by Shane Ryan
Tiger is a stubborn man, but even he realized that this back problem wasn’t going away. He was left with no choice—he opted for a microdisectomy on the last day of March. It was the same surgery Graham DeLaet, a much younger man, had undergone in 2011. DeLaet didn’t start hitting balls for four months, and it took him a year to fully recover. Woods, on the other hand, couldn’t make himself wait three months before he was playing competitive rounds, and he paid the price for his haste—the rest of his year was a disaster, and cast serious doubt as to whether he could ever return to his previous form.
Tiger would be back, and maybe one day he’ll rediscover his greatness, but that Sunday at Trump National, it felt like we were watching the final act of a legend.
—
While Tiger was waging war on the spectators, German and American alike, Reed got off to a hot Sunday start with three early birdies. On the third and fourth holes, he made putts of twenty-three and nineteen feet to take a six-shot lead on the field—Dufner and Mahan were fading almost as fast as Tiger, and would each finish with a 76—and proceeded to make nine straight pars to take a commanding lead into 14.
Elsewhere on the course, as his rivals plummeted, there weren’t many players putting up red numbers. Jamie Donaldson had stumbled early, which left Bubba Watson within threatening distance at -1. Soon the gap would tighten, just as it had at the Humana. Bubba stuck his tee shot on the par-3 15th to nine feet and sunk the birdie, and then opted to go over the water on the par-4 16th, landing in a greenside bunker and getting up and down for another birdie. He made par on the last two holes to finish with a 68—the second-best round of the day, after Jonas Blixt’s 66—and took the clubhouse lead. Two groups ahead of Reed, Donaldson quickly got his act together, with lethal approach irons on 10, 14, and 17 that produced birdies. With a hole left, he improved to -4 for the tournament.
The tournament was still Reed’s to lose, but he found the rough off the tee on 14—not a thick rough, necessarily, but clumpy and irregular—missed the green from there, and took bogey when he couldn’t get up and down. That left him at -5, and his situation began to look tenuous when he landed his iron in a greenside bunker on the par-3 15th. From forty-four feet away, holding on to a slim lead, he pulled off one of his best efforts of the day, a soft bunker shot that nearly found the hole for birdie. He tapped in for par, and couldn’t help but smile at himself. He slapped five with the kids near the ropes as he walked to 16, where he decided to play cautious on the dangerous par 4. Instead of taking the water route like Bubba, he laid up on the right side. The “safe” option wasn’t much safer, though, because of the narrow fairway, and his tee shot found yet another bunker. Now in full scrambling mode, staving off bogey after bogey, he got up and down from twenty-two feet for another par.
Inside a glassed-in viewing area overlooking the 16th green and 17th tee, you could hear the sound of blaring salsa music. Most of the spectators drank cocktails and socialized without paying attention to the action outside—Miami sports fandom in a nutshell. At the entrance to this VIP area, desperate lonely men could get their photos taken with two beautiful, busty women in white dresses who would fake a toothy smile while Miller Lite girls in tight shirts offered free gift certificates. This kind of blatant selling of sex isn’t typical at professional golf events—they’re too proper for that kind of thing—and it was in these deft touches that you could see the tacky, invisible hand of Donald Trump.
Wearing a white dress of her own—the maternity style—Justine followed Patrick outside the ropes. She was due with their first child in late May, and her younger brother Kessler was on the bag. They’d put him through a caddie boot camp in December—a “grueling month,” he told me—and it had paid dividends already with the Humana win. Now, as they stepped up on 17, a look at the scoreboard revealed that Donaldson had made birdie on the hole and closed to within a shot.
Reed took out driver on the long par-4 and missed the fairway for the fifth straight hole, and wound up in the bunker for the fifth time on the back nine. Only a day before, he had called his fairway sand game a weakness, but this time he managed to find the green with his second shot. His aim now was to two-putt from fifty-four feet and pray that Donaldson didn’t birdie the 18th—a realistic prayer, seeing as how it was one of the toughest holes on the course. Once again, facing a tough par save, he manufactured a special shot; his lag traveled fifty-three feet and stopped less than a foot from the hole for another easy par.
