Starting and Closing

by John Smoltz

  Big Daddy Crane must have heard the mama’s cry for help and he came swooping in from Steve’s blind side. It seriously looked like the bird was going to land on his head! We’re like, “Steve! Look out behind you!” He turns around and here’s this ginormous bird coming right for him. I mean the wingspan on this thing is god-awful big; it looked like something straight out of Jurassic Park. Steve took one look at the talons closing in on him and took off running.

  Once Steve had sprinted out of harm’s way, the cranes wandered off. The rest of us laughed until we cried. And then we laughed some more. Steve just walked around shaking his head. So that’ll teach you, beware when you backpedal, especially in Florida.

  I’m convinced that it was things like this—you know, your typical run-of-the-mill crane brushups—that helped make our rotation better. All the time we spent together, all the ridiculous things that happened—they made us comfortable with each other. Golf was our collective escape from baseball, but it also became the avenue through which we shared a lot of good information. We were never out on the course breaking down baseball like it was rocket science, but we picked each other’s brain. We’d talk about the next team we were facing, who was hot in their lineup, what made that guy vulnerable, etc. It wasn’t all we talked about, but we did it enough that we all gained knowledge.

  Now, don’t get me wrong me here: I’m not saying golf is the answer for every starting rotation in baseball. I’m just saying it worked for us. It’s like when people try to compare us to the Philadelphia Phillies of today. From what I know, I don’t think their pitchers golf much. I don’t know if they even hang out much. You’d have to go ask them what they do, but whatever it is, they obviously have a shared mind-set of perfection. They may go after it in a different way than we did, but for the Phillies, it works. You can’t argue with their numbers; and you can’t argue with our numbers.

  One thing is true, though. We enjoyed a luxury that hardly any other rotation enjoys today: Not only did we love to play golf; we were allowed to play golf. That fact is a reflection on both our manager and on the way we went about our business.

  Each and every one of us took baseball seriously. We respected the game, we did our work, and we were responsible when it came to fitting in time to hit the golf course. We also respected Bobby Cox and his expectations, and we would never have done anything to make him think we were taking advantage of his leniency or letting golf become a distraction. If we had acted like a bunch of goofballs, I’m sure Bobby would have treated us as such and we probably wouldn’t have been able to play golf.

  My time on the golf course together with the guys in our rotation, Tommy Glavine and Greg Maddux especially, was an amazing gift to my game. I can’t imagine baseball without them or without golf. And I suspect that might be the case for all us.

  My golf story really doesn’t end there, though—or at least I hope it doesn’t. While it was a recreational outlet during my baseball career, I now actually have my sights set on playing professional golf in the future: My aspiration is to someday qualify to play on the PGA’s Champions Tour.

  You have to be at least fifty years old to be eligible to compete in events in this senior version of the PGA Tour, so this gives me roughly five years to try to get my game ready and learn how to play competitive golf. It’s a daunting task, since I will be matching my will and experience against guys who are doing this for a living, but I truly believe that I have what it takes to compete at this level. And what may not be obvious is that I’ve been testing myself for years now in order to be able to make this jump.

  I actually had the remarkable privilege of playing more than thirty rounds with Tiger Woods, back when he was in his prime. Watching Tiger play the game, the shots he took, the way he saw things—it was just unbelievable. Even high-definition TVs couldn’t do it justice; you couldn’t truly capture Tiger’s greatness when he was at the top of his game except with your own eyes. To see him do what he could do in person, it was an incredible, incredible learning experience for me.

  Once I got over the intimidation factor of playing golf with Tiger, I did, on occasion, give him a little run for his money. I never beat him, but there were several times when I almost beat him. But then again, that almost word is pretty popular when you talk about Tiger. I’m one of many guys who can say I almost beat Tiger.

  Let me just say before I go any further that the events that unfolded with Tiger in November 2009 were as shocking and disappointing to me as they were to a lot of other people. We haven’t spoken since, but I am rooting for him to rally and do incredible things; I am confident he will one day regain his form as one of the best golfers in the world.

  I can’t say that I ever beat Tiger, but I can say one year I beat Annika Sorenstam head-to-head. This was back in 2003 when Tiger and Annika were, respectively, the top-ranked men’s and women’s pro tour golfers in the world. I was really amped up for the round, but of course, it couldn’t be enough for me to just go play with them. No, I’ve got to call Tiger up the night before and tell him: “Just between us, I’m willing to make a nice, friendly wager that I’m going to beat Annika tomorrow. But don’t say anything about it during the match.”

  So we showed up the next day and Tiger and I are just playing it cool like nothing else is going on. Certainly, nobody has said a word about the bet. Then literally right before I am about to tee off the round, Tiger blurts out, “John, I’ll bet you a hundred bucks that Annika beats you today.”

  Annika is standing right there and I’m like, great. But being a man with both pride and ego, I, of course, say, “All right, you’re on.”

  Now, before I continue, it’s only fair to point out that this was Annika’s first time playing with Tiger, and when you’re playing with Tiger for the first time, you’re liable to do a few things you’ve never done before. We were also playing Isleworth Golf & Country Club near Orlando from the back tees, which back then probably covered 7,200 yards. That’s a long way for anyone, let alone Annika, who was used to playing slightly shorter courses.

