ or anything like that. He’s a guy who is very comfortable with himself. He can go off and hit balls alone for hours and be very happy. He’s content. We’re lucky he made the money he did so we aren’t scrambling; we’re comfortable.
“The other night we had Chinese food and Len’s fortune cookie said, ‘Relax and enjoy yourself.’ I actually believe he’s doing that right now. Would he like to play better? Of course he would. But his demeanor never seems to change. I’ll go pick him up in the car after he plays, and when he gets in I have no idea if he shot 64 or 74. I still remember picking him up one afternoon in North Carolina a few years ago. It was a Friday and he’d played well on Thursday, so I asked what time he was playing the next day.
“He said, ‘I’m not. I shot 78. I missed the cut.’ I honestly didn’t believe him at first, he was so calm about it. But he had. You can never tell if something is bothering him.”
On the outside, anyway. On the inside, it is pretty clear that something still gnaws at him about that day at Augusta when he played the round of his life, a round he should remember proudly—and says he does. But the memory clearly isn’t that simple or clear. He shot 65, one of the great Sunday rounds in Masters history.
But Mike Weir is the one who puts on the green jacket on the second Tuesday in April every year and has dinner with Nicklaus and Palmer and Woods and Watson and Player. It is almost as if Len Mattiace can hear their voices but can’t quite make out what they’re saying.
And whether he talks about it or not, the pain is still evident.
STEPHEN LEANEY’S SITUATION DURING that rainy, humid week in June was considerably different from Mattiace’s. He had not dealt with a major injury or surgery after his Moment at the ’03 U.S. Open, but he had dealt with a mystery illness that had made playing golf very difficult.
Things had gone well for him after his runner-up finish to Jim Furyk and his decision to move his family to Dallas so he could play the U.S. tour full-time. He hadn’t done anything spectacular—his best finish during his first four years on the tour had been a third place at Hilton Head in 2007—but he had pieced together a solid, lucrative career when he finally made it to America after all the years of trying to get there.
He made more than $1.1 million in 2004, with two top-10 finishes and six in the top 25, including the tie for 17th at the Masters. That put him 68th on the money list. The next three years weren’t as good, but he played well enough to keep his card comfortably and again went over $1 million in earnings in 2007.
Midway through 2008, Leaney began to feel tired and dizzy on the golf course. It made no sense. He was thirty-nine years old, in excellent shape, and all of a sudden he was having terrible trouble finishing his rounds without feeling exhausted. In addition, he felt unsteady as he stood over the golf ball. He went to the doctor and had all sorts of tests done. They couldn’t find anything wrong. He kept playing but didn’t feel better. Finally, after another round of tests, the doctors came back and said he had an inner-ear infection.
They told him he should shut down for a while, rest, take meds, and come back to play when he felt better. He had already played seventeen tournaments by the time the doctors told him to stop playing and had only made $157,963, well short of the $852,752 that he would need to finish in the top 125 on the money list. But at that point, Leaney wasn’t worried about his standing on the money list—he was concerned about trying to get healthy.
“It’s bad enough to not feel well, but when the doctors couldn’t really tell me what was wrong, that made it worse because then there’s no guarantee you’re going to get better,” he said. “When I stopped playing, I had no idea when I was going to feel well enough to play again.”
The meds he was taking for the inner-ear infection didn’t seem to help. Whenever he tried to play golf, even at home, he felt tired and unsteady. He was tested for diabetes. Negative. He went to see yet another doctor. More tests. This time the diagnosis was different: he had vertigo. At the very least, that might explain why he felt unsteady over the ball.
“They recommended I eliminate all dairy products from my diet,” he said. “I stopped eating meat too. Right away, I started to feel better. It wasn’t as if I was 100 percent in a week, but I definitely started to feel as if I was going in the right direction. It was a huge relief just to feel as if I was making some progress.”
Leaney knew when he returned to the tour in 2009 that he would have just eleven tournaments to make almost $700,000. Given that he had been away from golf for almost nine months before he felt well enough to play, that was probably going to be a long shot.
“It’s nice though that my major concern right now is my golf,” he said, sitting out one of the rain delays at Woodmore. “I feel so much better. I just haven’t been able to find my game again yet.” He smiled. “I know it’s in here somewhere.”
