xxiii

THE FLIGHT TO San Diego was loads of fun.

I couldn’t very well check the trophy with the rest of my luggage, so I brought it on the plane. Not surprisingly, the sight of me lugging that big thing down the aisle caused quite a stir, and word spread quickly through the cabin that I was the pro who had just won the Phoenix tournament. The pilot even came on the intercom not long after takeoff and congratulated me on behalf of the crew. Then a number of people came over and asked for autographs.

At first, I was kind of embarrassed, and I guess part of me was afraid to take any of it very seriously. I remember thinking, who am I to be signing autographs? The only thing anyone had ever wanted me to sign before was a check. But I soon realized that these people were golf fans who were genuinely interested in getting me to sign something for them, and I began to relax about the whole thing and to enjoy the attention.

Much the same thing happened the next day when I arrived at Torrey Pines for my first practice round. More and more people seemed to recognize me, not just as one of the pros but as one of the elite group of tournament winners. Not only that, but the other players seemed to regard me a little differently as well. Stewart was right; winning had definitely changed my standing on the Tour.

As for me, I was happy to be in San Diego. There wasn’t a better place on earth in terms of golf weather, and the North and South courses at Torrey Pines were both fun to play. Since I was playing the best golf of my life, I had great expectations for the week.

During the three days of practice rounds, I found that opening and closing Stewart’s window wasn’t always going to be so easy. Now that I was a winner—and the story du jour of the Tour—people pressed in on me from all sides. For one thing, everyone wanted an autograph, and getting from one hole to the next was like running a gauntlet.

Then there was the media coverage. I quickly discovered that writers compete with one another for “exclusive” interviews, which means that you have to answer the same questions over and over in one-on-one exchanges instead of just once before the entire group.

The whole thing made me marvel at how well the big names seemed to cope with it. Of course, Arnold Palmer was the best ever. Somehow he could connect with everyone around him—whether it be the gallery or the press—and make them feel that, for a moment, it was just the two of them. At the same time, he could return to his game in an instant and not lose his focus on the shot to be played.

I wondered how he could do that and not feel like a Ping-Pong ball, going back and forth from his game to everyone who wanted a piece of him. There were others, of course, who learned to do it as well. No one played to the crowd better than Chi Chi Rodriguez. Lee Trevino, too—as long as he was playing well.

I couldn’t help but notice that my generation of players was decidedly indifferent to the galleries in comparison to the older guys. Even during practice rounds, many of them failed to acknowledge the gallery’s applause.

Stewart noticed it, too.

We were playing a practice round on Tuesday with Duffy Waldorf and Alan Dunkel. Waldorf was a throwback in the sense that he wore colorful clothes, painted his golf balls with radical designs, and insisted on keeping golf fun. On the other hand, Dunkel was unfortunately typical of the superserious automatons being cranked out by the major collegiate golf programs in recent years. He was wound so tight I wondered how his bowels moved.

To put it kindly, Dunkel acted as if he were on the deck of a sinking ship and had just been told there was no more room in the lifeboat. He reacted to any shot that was less than perfect with a gravity ordinarily reserved for the last round of a major championship.

It rubbed off on his poor caddie, too. The guy didn’t have a lot of experience, which is about what you get as a newcomer on Tour. But he seemed nice enough, and it was obvious that he was trying hard.

Dunkel didn’t seem to notice or appreciate his aide’s efforts. Instead, he took out his frustration over his poor shots on the one guy on the course who was pulling for him to do well. Of course, this only made the caddie, whose name was J.D., even more nervous and tentative. It showed in every putt he read or club he recommended.

After watching Dunkel abuse his caddie for a while, I looked at Stewart. “You always hurt the one you love, right?”

Stewart laughed softly. “If he’s this way during practice, we don’t want to be around him on Thursday.”

Waldorf, on the other hand, made the afternoon a pleasure. It soon became obvious why he was one of the most popular guys on Tour. The word around the clubhouse was that the Duffmeister was virtually every Tour player’s second choice (after themselves, of course) to win every time he teed it up.

