Slaying the Tiger

by Shane Ryan

  After the Masters, he spent weeks using putting mirrors and chalk lines in an attempt to retrain himself to see a straight line from a proper stance. In those monotonous hours of adjustment and repetition, he hoped the work would pay dividends in the summer. He told us this story at the Wells Fargo a month later, and none of us knew at the time that his epiphany at Augusta would prove to be one of the most important moments of the entire season.

  * * *

  * Some players use this technique on every putt—Rory does not.

  11

  NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

  The Loneliness of Seung-Yul Noh; The Embattled Keegan Bradley; A Showdown in Big Easy

  ME: Do you like America?

  NOH: Mmmmmmmm…no.

  —Exchange with SEUNG-YUL NOH

  Tell me everything you know about twenty-two-year-old Seung-Yul Noh, who finished first on the Asian Tour money list in 2011 and, unlike Jordan Spieth or Rickie Fowler, won on the PGA Tour in 2014. Or what about Hideki Matsuyama, even younger than Noh, also a 2014 winner, and one of twenty-nine golfers who made it to the Tour Championship in Atlanta? Or what about K. J. Choi, or Ryo Ishikawa, or Sang-Moon Bae, all of them Tour fixtures? And since we’re here, what do you really know about Y. E. Yang, the only golfer in history who has ever chased down Tiger Woods when he held a lead in the final round of a major championship?

  You get the point—in terms of American and European media coverage, there’s an Asian vacuum. Professional golfers from east and southeast Asia—mostly Japan, Korea, and Thailand—exist behind a veil, posting results that would attract far more attention had they been born in the western world. Whatever else factors into this phenomenon, the primary issue is language.

  European golfers from outside Great Britain and Ireland have studied English for years, and most are fluent. For most Asian golfers this isn’t the case, which makes it difficult for reporters to conduct snappy interviews, or to ask the type of personal questions that produce the best background details. Meaning is often lost in translation, leading to exchanges like the following, with Korean Sang-Moon Bae:

  REPORTER: What’s the key to your success this week?

  SANG-MOON BAE: Uhh….yes.

  Later in that same interview, when asked about his patience, Bae responded by saying he wasn’t angry, and then asked the speaker to slow down.

  Consequently, interviews with Asian golfers tend to run about half as long as interviews with English speakers, and the questions remain more superficial. This creates a feedback loop—the public expects less information about these golfers, reporters put in less effort, and the veil thickens.

  The same phenomenon that isolates Asian pros from the media also sets them apart from their fellow professionals.

  When I spoke with Seung-Yul Noh at the Wells Fargo in Charlotte, he told me he wasn’t very happy in America. “Is fun because my dream is playing PGA Tour when I start playing golf,” he said, “but not many friends here.”

  “Is it lonely?”

  “Very much, yes.”

  “Do you mostly hang out with the other Koreans?”

  “Yeah, very good friendly all the Korean players, we probably ten guys playing in Tour, Koreans, so we eat dinner every night. Almost every dinner.”

  “Are you sick of being around the same people all the time?”

  He laughed and nodded.

  On the other hand, Asian golfers deal with an almost oppressive amount of attention from their home media. While American journalists might focus on any of a hundred golfers in a given week, Korean and Japanese media will always tailor their coverage to the native sons. The result is that players like Noh and Matsuyama often find themselves in the midst of huge circles of writers and photographers, where an American golfer would experience this only after winning a tournament—or if he happened to be Tiger Woods.

  For Korean golfers, playing in America is a prerequisite for earning a high public profile back home, as Noh himself knew all the way back in 2010, when he earned his way into the PGA Championship and opened with a strong 68-71:

  Q. Dealing with both the Korean and American media, how different has it been and how are you gaining some celebrity status back at home?

  SEUNG-YUL NOH: I don’t play much on the PGA Tour so that’s why I’m not very famous back in Korea. But after this, maybe I’ll be famous.

