Tales from Q School: Inside Golf's Fifth Major

by John Feinstein

  “I need the Jason Gore effect,” he said with a smile. “I need about three hot weeks to get on a real roll again.”

  Jason Gore had become the new poster boy for all struggling golfers in 2005. He had been one of those players good enough to compete on the Nationwide Tour, good enough to make it to the PGA Tour (twice), but never good enough to make a dent once he got there. He had played horribly the first half of 2005 but had managed to qualify for the U.S. Open at Pinehurst. There, for three days, he was blessed by the golfing gods and found himself playing in the final group on Sunday with two-time Open champion Retief Goosen. The wheels came completely off on the final day—he shot 84—but his easy smile, his paunch, and his sense of humor had made him an instant star. He returned to the Nationwide Tour and, as if the 84 had never happened, picked up where he had left off on Saturday at Pinehurst. He won three times in five weeks, actually winning three straight starts since he took off two weeks after the second win. Prior to that streak, he had won only three times on the Nationwide in eight years and not at all since 2002. The third victory earned him a “battlefield promotion” to the PGA Tour. (Any Nationwide player who wins three times in the same year is immediately promoted to the PGA Tour.) To prove that neither Pinehurst nor the three-tournament string on the Nationwide was a fluke, Gore won the 84 Lumber Classic playing with the big boys in September, earning a two-year tour exemption and a slew of sponsorships. In less than four months, he had gone from 668th in the World Golf Ranking to 89th. He had gone from being a struggling thirty-one-year-old journeyman trying to support his wife and infant son to being a folk hero—a suddenly very financially comfortable folk hero.

  Every player going through the Q School experience wanted to become Jason Gore. Every one of them was convinced he was just one good round away from getting on that kind of roll. If it could happen to Jason Gore, why couldn’t it happen to them?

  “Of course you need a shot of confidence,” Gangluff said. “My problem right now is, I’m playing scared. I’m letting the golf course intimidate me. I feel like I’m fighting all sorts of demons, and I know, even if they go away next week, it will be too late. I have to figure something out now.”

  Gangluff started the first round on Tuesday feeling as if he had the demons under control. He was two under par walking to the 17th tee and thinking he was on his way to putting himself in good position after 18 holes. But he missed the green at 17 and made a bogey. He could feel the demons encroaching. “I should have been thinking, ‘Okay, let’s just play 18 well and get inside, one under is just fine,’” he said. “But I wasn’t thinking that. I was losing it again. I hit my drive about 500 yards to the right of where I needed to be.”

  From there he hit one ball in the water, and by the time he tapped in and limped off the green, he had made a quadruple-bogey eight. What should have been a comfortable one-under-par 70—or, at worst, an even-par 71—had become a 74 that put him well back in the pack. “This is what I’ve been doing for a while,” he said, sitting in the clubhouse eating lunch. “I’ve got to find something to get my confidence back.” He forced a smile. “And I’ve got about forty-eight hours, max, to find it.”

  He stood up to head back to the range to pound balls and continue his search. The midday temperature was about 90, and the humidity was thick enough to peel. Gangluff, like almost everyone else, didn’t notice. He had too many other things to worry about at that moment.

  GANGLUFF’S DAY HAD ENDED BADLY, but not nearly as badly as Chris Wisler’s. Wisler was a twenty-five-year-old pro from Dover, Delaware, who had teed off on the 10th hole in the fourth group of the day with Jon Turcotte and R. E. Winchester, a young player from Great Britain who was giving U.S. Q School a shot.

  Dillard Pruitt was patrolling the front nine, checking on the pace of play among the early groups, when he got a call on his radio saying he was needed at the 16th hole. There was, he was told, “an issue.” Pruitt shook his head. That was never good news. When he arrived at the 16th, Wisler explained to him that while playing the 14th hole, he had hit a ball into a lateral water hazard and had gone to his bag for another ball. He’d finished the hole with that ball, then teed off on the 15th. When he’d gone to mark his ball on the green, he’d noticed that the ball was a different brand than the one he had started the round with. Not wanting to hold up play, he had not asked for an official to come out to explain the rule to him. “He knew something was wrong, but he wasn’t sure what,” Pruitt said. Instead, he had gone to the 16th tee and teed off, still using the same ball.

