by Shane Ryan
All the instruction only made him worse, and by the start of 2014, at the Hyundai Tournament of Champions in Hawaii, he hit rock bottom. The Hyundai is an event exclusively for players who won on Tour the previous season—designed to kick off the year with a showcase of the best and the brightest. Of the thirty players in the 2014 field, twenty-nine of them finished the tournament at even par or better. Derek Ernst finished at +9.
There were extenuating circumstances—Ernst had gained twenty pounds of muscle in the off-season, attempting to bulk up his slender frame, and was still adjusting to his new body. He also had a new caddie he’d met just three days before the tournament began, so the timing wasn’t perfect. Nevertheless, he knew the result was embarrassing, and if he didn’t, the Internet was about to inform him.
In Sports Illustrated, he made the wrong half of Alan Shipnuck’s “Heroes & Zeros” column. Golf Digest’s Alex Myers pointed out that Ernst’s $61,000 payday for finishing dead last was by far the best he’d had since winning in Charlotte, and put his odds of winning a tournament in 2014 at 1,207-to-1—a reference to his world ranking when he won in Charlotte. In the San Jose Examiner, Gary McCormick chronicled these criticisms and more in a piece ostensibly supporting Ernst, but which mostly served to highlight his slow decline.
The commentary on Twitter, as usual, was far less polite. “I’m sure Phil doesn’t dwell on such things,” wrote the Augusta Chronicle’s Scott Michaux, “but every now and then he must wonder how Derek Ernst possibly beat him at Quail Hollow.” Outside the media, as Ernst prepared to head to Charlotte for the one-year anniversary of his big win, the discourse devolved into scathing insults and cruel taunting.
—
For Ernst, this was nothing new—he’d been picked on his whole life. Growing up in Clovis, a city just outside Fresno in California’s San Joaquin Valley, Ernst was tiny—he stood five foot two and was rail-thin for most of his childhood, only hitting a rapid growth spurt at age seventeen. He played baseball, but classified himself as “a short guy that was never tough enough,” and some of his larger teammates would pick on him for his size.
Socially, Ernst was so shy that he wouldn’t talk to anyone in high school.
“Literally,” he told me, “I wouldn’t say anything.”
When I asked why, he attributed the shyness to a crushing fear of what other people might think of him. Golf was his escape. He mostly stayed local since his parents didn’t have enough money to send him around the country or enter him in many AJGA tournaments. While the young jet-setters made their way around the country, Ernst played in thirty-dollar tournaments with players of all ages, most of whom shot in the 80s. And though he lacked the high-level national competition, he learned how to win.
At seventeen, he sent a minor shock through the golf world when he made the knockout rounds at the U.S. Amateur tournament and met Billy Horschel, already a college star at Florida and one of the best amateurs in the country.
“I had no idea who he was,” said Ernst, “which was good, because I would’ve fallen over.”
On the first hole, a par 5, Ernst hit a soft 3-iron into the fairway, and watched as Horschel bombed a driver almost one hundred yards past him. Unfazed, Ernst won the hole with a birdie, and went on to win the match 4&3.
His freshman year at UNLV began with great difficulty. Ernst had been a Christian since his early days, but when he arrived at college, still very much an introvert, another student in his freshman dorm began bullying him about his Christianity. They were nominally “friends,” but the other student would bash him so regularly about his faith that it created intense feelings of stress. He spent all his free time at the golf course just to get away from the abuse, but the minute he returned to his dorm, it would start over again. It made an already difficult journey even harder, and he wanted to leave Las Vegas.
“I still know him today,” Ernst said of his tormentor. “He does nothing but smoke weed and climb rocks.”
“Sounds like a bad combination,” I offered.
“Yeah, right?” he said. “That doesn’t seem safe.”
