Slaying the Tiger

by Shane Ryan

  “It’s a job,” he said. “And you see people say, ‘Everyone looks so miserable while they’re playing.’ Well, the highs are really high out here and the lows are really low. I mean, you’re not making any money when you’re down, and it feels like you’re going to be down your whole life. It’s like you honestly do not know when you’re going to play good again.”

  And since the lows are more frequent, that’s what fans will see almost every time.

  —

  Matthew King Every grew up on the water in Daytona Beach, the son of Kelly, a construction worker who had tried professional golf, and Penny, a secretary at a lawyer’s office. He started golfing at age six, and he grew up playing at the Riviera Country Club in Ormond Beach, a public course owned by a friend of the family where he could play for a song.

  From the time he was very young, Every loved golf because there were fewer politics involved in who would make a team, or who succeeded, than the other sports. Still, there were things that frustrated him. The Everys were middle-class, and Every bristled at the cost of the premiere junior tournaments. Kelly went on to own a construction company in Matt’s high school years, but the recession hit the business, as well as family real estate investments, hard.

  “If you step back and look at these kids grinding out there,” he told me, “it means nothing. It means nothing. You don’t want to peak when you’re fifteen. That’s terrible. I think that’s what happened to James Vargas at Florida [a teammate of Every’s]. He was a world-beater when he was a kid, he was a stud, and then he got to college and it was like, ‘Where’s your room to improve?’ ”*

  When Every couldn’t golf, he’d shoot hoops on the strip of concrete outside his house, playing so long that eventually his father put lights out for him. The sport was his first love, and until age twelve, he was convinced he would play for the Orlando Magic, following in the footsteps of heroes like Scott Skiles, Dennis Scott, and Nick Anderson. Then high school came around, and while most of his friends went to Seabreeze High, Every was off to Mainland High in Daytona, where he suddenly found himself in a very different demographic. Playing with the brothers, Every barely made his freshman basketball team, and wasn’t nearly good enough to start. He couldn’t lie to himself, and when the school switched the golf season to overlap with basketball, the choice was easy—golf or bust.

  He improved enough in the next two years to start getting letters from smaller colleges, but his heart was set on being a Florida Gator. Buddy Alexander, the head coach, liked him, but not enough to give him a scholarship.

  “Matt likes to tell people that he’s a walk-on,” Alexander said, “but that’s not true. I did have to tell Matt that I was out of money, and he decided, ‘I don’t care.’ His comment was, ‘I’m not North Florida material. I’m coming to UF.’ And if you know Matt, you’re chuckling because you know exactly how it sounds coming out of his mouth.”

  Every came in a little bit anonymous—“fucking terrible,” in his own words—but his improvement during his freshman year turned heads. Alexander considered red-shirting him in the fall, but by the spring, he had done so well that the coach, who loved his confidence, took a calculated risk and made Every the team’s number 5 player for the postseason. From there, he finished top-ten individually in the SEC Championship, top-20 in NCAA regionals, and, most surprisingly, 12th at the national championships. By the end, Every was calling himself “the greatest number-five man in college golf history.”

  Every went on to become first-team All-American three years in a row, and won the Ben Hogan Award as the nation’s top college golfer in 2006. He discovered that entering a slump wasn’t the worst outcome in the world, and that he could sometimes break out of it with the power of positive thought—or, as he put it, lying to yourself and then believing it.

  He also gained a reputation as a “cocky” golfer and an outspoken nonconformist. At the 2005 U.S. Open, he told reporters that he was equal to, if not better than, the other players in the field, and after playing the Walker Cup later that summer, he let the Orlando Sentinel know that he hated the U.K. because there was “nothing to do, nothing to eat,” and that even the French fries were terrible.

  Socially, Every spent most of his free time with his girlfriend, Danielle, who he married in 2009. Drinking held little appeal; he had worked at a seafood restaurant in high school, and the smell of stale beer that confronted him each time he took the trash out was enough to put him off the suds. (“I would party in other ways,” he told me.) Nor were academics a priority, a truth he doesn’t go out of his way to hide.