  When Wisler finished his story, Pruitt’s heart sank. The tour’s rules on ball branding are very strict. A player can’t start a round playing Titleist, then switch to Nike, or vice versa. This is true at every level of the tour, right down to the first stage of Q School. In a sense, the rule is archaic, because it dates back to the days when golf balls were different than they are today. Years ago, most tour players used balls that were wound on the inside, made of balata. Others used balls with a hard center. The balata balls, which were far more likely to suffer cuts because of their soft centers, flew higher than the other balls. It was not uncommon for a player to change from one kind of ball to another depending on how much distance he wanted. On a long par-five, a player might play a hard-core ball, wanting a lower flight or more bounce. On a par-three, playing a short iron, he might switch to balata, wanting a high flight and a soft landing.

  These days, all balls have hard-core centers, so that is no longer an issue. Now the issue is avoiding what tour officials call “a golf ball hitting demonstration.” If Nike or Titleist or Callaway is unveiling a new ball that flies longer or lands softer or spins more—whatever the twist may be—it could ask a player who is under contract to the company to use the new ball on specific holes to demonstrate that quality. Thus the rule remains: once you begin a round with a certain brand of ball, you must finish the round with that brand of ball.

  Wisler clearly wasn’t trying to put on a golf ball demonstration. At the moment Pruitt arrived to talk to him, there was only one spectator who appeared to be watching the group: a man carrying a tackle box who had been fishing in a water hole nearby and had stopped when he saw Pruitt’s cart pull up. That didn’t change the rule. “When he noticed he was playing the wrong ball, he needed to take it out of play right away,” Pruitt said. “The penalty would have been two strokes for the 14th and two strokes for the 15th. That would have hurt him, but he could have kept playing until the moment when he knowingly played a wrong ball. Once you do that, you have to be disqualified.”

  Pruitt had Wisler repeat the story so that he was absolutely certain of the facts. Wisler admitted that he had knowingly continued with the wrong ball, apparently because he thought that changing again might involve an even more serious penalty.

  “If he was unsure and his fellow competitors weren’t sure, he should have waited until I got there,” Pruitt said. “We tell players that all the time: if you aren’t 100 percent sure, ask. I felt awful. I mean, the guy spent $4,500 and no doubt spent weeks or months preparing to play four rounds. The penalties obviously would have hurt him, but it’s a 72-hole event; a lot can happen. The guy handled it with amazing grace. He went and shook hands with the other two guys in his group and actually said, ‘I’m sorry for causing this trouble.’ I mean, my heart really sank when I heard that. Made me feel even worse.”

  Wisler was, in fact, a legitimate player, not someone just taking a crack at first stage. He had made it through first stage in 2002, 2003, and 2004, so he had every reason to believe that he would be among those advancing out of Tampa. Instead, he never got to finish his first round. On tour, where there are several rules officials patrolling each nine, it rarely takes more than a minute to get word from a marshal to a rules official that a ruling is needed. But with no marshals—or fans—at a first stage and with Pruitt the only PGA Tour official on-site (the rest of the officials at first stage are local PGA of America officials who volunteer to help out),
the wait would have been much longer. That’s why Wisler had decided to continue playing until Pruitt arrived. That proved to be his undoing.

  Of course, stories like Wisler’s aren’t uncommon in golf. Greg Norman was once disqualified from a tournament because even though he was playing a golf ball that had been approved by the U.S. Golf Association (all golf balls must receive USGA approval before they can be played), it had not yet been officially placed on the approved ball list. But when these things happen at Q School, they are that much more poignant, because the disqualified player can’t just go and tee it up someplace else the next week. He has to wait an entire year for another chance.

