by Shane Ryan
He received a quick reply—it was about four a.m. Denver time, but five a.m. in Kansas City where Watson deliberated—saying simply, “this is a tough decision, Webb.” A half hour later, Watson actually called and put the question to him: Why should he put Simpson on the team? A bit groggy, Simpson trotted out the same arguments—he had “passion” for the Ryder Cup, and wanted redemption for Medinah. By the end of that phone call, according to the Golf Channel’s Jason Sobel, Watson told him he had made the team.
The way he presented it at the Ryder Cup, this was a feel-good story—Watson was swayed by Simpson’s fighting spirit, and filled his vacant twelfth spot in good conscience. In fact, things were not so cut-and-dried—Watson had actually made a different captain’s pick prior to speaking with Simpson. Sobel became the first to report that information later that day, and most of us assumed the pick had been Chris Kirk, with some guessing Billy Horschel, who had finished second at the Deutsche Bank but only made his FedEx Cup run after the picks.
We were all wrong. Golf Week’s Alex Miceli finally broke the real story—after the Deutsche Bank ended, Watson had indeed decided on his three picks, but the third was neither Kirk nor Horschel. It was Bill Haas, who had finished ninth that weekend. Miceli’s scoop was strange news by almost any reckoning—Haas had put together a consistent year, and never missed a cut, but he hadn’t won a tournament, or made any real impact in the majors. His only top-five finish came at the Wyndham, which most of the best players skipped. In addition, he was far down the Ryder Cup standings, in twenty-eighth place, well below anybody else who had been seriously considered. Tom Watson had never mentioned him in a pre–Ryder Cup press conference, and as far as I could tell, nobody else had either. Haas was the ultimate dark horse—a five-time career winner on Tour and a steady veteran, but not exactly an inspiring choice.
One of the few players to mention him at all, interestingly enough, was Webb Simpson. He brought up Haas at the Ryder Cup press conference when he told the story of his conversation with Watson. When he spoke with Watson that fateful morning, he mentioned Haas (along with Kirk and Horschel) as a strong alternative. He was one of the only people who thought to include Haas, and it makes little sense—unless he already knew that Haas had been picked.
Which brings us to the piece of information that turns Simpson’s story a bit sour. As Miceli reported, Watson had called several of his automatic selections on Monday night to let them know the three players he would pick. By the time the golfers hit the range on Tuesday morning, word was out—he had chosen Bradley, Mahan, and Haas. They didn’t know that Simpson had swayed him in a different direction in the predawn hours Tuesday morning, but—this is the critical point—it’s hard to imagine that Simpson didn’t know about Watson’s picks before he ever sent the first text on Tuesday morning. He had too many friends on the team, many of whom had received word from Watson himself about the impending captain’s picks, not to have heard. If word was out on Monday night, as we now know it was, Simpson would be in the loop.
If Simpson truly mentioned just three names in his talks with Watson—Kirk, Horschel, and Haas—and he already knew the picks, it means that at least in a subtle way, he was targeting Haas. Otherwise, why not bring up Keegan Bradley and Hunter Mahan as part of Watson’s “tough decision”? Simpson is smart, though—he would have known that Bradley and Mahan were safe, and that if he could finagle his way onto the team, it would be at the expense of Bill Haas, the vulnerable third pick.
It gets more damning. In his press conference, Simpson even let it slip that Keegan Bradley and Hunter Mahan had already received their congratulatory phone call from the captain by the time he sent his fateful texts, and that he learned of their inclusion on Monday night, before he ever contacted Watson. The one lingering doubt is whether he also knew that Haas had been selected, but with the way word traveled between the players—and the variety of sources in Simpson’s immediate network—it seems ludicrous to think he was in the dark.
Reasonable people can disagree about Simpson’s last-ditch plea—golf is a competitive game, and if he sensed Watson wavering on the third pick, who’s to say he was wrong to advocate for himself, even at the expense of Haas? It casts a ruthless light on the whole spectacle, but what Simpson did wasn’t illegal, and golf, in the end, is just a game—any rule he broke was an unwritten one.
The real issue here was Watson himself. By leaking his three picks before he had solidified them, he created the embarrassing spectacle at Denver, where a large group of players wrongly believed Bill Haas was on the team—including Haas himself, probably. When Watson allowed himself to be overruled by Simpson, a player in objectively worse form than Haas, the farce was set in motion. Somehow, America’s leader managed to turn the simple task of making three captain’s picks into an embarrassing comedy of errors.
McGinley’s picks told us something important about how he planned to lead Team Europe, but it would be some time before the truth emerged about Watson’s maneuvers. Winning in Scotland was always going to be difficult against a loaded European side, and it would take a strong, levelheaded captain to help the Americans pull off the upset. Unbeknownst to us, as Webb Simpson sat in front of the Golf Channel cameras and rambled on about “redemption,” Watson had already given the first indication that he might not be the man for the job.
25
ANTIBES, FRANCE
The Real Dubuisson
“Mr. Ryan, I will take the time to answer your questions, with sincerity and in great details. Some truths will not please him, but as a father, I want truth to be known once and for all.”
