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MY PGA TOUR debut in Hawaii was an inauspicious one.

Although Stewart had done his best to prepare me for opening-night jitters, I found it impossible not to be nervous. And even though the field was missing some of the bigger names on Tour, the thought of finally teeing it up with the best players on the planet was stuck in the recesses of my brain and couldn’t be pushed away.

We arrived early enough to play three practice rounds at the Waialae Country Club in Honolulu, where the Hawaiian Open was being played. Since this was the first full-field event of the year, I expected a line of players at the gate to enter the tournament, all eager to spend a week in beautiful Hawaii with the wife and kids. For some reason, however, the tournament didn’t draw a particularly strong field, and I was able to get in.

I played my first practice round with Dave Timpa, a guy I knew from college golf, and Kirk Triplett, a Tour veteran who had a much better game than his relatively obscure identity would suggest. Both were genuinely friendly and welcomed me to the Tour.

At first, I was so jittery I thought I wouldn’t be able to take the club back. It wasn’t just that I wanted to make a good impression on my fellow competitors, either. Hell, there were more people in the gallery just watching us practice than I had ever seen at any mini Tour event.

I learned quickly though that practice rounds are pretty loose deals on the Tour. Players are normally allowed to hit as many shots as they like at each hole, provided it doesn’t hold up play. Triplett had played in Hawaii several times before and showed us where the holes would probably be located during the four rounds. If no one was waiting behind us, we’d hit several putts at each of the likely pins to get an idea of how they would break.

I noticed Stewart paying especially close attention to all this. He knew, as I did, that there was nothing more important than getting the correct read on a putt. More than once, I saw him penciling notes in his yardage book about the contours and grain in different greens as we putted.

I felt good about my first time around the course as a PGA Tour regular. Both Timpa and Triplett complimented me on a number of my shots, which served to remind me that I was perhaps as capable of impressing them as they were me. Both of them, it turned out, were also curious about my irons. Apparently, one of the favorite pastimes of Tour players was scoping out one another’s equipment. Everyone seemed to be looking for an edge, and they didn’t hesitate to look for it in another player’s bag. In fact, I was surprised to see players routinely swinging each other’s clubs on the range and comparing notes on them.

Of course, I didn’t know what to tell these guys when they asked where my irons came from. All I could say was they were a custom set that my caddie had given me. That didn’t satisfy either one of them; they wanted to know swing weight and shaft flex, and naturally I couldn’t tell them. I didn’t know whether they thought I was holding out on them or just plain dumb.

At any rate, I played again with Triplett on Tuesday. Timpa had other plans, but we picked up Mark Calcavecchia and another rookie named Dave Frazier, who had finished two spots ahead of me at La Quinta. This would also be my introduction to four-ball competition on the PGA Tour. We tossed up the balls on the first tee, and Triplett and I took on Calcavecchia and Frazier. The stakes were twenty bucks a hole, with an extra twenty for winning either nine and forty for winning the eighteen.

Nothing ever got my attention faster than playing for money. And I suspect that having another rookie in the group helped settle my nerves. For whatever reason, I played pretty well, but Calcavecchia made seven birdies by himself, and we lost sixty bucks apiece.

On Wednesday, they put me in the pro-am at the last minute to fill in for Davis Love, who pulled his back working out in the fitness trailer. I was a little uncomfortable about replacing such a prominent player. For one thing, I knew that my amateur partners would feel bad getting an unknown rookie after being told they were playing with one of the biggest names in golf.

I did my best to entertain the three guys who had each paid $2,500 to play one round of golf with a “real live” PGA Tour player. I basically gave them all a playing lesson, clubbing them on shots, reading their putts, and searching for their balls in the rough. Despite my best efforts, though, we didn’t come close to winning anything. Needless to say, I didn’t get much out of the round to prepare me for the start of the tournament the next day, but I considered it part of my duty as a fledgling player. (Again, as Stewart would say, it was all part of climbing the learning curve.)

All this time, Stewart was taking notice of my fidgety behavior and doing his best to keep me grounded. More than once, he reminded me that I had earned my way on Tour and belonged there. Of course, I knew he was right, but it was still unsettling to eat lunch in the locker room between Paul Azinger and Mark O’Meara or warm up on the range next to Ernie Els and Hal Sutton. I figured I’d eventually be comfortable enough to ask Sutton how he liked the potato salad on the players’ buffet but not anytime soon.

I won’t put either of us through the painful details of my short-lived experience in the tournament. However, I will tell you that I liked the Waialae Country Club and was disappointed that I didn’t score better on it than I did. It’s an old course, designed by Seth Raynor in 1926, and plays short by today’s standards. I’m not one of those, however, who believe that a course can’t be a good test of golf unless it measures 7,200 yards from the tips.

While Waialae does give up a lot of birdies when the Tour’s in town, its list of past champions includes Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Hale Irwin, and Ben Crenshaw. Any course producing such an illustrious group of winners doesn’t have to prove anything more to me.

It’s taken me awhile to admit all that. Frankly, if you had asked me about the place right after I shot 72–73 to miss the cut, I wouldn’t have had very nice things to say about it. I certainly couldn’t fault my ball striking for the high scores. If the truth be told, I hit the new irons as well as I could—so well, in fact, that I noticed Dan Forsman staring into my bag while we were waiting to hit on the eighth tee on Friday.

“Where’d you get these things?”

“My caddie got them for me. They were custom made in Scotland.”

Forsman raised his eyebrows. Fortunately, before he could ask any more questions, the fairway ahead cleared, and our attention turned to our tee shots. I realized, however, that the professional curiosity about my clubs was not going to go away. There would be more questions as other players saw my clubs.

The real problem with my scoring at Hawaii, as you might imagine, was that I couldn’t buy a putt. In hindsight, I suppose I was pressing a bit. Stewart later said as much, but told me not to worry about it. He said that part would come as we became more accustomed to being out on Tour.

David Feherty, the Irish player whose outrageous sense of humor had earned him an escape from the world of gut-wrenching six-footers to that of television headsets and magazine columns, recently told me that my first time out was pretty typical. In fact, he gave me a passing grade just for keeping breakfast down each day.

Stewart’s assessment was pretty much the same. He assured me that, for every player like Ben Crenshaw who won his very first Tour event, there were thousands of others like me who missed the cut. The important thing, he said, was to take something away from the experience.

I almost winced when he told me that. I figured out a long time ago that people only talked about learning experiences when something crappy happened. Let’s face it, no one ever said to the guy who just won the lottery, “Now, what do you think we can learn from this?”

Despite Stewart’s consolation, it was a long flight from Hawaii. My expectations had been high, and I was disappointed. Still, I soon discovered a wonderful thing about life on the PGA Tour: There’s an opportunity for redemption each week. We were headed for Bermuda Dunes and the Bob Hope Desert Classic, and I would have a chance to make up for the disappointment in Hawaii.

Not only that, but it would be my first encounter with the most popular player of all time, Arnold Palmer. I would never have expected him, of all people, to give me my biggest clue to date about Stewart’s true identity.