  Mark Russell, a longtime tour rules official, remembers a second-stage qualifier in the late 1980s when a player came to him after the second round to tell him he believed one of his fellow competitors had signed for a wrong score that day. Russell asked him what he was talking about.

  “He said this guy, his name was Ivan Smith, had hit a bad tee shot on a hole and, thinking it was out-of-bounds, grabbed another ball, teed it up, and hit again. When they got down the fairway, Smith found his ball was inbounds, so he played it. According to the guy who was playing with him, he had never said, ‘I’m playing a provisional’ before he hit his second tee shot. When he didn’t say that, under the rules the second ball was in play, and he couldn’t play his first ball. What really upset me was that the guy clearly knew Smith had forgotten to declare a provisional and never said anything to him then or before he signed his scorecard. If he had called it before he signed, it would have just been a two-stroke penalty. Instead, he comes to me after he’s signed and tells me this. I was furious with the guy. I told him he was completely outside the spirit of the game and the rules. I don’t think he cared.

  “I had to go find Smith, who I knew because he had played some on the tour. He was in pretty good position, if I remember correctly. I asked him if he had declared a provisional on the tee when he’d hit the shot he thought was going out-of-bounds. He just stared at me for a second and said he didn’t remember saying anything. I asked him to think again. I could see this look coming over his face. He started shaking his head and telling me that, no, he was angry, and he just grabbed a ball and hit again. I told him that once he did that, he had to play his second ball, that it was in play. He asked me what the penalty was.

  “There was nothing I could do. The rules of golf don’t let you let a guy off the hook because he didn’t intend to do anything wrong. Intent doesn’t matter. I said, ‘Ivan, you signed for an incorrect score that was two shots lower than what you actually shot. I’ve got no choice but to disqualify you.’

  “His face went completely white, and then he looked at me and said, ‘Do you know that you’re ruining my life? Do you know that? You’re ruining my life!’ I can still hear his voice clear as can be to this day.”

  Russell swears he can’t remember the name of the whistle-blower, but he does remember checking to see how he did the rest of the tournament and being relieved when he didn’t qualify. “I don’t often root against a player,” he said. “But I rooted against that guy. The day after this incident, he came to me and started asking me some other rules question. I said to him, ‘What’re you trying to do, get someone else disqualified today?’”

  Most DQ’s happen the way Wisler’s did: an innocent mistake. Very few players want to see another player disqualified. Most are so worried about their own games that they don’t pay that much attention to what their competitors are doing, although they’re all aware of their obligation to “protect the field.” The Ivan Smith incident is rare. Even rarer are accusations of outright cheating. In one case, however, Joe Ogilvie, who has played on the tour for six years now, refused to sign a fellow competitor’s scorecard because he believed he had cheated.

  SOME PLAYERS ACTUALLY WITHDRAW from Q School voluntarily. These are usually veterans who are coming to grips with the fact that they no longer have what it takes to compete. They get so far behind after a couple of rounds that they decide to pull out. Most players, however, slog on, believing that there is a 63 somewhere inside their bags.

  Marc Turnesa was one of those players. He is from a golfing family on Long Island. His dad, Mike, was a longtime club pro at Rockville Links Country Club. His older brother, also Mike, is now the pro at the Apawamis Club. For as long as he could remember, Marc had played golf with his father, his brother, and his older sister, who was also a good player. He had spent two years at the University of South Florida before transferring to North Carolina State, where he graduated in 2000 with a degree in communications. But he had no desire to use that degree anytime soon. He’d had his heart set on being a golf pro—a playing pro—all his life.

  “I had a good amateur career, not a great one,” Turnesa said. “I won the Long Island Amateur, and I did well, but never overwhelmingly well, in college. I always wanted to take a shot at doing this. I guess the best thing I can say about myself right now is that I still feel as if my swing and my game are improving. Still, I need to make something good happen here pretty soon.”

