by Shane Ryan
If you’re Heath Slocum at the Wyndham Championship, there’s only one answer: Go for the win. And, in this case, you run the birdie putt six feet past, miss the comebacker for par, and walk around the scoring tent in a wide-eyed daze, trying to explain your inexplicable trauma to a half-dozen television cameras while you fall deeper into shock.
“Everything just piled up on top of me,” he said, his eyes moving from face to face, searching for answers that weren’t there.
—
The PGA Tour will dish out its fair share of cruelty throughout the season, but it saves its sharpest sting for last. There is very little glory to be had in Greensboro, North Carolina—the season-ending Wyndham Championship is a minor event, skipped by many of the Tour’s best players—but there is plenty of pain. It may look like a fun affair on the surface—the venue includes tropical-themed party tents, live bands, sand sculptures, and, for some reason, fake snow at the base of its sidewalk cedar trees—but the glossy veneer can’t disguise the underlying anxiety.
Out on the course, the golfers are engaged in a desperate survival act. They’re not fighting for trophies or exemptions or millions of dollars, but merely to keep their jobs. Failure here means relegation, down to the minor leagues of the Web.com or worse. It’s their last chance to avoid golfing purgatory—a place from which some players, with time and luck, will fight their way back to the top.
And some won’t.
—
Nicholas Thompson, fresh off a final-round 69 that moved him to even par for the tournament, already had a sense that Robert Allenby was the man to catch if he wanted to make the first event of the FedEx Cup playoffs. From there, anything was possible. A good finish at the Barclays in New Jersey would get him into the Deutsche Bank Championship in Massachusettes, and then the BMW in Colorado, and—who knows?—maybe even the season-ending Tour Championship with its huge purse and prestigious field. It may have sounded like pure fantasy, but similar stories had happened before. He just had to sneak into that first event. But without a top 125 finish in the FedEx Cup points list, the only place to go was home.
Outside the scoring trailer at Sedgefield Country Club, in the oppressive Carolina humidity, he sat beside the PGA Tour’s Tom Alter and stared at the two computers resting on a black tablecloth. He knew his position was tenuous—he entered the week ranked 123rd in the FedEx Cup points standings, but a mediocre showing here had relegated him to the bubble. By Sunday morning, with just one round left in the PGA Tour’s regular season, he was one of two golfers who had played himself out of the projected top 125. The other was Allenby, and though Thompson finished early on Sunday, with hours of drama yet to unfold, he identified the Aussie as his critical target.
In fact, Allenby would enjoy the most interesting day of any golfer in the field, bouncing above and below the cut line with seismographic unpredictability. His FedEx Cup fate careened like a roulette ball, dizzily spinning into red, and black, and red, and black, for the eight hours it took the event to finish. These stomach-churning vicissitudes would have been fascinating under ordinary circumstances, but one fact made them especially so: Allenby wasn’t even playing. He had missed the cut on Friday, and now sat somewhere far away and private where a trusted friend probably hovered nearby with a stiff drink and a sack of smelling salts.
“What I want you to tell me,” Thompson said to Alter, his irritation just beginning to show, “is where I have to finish to catch Allenby.”
Alter, the VP of Communications for the PGA Tour and the man who agreed to let me shadow him on the harshest day of golf’s calendar, soon arrived at the answer: 68th place.
Alter is in a very delicate and unenviable position on a day like Sunday. Any idiot can deliver good news, but it takes a practiced hand to convey misery and heartbreak, and that was the exact nature of Alter’s mission on Sunday. Over and over, he had to pronounce death sentences of all kinds, with only a very occasional bit of happiness mixed in.
Luckily, the Tour chose well—Alter had a terrific bedside manner. He was precise, too. Using several computer simulations, and his reservoir of experience, he had a very solid idea of which figures the players would have to reach by day’s end to meet certain milestones. For a top-125 finish on the money list and the chance to retain full Tour status, he told me on Sunday morning, you’d probably need around $712,000. For top 125 on the FedEx points list, and a berth in the playoffs, he estimated that the cutoff would come somewhere near 450 points. As it happened, the 125th place finisher on the money list earned $713,337, and the points cutoff came in at 438.