  Noh grew up in the northernmost part of South Korea and began golfing at age seven. Noh’s English is slightly better than most, in part because he began traveling to America every winter to train when he was eight. His parents both worked in banks, but his mother quit her job when he was twelve to drive him around the country to golf tournaments, and his father followed suit four years later to become his son’s caddie. Noh turned professional at sixteen, qualified for the Asian Tour that same year, and won a tournament in China the next season. By 2010, he had topped the money list there and become the second-youngest winner ever in European Tour history when he beat K. J. Choi to take the Malaysian Open. After making the cut in three majors in 2011, he decided to come to America to try out Q-School.

  He made it, and his life changed in a hurry. He settled in San Diego at his uncle’s house, traveled with his sister while his parents stayed in Korea, and began working with swing coach Sean Foley—who overcame the language barrier by showing Noh pictures of how he wanted him to swing. He felt lonely, but he liked the conveniences of America, with laundry services and courtesy cars and Korean restaurants in almost every town he visited.

  On the course, fans mistook him for other Asian or Asian-American players—especially Kevin Na—but it was a headache he could bear. He ended his rookie season with a forty-ninth-place finish in the FedEx Cup standings. Though his mental game suffered in 2013 and his scores ballooned, he redeemed himself with a fourth-place finish at the Web.com Tour Finals to keep his Tour card. He bought a condo in Dallas and now spends his free time watching Korean movies, but he still doesn’t know if his adventure in American golf is permanent.

  “You know,” he said with a deep sigh, when I asked if he’d eventually head home and play on the Asian Tour, “I’ll make a lot of money for the U.S. and then maybe playing in Korea. Spend money in Korea.”

  Noh remembers watching Y. E. Yang beat Tiger Woods at the PGA Championship, which made Yang a hero in Korea and went down as one of the great major victories ever. Yang was the first golfer in fifteen tries to beat Tiger Woods at a major when he led on Sunday, and also became the first Asian-born player to win a major title. He’s still the only one.

  When Noh came to America, he became friends with Yang and ate dinner with him frequently. He had countless questions about that epic Sunday. Noh had watched the video over and over, knew every hole, and asked Yang about all of them—why had he hit that particular shot in that particular situation? What was he thinking about before the round, knowing he was playing against Tiger and facing a deficit? How did he feel as the round wore on, and he had a real chance to win?

  Yang opened up to him, and Noh started to dream of winning on Tour himself. It wasn’t far-fetched; Noh and Matsuyama represent a new breed of Asian golfer. As Rory McIlroy pointed out in Charlotte, the stereotype of Asian players is that they come to America and Europe with mechanically flawless swings, but generate little speed and hence have little power. The first time McIlroy saw Noh swing, he was blown away—he swung hard, and the ball jumped off his club. In 2014, Noh and Matsuyama each finished with a driving average of about 295 yards, good for fortieth and fifty-first place, respectively—well into the top half of Tour pros.

  At the Zurich Classic, two weeks after the Masters, Noh opened with a 65-68-65 three-day stretch, free of bogeys. It gave him the first fifty-four-hole lead of his career, and a two-shot lead on his playing partner for the final day, Keegan Bradley.

  * * *

  “I’m amazed looking back at how many people were outright telling me how ridiculous it was to want to play on the Tour. But I remember those people. I remember
who those guys are. I’ll never forget.”

  —KEEGAN BRADLEY

  Keegan Bradley taught me an important lesson in 2014, which is that if you have to ask a golfer for an interview more than three times, you’re better off just forgetting the whole thing. By the time our endless miscommunications reached a climax at Bay Hill, we were both so annoyed at each other that a good outcome was basically impossible.

  I approached him anyway, on the range, and with a sigh he agreed to make good on our plan to talk. I know now that I should have cut my losses and moved on; instead, we marched to an equipment trailer and I made small talk that he ignored while texting his girlfriend. When we sat down, I tried to salvage some goodwill by apologizing for using up his time—a move that he probably saw as insincere, and only made things worse.

  On the other hand, the fact that our interview was conducted under duress allowed me to observe a trait of Bradley’s that rarely sees the light of day—the chip on his shoulder. He is a connoisseur of old insults, and uses his resentment as fuel.

