Tales from Q School: Inside Golf's Fifth Major

by John Feinstein

  Colby Beckstrom woke up feeling completely calm, no nerves at all in his stomach—which surprised him. “To be honest, I love nerves,” he said. “They make me feel as if I’m ready to play.”

  Beckstrom and his family had eaten their usual meal at their usual spot the night before, and it had felt like a pregraduation gathering. He had shot 69 on the third day, leaving him at nine under par for the tournament. That put him in a tie for sixth place and in the second-to-last group on the final day.

  “Dinner on Friday night felt almost like a celebration,” he said. “It wasn’t as if I was cocky or overconfident. I wasn’t. We were planning the real celebration for the next night. But we were all feeling good about things.”

  There was no reason not to feel good. His day had perhaps been summed up by the ninth hole, where he had hit his third shot up against a tree behind the green, leaving himself with two options: take an unplayable or try to chip the ball onto the green left-handed. Before he could go over and consider his options, Beckstrom was distracted by Akio Sadakata, who had hit his second shot into the water hazard fronting the green. There was some question about where the ball had entered the hazard and where Sadakata should drop. Sadakata believed he was entitled to drop in a spot far more advantageous than the one Beckstrom and Joe Alfieri, the third player in the group, thought he was entitled to. After a couple of minutes of discussion, Beckstrom walked away.

  “I’m up against a tree lying three,” he said. “If that’s what he thought, that’s what he thought. I wasn’t going to spend all day arguing about where his ball entered the hazard. In the end, he has to make the call.”

  Beckstrom decided to play his fourth shot left-handed, hoping to get the ball close enough to the hole to save par. He failed. The ball rolled straight into the cup for a miraculous left-handed birdie. He was on cruise control the rest of the day.

  Now he figured he would find his nerves warming up on the range. If there is anything quieter than a golf course at Q School, it is a range at Q School—especially before the last round. Everyone is lost in his own thoughts, each trying to get himself into exactly the right mind-set for the day. Everyone knows it will be a long day. The pace of play is never fast at Q School, but on the last day, when players will frequently mark 1-foot putts, it slows almost to a halt.

  “On the one hand, you don’t want to see play get ridiculously slow,” said Steve Rintoul, the former tour player who was running the qualifier. “On the other hand, I’ve been where those guys are, and I’m not going to put someone on the clock unless it’s really getting bad out there.”

  For many players—Beckstrom among them—the stakes for the next 18 holes were the highest they had ever faced. For players who had no status on either the PGA Tour or the Nationwide Tour—Beckstrom, Jeff Curl, Joe Alfieri, Brad Klapprott, Patrick Damron, Hiroshi Matsuo, Garrett Frank, and Steve Wheatcroft among them—this was their chance to get off the mini-tour merry-go-round and secure a spot on the Nationwide, with a chance in three weeks to play themselves into golf nirvana—the PGA Tour.

  For those who did have some kind of status—ex-winners like Donnie Hammond, Mike Hulbert, Blaine McCallister, Matt Kuchar, Grant Waite, and David Gossett—this was a step toward getting back to where they all thought they belonged. For players who had been on the Nationwide recently—Bubba Dickerson, Chad Wilfong, Tripp Isenhour, Tommy Tolles, and Kelly Gibson— this was what they needed to have the opportunity to take that next step.

  Tolles might have been the only player with reason not to be that nervous. He stepped on the first tee that morning knowing he could shoot 80 and still qualify. “Of course, the last thing you want to do is start out thinking ‘Let’s break 80,’” he said. “You try to flush your mind and play a good round of golf.”

  That’s what they were all doing in one form or another. In some ways, the lack of scoreboards at Q School is helpful. Sure, they all have an idea what the number will be, but because they aren’t certain, they have to keep grinding regardless of where they think they stand.

  “You might think you’re safe and then find out you miscalculated,” Bob Heintz said. “Or you might think you’re a dead man walking and then find out you have life. That’s why you keep playing no matter what.”