Ernst gradually came out of his shell, and his golf game blossomed—he made All-American four straight years, and finished as Mountain West Player of the Year twice. When he graduated, he turned pro and won four thousand dollars at a Pepsi Tour event, and then it was off to the last Q-School in PGA Tour history. Six days later, he had qualified for the PGA Tour.
* * *
“What do Craig Stadler and Derek Ernst have in common? Both playing in their last Masters.”
—Twitter volley, launched at Ernst in April 2014
When I told fellow journalists that I wanted to speak with Derek Ernst, the two most common reactions were laughter and confusion. Ernst, too, was wary of me. His new agent helped me arrange time to talk, but Ernst couldn’t understand why anyone would want an interview unless they were writing a sad story about a kid who got too much, too soon.
I didn’t see him that way. To me, he represented the underbelly of the Tour—a perfect example of golf’s fickle nature, where you can be plucked from obscurity in a moment of glory, and then spend years fighting like hell not to lose your dream. I saw Ernst not as a subject of pity, but someone in the midst of a desperate war that would reach its conclusion in 2015, his last chance on Tour. Until then, the preparations for that moment fascinated me—a statistical outlier trying to capitalize on his good fortune.
When we finally met up, he was open about how the negativity had hurt his feelings. You can read the sensitivity on his face, and if you didn’t know any better, you might guess he was too soft for the competitive life. When people are mean to him, as they have been his whole life, it hits him right in the gut because he actually can’t conceive of why it’s happening, and he reacts with childlike astonishment. While most of us grow tough hides when we encounter cruelty, and maybe even become a little mean ourselves, the whole process seems to take longer for Ernst.
“It’s kind of like, wait, what did I do?” he told me. “It hurts, you know?”
His confidence had taken more than a few hits, and he didn’t expect much in the way of credit or fan support. It had gotten to the point that when somebody was nice to him, it came as a shock. At the Byron Nelson a week before our chat, I watched his caddie walk up and tell him that a couple of girls standing nearby wanted his autograph. Ernst couldn’t hide his surprise: “They do?”
—
As the defending champion in Charlotte, he had to face the media room on Wednesday, which was a hot seat he’d mostly been able to avoid during his rough stretch—perhaps the only silver lining of playing bad golf. He knew the hard questions were coming, but the rapid-fire process still came as a shock. They felt more like insults, flying in one after another, targeting his failure.
Q. Derek, if you could expand, how difficult has it been? The Cinderella story, you win the monster tournament, then struggles. How difficult was it for you in the last year?
Q. Do you still remain as confident now as you were a year ago?
Q. Derek, why the need to make a change? All the changes?
Q. Rocco Mediate once said when you win you shouldn’t change anything except perhaps underwear. Do you regret any of the changes?
Q. Derek, with all the changes that you made, and not talking about regrets, but the results not coming as quickly, how have you fought off the frustrations of that?
Q. Had you decided to make these changes before you won? Is that something you knew you were going to do all along?
Q. Derek, what would you say to the people who say because of the greens the way they were last year that you were a fluky winner?
It wasn’t much better with the fans. Around the course, they recognized his face from the year before, but kept calling him “David Ernst.” He patiently reminded them that his name was Derek, and he tried to stay optimistic. This week, at least, it worked—he went out and shot a Friday 68 to make the cut and eventually finish in thirtieth place. I
t was his best result since the Cinderella weekend a year earlier.
But the feel-good ending, if it happens at all, was still months and perhaps years away. He followed up the strong showing in Charlotte with six more missed cuts, and stumbled into July still preparing for a battle that had begun to look hopeless.
13
PONTE VEDRA, FLORIDA
Fifth Major or First Minor?; Jordan, Martin, and the Third Wave
The Players Championship is the most prestigious tournament run by the PGA Tour, and is colloquially known as the “fifth major,” though it enjoys no official status with the real majors. This fact has always struck me as cruelly ironic—the PGA Tour bears more responsibility for the health of professional golf in America than any other organization, and they run more than forty events each year with the kind of efficiency that every other organization aspires to. Yet due to the vagaries of history, the four most important tournaments each year are run by outside bodies—the USGA for the U.S. Open, the PGA of America for the PGA Championship, the R&A for the British Open, and Augusta National for the Masters. The PGA Tour deserves a major, but the Players Championship is as near as they come—close, but no cigar.