  I played three under for the first eight holes before tapping in a triple bogey on eighteen, our ninth hole, since we had started on the back nine. Up until that point, I was playing really well and capitalizing on Annika’s first-time-playing-with-Tiger nerves. I thought my miscue on eighteen might lead to my demise, but I managed to match Annika shot for shot down the front nine and finish the day a couple strokes under her score.

  The round was great, beating Annika was obviously great, but I’ll tell you what I truly cherished more than anything—the chance just to watch those two practice. There they were at the very top of their games and I got to stand there after the round and get an education not only on how hard they worked at their trade, but on the prowess they both clearly possessed. I would have taken the opportunity just to watch them practice over the chance to play any day, but thankfully, I didn’t have to choose.

  I never said a word about beating Annika, with the exception of a little “I told you so” when I snatched my new hundred-dollar bill out of Tiger’s hands, but news about the round got out quickly. Everywhere I went for the next three or four days, people kept bringing it up. Michigan State was playing Florida that year in the men’s NCAA Division I Basketball tournament and I had the chance to go to the game during spring training. I remember sitting down in my seat and a guy yelling at me, “Way to go, Smoltz! You beat Annika!”

  The following year, Annika, Tiger, and I teed it up again, this time at Reunion Resort near Orlando. On this day, Annika shot in the sixties, beating me handily by five or six shots. She let me have it, serving up a round chock-full of both birdies and good-natured smack talk; she duly reminded me why she was getting paid well to play golf for a living.

  Now, I’m not saying I think I am going to play professionally someday because I once beat Annika. Rather, I think I have a good chance at playing professionally because I am more than willing to get out of my comfort zone and force myself to stre
tch and grow. I wasn’t afraid to fail in baseball and I am not afraid to do it now in golf.

  While I’m convinced I can play with anybody, there’s a critical piece I have yet to master: how to play tournament golf. You see, I like to play golf really, really fast. If I tee off at 8 A.M., I can actually play four rounds of golf—all seventy-two holes—in one day, finishing up around 6 P.M. A lightning-fast pace is great for me, but you just can’t play like that within a tournament format. Learning how to deal with those idle minutes between shots has proven to be an enormous challenge for me.

  Since I retired from baseball, I have played in two one-day U.S. Open qualifying tournaments, two Georgia Opens, and most notoriously, I accepted a sponsor’s exemption to play one event on the Nationwide Tour, which is basically the Triple-A version of the PGA Tour. So far, I have made the cut twice, but it’s safe to say those aren’t the moments anyone remembers.

  I always have this notion that I’m going to shock the world. Well, it’s safe to say I shocked the world at my first Nationwide event—the South Georgia Classic at Kinderlou Forest Golf Club in Valdosta, Georgia—in late April 2011.

  Coming into the event, I was concerned about three things: my patience, my technology, and my left shoulder. I knew the pace of play would be a challenge, but I also had a feeling that the clubs in my bag wouldn’t match up well to the ones true golf pros use today. And then there’s my shoulder. My left shoulder suffers from the same loose joints as my right, but I never had to really rely on it when I played baseball. Since I picked up golf in a serious way, it’s been a different story.

  While I had a read on my weaknesses and I knew enough to suspect these things might give me problems—I would have never imagined how all three of them would conspire to lead to one of my absolute worst performances on a golf course ever. And, conveniently, in front of all the cameras in my first time out playing with the “big boys.” I should have known it was destined to be a monumental learning experience when the tournament actually began with a five-hour rain delay.

  Surprisingly, I actually weathered the first delay in fairly decent form. I started the tournament with a good mind-set and my score reflected it: I notched my first birdie and I was one under through the first three holes. I was in a rhythm and rolling right along right up until my third shot on the fourth hole. That’s when the sirens went off again and they suspended play for another five hours due to rain.

  This was uncharted territory for me and I didn’t know to handle the delay; I had no idea how to pass the time yet stay focused. I went back and forth from the driving range, the tee box, and the clubhouse. I was restless and unsettled, and when we finally resumed play, it showed. We played five more holes before darkness set in, and I shot bogey, bogey, double bogey, and bogey. I was completely out of my rhythm, and try as I might, I couldn’t get it back again. I rallied slightly to finish with a par before play was suspended yet again. I ended the day four over, which isn’t completely horrible, but certainly not where I had expected to be.

  Despite the best of intentions, when I came back the next day to finish the last ten holes of my first round, I wasn’t able to salvage my score. When I finally tapped in on the eighteenth hole, my score had gone from marginally bad to straight-up horrific: I had shot eighty-four over the two-day first round. I was dejected but determined to rally; I went out and found a local public course and played another eighteen holes before I went to bed to try to work out the kinks.

  I tried to come back the next day, compose myself, and get after it again, but on Saturday it was a similar story line: I was plagued by tap-in bogeys and stupid little mistakes. Of all things, I shot even worse. In my first introduction to golf at the next level, I shot eighty-four in the first round and eighty-seven in the second. I was humiliated, I was furious with myself, and all I really wanted to do was get in my car and drive home. But regardless of how I felt, I knew what I had to do. I knew it was time to face the music and answer all the predictable questions that were coming after I had just missed the cut by twenty-seven strokes.

