by Shane Ryan
All of which leads to an obvious question: How could he lie about a Jet Ski injury when he’d been suspended?
The answer to that question gets to the heart of the PGA Tour’s cloudy substance-abuse policy. In contrast to almost every other professional sports organization, the Tour does not publicize its suspensions. Which means that when they told Dustin Johnson he couldn’t play for three months back in 2012, he and his agents were free to make up whatever excuse they wanted—in this case, a back injury caused by a Jet Ski that lasted exactly three months.
Any connected journalist knew the real reason, but my ignorance about what had happened in 2012, before I began covering golf, shows how effective the Tour’s policy can be at keeping ugly truths hidden from the public. The only way we learn the truth is when the police or courts get involved—Matt Every, for instance, couldn’t deny the nature of his absence after news of his arrest for possession of marijuana became public.
The Tour’s lack of transparency extends to on-course fines for swearing or slow play, but there is one exception. Since drug testing began in 2008, the Tour is supposed to announce when a player has been suspended for performance-enhancing drugs. That’s happened exactly twice, to low-profile journeymen Doug Barron and Bhavik Patel.
This is where the actual language of the Tour’s bylaws gets tricky: They have to announce a suspension, but they don’t have to announce a positive test that doesn’t result in a suspension. In other words, if Tiger Woods got caught doping, and commissioner Tim Finchem decided that it would be bad for business if the news went public, there would be no suspension, and we’d never know.
The fact that golfers are contract employees who don’t belong to a players’ union allows the Tour to set and define their own policy, and there’s little doubt that it exists mostly to keep up appearances—you only have to read certain quotes from the people in power to know which way the wind blows.
“Why don’t we talk about it or give out the details? One, we don’t feel like people really care that much,” Tim Finchem said in 2009. “We don’t get emails from fans saying, ‘Why don’t you tell us?’ So we don’t think there’s this hunger for that information. Two, candidly, we don’t have that much of it, and we don’t want to remind people about it.”
When questioned about why the policy existed in 2013, executive vice president of communications Ty Votaw told Sports Illustrated that the goal was “to make sure we are seen as being a clean sport.”
The common thread here is the need to seem a certain way, rather than to actually be that way. The Tour buckled to pressure by instituting a testing policy in 2008 because that was best for projecting a clean image, and they keep the details secret because that, too, is best for projecting a clean image. It’s a bureaucratic absurdity straight out of Kafka, but there’s not a damn thing any journalist can do about it.
Unless, of course, they develop a source inside the Tour and blow the whole thing out of the water. Which is exactly what Sports Illustrated’s Michael Bamberger and Mike Walker did on Friday, August 1.
If anyone had any doubts about the nature of Johnson’s “leave of absence,” they were squashed when Bamberger and Walker’s story hit. Not only had the Tour levied a six-month suspension after a failed cocaine test, the source said; the old rumors were true, too. For the first time, a legitimate outlet had reported that Johnson’s previous Jet Ski injury was a cover-up, and the three months he missed had been the result of his first cocaine suspension (he had also tested positive for marijuana in 2009).
The story spread, and the Tour was reeling. Still, they had one arrow left in their quiver, and they didn’t hesitate to use it. The stated policy is that they don’t comment on drug suspensions, but they reversed this stance to issue a brief statement:
“With regard to media reports that Dustin Johnson has been suspended by the PGA Tour, this is to clarify that Mr. Johnson has taken a voluntary leave of absence and is not under a suspension from the PGA Tour.”
The Tour’s unprecedented statement, issued opportunistically and against policy at a time of crisis, was no more than a bit of deceptive wordplay, and a lame attempt to undermine a larger truth.