—ALBAN DUBUISSON, Victor’s father
To Paul McGinley, the emergence of Victor Dubuisson as a match play star in Arizona must have seemed like an incredible bonus—another weapon to throw at the depleted Americans in Scotland. At the same time, he realized that the Frenchman’s personality made him a challenge—how do you deal with this guy? How do you incorporate him into the team and make sure he’s a positive presence? As he came closer to automatically qualifying for the team, the onus fell on McGinley to solve the Dubuisson mystery. Coincidentally, I was trying to do the same thing.
Late in 2014, I expressed my frustration to a French journalist after hitting a brick wall on the story of Dubuisson’s past. The burgeoning star who had won his first tournament in Turkey the previous fall—and made himself famous in America with his heroic shots at the Accenture Match Play Championship—remained a complete enigma to the entire American journalistic establishment. His past was shrouded in mystery; his personality was an unbroken code.
Sometimes, the secrecy led to incredible feats of misinformation. The UK’s Daily Mail, for one, reported in May that Dubuisson lived in Honduras—a fascinating detail, I thought, since it made absolutely no sense. Why would a golfer who plays primarily in Europe take up residence in Central America?
I puzzled on that one for a few minutes, and finally the truth clicked—the journalist had heard a French person say the word “Andorra”—the tiny country in the Pyrenees where Dubuisson actually lives, in order to escape France’s punitive tax rate—and his ears picked up “Honduras.” Undeterred, they ran the same factoid in September—still convinced, months later, that Dubuisson flew back and forth between his European tournaments and the small nation in the Caribbean.
It’s the kind of mix-up that makes you laugh, but it’s also symbolic of the whole Dubuisson debacle. Digging for information on him is like playing the children’s game of telephone, where each new fact is incurably distorted from its point of origin—a point that is, itself, difficult to identify with any accuracy.
After expressing my frustrations to the French journalist, he simply shrugged—c’est la vie—and told me that perhaps I should look up the golfer’s father on Facebook. I grumbled at this advice, thinking it was merely a shot-in-the-dark suggestion that would only lead to more silence, along with the added obstacle of a language barrier. Plus, hadn’t Dubuisson claimed
that he had no family?
When I returned from the Ryder Cup, I thought back to that conversation, and decided to venture online and see what I could find. As it turns out, Dubuisson comes from a tremendously athletic family. His uncle, Hervé Dubuisson, is considered one of the greatest professional basketball players in French history—the “Kobe Bryant of France.” There are articles that feature him alongside Tony Parker, the French point guard who became a star with the San Antonio Spurs, and Parker is considered the Hervé Dubuisson of his generation. Dubuisson holds the French record with 254 games played for Team France. He also owns the record for most career points—3,821—and the most points in a single game—51 against Greece in 1985. He won multiple scoring titles and a few championships in France’s top professional league, and for two of those years, he played alongside his brother Alban—Victor’s father.
When I sent Alban a friend request on Facebook, I expected to encounter someone trained in the family’s secret arts. To my surprise, he proved very willing to talk about his son. This willingness preceded our connection—he had written extensively about him on Facebook already. The messages showed a father who was equal parts proud of what Victor had accomplished, hopeful for his future, and bitter at the turn their own relationship had taken. In a story that instantly reminded me of Patrick Reed and his parents, Victor and his father had not spoken a word to each other in four years.
A typical example of Alban’s posts:
“I am proud of his success, but when he says he didn’t have a family, it’s absurd!!! It makes me want to puke to read all this bullshit. Without his grandfather, his mother and myself, he would never be at the level he is at today and he would have never had his dream come true. It’s pathetic!! My Facebook friends who followed his rise will be able to testify to it, I hope, but that’s life and I wish him the greatest of success. He is and will always be in my heart.”
I reached out to Alban, and we began corresponding over email. With the help of a translator—a native Parisian—I began to piece together the story of Victor Dubuisson.
What I discovered was that even very basic details of his accepted biography are wrong. In every story written about him at home and abroad, for instance, his birthplace is listed as Cannes. In truth, he was born on April 22, 1990, at the Clinique St. Georges in Nice, and though his family moved several times, they never once lived in Cannes. Victor only moved there himself after he turned pro, and was apparently content to tell any journalist who asked that he had been born and raised in the city.
Alban had played at the top level of French professional basketball for two years, winning a title playing with his brother for Le Mans, but he wasn’t good enough to stay. He went on to toil in the minor leagues for a team on the French Riviera, but when he met his future wife, Cathy, they decided to start a laundry business. Alban quit basketball, business boomed, and the family was prospering by the time Victor, their first child, was born.
The Dubuissons lived in Antibes then, another town on the Mediterranean, and when Victor was six, thinking that he might follow in the family tradition, Alban and his wife Cathy registered him for basketball. The boy hated it. He also hated tennis, soccer, track and field, and judo—not to mention school. They began to believe their son simply wasn’t meant to play sports.
His maternal grandfather, Leon, was a golfer, and one night when Cathy’s parents were babysitting, Leon began playing with his grandson on a small putting mat. It’s impossible to say why the activity intrigued the boy, now eight years old, but soon he was begging his “Papé” to take him to a real course. Leon obliged, picking Victor up from school one day and buying him a short 7-iron. They drove to the practice green at a course in nearby Biot, where they chipped and putted. By the time they drove home, Victor was in love.
