4

THE FALL CLASSIC

TO THE STARS, the last two months of every year is a gravy train, a time to pick and choose among the made-for-TV goodies that are available to them week after week.

That is the side of golf the public sees as the holidays approach: the Kapalua Invitational on Maui leading to the Shark Shootout in California, which comes before the Skins Game in Palm Springs and just before the zillion-dollar Johnnie Walker Invitational in Jamaica. One corporate sponsor after another lines up to play Santa Claus to the game’s millionaires.

The side the public doesn’t see is entirely different. For most players trying to make a living playing golf, November and December are the months that determine where they will be playing during the next twelve months. Will they be on the Big Tour, playing for million-dollar purses every week, trying to decide whether they prefer the blue courtesy car or the red? Or will they be slogging along on the Nike Tour, playing for 20 percent of what they play for on the big tour, hoping their car can crisscross the country without needing a new engine. Many won’t even make the Nike Tour; they will be forced to play in Asia or Africa or South America or, if they don’t want to go overseas, on the various mini-tours around North America, where you have to finish in the top ten most weeks just to recoup your entry fee.

All of them dream about walking the fairways with the TV cameras shining and the crowds screaming. But to have any chance at all to be one of the elite, they all have to go through the same labyrinth, one that often seems to have no exit.

On tour, they call it school. It is school—in the same sense that swimming the Atlantic might be called a workout.

On a picture-postcard December afternoon in Palm Springs, the Dunes Course of the La Quinta Golf Club looked no different than it looks almost every day of the year. The temperature was in the 70s; the afternoon shadows, which begin closing in by 3 o’clock during the winter, were beginning to darken the surrounding mountains; and as far as the eye could see, there were golfers.

But these golfers weren’t playing for a dollar or for five dollars or even for that night’s dinner. They were playing for their lives.

If the Ryder Cup is the event all golfers dream about, the PGA Tour’s annual Qualifying School is the event they all have nightmares about. Many of those nightmares are quite real. Almost everyone who has ever collected a check on tour has a story about Q-School. The first time Curtis Strange went through the school he bogeyed the last three holes to miss qualifying for the tour by one shot. “Choked my guts out,” he said years later. “I doubt if I’ve ever choked that bad any other time in my life.”

His wife, Sarah, remembers that night vividly. “We just sat in the hotel room staring at one another, thinking now what do we do?”

Back then what you did was wait six months for another chance, because there were two schools each year. Now the wait is twelve months. Some have likened the brutal pressure one goes through at Q-School to taking a bar exam. Brian Henninger, a tour rookie in 1993 who had just missed keeping his playing privileges, was at Q-School for the fourth time. To him Q-School is tougher than law school. “At least if you pass the bar, you’re done,” he said. “Here, you can pass the test one year and be right back taking it again the next year. And the year after and the year after.”

More than any other professional sport, golf forces players to perform each year in order to continue to play. There are no long-term, guaranteed contracts like the ones in team sports. In tennis, players are paid just for getting into a tournament, and if their singles play falters, they can fall back on doubles as a career. In golf, you have to beat half the field every week to make any money and there’s no such thing as doubles.

Everyone starts each year at zero. There are two ways to avoid the hell of qualifying: winning and earning. Winning a tournament earns you an exemption for two years. Seven tournaments carry a ten-year exemption: the four majors (the Masters, the U.S. Open, the British Open, and the PGA), the World Series of Golf, the Tour Championship, and the Players Championship. That means there are usually about a dozen players with a long-term playing guarantee and perhaps thirty to forty others who have two-year guarantees. Everyone else is playing for a spot among the year’s top 125 money earners. If you don’t make that list you go back to school, where the top forty scorers (and anyone tied for fortieth) earn a spot on the next year’s PGA Tour.

On this day—the third day of the 1993 school—Wendy Goydos stood on the 13th tee at the Dunes with a look of complete terror on her face. Unlike on tour, where everyone must walk—carts look bad on TV—players are allowed to use carts during Q-School. Wendy Goydos was caddying for her husband, Paul. That meant she was driving the cart, keeping his clubs clean, and trying to keep him from—his words—“turning into a Tasmanian Devil.”