Perhaps Johnson wasn’t “suspended” in the formal sense of the word, but since the Tour didn’t refute the notion that he had failed three drug tests and wouldn’t be playing for six months as a result of the last one, Bamberger and Walker’s facts stand up. Rather than “suspending” him outright, did the Tour offer Johnson the choice to take a voluntary leave of absence? And was this offer not truly voluntary at all, since he’d be suspended formally if he refused? If it’s true, the approach did allow him to frame things however he wanted, and to avoid the explicit mention of drugs, which seemed beneficial to both him and the Tour.
Ironically, that veil of secrecy now seems like a dubious benefit for players and agents. Johnson’s saga in particular serves as a cautionary tale. Guilty parties will have to think twice in the future, because any anonymous leaks from the Tour’s rank-and-file stand to leave them exposed, with their own version of the Jet Ski lie napalming their credibility. And though the Tour did its best to run interference against Bamberger and Walker with their coy statement about the suspension, everyone in the media saw it for what it was: disingenuous semantics that failed to do any real damage to the greater truth of the report.
None of the actual information in Sports Illustrated surprised anyone in the media, except me, but this was the first time the news went public. That sparked a furor in Akron—suddenly, it was open season on the Tour’s drug policy. Bob Harig at ESPN.com and Karen Crouse at The New York Times swung the biggest hatchets, and on Friday, Crouse and I had the same idea of talking to Matt Every after his round in Akron. As usual, he offered a nakedly honest take on the whole deal: If he hadn’t been exposed in the papers, he too would have made up an excuse for his suspension, because it would have protected his image with both his fans and sponsors. Every had been with Bridgestone at the time of his arrest, and while the company eventually decided to stick with him, they obviously weren’t pleased—they could have pulled their money, and that would’ve made Every poison to other companies as well.
The whole byzantine system seems to have an easy solution: If the Tour doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s image, including its own, with any drug associations, and if they’re going to lie by omission when players test positive, then why test in the first place?
As Every pointed out, recreational drugs don’t actually help anyone on the course, and unless a player becomes an addict, they probably don’t hurt very much either. Even if they do, it scarcely matters. The Darwinian nature of golf punishes anyone who struggles, and a heroin addict isn’t going to last very long in the top ranks of professional golfers. Practically, there’s no great reason to test for recreational drugs beyond the morality of it, and if the Tour really cared about that, they’d have started testing long before 2008. Drugs, as far as I’m aware, were not invented that year.
It’s window dressing. The Tour wants everyone to think they care about drug use, but the few positive tests reveal that they’ll frantically try to hide the connections whenever possible. So why not just dispense with the whole system, test for PEDs, and leave recreational drugs out of it?
Impossible—it would be an unacceptable public relations move, signaling to the conservative base that the Tour doesn’t care about illegal drug use. They’re not going back, but they’re sure as hell not going to cost everyone money by heeding calls for transparency.
And so the strange charade continues.
* * *
“I can resist anything except temptation.”
—OSCAR WILDE
And what about Dustin Johnson? The lanky bomber with the “oily gait of a jungle cat,” to quote Golf Digest’s Jim Moriarty, was out until February.
At thirty years old, he’d been suspended at an interesting time for his legacy. You don’t have to be an expert to see that Johnson is one of the game�
�s best athletes. He’s a lithe, six-foot-four natural who can dunk a basketball with ease, and swings with the God-given combination of finesse and power that other golfers would kill to possess for a single weekend. He had the most PGA Tour wins of any golfer age thirty or younger prior to that summer, when Rory McIlroy overtook him, and he’s long been seen as a superstar-in-waiting. He’s the first player since Tiger to win a tournament for seven straight seasons coming out of college, and from 2008 to 2013, he was a moneymaking machine, never finishing outside the top fifteen in the FedEx Cup race. In 2014, he even stayed in the top thirty despite missing the final two months of the season.
By golf’s high standards, though, there’s a sense that something’s missing in his career résumé, and that something is a major. In twenty-three starts, Johnson has put up seven top-tens, including a second at the 2011 British Open and his nearest miss of all—the 2010 PGA Championship.
Over and over, you hear people close to him express the same sentiment. “If he ever puts his mind to it, he’s going to be the best player in the world.” Okay, but when will that be?