After taking all of this in and thinking again about the grace and style of the elder statesmen of the game, I resolved to accommodate everyone around me. So I signed every autograph, gave every interview, and thanked every volunteer.

And played like crap.

It really showed in the Wednesday pro-am. Between signing every program and cap in sight and helping each of my amateur partners select clubs and read putts, I had no energy left to concentrate on my own game and shot 74.

Stewart and I talked about it at dinner that night.

“How do you do both?” I asked him.

He was just finishing a spinach salad (in contrast to my steady diet of cheeseburgers, Stewart tended to eat healthy). “You mean play your game and take care of the rest of it as well?”

“Yeah,” I nodded.

He put his napkin aside. “You’ve got to decide how much time you need before each shot. That’s your time. After the shot is their time.”

“You make it sound so simple.”

He shook his head. “You have to keep it simple. It’ll get easier with practice.”

I wasn’t so sure. Sensing my unease, he added, “When it’s your time, you’ve got to give the shot your undivided attention and block everything else out. That means shutting the window all the way. Otherwise, you won’t play well, and they won’t have anything to watch.”

I drew some comfort from the fact that I would have no pro-am partners once the tournament started. That meant fewer distractions. But the galleries would still be there, probably bigger than during the practice rounds. It was important to me to play well. I didn’t want to be known as a one-shot wonder. I was going to have to open and close Stewart’s window at the right times.

Befitting my new status as a Tour winner, I was grouped with Jesper Parnevik and David Ogrin for the first two rounds. We went off on Thursday morning at 9:26. Both guys were easy to play with. With Stewart’s help, I was a lot better at taking care of business and shot 70, which was decent enough under the circumstances. I’d have to do better the rest of the way, though, if I wanted to have a chance to win.

We had played the North course the first day. It was the shorter and, for the most part, easier of the two layouts. That made my 70 even less impressive. It also meant that I would have to make up ground on the South course, which was considerably more difficult, especially after Rees Jones remodeled it in an effort to persuade the USGA to place the U.S. Open there.

Other than the difference in difficulty, there wasn’t much to distinguish one course from the other. They were designed by the same architect, Billy Bell, in the early ’50s, and both courses featured magnificent views of the Pacific Ocean. Throw in the balmy San Diego weather (the forecast was either nice or nicer, depending on the day), and you could think of worse things to be doing than trying to make the cut at Torrey Pines.

Despite the tougher layout, I regained my touch on Friday and cruised to a 66. As I clicked on the locker room computer and watched the scores being posted in something called “real time,” I could see that I had already vaulted over a whole slew of players. If the wind from the ocean picked up in the afternoon (as it often did), I could end up in the top fifteen or twenty spots for the weekend.

And that’s basically how it turned out. At the end of the day, I found myself tied for seventeenth with Emlyn Aubrey and Robert Gamez. Better still, I was only five shots back of the pace being set by Rick Fehr and Steve Elkington.

On the ride back to the hotel, I told Stewart that I thought we had a chance to make it two straight. As soon as I said it, I realized that it was probably a ridiculous statement for a Tour rookie to make, and I half-expected Stewart to laugh at my brashness. He didn’t.

Instead, he agreed. As he put it, “If we can post two more good rounds, I’ll be quite content to sit back and let the others shoot at us.”

We were going to play in threesomes after the cut, like we did at Phoenix. Gamez and I would be playing together with Brad Faxon, who was a stroke ahead of us. Aubrey would be in the group ahead, as he had been the last to finish at 136.

I hadn’t played with either Gamez or Faxon before. They were something of a contrast in styles, with Gamez being very demonstrative and Faxon very laidback. While that perhaps would interest the gallery, it was not important to me. As Stewart pointed out, I needed to learn to play well regardless of who was in my group.

I had also learned that outside distractions seemed to become more noticeable when I was struggling with my game. When I was playing well, the colors and shapes bordering my peripheral vision faded together, and the various sounds of the gallery and camera clickers became a soft, white noise. I was at peace at times like that.