  Heintz was one of the twelve players who began the last day one shot outside the number. He had put himself in a hole with an opening-round 74, but back-to-back 69s had jumped him back into contention. “I’ll take 69 and take my chances right now,” he said early Saturday morning. “Just give me the card and I’ll sign it.”

  Heintz was another player who didn’t fit comfortably into the PGA Tour hunt/fish/vote Republican stereotype. (Of course, Brad Faxon, the longtime tour player who listed his special interests in the media guide as “all sports except hunting and fishing,” as a goof on his fellow pros, was not only a Republican but a close friend of the Bush family.) Heintz lists “collecting chess sets” as one of his hobbies, and you could bet serious money that those three words did not appear anywhere else in either the PGA Tour or Nationwide Tour media guides. He was actually a fan of the first President Bush but it may have had something to do with the fact that both were graduates of Yale.

  He had ended up at Yale in part because Duke, his first choice, chose not to offer him a golf scholarship. Bob and his brother Chris had grown up in Syosset, New York (on Long Island), believing they were destined to be professional athletes. Their father was a high school basketball coach, and for a long time, Bob thought he would go to college on a basketball scholarship. By the time he was a senior, he was big for golf (6 feet, 200 pounds) but small for basketball. When Yale, which technically doesn’t offer athletic scholarships, offered him financial aid to come and play golf, he took the university up on it. He got his degree in economics and was an academic all-American as a senior, but he wanted to take a shot at golf before deciding whether to use his degree or pursue an MBA. After struggling on mini-tours for three and a half years, he decided it was time to look for a job. In 1996 he was hired as a financial analyst by Raymond James.

  “That was a good experience for me because it motivated me to work harder at my golf,” he said, smiling. “If you have a degree from Yale, you can always get a job. But if you want a really good job in finance, you need an MBA. At one point, Nancy [his wife] asked me if I wanted to go back and get my MBA. I said, ‘Hell no.’ She said, ‘Well, then, play hard.’”

  His work began to pay off in the late ’90s. He first made the Nationwide Tour in 1999 and then became one of those ping-pong balls bouncing back and forth between the Nationwide and the PGA Tour. His game was consistently good enough to play well on the Nationwide, but not good enough to keep him on the PGA. Three times he made it through Q School, and three times he failed to crack the top 150 on the money list, including in 2005. Now, at thirty-five, with three children and a degree from Yale, he conceded that thoughts of finding a new way of life crossed his mind.

  “I’m not doing this because I don’t have anything else I can do,” he said. “If I wasn’t supporting my family, I would stop. But I am. This year I was 171st on the money list, which technically makes me a failure because I’m back here. But I made $355,000 in prize money. I had a fifth [San Antonio] and an 11th [Vancouver]. I still believe I haven’t lived up to my potential yet. I think I owe it to myself to keep at it a while longer and see if I can’t put together one of those Jason Gore years. I believe I have that in me.”

  Heintz isn’t nearly as rotund as Gore, but he does have a round face and a quick smile. He also has what would have to be considered a cerebral view of Q School. “The dichotomy is easy to understand, if you think about it,” he said. “We’re all trying desperately to do something in which the harder you try, the worse you’ll do. You have to fight the idea that the consequences of failure are as bad as you make them out to be.”

  He smiled. “I keep telling myself that if I’m back on the Nationwide next year, my family really enjoys spending time at t
he Peek’n Peak Resort” (the site of a Nationwide event in Findley Lake, New York). “Of course, if I ever really got my game together, we could afford to go there on a vacation anytime we wanted.”

  Nancy Heintz is a graduate of Villanova who teaches preschool when she isn’t taking care of their kids, ranging in age from four to ten. “The biggest problem for a tour wife is finding a sense of purpose and worth,” she said. “People think all the wives just want to be ‘Mrs. So-and-so’ and hang out at the spa or shop. That might be true for some, but it isn’t true for a lot of us.”

  Having spent time on both tours, her husband had found a simple way to describe the differences between them. “It’s all in the walk from the clubhouse to the range,” he said. “On the PGA Tour, [when] you make that walk, you have to deal with media, with fans, with club equipment reps, with agents. It’s a traveling circus. You’re talking thirty to sixty minutes a day to deal with all the chaos outside the ropes.