  “People asked, ‘What do you want your major to be when you go to college?’ ” he remembered. “It’s like, psssh, whatever has the least amount of math. I don’t care. I’m not going to use it. My major was commercial recreation. I don’t even know what I could do with that.”

  * * *

  “Man, I hate it when you see a Tour player interviewed and he has absolutely nothing to say,” Every said. “All that, ‘One shot at a time, staying in the moment, playing my own game.’

  “How boring is that? Blah, blah, blah.”

  Every, a two-time NCAA All-American, is an endearing, animated mix of combustible quotes, edgy enthusiasm and occasionally smug obnoxiousness.”

  —Orlando Sentinel, 2005

  It didn’t take long after graduation for Every to find out how meaningless his Hogan Award would be in the professional ranks. He missed Q-School after graduation, and didn’t make the PGA Tour until 2010. He also missed six weeks in his rookie season when he broke his finger playing a game called “burnout” that involved him and his caddie pegging a football at each other. That was a minor setback compared to what came next. Just two weeks after his return, at the John Deere Classic, Every made a mistake that would come to define his golfing life—or at least how he was perceived by the media and fans—for years.

  At the Isle Casino Hotel, in Bettendorf, Iowa—just across the Mississippi River from the TPC Deere Run course in Illinois, where the tournament is held—Every stepped off an elevator and wandered into a room where his caddie and two others were smoking marijuana. According to Every, he was only in there for a few minutes when hotel security burst through the door, tipped off by someone who had smelled the telltale odor that seeped through the door.

  “I probably could have gotten out of that situation if I did things a little differently,” said Every, “but it doesn’t fucking matter now.”

  The four of them didn’t move, and Every maintains that the security guards violated their rights and didn’t go to great lengths to mention that they weren’t actual police officers. They pulled the culprits one by one into the bathroom, extracted confessions, and finally turned them over to the real cops, who booked and arrested them.

  “I don’t know if they just have a hard-on, or they feel like they’re saving the world, or what,” Every said.

  The PGA Tour makes a policy of not commenting on its suspensions—a fact that would come into play later in 2014—but Every’s PR company revealed in August that he’d been hit with three months for “conduct unbecoming a professional.” He came back in time for the final tournament of the season, but he failed to keep his Tour card, and was back on the Nationwide Tour for 2012—a brutal demotion, subtracting a zero from his average paycheck.

  He fought back, finishing 18th on the money list and regaining his Tour card within a year. Every still thinks winning that fight was his greatest professional accomplishment, and one that validated his status as a “real golfer”—the kind who deserved to be on the PGA Tour.

  The arrest and suspension dogged him long after he fought back to the big leagues. Every has no problem with marijuana, but he doesn’t identify as a stoner, and it bothers him that the people who know his name tend to associate him with drugs.

  “There’s so much more to me than that,” he said, “but that’s just the way it’s going to be, man. You hear stuff all the time in galleries. Mostly conversations, bu
t you’ll get a guy who will yell out ‘420!’ or something, and I don’t think it’s a fair representation of me. And now that Twitter’s out there, everyone thinks they’re a comedian. Even the media, some guys will put the dumbest shit out there. Like if it’s foggy out, they’ll write, ‘Oh, Matt Every must be playing this week.’ ”

  It would have been easy for Every to kowtow to the conservative faction and claim that he was a changed man, that drugs were Satan’s work, and that he had recognized the error of his ways and reformed himself in the image of a law-abiding family man. Instead, he scoffed at the punishment and refused to hand anyone—especially the media—the easy redemption story.

  “No, I still hang out with the same people,” he told reporters at the 2012 Sony Open, his first tournament back on Tour. “I have great friends, man. If one of my friends likes to smoke marijuana every now and then, I’m not going to say, well, you can’t be my friend anymore. Honestly, man, I know more people who smoke marijuana than who don’t smoke marijuana. I know that’s probably not the politically correct thing to say, but it’s the truth.”