That was the way I was feeling right then, calm and focused, with the outside world at a distance. And it showed in my score. I breezed around the South Course on Saturday with a second straight 66 and suddenly found myself two shots back of Elkington and only one behind Fehr.

The game was on for Sunday. The three of us would be playing together. And I was suddenly a big story again. Not that the questions were any different: Did I ever expect to be playing this well so quickly in my first year on Tour? Did I think it was possible to win two tournaments in my first month on Tour? Was I ready to prove that Phoenix was not a fluke?

Stewart had already warned me to take every question seriously and to answer as if I had never been asked that question before. He especially cautioned me not to commit the mortal sin of laughing at a question or dismissing it as stupid. I had to remind him that I knew better than to pick a fight with anyone who bought ink by the barrel.

When we were finally able to get away from the course, Stewart warned me that the prospect of a Tour rookie winning twice in his first four starts was going to attract a lot of media attention. He suggested, therefore, that we eat somewhere besides the sports bars that I preferred so that I wouldn’t see or hear the evening sportscasts. A quiet dinner somewhere, he said, followed by a movie, would be the perfect way to prepare for the next day’s festivities.

I playfully suggested that we see if Caddyshack was playing anywhere, but he had already arranged our evening. After a pleasant meal at a neighborhood restaurant called Shaun’s, we watched one of the Star Wars movies at a nearby dollar cinema. Then it was back to the hotel, where I fell asleep within fifteen minutes.

When I awoke the next morning, I felt well rested and hungry. Of course, Stewart was up before me and was sitting in a corner chair wiping down my clubs.

“How long you been up?”

He just smiled before saying, “Long enough to get in five miles at the beach.”

I was still squinting as I tried to adjust my eyes to the sunlight streaming through the window. I noticed that Stewart had pulled back the curtains, no doubt deliberately to wake me up.

Sensing that I had gotten my bearings, I looked over at my caddie and asked, “How about some breakfast?”

He shrugged. “Already had some. But I’ll go with you if you like.”

It took me about fifteen minutes to jump in and out of the shower, and then we headed downstairs to the coffee shop. We found a quiet table over in the corner. I had barely settled in when Mike Heinen, who would be playing a couple of groups ahead of me, came walking by. He stopped briefly, dropped a folded sports section from the Sunday San Diego Union-Tribune on my plate, and said with a smile, “Nice article. Good luck today.”

I unfolded the paper. What I saw made me suck in so hard that I made a sound. Across the top of the page was a huge headline that read: REEVES NEW TOUR PHENOM? The byline for the article beneath it belonged to T. R. Reinman, the paper’s well-respected golf writer. Essentially, Reinman made a case for my being the next superstar on Tour. “Admittedly there isn’t sufficient evidence to reach a judgment with any confidence,” he wrote, “but those who have watched Bobby Reeves over the last two weeks don’t see any weaknesses in his game.”

I was starting to read more when I felt Stewart’s hand across the table on my arm. “I was afraid you’d see that,” he said. “The best thing you can do is put it away.”

I knew he was right. Without saying anything, I folded the paper and laid it on the floor beneath my chair.

Stewart seemed to be studying me. Finally, he said, “Reading that stuff can’t do a thing for your game. It can only burden you with other people’s expectations.”

“Well,” I sniffed, “they’ve got to find some angle for the tournament. They get tired of writing about Tiger, you know.”

He nodded. “That’s fine, as long as you don’t take it seriously. Remember, today’s newspaper is tomorrow’s birdcage liner.”

I laughed. “Kinda gives new meaning to the phrase ‘catching a lot of shit,’ doesn’t it?”

Stewart wasn’t entertained by my attempt at humor. “Bobby, you’ve got to be prepared for the attention. Remember: Just open and close that window. We’ve got another chance to win, but we’ve got to avoid distractions.”

I had a feeling that was going to be harder now than ever before.