On the 18th tee, Reed peered into the distance at the green. The Blue Monster’s final test is also its signature hole. A 471-yard par-4, it bends to the left, curving around a lake. The fairway is narrow and dotted by palmettos, and anyone who takes a risk by using a driver off the tee brings the water into play on the left, and fairway bunkers on the right. Those who don’t take a risk, though, can end up with an impossibly long approach to the green, which veers to the left at a harsher angle than the rest of the hole, so that there’s a water risk in the front and the left…not to mention the spitefully narrow bottleneck landing area ahead of the green, and the greenside bunkers on the right.
Reed needed to know where he stood, and the groans and cheers ahead made it unclear exactly what Donaldson was enduring on the green. The fans around him speculated blindly, with the kind of assurance that only the totally clueless can muster. Everything from birdie to double bogey was mentioned, until the man holding the boom mic for NBC received word—Donaldson had bogeyed.
Reed now held a two-shot lead with nobody left on the course to trouble him, and he shifted his mind-set accordingly—it was time to play for bogey. A 3-iron landed safely in the right rough, just where he was aiming, far away from the water. From there, he laid up to the right side of the fairway, seventy-six yards away and with a dry approach angle. A cautious wedge to the back left pin placement came up thirty-two feet short—his only iffy shot—and a good lag left him a foot and a half for the bogey and the win. He polished off the putt, looked up, and raised a fist. He had secured the third, and biggest, win of his career.
* * *
“Not since Ian Poulter declared a few years ago that Tiger Woods would soon be his only rival has a player caused such a stir as the American Patrick Reed.”
—The Daily Mail, in a story called “Meet the Yanks’ Answer to Ian Poulter”
In the immediate wake of his victory, after receiving homage from the big shots who descended on the 18th green—Donald and Ivanka Trump and all the well-coiffed Trump children, Jeb Bush, PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem—Reed stood with NBC’s Steve Sands and made a comment on live television that would forever change his relationship with the media.
In an interview that ran on NBC the day before, Reed mentioned that he considered himself a top-five player. It didn’t produce much of a reaction, and the real clamor—including the comment that would follow Reed around all year—didn’t start until Sands brought it up again as Reed basked in the glow of victory.
“I’ve worked so hard,” he said. “I’ve won a lot in my junior career, did great things in (my) amateur career, was 6-0 in match play in NCAAs, won NCAAs two years in a row, got third individually one year, and now I have three wins out here on the PGA Tour.
“I just don’t see a lot of guys that have done that, besides Tiger Woods, of course, and, you know, the other legends of the game. It’s just one of those things, I believe in myself and—especially with how hard I’ve worked—I’m one of the top-five players in the world.”
—
I was minding my own business in the press center when the words that would live in infamy came blaring out of the big-screen TV at the front of the room. In truth, I hadn’t been paying attention, as I was already inured to the dull, superficial sound bites television interviews usually produce. I might have missed the whole thing completely if I hadn’t heard the subsequent uproar from the reporters all around me.
What the hell was going on? They couldn’t believe the audacity, and some of them could
n’t stomach it, either.
“I don’t even want to go listen to the tosser!” huffed an Australian reporter to my right, threatening to boycott his upcoming press conference in a move that would surely have devastated Reed.
With the win, Reed moved up to the 20th spot in the world, and clearly had a decent argument to make about the top-five business, having won three times since the previous August. The claim wasn’t that crazy—it wasn’t like Bubba claiming to be one of the world’s top-five Christians—but, in a pattern that had dogged him for most of his life, the way he delivered the words rubbed everyone the wrong way.
When he made his way to the interview room, the best question came from Doug Ferguson.