  “The Nationwide is a lot more peaceful.”

  He stood up to make the quiet walk to the range. “I kinda like the chaos,” he said, his spikes clicking in the silence against the paved cart path as he walked.

  HEINTZ MADE A HABIT of not studying the leader board closely until after the third round. “At that point,” he said, “you want to have a sense of what you’re up against going into the last day.”

  His mission, like that of a lot of other players, was to try to shoot in the 60s the last day. With the wind up, there probably weren’t going to be too many rounds in the 60s, and it seemed likely that anyone in contention who could shoot in the 60s would be in very good shape.

  Colby Beckstrom didn’t need to shoot in the 60s. He could probably afford to shoot a couple of shots over par and still qualify with ease. But that wasn’t what he was thinking as he and his brother walked to the first tee at a few minutes before 10 a.m. to join Scott Parel and Deane Pappas in the second-to-last group of the day. “I just wanted to go out and keep doing what I’d done in Tampa and what I’d done for three rounds,” he said. “Just play good golf and not worry about my score or anyone else’s. It had worked for seven rounds. There was no reason why it shouldn’t work for one more.

  “The funny thing is, if someone had come up to me before the round and said, ‘Hey, Colby, shoot 75 and you’re in the finals,’ I’d have laughed at them. The thought of shooting a score anywhere close to that high never crossed my mind.”

  Months later, looking back at the day, Beckstrom realized there were warning signals: the lack of nerves, the case of the giggles he had on the driving range. “It wasn’t like I was laughing out loud at anything,” he said. “I was just kind of giggly out there with J. J. That’s really not me before an important round of golf. On the tee, I felt so relaxed. Again, that’s not me. It was as if I couldn’t get the adrenaline rush you need in that kind of situation.”

  He missed the green to the right on the first hole, chipped poorly, and made a bogey. A shaky start, but hardly a big deal. The second hole at Lake Jovita is a reachable par-five, but Beckstrom drove it into the right rough. Rather than take any chances, he decided to lay up. “I think I got a little too greedy with the shot,” he said. “I left it in the thick rough on the right.” His third shot was a chopped seven-iron from the gunk, and he was still well short of the green. He then hit a mediocre pitch that was still short of the green. He chipped to 10 feet and missed the putt for bogey. Two holes played, three shots given up.

  “At that point, I was just a little bit baffled,” he said. “I certainly wasn’t panicked. I was telling myself, ‘Calm down and let’s go.’ But I was calm. So telling myself to calm down really wasn’t the answer.”

  He finally hit a good drive at number three and had 100 yards to the flag. He hit an easy gap wedge, knowing that with a full swing, the farthest he could hit the ball was 110. “I took what I thought was my 100-yard swing,” he said. “The ball went five yards over the green.”

  It was at that moment that it first occurred to Beckstrom that he didn’t have complete control of his body; that what he had thought was calm was something a lot closer to terror. He made another bogey from over the green, took a deep breath, and finally hit a green in regulation at number four, making a routine two-putt par that, at that moment, felt like a hole in one. “Okay,” he thought, “the miserable start is behind me. I’m still in good shape if I just play good golf from here to the clubhouse.”

  But it wasn’t behind him just yet. At number five, a hole he had played well all week by hitting a draw off the tee, he played the same draw. “I knew I’d hit it well,” he said. “I looked up, expecting to see it going from right to left, and the ball was slicing. By now, I was in some kind of state of shock.”

  The ball landed in a bunker against the lip. By the time he hacked it out and got it on the green, he was looking at another long bogey putt—which he missed. He walked off the green in a state of panic and anger. His face was red, and he stood off to the side of the tee trying to collect his thoughts. Parel was sympathetic, saying softly, “Hang in there, Colby.” Pappas said nothing. In fact, Beckstrom was convinced that he looked annoyed, which only served to make him angrier.

  “At the time I thought he was being a jerk,” he said later. “But when I thought about it, I realized it was a big day in his life, too. He’s trying to grind through this thing, and he’s playing with this guy who is hacking it all over the place.”