This origin story also conflicts with another popular Dubuisson myth—that he was first seduced by golf when he watched Tiger Woods win the 1997 Masters. Alban was not a golfer or a fan, and if it’s true that Victor was first introduced to the game by his grandfather at age eight, that would have been at least a year after Tiger’s first green jacket. Here again, we may be running up against Victor’s tendency to exaggerate to the press.
Leon, incidentally, is another casualty of Victor’s code of silence to his family.
“Without his grandpa, what would he do today?” Alban asked rhetorically, in one of his mournful Facebook posts. “Is it that difficult to say thank you and have some recognition for his grandpa. For Victor, apparently it is!!!! All I have to say today is that today, his grandpa and all the people who guided him over the years are happy for his success, even though he doesn’t deserve our respect. He is forever in our hearts, our little Victor in shorts who we knew and made us dream.”
At the time, Alban was thrilled to see that Victor, who could be a moody child, had something that made him happy. He and Cathy supported their son’s new passion, and Victor showed immediate talent—no surprise, considering his genes. Alban took up golf so he could spend time with his son, but soon Victor was beating him every time.
Nothing could deter Victor from his obsession, and Alban signed him up for weekend tournaments against kids three or four years older than him—another echo of the Patrick Reed saga. Alban sensed this was the best way to help his son become competitive, and though the boy got thrashed initially, he believes the difficulty made Victor tough. Alban took his inspiration from a Tiger Woods biography that discussed Earl’s past as a Marine, and he admits that he could be hard on his son.
Victor was a perfectionist, and had a habit of throwing clubs, or banging them on the ground, and Alban tried to tell him that he needed to accept bad shots and stay positive. They’d have long talks about his attitude, but no matter what, Victor had trouble handling the reality of error on the course. It took years before he was able to keep his cool during a round, and even today, he retains those perfectionistic tendencies. According to Alban, these talks represented the extent of his “tough love.”
Contrary to media reports—a familiar refrain, at this point—Victor did not quit school at age ten, and reports to that effect always made Alban laugh. Education is mandatory in France until age sixteen, but Victor did make use of a French Department of Education program called CNED—the National Centre for Distance Education—so that he could be homeschooled using online materials for the last years of his education.
The family moved a few miles inland to Opio, and during holidays, his mother would drive him to a golf course called “Golf de la Grande Bastide,” where he would have friendly competitions with the caddies, and play thirty-six holes every day. The course allowed him to play as much as he wanted for a flat fee, which saved the family money, and allowed Victor to avoid the “boring” driving range. He explained to his father that playing on the course put him in “make-believe situations,” where he could pretend he was in a real tournament. Even today, he often trains by playing against three friends, using two balls per hole, and taking the worst of his two scores against the best of their three.
When Victor was twelve, he and his father played at the Grand Bastide in the winter, under difficult conditions. As they made the turn after the front nine, Alban asked his son for his score. Victor told him: 3-under.
“I thought he was joking,” Alban wrote, “but no. He ended up shooting 8-under and beating the course’s record. And it happened to be the Christmas Cup so the conditions were not favorable.”
In Opio, realizing his son’s extraordinary talent, Alban brought Victor to a swing coach named Stephane Damiano. They worked together until Victor was thirteen years old, when he began working with Stephane’s uncle, Roger Damiano, one of the region’s most famous instructors. Both were tremendously impressed with Victor’s short game, and the way he thought his way around the course with a sort of quiet, ruthless intelligence.
They also learned that Victor had a deep and abiding mistrust of authority, along with a propensity to simply skip appointments without a
ny notice. They had to fight for his trust, and forgive him when he flaked out—a double standard that all of Victor’s future coaches would encounter. Stephane Damiano, despite becoming one of his staunchest supporters, told Le Monde that with Victor, “You need to be able to wipe the slate clean.”
Victor can come across as selfish in these stories, but eventually, a more complex truth emerges—he’s self-centered, sure, but not malicious. It simply doesn’t occur to him that life could be lived another way. It’s almost as though there’s a barrier between Victor’s brain and the world of social niceties—until he can be convinced, he sees nothing but bad intentions in other people, and therefore sees no reason to extend his own good faith. It smacks faintly of paranoia, and any goodwill he establishes with others tends to be tenuous at best.
As he reached his teens, Victor was already recognized as one of the brightest young talents in France. He had begun training with the Pôle France Élite at age twelve—a group of the country’s top young golfers sponsored by the French Golf Federation. It didn’t go well. According to Alban, Victor acted “pig-headedly” and refused to adhere to their training methods unless they came from his specific coach. He would miss practices, ignore advice, and generally thumb his nose at anyone who tried to order him around. He would disappear for weeks without any explanation, and soon his friends came up with a new term for the vanishing act: “Do a Dubush.” Finally, the exasperated Federation cut off his funding for certain trips in 2006, though they continued to let him travel with the national team, which Victor had joined at age fifteen.