“If you consider yourself top-five,” he began, “who are the other four? Who else do you consider there?”
Ferguson had brilliantly put Reed on the spot, and he fumbled his way to naming five other golfers—Woods, Adam Scott, Phil Mickelson, Graeme McDowell, and Dustin Johnson. But as much as I enjoyed the verbal sparring, the capital-M Media cared little for the logistics of Reed’s bold proclamation. They needed grist for the mill, and Reed’s brashness worked perfectly.
Reed maintained publicly that none of it fazed him, and he had a good defense prepared by the time the next tournament rolled around—it was simply a statement of self-belief, and an aspiration for future accomplishments, and so on—but when I spoke with him and Justine in July, they admitted they were surprised by how it had spun out of control.
“They amped it up,” Justine said. “They need a villain, in a sense, and that’s sad that they do that to what he said. Because at the end of the day he just believes in something, and yes, he does want to be a top-five player in the world.”
Both emphasized to me that none of the actual players cared about what he said. If anything, they found it funny, and Henrik Stenson even teased Patrick on the range, judging each shot he hit by whether it qualified as a top-five effort or not. Matt Every defended him two weeks later at Bay Hill, though he found fault with the way Reed had listed his résumé. As for the media, Patrick told me that they’d never really know him—myself included.
If that had been true before, it was especially true after Doral. Whatever trust had been built up collapsed like a house of cards. To Reed, the media became just like everyone else who had failed to understand him, and who had isolated him along his path to the PGA Tour. And if that was the way it had to be, then okay. He had his loyal inner circle now—Justine, Kessler, Janet (the Karain matriarch), his agents and swing coach, and soon a new daughter who would be raised on Tour. He was a millionaire with a brand-new David Yurman bracelet, and his ascent up the world rankings proved that his system worked. He didn’t need acceptance; he never needed it. The media, and anyone else who didn’t believe in him, could go to hell.
He withdrew further into the shadows; the wagons circled tighter. In a culture that loathes gray area, Reed had been typecast before his twenty-fifth birthday. He was golf’s remorseless villain, and stood as a rare exception to the old proverb—not everybody, it seems, loves a winner.
7
ORLANDO, FLORIDA
Bay Hill, or Matt Every Is Sweating
“You remember in high school, you’d have those assemblies where some kind of professional athlete came in, and he’d tell you to always have a backup plan? ‘Only .02 percent of you guys are going to go pro in your sport.’
“I remember sitting in there and just thinking, ‘Fuck this guy.’ If you have a backup plan, guess what? That’s what you’re going to be doing.”
—MATT EVERY
It had been my plan to stay in Florida for the entire month, with a brief hiatus in Austin, Texas, to unwind at the South-by-Southwest festival, but after having my spirit crushed in Doral, it became clear early in the Bay Hill week, driving through the gaudy wreckage of American civilization known as Orlando, Florida, that I was dangerously close to a complete nervous breakdown. This could be life or death, or so I thought in my nervous state.
I tried to stick it out…I sat through a press conference with Arnold Palmer, suffered through an antagonistic and ultimately boring interview with Keegan Bradley, and drove around looking for decent food, or at least a parking spot, in the strip malls. But after skipping the action on Thursday to watch the first round of the NCAA Tournament, it became imperative that I drive home to North Carolina immediately. I made a break for it on Saturday morning, and when I was accosted by a raving madwoman at a McDonald’s near the Disney World exit—clearly, another victim of her environment—I knew I’d made the right choice.
Unfortunately, this also meant I missed seeing the final round at Bay Hill in person, where Adam Scott, within a whisper of the world number 1 spot, looked to be a certain winner. But there was something strange happening in Florida that month, and if Russell Henley could erase a two-shot deficit on Rory McIlroy despite shooting two-over on Sunday, there was hope for the chasers at Bay Hill.
As it happened, the leaders were in for another rocky start. Bradley double-bogeyed the second and bogeyed the third to seemingly take himself out of contention, but Scott didn’t fare much better, with three bogeys of his own by the seventh hole.