  After the second round that week, a 64, he sat down with the Golf Channel’s Kelly Tilghman. After some chitchat about golf and snorkeling, Tilghman got down to business and unleashed what stands as the most awkward segue in television history.

  “I look back at this island,” she said, turning to a mass of stones and palm trees in the water behind her, “and it kind of reminds me of that TV show Lost, which you say is one of your favorites.”

  “Oh yeah, I love that show.”

  “And I know that the word ‘lost’ might also be a fitting word to describe the state of your mind and game about two years ago,” Tilghman continued, in all her ham-fisted glory, “when you were arrested on drug charges and suspended by the PGA Tour. That must have been a difficult experience for you. Take us back to that time and what it was like.”

  Every stared at her for a moment, grinned uncomfortably, and sank even lower in his chair. His eyes were mostly hidden by the shadow from the brim of his Bridgestone cap.

  “Uhhh….” He said. “It was all right. I mean, I just got three months off.”

  The interview devolved from there. Every told her that he wasn’t doing anything wrong, that he’s the same person with the same friends, and that worse things happen all the time on Tour. Tilghman, not content to settle for anything less than the trite, made-for-TV coming-of-age story she’d envisioned when she asked the question, followed up, wanting to know what Every had “learned.”

  When I reminded him of this moment, Every had only one regret. “What have you learned from that?” he asked rhetorically. “Put a towel under the door. I should have said that.”

  This, it seemed, was Every’s curse. He was doomed to be misunderstood by everyone; either you thought he was a chronic pothead who wandered around in a drug-induced stupor, or you wanted to pigeonhole him as a reformed criminal who had emerged from the depths of depravity to resurrect his life and career. The truth—that he’d been a bit stupid and a bit unlucky, wasn’t palatable. And he knew that the only thing that could truly put his arrest in the rearview mirror was winning.

  On a positive note, he’d finally found a good ADD drug after experimenting for a couple years (he wouldn’t tell me what it was), and it made a huge difference for him on the course. His game rounded into shape, and after four top tens to start his best season to date, he came into Sunday’s round at the Arnold Palmer Invitational in third place, trailing Adam Scott by four strokes and Keegan Bradley by three. By the 14th hole, he was poised to beat them both.

  —

  On the final day of the Florida swing, Scott made Every’s task a little easier by closing with bogeys at 14 and 17 to stumble in with a 76. Bradley, though, wasn’t finished. He had emerged as one of the flukiest major winners of all time when he survived a disastrous triple bogey on the 15th hole at the 2011 PGA Championship, so he knew as well as anyone that his ugly stretches at Bay Hill were not necessarily a death sentence. Just like he had at the PGA, he birdied 16 and 17, reaching -12.

  Which still wouldn’t have been anywhere near Every, or at least the version of Every that would finish with birdies and pars. But that’s when the nerves hit him, and the focus he’d maintained all round began to slip. On 16, he stood up on his tiptoes as he swung his driver, launching the tee shot into the right rough. When he attempted to hack out to the fairway, he hit the trunk of a small tree and watched the ball ricochet backward. He now had a choice to make—go for the green, even though he was still obstructed, or hack out of the rough into the fairway and try to get up and down for par.

  The NBC cameras closed in on Every as he listened to Derek Mason’s advice. “If we just put this right in the fucking end of the fairway, we’re gonna fucking get up and down 75 percent of the time,” the caddie said. Gary Koch apologized to the audience, but said he agreed with Mason. So did Every. He didn’t get up-and-down, though, and the bogey brought him to -14.

  On the par-3 17th tee, he was a twitchy, sweaty mess. He looked so uncomfortable that Johnny Miller wondered aloud if he could perform at all. His tee shot didn’t do much to assuage those fears, landing in a bunker fifty feet from the hole. On the brink of disaster, he pulled out a brilliant shot from the sand and saved his par. On 18, needing only another par to secure his win, he hit his approach over the water a touch too far and into the deep grass. He walked up the fairway with a stupefied smile, hit a perfect chip, and watched it trickle to the hole.