Like Henninger, Goydos had been a tour rookie in 1993. He had struggled, finishing in the top twenty in one tournament. But he had improved as the year went on. He had played steady golf for two days, shooting 71–71. That put him in a tie for fifty-seventh place, not brilliant, but comfortable with four more days to play. Now though, after knocking his ball in the water at the 10th hole and making double bogey, Goydos was one over par on his third round. If he went any higher, he would be digging a hole for himself.

“There’s just no margin for error right now,” Wendy Goydos said quietly. “Right now, I’m dying.” She took a deep breath. “I don’t think I’ll be able to breathe until I see that ball safely on dry land.”

The ball in question was, at that moment, resting near her husband’s feet. He had a nine-iron in his hands and was taking aim at a long, narrow green 147 yards away. The 13th hole at the Dunes is a simple-looking par-three, but it has water in front and a couple of deep bunkers behind it. On this day, the pin was cut up front, near the water. If you tried to get the ball close, you risked the water. If you played safe, you could find the bunkers or have a very long putt.

“Friend of mine made eight here yesterday,” Goydos said casually, waiting for the group in front to clear the green. Wendy looked slightly ill.

Goydos pulled the nine-iron back, made a smooth pass at the ball, and it flew toward the green. “Is it enough?” Wendy Goydos asked.

It was. The ball hit and stopped 10 feet behind the pin. “I smothered it,” Goydos said, handing the nine-iron to Wendy, not willing to concede that he had hit a superb shot.

Wendy Goydos was breathing again. Barely. “And just think,” she said, “after today, we’re still only halfway there. Paul will make it. I’m not sure I will.”

There are three stages of Q-School each year. In 1993 there were eight hundred entries. The entry fee is $3,000 for most players. Based on their earnings that year, about a hundred players are exempt from the first stage. Their entry fee is $2,750. About thirty more are exempt into the finals based on finishing 126th to 150th on the money list or because of career earnings. Their fee is a mere $2,500.

How often do players go back to school? Consider the field of 191 players who reached the Q-School finals in 1993: seventeen of them had won at least one tournament on tour. Of the forty-three players who had made it through the school in 1992, only twelve had retained their playing privileges at the end of 1993. Two—Brett Ogle and Grant Waite—had won tournaments. Ten others finished in the top 125. The other thirty-one headed back to school. Four of those thirty-one were exempt into the finals because they had finished between 126th and 150th on the money list. The rest were exempt from only the first stage.

The players who gathered in Palm Springs to begin play on December 1 ranged in age from twenty-two to forty-five. The oldest player in the field was Bobby Cole, who, twenty-six years earlier as a nineteen-year-old phenom out of South Africa, had won the Qualifying School. Stardom had been predicted for him then. Instead, his major claim to fame had become his marriage to Laura Baugh, a phenom herself on the women’s tour as much for her blond good looks as her golf swing. Now, with five children at home, Cole was hoping for one more shot at the tour.

George Burns was also forty-five, and he was trying to get back on tour too. Twelve years earlier, with nine holes left in the U.S. Open at Merion Country Club outside Philadelphia, Burns had led the tournament. David Graham caught him on the back nine, and Burns never came close in a major again.

And then there was Mike Donald. Among the 191 players, Donald was probably the most famous. Anyone who followed golf at all remembered Donald’s 1990 U.S. Open. He was the career journeyman, the lifelong tour grinder who, in his eleventh year on tour, almost won the Open. It could have been Jack Fleck in 1955, Orville Moody in 1969, Mike Donald in 1990; men whose names appeared out of place on a list that included Hogan, Palmer, Nicklaus, and Watson, but were there nonetheless.

Donald led for most of the last two rounds, and he still led with three holes to play. If Hale Irwin had not holed the greatest putt of his career over hill and dale from 60 feet away on the 18th hole, Donald would have had a two-stroke lead.

Instead, it was a one-stroke lead. And so, when he bogeyed the 16th, he ended up tied with Irwin, creating an 18-hole playoff the next day. Donald led all afternoon. This time he did have a two-shot lead with three holes to play. But Irwin birdied the 16th and Donald bogeyed the 18th and they were tied again. Halfway to the hole, Donald’s par putt at the 18th, a 15-footer, looked like it was going to go in. Donald certainly thought so. He started to walk sideways, preparing to celebrate. But as it got closer, Donald stopped. He could see it was dying to the right. “I was hoping it might just nip the side door and spin in.”