Nicholas Thompson, knowing he needed to jump up to 68th, peered at the computer. Behind him, leaning over a blue Wyndham barrier and frantically waving a baseball hat, a raving little autograph hound called out to his playing partner.
“Mr. Malinari!” he screamed, at Peter Malnati. The same kid would later refer to Jeff Overton as “Everton” and address Brooks Koepka with what sounded like a bastardized version of Kansas’s state capital: “Kopeka.” And he wasn’t even the most notable of the urchins; down the line ten feet, a boy wearing a “Got Jesus?” T-shirt asked every player, for reasons that remain unclear to me, to sign his white coffee mug.
If Thompson was fazed by the circus, he didn’t show it. “Am I back to T-69 now?” he asked, finding the name “Thompson” on the computer in that spot. The hope faded almost as fast as it appeared—a case of mistaken identity.
“Oh, that’s Michael Thompson. Fuck.”
When he located his actual name farther down at T-73, he pronounced himself dead and walked away.
Even without a place in the Barclays, Thompson had a nice safety net—his position on the money list was secure, and he’d retain his card in 2015 since the tour offers amnesty to the top 125 on money and FedEx lists alike. But safety nets and silver linings were in short supply Sunday. Everywhere you looked, it was a landscape of suffering and devastation.
—
J. J. Henry, too far back on the money list and needing to make the cut on FedEx Cup points alone, had an eagle attempt on the 15th hole to go from 130th position to 124th. He made birdie, which got him up to 126th with three holes to play. On the difficult uphill par-4 18th, needing one last three, he placed his approach in the greenside bunker, made bogey, and lost his status.
Brad Fritsch, the Canadian who started the week hopelessly stuck in 163rd place, proceeded to defy the odds by playing his way into Sunday’s final group. He still had a chance to earn limited Tour status by finishing in the top 150, and after a decent start to his round, all he needed was a birdie on one of the final six holes. His best chance came on the 15th, but he failed to convert a five-foot putt. When he couldn’t reach the 18th green with his second shot, he had doomed himself to 151st place and a trip to the Web.com Finals.
Everyone in Greensboro was playing for something. Even at the top, a player like Patrick Reed hoped to safeguard his spot in the Tour Championship, with its super-elite field of thirty golfers, against the vagaries of what might happen in the first three playoff events. A step below him, others strove to lock up berths at the BMW Championship (seventy players) or the Deutsche Bank (one hundred). Next came the FedEx Cup bubblers, like Thompson and Allenby, hovering around 125, but with a puncher’s chance to regain status at the Web.com Tour Finals as long as they finished inside the top two hundred.
Such luxuries were denied Kevin Foley, the twenty-seven-year-old Penn State alum who earned one of the last spots from the Web.com Finals last year but who had trouble even entering PGA Tour tournaments in 2014. Once he finally got to play, he couldn’t seem to make a cut, and the negative energy mounted. He came into Greensboro fresh off six straight missed cuts, saddled with an ugly FedEx Cup rank of 208th. In order to even have a shot at the Web.com Finals series—a fate most others were trying to avoid—he’d need to find some of the old magic and crack the top two hundred.
He made the cut, and when he birdied 15 and 16 on Sunday, it looked as though he’d br
oken through. It didn’t even matter that he missed a four-foot par putt on 18, we thought—it was irrelevant, he’d done enough. The computers confirmed that he’d reached number 200 on the nose, knocking David Duval into the wilderness below, and we were pretty sure that nobody could catch him. His mother had come to see him play, and was waiting even now beyond the blue barriers. Failure-by-gut-punch would be a rotten way to end the weekend.
But wait. There was one more golfer on the course….