  When it stopped, he had five feet left for par. He’d been lucky to avoid that tricky distance all day—he’d missed a few twelve-to-fifteen-footers, but nobody expected him to make those, and he knew missing shorter putts might have killed his confidence. Now he’d have to face it head-on, with a chance to lock up his first win on Tour. The vague pressure he’d felt all day escalated into a throbbing, full-body hum. He knew exactly where he stood, and he wanted badly to make the putt so he could celebrate on the green. Framed by the water, with Arnold Palmer looking on, he hunched over the ball.

  “The only way I can describe it is, it’s like someone is chasing you,” he said, looking back on the round. “Like they’re running you down, and you’re running as fast as you can. And you can’t look back to see where they’re at. You just keep running. That’s the feeling.”

  He ran the putt three feet past the hole.

  “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen emotions so raw on a guy trying to get it done for the first time,” said Dan Hicks, on the NBC broadcast.

  When he made the comebacker for bogey, his lead was down to one shot over Bradley, who was now playing the 18th. Every moved off to the scoring trailer, where they had a small TV, and he watched Bradley on the final hole. His drive was good, but his approach was just average, leaving him thirty feet for the birdie he’d need to force a playoff. Every began pacing back and forth in the scoring area, glancing back at the television as Bradley read the putt, lined it up, and sent it toward the hole.

  He had barely made contact when Every heard a loud groan from the 18th hole, and the sound of his wife and parents cheering just outside the tent. Watching on delay, he saw the ball run by on the left, and he knew that after ninety-three starts on the PGA Tour, he was finally a winner.

  The Golf Channel’s Steve Sands grabbed him for the reaction interview, and Every was already crying. “It’s hard,” he said, his voice cracking. “It’s tough, man. You just never know if it’s going to happen. You get there so many times…I kept telling myself maybe it was going to be somewhere special. I still can’t believe I won.”

  The cocky facade, the way he grimaced and sighed and groaned, the bluster and the brio…it all shattered in the startling face of the dream.

  —

  It didn’t take long for the pieces to reassemble—Every couldn’t stop being himself for very long.

  When Golfweek’s Jim McCabe wrote an article taking him to task for skipping the ensuing events in order
to prepare for Augusta, Every found the writer’s phone number and called to confront him. At Augusta, he arrived too early and over-practiced, stumbling to a 77-78 cut. By the time we spoke at the Colonial, he was using the two-year exemption he’d gained from winning to make swing adjustments.

  I saw him next at the British Open, and though he was upset because he “putted like shit,” his trademark confidence hadn’t wavered. “Dude, my game is coming along pretty good,” he said. “Like, the end of the year is going to be good. I’m excited.”

  After that prediction, he played seventeen more rounds in the 2014 season. He broke 70 only three times, missed a couple of cuts along the way, and hit rock bottom when he shot an 86 in the third round of the Deutsche Bank Championship.

  None of which, really, felt surprising. Matt Every’s golf career was a delirious roller-coaster ride long before Bay Hill; why would the simple fact of winning change anything?

  His win came with more than just $1.1 million and a two-year exemption. It also earned him a spot in the tournament that every pro—sane and crazy alike—covets with the deepest part of their being. Every season, toward the beginning of March, they begin dreaming of America’s most famous course, and their eyes look ahead, past Florida and Texas, to the promised land hidden in the heart of Augusta, Georgia.

  * * *

  * That distaste for unearned plaudits persists today. He didn’t want to speak on the record about the aspects of Tour promotion that bothered him, but he gave Jordan Spieth as a counterexample.

  “It’s awesome he’s getting the attention he is, because there’s no sideshow about him. He does have his moments where the camera might catch him whining, but whatever, he’s twenty years old, and my point is, he’s not wearing stupid clothes to get noticed. I feel like some guys out here—and it’s not their fault—they’re taking advantage of it, and they get a little too much attention.”