  The hacking continued on number six, a relatively easy par-four—if you hit the fairway. Beckstrom didn’t. Completely unsure which direction the ball was going, he hit it deep into the left rough and had to pitch out. From there he knocked his third shot on and made a routine bogey, leaving him seven over par for six holes. On Friday, he had played the first nine holes in 34 shots. He had now taken 31 shots to play six holes. More important— most important—he had gone from nine under for the tournament to two under, which he knew was well outside the number he was going to need to advance.

  Walking to the seventh tee, he heard J. J. talking to him for the first time all morning. He had kept quiet, not wanting to pick his brother up with false encouragement, but also not wanting to sound panicked by talking too much. Now he said, “Hey, Colby, let’s play golf.”

  It was the quick slap in the face Beckstrom needed. “I knew I had to make birdies at that point,” he said. “I went from the protecting mind-set back to the attacking mind-set. I started hitting the ball the way I had the first three days.”

  But he couldn’t make enough birdies. The chances were there, but the putts, which now had to drop, weren’t dropping. He played the next 11 holes at one under par—very solid golf, but not good enough because of the disastrous start.

  “I hadn’t thought about a number until the seventh hole,” he said. “Then I began thinking I needed to try to get to five [under] to make it, and there was some chance I might make it at four. But my goal was five.”

  Standing on the 18th tee, he knew the only way to get to five was to hole out from the fairway. He hit a huge drive and had only 132 yards to the hole, which was tucked behind a bunker on the water side of the green. A classic last-day, last-hole sucker pin—as in, one had to be a sucker to fire at it, given how close it was to serious danger. At that moment, Beckstrom never thought about the bunker or the water. The only thing in his mind was holing the shot.

  “Believe it or not, when the ball was in the air, I thought it had a chance,” he said. “I hit it just about perfect.”

  But there was wind, and the ball came up just short of the green. As if to remind Beckstrom that it wasn’t his day, it stopped dead rather than bounce up onto the putting surface. Even then he wasn’t ready to give up. He had chipped in from behind the green on the second day and holed out from a bunker on the third. Maybe he could hole out one more time, and the number would somehow slip to four.

  He came close, but the ball slid to the left of the flag at the last possible instant. He tapped it in for par and 78. O
nly two players among the seventy-one who teed it up that day carded a higher number. As Beckstrom shook hands with Pappas and Parel, he knew that his dream of going straight from college in the spring to the PGA Tour the following winter was gone. Pappas, who had started one shot ahead of him, hadn’t played a whole lot better, but his 76 was good enough to get him in at six under par, safely inside the number. Parel had shot 74 to finish eight under.

  As Beckstrom walked off the green, the first person he saw was David Schultz, a teammate from TCU who had also made it through first stage. Schultz had never been in serious contention at second stage and had finished 70th. He had just finished a few minutes earlier on the front nine and had a big grin on his face as he shook Beckstrom’s hand.

  “Congratulations,” he said. “I couldn’t be happier for you.”

  Beckstrom’s family hadn’t been able to warn Schultz about what had happened before he saw Beckstrom. “I felt terrible, because I knew how terrible he was going to feel when I told him,” Beckstrom said. “I just looked at him and said, ‘David, I didn’t make it. I shot six over.’”

  Beckstrom saw terror and shock in Schultz’s eyes. “He didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to say,” he said. “At that point, I was completely out of it. I kept thinking there had to be more to do, more golf to play, that it couldn’t really be over. But it was.”

  He signed his card and accepted consolation hugs from his family. He didn’t want to run out on everybody, didn’t want to pout, so he hung around, accepting condolences from other players who saw his score and came by to tell him they were sorry. Beckstrom’s face was blank as he spoke to them, the kind of look often seen at an accident or a fire. Or on the last day of Q School.

  After a while, he and his girlfriend walked to the parking lot so Colby could change his shoes for the ride home. He put his clubs in the trunk and took a deep breath. They had been standing there talking for a few minutes when J. J. walked up. He had lingered by the scoreboard, watching the numbers go up, listening to people talk about who was in and who was out.