Leaney had come back to the tour in Tampa in mid-March
and, not surprisingly, missed the cut. He’d made the cut at Hilton Head (T-58) but hadn’t made a cut since. He was playing at Woodmore because he had not been invited to play in the Memorial Tournament, and he thought it was important to keep playing.
“I’ll play my eleven and see where I am,” he said. “If I don’t keep my card, I can go to Europe and play some events there. The important thing for me now is to figure out a way to play better. Having playing status doesn’t matter very much if you can’t play.”
The idea of going back to Q-School, a place he hadn’t been since 2002, didn’t seem to frighten Leaney. “I’d rather not do it of course,” he said. “But if it comes to that, it comes to that. I’m certainly not the first player who has faced this sort of thing.”
He leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Just look around this room. There’s no margin for error in this game.”
Unlike Mattiace, Leaney has no ghosts chasing him from 2003. “Obviously, there are moments when I think about what it would have been like if I’d won,” he said. “But Jim [Furyk] was so clearly the best player that week. I went into Sunday telling myself to try to win the tournament in large part because I was convinced if I played for second I’d probably end up 20th. You just can’t have that ‘hang on’ mentality and succeed.
“There were a couple of moments where I might have cut the lead to two, and he made tough putts. On the one hand, you can say ‘What if…’ On the other, you can also say ‘That’s why he won. He was that good that week.’ It’s not as if I second-guess anything I did. I was second best, and for me that was a good showing.
“I’d love another crack at it, especially since I thought I held up pretty well that Sunday, being in the last group with all that pressure and so much riding on the outcome. Sometimes I think about that week and it seems so long ago, I wonder if it was really me. Other times it feels like it just happened.
“Right now, I just want to play good golf again. If I can do that, the rest will come. It always has in the past.”
Leaney shot an opening round 76 at Woodmore, which meant that his second round 69 left him four shots outside the cut number. He went back to the PGA Tour to finish his eleven tournaments and made one more cut, finishing 50th in Milwaukee.
He played briefly in Europe but in October found himself playing in China, on something called the OneAsia tour, a start-up tour that consisted of players from China, South Korea, and Australia. He was, by far, the biggest name in the field. He was also a long, long way from Olympia Fields.
IF ANYONE CAN RELATE to the way Len Mattiace feels about the 2003 Masters, it is Thomas Bjorn. Of the four men who finished second in the 2003 majors (Bjorn actually tied for second at the British Open with Vijay Singh), no one had been closer to victory than Bjorn.
He was at the peak of his career, about to play on his third straight European Ryder Cup team. He had won nine times in international events, including his victory over Tiger Woods in Dubai in 2001. At age thirty-two, he appeared ready to take the next step and become one of the game’s elite players.
For 14 holes on that Sunday at Royal St. George’s, he was in control of his game and the championship. He stood on the 15th tee with a three-shot lead. Even after bogeying 15, he still led by two with three holes to play. And then came the 16th, a par-three that didn’t really frighten anybody very much. But Bjorn’s tee shot floated right of the flag and hopped into a bunker. From there, he had needed three swipes to get the ball onto the green.
It was so shocking to watch that Davis Love III, standing there with a 10-foot birdie putt, couldn’t believe his eyes. “The thought that he might leave it in the bunker never crossed my mind,” he said. “It wasn’t necessarily an easy shot to get close, but as long as you made sure to fly it up onto the green, it shouldn’t have given him any real trouble.”
Except that it did. Bjorn was gracious in defeat, seeking Ben Curtis out to congratulate him and making no excuses for what had happened.
He continued to play well after the meltdown at St. George’s but not as well. He won again, twice, on the European Tour and even finished tied for second at the 2005 PGA, one shot behind Phil Mickelson. But Bjorn was left off the 2006 Ryder Cup team by captain Ian Woosnam and was so critical of Woosnam for choosing Lee Westwood over him with his last captain’s pick that eventually he had to apologize to Woosnam, especially after Westwood picked up four points in Europe’s one-sided victory.
By 2009, Bjorn had dropped out of the top 100 in the world rankings, even though he was not yet forty years old. He entered the European qualifier for the U.S. Open but withdrew without ever teeing up. He did show for the British Open qualifier but failed to make the field for Turnberry. By year’s end, he was 101st on the European money list—still exempt but a long way from where he had been in 2003.