Held at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra, Florida, the Players also occupies a strange headspace for golfers. In the days leading up to the event, and during the event itself, there’s absolutely no questioning the event’s magnitude. Forget the official stance—to these guys, it’s a major, and they’re willing to say so. The tournament boasts one of the year’s strongest fields—by the world rankings, even stronger than the other majors, since there are no amateurs here—and TPC Sawgrass is home to the most famous hole in American golf. The par-3 17th, with its iconic island green, has served as perhaps the most anxiety-provoking tee shot in the sport for forty years, leading to triumph and tragedy in equal measure.
The most famous success came in 2001, when Tiger Woods’s tee shot on Saturday barely remained on the fringe, leaving him a treacherous sixty-foot downhill putt. As it began its journey to the hole, NBC’s Johnny Miller asked Gary Koch how he’d done. “Better than most,” Koch replied. The ball began breaking right, and when it dropped in the hole, Koch seemed to jump out of his shoes. “Better than most!” he cried again. Tiger went on to beat Vijay Singh by a single stroke, and Koch’s call has become iconic.
On the flip side, it’s hard to forget Sergio Garcia’s 2013 meltdown. On Sunday, tied with Tiger Woods after a tense weekend, which saw Sergio accuse his rival of trying to distract him on Saturday by pulling a wood out of his bag when Sergio was about to hit his ball, Sergio needed a good tee shot on 17 to keep pace. Instead, he dumped two straight wedges into the water, made a quadruple bogey 7, and watched as the man he couldn’t beat took home yet another title.
It’s an interesting exercise to imagine the Players Championship as a major. How many careers would be changed? Sergio, for one, would have removed himself from the top of the “best to never win” list with his playoff victory over Paul Goydos in 2008. Greg Norman’s ’94 win, with a record score of -24, might mitigate his history of choking in critical moments. Henrik Stenson and Matt Kuchar would have the enormous major monkey off their backs, and we’d look at players like Tim Clark (’10), Stephen Ames (’06), and Fred Funk (’05) in a completely different light. Four golfers—Fred Couples, Steve Elkington, Davis Love III, and Hal Sutton—would increase their major totals from one to three, taking a significant step toward legendary status. Craig Perks (’02) would join the ranks of the flukiest major champions in golf history. And Tiger Woods himself would be two wins closer to Jack Nicklaus’s career record, except for one problem—Nicklaus’s total would grow to twenty-one majors after his three wins, including the first ever Players Championship in 1974.
But this is revisionist history—it may be the fifth major in the players’ minds while they’re at Sawgrass, and the tournament itself may be endowed with the same tension and meaning—but the minute it ends, so does the fantasy.
Looking backward, reality asserts itself. This is not a major. Regardless of what transpired on the course, among the best golfers in the world, nobody thinks of Henrik Stenson or Sergio Garcia as major champions. None of the Sawgrass winners receive the same accolades as the heroes who win the real ones. All they have in common—the lonely sliver of equality—is the goddamn suffering.
—
On Thursday, Russell Henley finished two shots off the lead after a near-flawless 65, and a stacked group that included Justin Rose, Jordan Spieth, Lee Westwood, and Sergio Garcia loomed at -5, four shots off the lead. On Friday, only Spieth kept pace, shooting a 66 to move to -11, just one shot behind the leader. It’s foolish to call a tournament a two-horse race after 54 holes, much less 36, but that’s how it felt on Friday night. Spieth would be the crowd favorite, and he’d be facing a man who had once been the best golfer in the world.