  Those who watch Bradley on television miss this aspect, but they notice a few other traits: his distinctive blue eyes, his bounding energy, his tense posture—shoulders hunched up into the neck, torso ramrod straight—and, of course, the OCD-like behaviors. When Bradley faces an approach shot, he glares at the ball with an intensity that verges on fury. He places one foot ahead of the other, as though he’s gathering his courage before taking a running start to leap over a creek. Then he hazards a step forward, decides it doesn’t feel right, and steps back. When he repeats the motion, it becomes a strange, rocking dance of hesitation. Sometimes he’ll hit immediately, and other times the routine will go on without end. On putts, Bradley twists his head to one side, contorting himself so that he stares at the ball with just his right eye, ogrelike. Other habits, like persistent spitting, have forced him to make a public apology; he didn’t even realize he was doing it.

  Later that year, at the U.S. Open, Martin Kaymer said what everyone was thinking: Bradley made things difficult for his playing partners. They never knew if he would play fast or slow, and it disturbed golfers who were accustomed to predictable rhythms.

  On this topic, I thought Bradley and I might form a bond. As a child, I washed my hands repetitively until they became cracked and bloody, flipped light switches off and on for minutes at a time until it “felt” right, and obeyed odd counting rituals. These habits ebbed away in my teens, but the impulse remains, and my brain is conditioned to think and behave obsessively. Unlike most spectators, who are inclined to make a joke of Bradley, I at least had a sense of what he was going through. When I asked him, though, I might as well have been speaking Greek.

  “I think it’s more of a Northeastern, New England thing,” he said. “I’m very stubborn.”

  I had no idea how geography applied at the time, and I still don’t.

  What really matters about Bradley is the way he views himself in the world. He grew up in Woodstock, Vermont, the son of Mark Bradley, a golf pro, and the nephew of Pat Bradley, who won three majors on the LPGA circuit in 1986, the year Keegan was born. Vermont isn’t exactly a hotbed of professional golf, but Keegan began playing golf at age five, and could practice for free at the nearby Crown Point Country Club, where his father worked.

  His competitive fire took flame at an early age, and at times he pushed it to absurd lengths. In a 2012 Golf Digest story, his high school coach remembered how Keegan would always make sure to walk ahead of his opponent during a match, on the advice of his aunt. But true to his obsessive nature, Bradley would make sure he was ahead even when he teed off second, which meant he had to stow his driver, grab his bag, and sprint off the tee box to race ahead of the other player—who must have been a bit puzzled, watching Bradley sprint by.

  The only thing that limited him was the Vermont winter; in the junior golf world, that was enough to keep him a step behind the Southern prodigies.

  “I went underlooked coming out of Vermont and New England,” Bradley told me, “and I never really got that much credit.”

  Bradley’s parents split up when he was seventeen, and while his mother and sister stayed in Vermont, he moved to Massachusetts with his father. Low on money, they lived together in a trailer park for seven months, which has become part of Bradley’s lore. In a 2012 interview with Golf.com’s Alan Bastable, Bradley described the layout:

  “It was like something out of a movie. My dad is 6' 4", he’s taller than me, and we were living in this trailer with bunk beds. He slept in the bottom bunk. I slept on the kitchen table—the table folded down and had cushions; that was my bed. We had communal showers and bathrooms; I wouldn’t be able to do that now. [Laughs] I remember one night the A.C. wasn’t working and it was so hot that I slept in my car. But I never remember it being terrible. I remember loving it.”

  In Massachusetts, Keegan’s trajectory only increased the size of the chip on his shoulder. He wasn’t even considered the best player on his high school team—or the second-best. Those honors went to Jon Curran and Kim Donovan, both of whom went on to play big-time college golf. Even when Bradley bested Curran—and everyone else in Massachusetts—to win the state title his senior season, he didn’t attract much attention from the big golf schools.