Hand in hand with the lack of major wins comes the widespread perception that he’s little more than a dumb jock in a sport that demands cunning and intelligence of its great champions. His interviews are aggressively dull, he barely seems to register when someone is talking to him, and he has the kind of dead eyes and flat affect that make people think there’s not much going on under the hood.
I spent an hour with Johnson and his younger brother, Austin—A.J. to everyone else, and Dustin’s caddie since late 2013—at the Colonial pro-am in Fort Worth. What struck me most in the hour we spent together was how even-keeled Johnson looked at every moment. There’s a sense that nothing can get to him, and whether that’s because he’s not very bright, or because he’s chosen to keep himself behind a sort of wall, is difficult to tell.
There were times, I admit, when he baffled me. At one point, standing on a tee box, one of his pro-am partners approached to ask for an autograph.
“Is this kosher?” the man asked, holding out a yellow flag that was full of other signatures. Johnson barely acknowledged the newcomer as he signed the flag in an empty space.
“There you go,” he said.
“Will you just write ‘To Steve’?” the man asked, pointing to the signature.
Johnson agreed, or at least seemed to. Slowly—Johnson does everything with the same languorous pace, as if he’s never been hurried or worried in his entire life—he took the flag and wrote “All the best” above his name.
The man looked again, and hesitated when he realized that the name “Steve” still did not appear anywhere in the signature. He gave it one more shot.
“Do you mind signing it ‘To Steve’?” he asked again.
Johnson slowly looked back. He peered at the flag again, still impossibly calm but a little perplexed, and spotted something.
“Well, they already got their name here,” he said, pointing to the upper-left corner, where another player had written “To Steve” above his own signature.
The man looked up, trying to determine if this was some kind of joke. When Johnson just stared back at him with those emotionless eyes, he broke quickly—you don’t argue with a pro golfer, even if you’ve paid ten thousand dollars and made what must have seemed like a very simple request.
“Yeah,” the man said. “That’s awesome.” And he walked away.
For the most part, though, Johnson was fun and friendly with his pro-am partners, despite the fact that this wasn’t his favorite activity of the week. He read putts, he chewed and spit tobacco, and he swore when he hit bad shots—“I blocked the shit out of it!”—just like they were bar buddies playing an afternoon nine at the local muni course.
His brother, A.J., was equally uninhibited. When Johnson’s trainer came by for a hole, I told him I’d read about him online.
A.J. eyed the trainer. “I read about you in the bathroom stall,” he deadpanned.
When Dustin hired his brother in late 2013, he joked with the AP that he hadn’t seen A.J.’s résumé and “probably wouldn’t have believed it anyway.” But now, when they weren’t giving each other shit, Dustin tried to crack the whip.
“What’s the yardage, A.J.?” he asked on a long par 4, as his brother rested in the shade of a nearby pecan tree. A.J. fumbled for his book and scrambled over as Johnson’s tone grew sharper. “What’s the yardage, A.J.? How much, A.J.?!”
He made his point, and then it was back to the old banter. I had to wonder what his management team thought about this relationship. Personally, I found it very entertaining, but even before the suspension came down, Johnson didn’t seem like the kind of person who was suited to be the more serious side of a partnership. Still, they won together in China, and he posted solid results in 2014—maybe the brotherly dynamic worked.
In some ways, the Johnsons had a normal athletic childhood. Growing up in Columbia, South Carolina, they loved being outdoors and spending summer days on friends’ boats on Lake Murray. Dustin started playing golf at the Mid Carolina Club, where his dad, Scott, was the pro. When I asked what their mother Kandee did, Dustin had no idea, and A.J. had to explain that she investigated worker’s compensation claims for the state. Watching his parents, Dustin realized early on that he hated school and never wanted a job that would keep him cooped up inside.