There was Doug LaBelle II. But he was below Foley and already on No. 15. To pass him, he’d have to play his last four holes at two-under. Even Murphy’s Law couldn’t be that cruel, because position number 201 is a brutal scene. It means you head straight to the second stage of Web.com Q-School, and even if you fight your way through that, your reward is to face all the losers of the Web.com Finals in the last stage. One stumble in that whole process, and it’s a fast track to the small time—sad little tours named after sad little strip-mall restaurants. Or, hell of hells, a desk job…
LaBelle birdied 15. He birdied 16 to pass Foley. He made par on 17. He found the fairway and green on 18, and two-putted for par. And those of us who expected a sympathetic finish stood around with our mouths agape. Foley had fallen to 201.
—
What about Jason Allred, comeback kid of the year, who blazed a trail out of golf obscurity in February when he battled Bubba Watson at the Northern Trust Open to earn a third place finish and more money—$388,600—than he had won in his entire career?
His third child, Lucy Hope, was now six months old, and her life had coincided with her father’s rejuvenated golf career. He hadn’t had a Tour card since 2008, but he was closer than ever after a year of fighting for tournament spots through Monday qualifying and sponsor exemptions. In that time, he had also became a minor media darling—with his gracious attitude and relentless kindness, everybody liked him.
Since Los Angeles, events had not been easy to come by for Allred, but he capitalized when he could—fifteenth at the Memorial, sixth at the Barracuda Championship—to come close to gaining full status for 2015. He came out firing in Greensboro, shooting 69-66-67 over the first three days. He needed to make about $100,000, which meant posting a final round of 68 or better.
But this wasn’t a day for happy endings. The Oregon native began his round knowing exactly how much was at stake, and in golf, that knowledge isn’t always helpful. He played tense, and the end came early—on the 8th hole, he hit two shots out of bounds, taking an unthinkable quadruple-bogey. He lost all the momentum he’d built up over three days—hell, over a season—and even an optimistic guy like Allred knew his chances were over. When he walked to the scoring trailer two hours later, all he could do was hug his wife, Kimberly, and fight back the tears.
—
Camillo Villegas is the kind of person who, according to Florida coach Buddy Alexander, numbers his socks so he can match them up when they come out of the washing machine. He emerged from the chaos to win the Wyndham Championship for his first Tour victory in four years. As the devastation continued, though, nobody really noticed—his happiness was obscured by all the dark clouds.
Amid the awful vacillations and gratuitous heartbreak, victims stacked up left and right. Among them was Nicholas Thompson, who fell to 126th and would not be making the trip to the Barclays. Nor would Slocum, and nor would Martin Laird, who needed birdie on 18 and, like so many others, found the sand instead.
Traveling in their stead, safe in 125th place after surviving the day of agony, was Robert Allenby. Call it a triumph for the cynics—the big win belonged to the man who wasn’t there.
22
LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY
The PGA Championship; The Great Schism and a Crisis of Identity; Valhalla’s Bad Rap; The New King
“I’ve had a great run of golf and played well over the past few months. I said at the start of the year that golf was looking for someone to put their hand up and sort of become one of the dominant players in the game. I felt like I had the ability to do that.”
—RORY MCILROY
The moment that defined Rory McIlroy, for me, came in the sweltering Kentucky heat at Valhalla Golf Club, in the final round of the PGA Championship. The brutal, unyielding sun seemed to thicken the blood of every golfer on the course, and the pace of play on the front nine moved from lethargic to glacial. McIlroy began the day with a two-stroke lead, but before long, Phil Mickelson and Rickie Fowler had erased the deficit from a group ahead.
By the sixth hole, Rory and Phil were tied at -12, and Fowler, fresh off a three-birdie run, led them both at -13. For Fowler, this was the first time—literally the first full hole—that he had ever led a major on Sunday.
An early weather delay had forced the PGA of America to condense the later tee times, and things got so slow in the early afternoon that multiple groups began to stack up on the tee boxes. That was the case on the sixth, when Rory arrived to find Mickelson and Fowler still waiting to hit their first shots on the long par 4.