  But Frank Darby, the St. John’s coach, got a call that autumn from a friend involved in New England junior golf who told him he needed to check out this kid from Vermont. Darby was an opportunistic recruiter, so he went up to Fairfield to meet Bradley the next day. The coach liked the kid’s pedigree, and Keegan liked the fact that St. John’s had developed Andrew Svoboda, a local legend who had nearly won the U.S. Amateur. He didn’t even need to see the campus—he committed on the spot.

  St. John’s was an underdog school—they don’t have a home course, and Darby has to maintain connections with many local courses in order to make sure his kids have a place to play. Every day, Keegan and his teammates piled into cars and headed to whichever club would have them. The schedule was unpredictable—sometimes they’d have to start on the third or fourth hole, with a plea from the club pro to behave themselves and avoid the members. On the other hand, some of the courses were excellent, and the players saw a wide variety of tracks—windy oceanside golf, tree-lined courses with narrow fairways, and everything in between.

  The wiry Bradley, incredibly long off the tee—even longer than he is today, he claims—benefited from the play-not-practice mentality that Darby fostered. After struggling through his freshman season, his game improved drastically. He would win nine tournaments in total before he graduated in 2008, and the idea of the unheralded kid from Vermont making the Tour started to look realistic.

  “He needed to be behind the pack and see what was out in front of him,” said Darby, who began to see the career patterns emerging in Bradley even in those early days. “He needs a little adversity, and all the sudden you can see it kicking in, he starts charging. He’s relentless. I wouldn’t want him on my tail, I’ll tell you that right now.”

  The same story repeats—even on the course, Bradley needs to feel slighted, beaten down, wronged in some way. Then he’s like a cornered animal, dangerous and aggressive.

  Socially, he had a one-track mind. No drinking, no partying, no nothing—just golf. “They used to call him ‘grandpa’ half the time because he’d be asleep by seven thirty,” Darby remembered.

  When I asked Bradley about his college career, it didn’t surprise me to learn that his chief memory is a bitter one. “I won a bunch of times, I never finished out of the top ten my senior year, and had one of the lowest stroke averages in the country, but I didn’t get an All-American,” he said. “It was a shock. I thought I’d get second team or third team, but I didn’t even get honorable mention. I was really upset about that. Little things like that have happened my whole career.”

  Bradley played the Hooters Tour out of college, and though he kept winning money, it wasn’t enough to sustain him. With the second stage of Q-School l
ooming in 2009, he was well short of the money needed to enter. He turned to a friend he had met during one of his college summers and explained the situation. The friend came through with six thousand dollars, and Bradley made it through second stage before earning his Nationwide Tour membership with a thirty-fourth place finish in La Quinta at the final stage.

  At the start of his rookie season on Tour in 2011, he says, he read articles from writers who argued he wouldn’t be any good, or that he’d lose his card, and he took those to heart. In May, already with two top tens in the bag, he forced a playoff with Ryan Palmer at the Byron Nelson and beat him on the first playoff hole. It meant all the usual perks—Masters, two-year exemption, a million dollars.

  It would have been a career-defining moment for any PGA Tour rookie. For Bradley, though, who felt disrespected on Tour, the lack of change in player attitudes left him with a sour taste. “I was just kind of under the radar, same thing as my whole career,” he said. “And when I won, I thought things would be different, but they were pretty much the same.”

  The turning point came at the PGA Championship later that season—the first major Bradley ever played.

  At the Atlanta Athletic Club, a second-round 64 put him squarely in contention, and after a Saturday 68 and a solid start to Sunday’s round, he stood on the 15th tee just two shots off the lead. He didn’t realize it, but he was about to embark on one of the strangest finales in major golf history.

  The day began poorly—Bradley chipped a ball into the water on 15 and ended up with triple-bogey. Suddenly, he was down five shots—lights out, or so it seemed. His hard work with sports psychologist Bob Rotella paid off, though, and he grounded himself enough to birdie two of the last three holes. It shouldn’t have been enough, but behind him, something remarkable happened—Jason Dufner, with the tournament in his back pocket, made three straight bogeys from 15 to 17, and finished in a tie with the man who would become his good friend.