“I could have made straight As no problem,” he told me. “But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to put forth the effort. I was always really smart with test-taking. I’d make As on every test, but as far as doing homework? Ain’t no chance. Ain’t no chance.”
The Johnsons had a great athletic pedigree—his maternal grandfather got drafted by the Lakers, though he never played a game, and his dad was a star football player in high school. What they didn’t have was money. Johnson became good at earning his own cash, which usually meant hustling grown men at the club. He also worked every possible job at the course—cart boy, maintenance crew, club grill, catering, pro shop—you name it. It gave him a little bit of money and free balls at the driving range, which was critical to his development as a player. I told him I’d been on a golf maintenance crew in high school, too, weed-whacking all day for entire summers—hard, hot, miserable work.
“Fuck yeah, it is,” he said. “I’d pull the carts out in the morning, go play a little bit, wash the carts, and then I’d go out and fuckin’ weedeat. I might sneak a six-pack of beer out of the cooler and I’d weedeat with a few coldies.”
After work, he’d play in “dogfight” matches around the area, hustling for a few extra dollars and honing his competitive instincts.
For fun, he and Austin would go out to a nearby rock quarry and jump from a ledge eighty feet above water’s surface. Once, A.J. managed to fall in sideways, and Dustin had to dive in to fish him out.
Things began to fall apart for Johnson in his early teens, when Scott and Kandee divorced and Scott lost his job at the Mid Carolina Club. Johnson began to skip class—“It was like pulling teeth to get me to go,” he said—and got kicked off the golf team as a result.
Six months after he turned sixteen, things got really dark. Writing for Golf Digest in 2009, Jim Moriarty detailed a harrowing experience Johnson endured when Steve Gillian, the older brother of Johnson’s friend Clint, put together a gang of boys to rob a local house. The details of the heist are available online in the court docket for the South Carolina judicial department, and they make for rough reading. Johnson had previously pawned stolen watches for Gillian, but this would be a new level of crime. It went off, and among the items the group stole was a .38 revolver.
When they met Gillian at a gas station afterward, he yelled at them for not stealing anything more valuable. Gillian then asked Johnson to buy bullets for the gun, which Johnson did, under duress, at a Walmart. The next night, Gillian attacked a group of high school kids in their house for evicting his friend from their party. He broke one’s nose with a headbutt, and as
saulted several others. When confronted by his friend Jason Ward—“quit picking on these little high school kids”—he became enraged, and Ward had to punch him and pin him to the ground in order to protect himself. When he finally let his friend up, they left the house together. Later that night, Gillian used the gun Johnson had helped rob, and the bullets from Walmart, to shoot and kill Ward.
Along with his anger, part of Gillian’s motivation was to gain “street cred” for his music career by killing someone. He was given life without parole, his appeal was denied at both the court of appeals and state Supreme Court level, and he’s in prison today. Johnson’s punishment was relatively light. He only had to pay for the items he’d stolen, and agree to testify—which, it turned out, wasn’t necessary. In 2009, he was granted a full pardon on the burglary charge.
He finished high school, but needed to take time off to get extra credits at Midlands Technical College while he stayed with his grandmother. After a year, he decided to join Coastal Carolina and head coach Allen Terrell at a time when most colleges were looking askance at Johnson because of his past. Terrell was a “hard-ass,” Johnson told me, but exactly the kind he needed.
At Coastal Carolina, he flourished, and when he turned pro he secured his card Q-School almost immediately. Late in his rookie year, at the Turning Stone Resort Championship—a defunct tournament played on land owned by the Oneida Indian Nation in central New York—he was alarmed to find that he kept shanking balls on the range. He hit five in a row that nearly clipped the other golfers, and he had to move to the other side of the range to avoid hurting somebody.
Despite the rough beginning, and another shank in the actual tournament, he trailed Robert Allenby by just a single shot when he reached the 12th hole on Sunday.
“I’m like, huh,” said Johnson. “Here we go, boys! I woke up real quick, because shit, I didn’t even think I was in it.”