* * *
“You can play golf with a fade—you don’t need to be able to hit the draw. You can win once in a while, of course you can. But standing here on the second tee and you can’t draw the ball? Or on 16? You know, when you’re that young, I was 25, 26 years old, how can you accept that you can’t hit that shot?”
—KAYMER
Q. Back to the swing changes for a second.
MARTIN KAYMER: Please, no. I’m done. I’m done with it.
If there ever comes a point in your life when you have the urge and the opportunity to irritate Martin Kaymer, ask him this question: Why, after winning the 2010 PGA Championship and reaching number 1 in the world early the next year, did you decide to retool your entire swing? Why change, Martin, when you were the best golfer on the entire planet?
It’s a question he’s faced for three years, over which time he’s come to hate it deeply, and the answer isn’t always satisfying. On a practical level, he wanted to make a few subtle changes—a shallower backswing, for one—that would allow him a bit more length, and help him hit a right-to-left draw to go along with his natural fade. The draw is particularly helpful at Augusta, and it’s no accident that Kaymer began to make serious changes after his fourth straight missed cut at the Masters in 2011. Still, the nagging fact remained—he was already the best player in the world.
The real answer gets to the heart of what makes Martin Kaymer one of the game’s most fascinating golfers: When he stood on a tee and realized he couldn’t hit a draw, it violated his sense of what a golfer should be. There is an ideal vision of a “complete player” in Kaymer’s mind, and it goes beyond winning and losing. It delves into the heart of talent and self-belief. He craved the ability to hit any shot, in any situation; he needed the absolute confidence that he could execute. Without it? Yes, he could win tournaments. Yes, he could ascend to the peak of world golf. But the victories would be shallow.
“To be honest with you,” he told the media at the PGA Championship in 2013, “when I became number one, it was a surprise. I was not playing like the best player on the planet. I didn’t feel like the best player. And therefore, I needed to change things.”
You could almost argue that he’s an aesthete—he wants to play the beautiful game, results be damned.
Which is a surprise when you consider Kaymer as a physical specimen. He’s a square-jawed German, and with his easy grin and athletic posture, he looks like the sort of man who breezes through his days and months and years on a cloud of self-assurance while the rest of us toil on earth. What you don’t expect is an artist who behaves with the perfectionism of a half-mad painter who has worked on the same canvas for an entire lifetime.
In art, there is no objective way to measure superiority, but even so, we have an instinct about which artists are masters of their craft. Kaymer was like a young, creative wunderkind who received every possible award, but knew in his heart that none of it mattered—his art was asking more of him, and he had yet to achieve his potential. Fulfilling that idealistic vision meant everything, and the trappings of early success—world rankings, trophies, accol
ades—meant far less. If he had to give up these decorations, so be it. He would be true to himself.
“We are out here to have fun and play good golf and show the people that we do our job with passion and love,” he said in early 2011, just days before he rose to number 1 in the world. “It’s not about winning or losing.”
There are not many golfers who would use the word “love” to describe the way they play, and I came to realize that the German is one of the few who truly believes he can transcend his results.
Kaymer struck me as intelligent from the beginning, but uniquely so for a professional athlete. His words demonstrate a deep understanding of human behavior, and a sharp insight into the subtle ways the mind works. He’s the kind of person who simultaneously wishes his lifelong coach Günter Kessler got more attention, for instance, but loves him for the fact that he doesn’t want it. You can always count on him for a terrific quote, and where others resort to clichés, Kaymer is expansive and creative. Even the simple questions generally yield thoughtful responses.
“I don’t really believe in taking momentum into the next day,” he said after his opening round 65 at the Players Championship, answering one of the most commonly asked questions on Tour. “Because you sleep, you wake up with a different body feel, everything is a little bit different. I think the most important thing is that you lower your expectations. Everybody else thinks you keep going like this, and subconsciously you think you should, but I, fortunately, I shot a few of those rounds in the past…I know that the next day is very difficult.”