  Turnesa had been living the mini-tour life for five years. “My results have been decidedly average,” he said. “This past summer I paid $18,500 in entry fees, and I made about $35,000 in prize money. That’s pretty much the way it’s been since I got down here. If you want to be able to make a reasonable living, you need to make at least $80,000 in prize money. I can only go on doing this for so long.”

  His dad owned a house in Palm Beach, which helped since the rent was quite reasonable. He’d made a lot of friends, and each year he felt closer to having the kind of game he needed to make it to the tour. But he was still struggling to get out of first stage. “There comes a point where you have to start to question yourself,” he said while cooling off in the clubhouse, literally and figuratively, after the second round. “Each year I’ve had what I thought were bad breaks. One year I shot nine under par, and it took ten under to get through. Another year I played a golf course that just wasn’t very good for me—it was a bomber’s course, and I’m not a bomber. Another year I got DQ’d because I forgot to get a signature on my scorecard and turned it in that way.”

  He forced a smile. “Today I could blame what happened on the rules guys, but in the end, it comes back to me. I was the one who couldn’t get out of my own way.”

  Turnesa had shot a two-over-par 73 on the first day, which put him back in the pack, but with no reason to panic with 54 holes to play. But he had blown up on the back nine in the second round and added a 76 to the 73. That put him a long way back of the leader, Ted Potter Jr., who was at seven under par. More important, it put him nine shots outside the cut line with a whole lot of players to pass to get into contention. “I lost my cool,” he said. “No one’s fault but my own.”

  He lost his cool because his threesome had been put on the clock by the rules officials. They had fallen behind the group in front of them soon after making the turn and looked up to see themselves being warned and then watched. Rules officials always walk a fine line when it comes to pace of play, especially at Q School. On tour, a slow player is subject to fines but isn’t penalized on his scorecard. At Q School, where there is no prize money until the finals and that money is essentially irrelevant, the only way to penalize a player is by penalty—in this case, two shots if you get a slow time while on the clock. Unless there is an exceptional situation—being behind a tree, being forced to change clubs, or, for example, needing a ruling—a player on the clock has forty seconds to put the ball in play once he pulls a club.

  A rules official is highly unlikely to penalize a player if he’s anywhere close to forty seconds. In fact, the player would probably have to go well over forty seconds on a consistent basis to be penalized, because no rules official wants to be the guy who costs a player a chance to advance by penalizing him.

  The flip side, though, is not wanting the golf course to come to a complete halt because one group is slow—which can easily
happen. It often happens at Q School because players slow down as the pressure builds. The last day at Q School can make the Last Supper look like a trip to a McDonald’s drive-through. Players can be seen changing clubs two or three times, walking off yardages they know cold, and lining up six-inch putts.

  Most of the time when a rules official puts a group on the clock, it is just to get their attention and get them moving faster. The official has no intention of penalizing any player unless he starts walking backwards or on his hands. “Usually [when] you put a group on the clock, you’re doing them a favor,” Dillard Pruitt said. “I would say 99 percent of golfers play better when they play fast. The slower they play, the more they overthink. You’d be amazed how often when you make guys speed up, they play better.”

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for Turnesa. He let the thought of being timed get to him. “I’m over the ball, and instead of thinking about my shot, I’m thinking about time. Has it been thirty seconds? Thirty-five? Am I about to get nailed for two? I got pissed off for three holes and made bad swings that led to bogeys. I looked around, and the group behind us was way behind, so I got more pissed off.” He sighed. “Next thing I know, I’ve shot 40 on the back nine, and I’m sitting in here stewing about it. I go to the range and stripe every shot. That doesn’t do me a lot of good right now, though, does it?

  “You know, I like to think of myself as a realist. If I didn’t think I was good enough to compete, I’d go do something else.” He paused. “Of course, I have no idea what that would be. All I’ve known my whole life is golf. I don’t see myself as a club pro. And yet, when I think about what else I might do if I don’t do this, I come up blank.