And, like Mattiace, Bjorn just couldn’t bring himself to talk about what had happened on those final holes or in that bunker at St. George’s. Even when asked to answer questions by e-mail, he politely declined. When told about Bjorn not wanting to talk, one friend from the European Tour nodded his head in understanding.
“I’m not sure he’ll ever be over it,” he said. “People talk about [Jean] Van de Velde because he fell apart [with a triple-bogey 7 at Carnoustie] on the 18th hole. This was just as bad, at least as bad, it just happened on 16, and there’s no picture of Thomas [as opposed to Van de Velde] standing in a berm with his pants rolled up to his knees.
“He knows he was the best player that week. But it doesn’t matter—he didn’t win. He’s told people that sometimes when he goes into a bunker, he still sees demons. He’s such a good guy. You have to feel for him.”
Two people who have always felt bad for him are Ben Curtis, who walked off with the Claret Jug that day, and Love, the eyewitness to the crime.
“Obviously I didn’t see it, and it played a big role in me winning and my whole life changing,” Curtis said. “But how can you not feel for a guy when something like that happens to him? I thought he showed a lot of class coming over to congratulate me that day.”
Love is more succinct: “I wouldn’t wish something like that on my worst enemy. Even though it gave me a chance to win, I certainly wouldn’t wish it on a guy like Thomas.”
Bjorn’s bunker debacle changed lives that day. Curtis and his family have had to live with the burden of being an out-of-nowhere major champion. Bjorn and his family have had to live with the burden of never being a major champion.
20
What Comes Next?
WHEN THE FOUR MAJOR champions for 2003 arrived on the island of Kauai for the Grand Slam of Golf, they were a bit awed by the show the PGA of America put on for them.
“Everything, I mean everything, was first class,” Shaun Micheel said. “I remember walking into my hotel suite, looking around, and thinking, ‘Wow, I have really arrived now.’ ”
Everyone brought family members. Since Dade was just two weeks old and too young for a plane trip, the baby and Stephanie Micheel didn’t go, but Shaun brought his parents, his sister and her fiancé, and Sam Carmichael (his old college golf coach at Indiana) and his wife along with him. There were parties and dinners every night, and then—finally—the four players went out and played 36 holes on the Poipu course on the resort property.
Even though there was money at stake and the event was televised by TBS, this was just a step above hit-and-giggle golf. After all Ben Curtis, who finished last, walked away with a check for $100,000. Jim Furyk, who beat Mike Weir by eight shots to win (Micheel was two shots behind Weir, Curtis three back), won $400,000. Weir won $300,000, Micheel $200,000. Not exactly high-pressure work for the boys.
“In a way, though, I felt like we’d all earned it,” Micheel said. “After all, there is no event in golf that’s tougher to get into than that one.”
Certainly true. Tiger Woods, who would win the Player of the Year award, wasn’t there. Neither was Phil Mickelson, who would finally break through and win his first majo
r the following April.
None of the four players knew each other very well. Furyk and Weir had spent some time together since both had been tournament winners prior to winning their majors, and Micheel and Curtis, who had been nonwinners before the summer of ’03, had a passing acquaintance with one another.
“Put it this way, I knew [Curtis] to say hello before he won the British,” Micheel said.
That put him well ahead of Furyk and Weir. But even though they all had families around, the four players did spend some time together. The most talkative was Micheel, who tends to think out loud a lot. Furyk still remembers Micheel talking about his concerns about “living up” to the idea of being a major champion.
“He talked about it a couple times,” Furyk said. “It was as if he felt he had skipped a step going from not winning a tournament to winning a major. In a sense, he had. So had Ben. When I won the Open, I felt prepared to deal with what came next because I’d had success beforehand. I’d won tournaments, I’d competed on Sunday in majors, I’d played on Ryder Cup teams. It was a natural step, one I very much wanted to make.
“I think for Shaun and Ben, it was a lot tougher because I doubt the thought of being a major champion seriously crossed their minds before they won. Then they woke up one morning, and it felt as if everyone wanted a piece of them. In a lot of ways, I felt sorry for both of them—not for winning but for what they had to deal with as a result of winning.”
Although Curtis did struggle over the next two years, he was young enough and had an inner confidence that didn’t let him get too down on himself, even when he heard the constant whispers that he had been a fluke. The two wins in 2006, the near win at the PGA in 2008, and the spot on that year’s Ryder Cup team did a good deal to quiet all the talk.
Moment of Glory Page 32