  I didn’t turn down a single interview after the round and I followed up with every media outlet that had asked me to do so before the event, including ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption. To be honest, most people were genuinely surprised even to hear from me. More than one person told me, “John, what are you doing calling? I would never have called if I shot those numbers!” Well, I myself certainly didn’t enjoy shooting those numbers, but I owned the moment as best I could and tried to explain to people why things had gone so poorly. I tried to explain why my scores were not indicative of what kind of golfer I really was.

  I had a four-hour drive home after my final round, and when I got in the car, I was spun up. On my way home I struggled with the humiliation of what I just went through and I battled in my mind whether pursuing golf in this way was worth all the struggle and heartache. But the longer I drove, the more I started to cut myself some slack and give myself the credit I deserved for taking the chance to go out there in the first place. How many people would have just sat in the stands and said “no thanks.” That would have been the safe thing to do, but in golf, as in baseball, I am patently uninterested in playing it safe.

  There’s no way to sugarcoat it: I bombed out at the Nationwide. For some people that would have been the end of the line, but to me it was actually the greatest thing that could have happened. The truth is, I would have learned much less if I had barely missed the cut or played great. After the Nationwide, I knew what I needed to do: I needed to upgrade the shafts in my clubs and I needed to pursue surgery on my left shoulder. Never would I have imagined that I would ever undergo major surgery again after I retired from baseball, but after the Nationwide tournament it was painfully apparent, in more ways than one, that for me to really attack golf like I needed to, it absolutely had to get done.

  So here I am today, ironically enough, working through another round of rehab and up to my usual tricks of pushing myself and my body and keeping it fun. Just yesterday, about two weeks since surgery, the stupidly nice December weather here in Atlanta lulled me out onto the golf course. Now, I can’t even stand to hold a club in my left hand yet, but that didn’t stop me from playing an entire round one-handed. And no kidding, I actually birdied eighteen.

  There’s still a long, long way to go to get myself back to 100 percent, and there are certainly no guarantees that even with my new shoulder I will be able to accomplish my dream to make the Champions Tour, but I’m taking that one-handed birdie as my first good omen.

  I probably have about as good a shot at actually making it as I did at age seven when I wanted to be a major leaguer, but I could care less about the odds. I just want to prove to myself that I can do it. It may not mean much to a whole lot of people, but it means a lot to me.

  Chapter Twelve

  STARTING OVER

  I was in for a whole new world, quite literally, in this next chapter of my life with the Boston Red Sox. The irony of the situation was almost palpable: Here I was at age forty-one, after twenty years in the major leagues, about to basically relive another rookie year.

  The enormous challenge of starting over again in my professional career was really only half the battle, as there was a whole other side of the story, namely my personal life, that we have yet to discuss. I was quite literally still picking up the pieces from 2007, and that added yet another layer of uncertainty and doubt amid everything else.

  The year 2007 marked the end of my sixteen-year marriage to Dyan, the mother of my four children. I found myself in a circumstance I deeply regretted, and one that I honestly never thought I would contribute to: the staggering statistics of divorce in professional sports. But I could only start picking myself up and moving on and adjusting to a new way of life.

  One of the most difficult parts was simply coming to grips with the time I had now lost with my kids. This new reality, compounded by the life of a pro baseball player, was the hardest pill to swallow. As any di
vorced parent who shares custody can attest, it’s mighty hard to get used to the idea that you can no longer walk down the hall every night and make the rounds through your children’s bedrooms, tucking in stray feet under blankets and securing closet doors to ward off monsters. I truly missed the everyday opportunities that come with just being a dad.

  My life had turned in a direction I had never intended, and to be blunt, I had no idea where I was going and what was next for me. I had a ton of questions and a new void to fill in my life.

  As they say, desperate times call for desperate measures, so I decided to take a year of solitude and I committed the next 365 days to just focusing on myself and forgoing any dating. During this time, I surrounded myself with eight people who would basically become my accountability team. These eight close friends served as my sounding boards, counselors, and guides. These were people who were committed to my best interests and were willing to level with me and tell me the hard truths that I needed to hear.

  As the months wore on after my divorce, there was some pressure, especially from the guys in the clubhouse, to get back “out there” again. It seemed like everybody knew someone I just had to meet. The offers were flattering, but I knew there was still work for me to do, and throughout my time of solitude, I stuck to my plan and dedicated myself to finishing the walk through the aftermath of my divorce.

  It certainly wasn’t easy and I certainly wouldn’t want to do it again, but my year of solitude ended up being a time of great growth and reflection. It’s hard not to be emotional about the end of a relationship, especially within the context of my religion, but I was able finally to come to a quiet inner place that allowed me to process this great sadness and move forward again. This challenge allowed God to show me things about myself, and further reveal His plan to me. God took me on a journey I didn’t think was possible, a journey of forgiveness that made it possible for me to trust again. On my own strength alone, there’s no way I could have done this.