Bernd Wiesberger, Rory’s playing partner, walked over to the two golfers and made polite conversation. It’s what you’d expect—despite the pressure, social decorum dictates that you exchange pleasantries, and pretend it’s just an ordinary round on an ordinary day. J. P. Fitzgerald, Rory’s caddie, did the same. Phil and Rickie gazed down the fairway and held a halting conversation—something about golf courses they’d played—and Phil mindlessly juggled a ball, tap, tap, tapping it with the face of his hybrid.
As they waited, a strange kind of energy took over the scene, and it emanated from the man who wasn’t talking. Ten feet away, Rory McIlroy sat on a bench, seething and motionless, hard eyes fixed on empty space. It was hard not to notice that he hadn’t offered any greeting to his fellow golfers—not a wave, not a tilt of his head, not so much as a spare look in their direction. He simply sat down and glared.
His silence affected Phil and Rickie. They flashed a glance or two at the bench where Rory sat, and they looked flustered—caught off balance by the fact that he hadn’t said hello. Once it became clear that there would be no words exchanged, they paced the tee box, stared ahead, and tried to ignore the best player in the world. The cold shoulder from McIlroy presented them with two options—approach him and blow the thing wide open, or pretend as though it wasn’t happening. They chose the latter.
Their small pantomime grew into a full performance as Rory’s fixed gaze went unbroken. They knew to look upset would show weakness, so they feigned indifference. All the while, they must have been cursing the delays—they longed for the freedom of the fairway, away from this tension, while Rory could have stayed comfortably in that one spot, you sensed, for hours.
It was such a small moment, but I couldn’t forget it. In the days after the tournament ended, I tried to analyze what was happening on that tee box. Was Rory’s silence just a result of frustration after a slow start? Was he simply behaving like he does on the range, staying inside a small bubble, free of friends, agents, and writers, to shut out any distractions? Was there an element of purposeful intimidation?
It didn’t matter which theory was correct, or if the truth is a blend of them all. What mattered was that Rory himself—the imperturbable force with the bloodless, roaming eyes—seemed totally at ease. It was a feat of competitive psychology, whether he meant it or not. He was at peace with himself, social niceties be damned.
That, I realized, was the gift of total confidence—a liberating freedom from self-doubt, even while your enemies fight off their own demons and blindly reach for greatness. Rory had the ruthless intelligence of the gangster—the ability to reveal the neuroses in those around him, and subconsciously exacerbate and exploit them. His presence dominated the tee box, and he never had to utter a single word. Everyone else—including two of the world’s best players—reacted to him.
I had never seen anything like it. That’s the Rory that stayed in my head long after the season had ended. Forget the thoughtful philo
sopher he became in the media room, or the fresh-faced icon who elicited screams of adoration from the gallery, or the grinning rogue that made racy headlines off the golf course. That day in Valhalla, on the sixth tee box, the essential Rory emerged—Rory the alpha dog. The man who owns the moment.
* * *
Q. There are a lot of young guys this year who are winning that grew up watching you play, idolizing you and being inspired by you, and now here they are competing with you. I’m curious what that feels like, if that’s an odd feeling in any way or if it’s just flattering or what?
PHIL MICKELSON: Just makes me feel old, that’s all (laughter). You know, when somebody says, yeah, I used to watch you on TV when I was six, how do you respond to that? Great. (Laughter).
It was fireworks and drama right from the start in Louisville, where if you were a journalist who didn’t want to be left behind, you had better hit the ground running. This was “glory’s last shot,” as the PGA Championship once called itself—the fourth and final major of the year. It also happens to be the only major with a serious, ongoing identity crisis.
It all stems from the Great Schism of 1968, a dramatic chapter in golf history when more than two hundred active touring professionals, spearheaded by Jack Nicklaus and a few others, made a move to break away from the PGA of America and form a separate organization. For years, their frustration had mounted, owing in large part to the PGA’s habit of funneling the growing amounts of television money away from the players who had earned it. The turning point came when Arnold Palmer finally joined the rebellion and funding was secured—with possible assistance from Las Vegas mafia figures, according to a Vice Sports article that referenced FBI memos—and by 1975, the “PGA Tour” name had been adopted.