While they continued to falter on the back nine, a winless Tour player named Matt Every pumped the gas, making three birdies in four holes to grab the lead away and put himself five shots ahead of Bradley and two ahead of Scott at -15. With five holes remaining, Every had overcome a significant deficit and put himself in prime position. If he could play par golf the rest of the way, he’d walk off with his first win.
—
When I sat down with Every at a shaded table outside the Colonial clubhouse in late May, it didn’t take long before he cemented his reputation as the most outspoken professional golfer in the universe. We had met just once before, and didn’t speak for more than five minutes. Clearly, my status as a stranger—and one armed with a tape recorder—didn’t faze him. Within minutes, he was boasting, complaining, joking, and opining about golf and himself—his two favorite subjects—with a startling amount of insight and intelligence. I liked him immediately.
If you can take this onslaught in stride, it quickly becomes clear that the recurring criticism of Every—his arrogance—was off base. He does carry himself with a certain amount of swagger, and has a smile that verges on smug, but there’s not much self-importance or superiority to him—far less anyway, than you get from your average golfer. The world is interesting to Every, and he makes himself vulnerable to outside elements. He wouldn’t like the word I’m about to use, and you wouldn’t know it by his bulldog build—five foot eleven and solid, with a head like a cinder block—but the truth is that he’s sensitive, albeit in the most combative way possible.
Every, then thirty, has been kicked around the Tour, mocked by fans and media, and targeted for his past, but unlike the vast majority of American golfers, he never tries to hide his emotions or retreat into a cocoon.
Instead, he’s the kind of guy that lets you drop the usual journalist-athlete code of conduct. I never felt the need to be deferential to him, as so many athletes’ egos require, and I never got the sense he was bullshitting me. For a brief moment, and for the first and only time in a year on Tour, I even considered the possibility that he and I, in a different universe, might actually overcome the wide gulf separating our lifestyles and—I can’t believe I’m saying it—be friends.
Then again, some of the things he told me are too good to waste on a friendship. We had barely sat down, for instance, before he began complaining about another journalist.
“He’s done it before,” he said intently. “He’s picking me out to be a villain because I’m an easy target.”
The subject was Geoff Shackelford, a blogger who covers the sport with an irreverent tone. But since this is golf we’re talking about, with all its claims to propriety, Shackelford toes the line, choosing his victims strategically in order not to offend anyone with real influence. For him,
Every made a perfect target—here was a player with no power.
Earlier that month, Every caused a minor stir when he complained about the state of TPC Sawgrass. He called it “the worst-conditioned course in Jacksonville” and compared the greens unfavorably to “Miami munis.” (This rant later earned him a “talking-to” from Tour officials.) However, he also took pains to blame himself for his 76-77-CUT performance, leaving the conditions out of it. Shackelford ignored that last part, and suggested that Every was merely making excuses for himself.
“And why is his opinion so fucking important?” Every continued, still chafing at the perceived dishonesty two weeks later. “I told you I don’t like Geoff Shackelford, and you can write that in your book.” He lowered his head inches from my tape recorder, speaking slowly and loudly for emphasis: “Fuck you, Geoff.”
“That will go in the book,” I promised.
This approach continued throughout the interview. When I asked him if he felt “lucky” in the general sense, and then clarified that I didn’t mean “lucky” in the way that outsiders use it—as in, oh, he’s so lucky to be a professional golfer—it set him off on a tangent.
“I’m glad you said that, because it pisses me off when people write, ‘Oh, that guy, I can’t believe he’d say something like that, he should be privileged to play on the PGA Tour!’ ” he said. “Like I got fucking picked out of a lottery. I mean, I’ve worked my ass off to be here. It’s not like they handed me this spot, you know?”
That set us on the path of how golfers behave on the course, and why it’s so difficult for spectators to understand their anger.