An inch more left, maybe two, and it would have done just that. By that margin, Donald missed a ten-year exemption and all that comes with spending the rest of your life being introduced as a U.S. Open champion. Instead, Irwin birdied the first hole of sudden death and, after ninety-one holes of golf, Donald had come up an inch and a half short.

But he was one of those runners-up people don’t soon forget. The son of an auto mechanic, Donald was the antithesis of what most people perceive PGA Tour pros to be. He had grown up playing public courses in south Florida and had scrambled his way through college and onto the tour. He went into the last tournament of his rookie year knowing he needed to make the cut to make enough money that week to retain his playing privileges for the next year.

He played well the first two days, made the cut, and walked into the scorer’s tent to sign his scorecard. A round of golf isn’t official on tour until a player has checked his score and signed his card. Suddenly, Donald felt woozy and dizzy. He actually thought he might faint. The numbers on his card were blurry. Hoping they were right, he managed to sign his name and stumble out of the tent.

“It just hit me when I walked in there that if I signed my card right, I was still on tour,” he said. “Next thing I knew, I couldn’t see straight.”

He saw straight enough to improve steadily year after year. His only win was at Williamsburg in 1989, but he made a solid, comfortable living doing what he loved to do most—play golf.

He looked like—and was—the kind of guy who would be just as comfortable having a beer in a truck stop or playing cards at the local muni-course as sitting in the clubhouse at a fancy country club. He had a beer belly and a friendly, round, ruddy face. Since he was single, the most photographed member of his gallery during that 1990 Open was Pearl Donald, his mom. The announcers kept mentioning that he was a bachelor, which didn’t make his girlfriend, who was watching on television, terribly happy. He was a gracious loser, someone who never whined about his fate or complained about bad luck. About the closest he ever came to expressing regret was an occasional shake of the head and a whispered “I had him by the short hairs” when he talked about the playoff.

He ended up having his best year on tour in 1990—finishing twenty-second on the money list—but in December of that year, his mother got sick. She was in and out of the hospital for the next month, growing weaker and weaker. She died in January at the age of sixty-four and, suddenly, the person Donald called first after a good round wasn’t there anymore.

He stayed home at the beginning of 1991 to make sure his dad was okay. When his father finally insisted he get back to playing, he flew to California for the Bob Hope Desert Classic. The pros play the first four days of the Hope with amateur partners, so Donald found himself walking down the first fairway on the opening day of the tournament with a 15-handicapper he had just met.

“How you been playing this year?” the 15-handicapper asked.

“To tell you the truth, I haven’t played the last few weeks,” Donald said. “My mom passed away last month and I wanted to spend some time at home with my dad.”

The 15-handicapper shrugged. “Buy him a dog and he’ll be fine.”

Welcome back to the tour, Mike.

Most people weren’t nearly that insensitive (how could they be?) and many of the other players went out of their way to tell Donald how sorry they were. But Donald simply couldn’t shake the angry, hurt feelings he had been left with after his mother’s death. It was as if the fool from the Bob Hope kept following him around repeating his boorish mantra.

For most of his career, Donald had been outgoing and friendly with his fellow pros. He was popular enough to be elected as one of the four player members of the tour’s board in 1987 (beating Tom Watson) and had fond memories of his early days on tour when everyone drove from one tournament to the next and the tour was as much a fraternity as it was a business.

It was all different by 1991. Now everyone flew and most players traveled with their families. A lot of Donald’s buddies were married or off the tour. He spent a lot of nights alone in his hotel room asking himself, what the hell am I doing here?

His attitude affected his play, and by the end of the year, Donald had finished out of the top 125 for the first time in his career. He went back to school and again came up short. Even so, he was able to get in most of the places he wanted to play in 1992 because when he wrote and asked for sponsor’s exemptions almost everyone said yes, partly because they remembered 1990 and partly because Donald had always been one of the tour’s good guys.

He managed to get his card back at the end of 1992—finishing 120th on the money list—but 1993 had been a disaster. He had missed the cut in his last eleven tournaments and finished the year 184th on the money list. He had made only $51,113.

Donald turned thirty-eight in July and talked often about quitting. His father kept telling him that he could probably live a very happy life back home in Hollywood, Florida, especially if he was as miserable as he said he was on tour. Donald certainly wasn’t happy.

“There’s a saying out here that when someone asks you how you played and you tell them you shot eighty, half of them are thrilled and the other half wish it had been eighty-one,” he said one afternoon shortly after another missed cut. “It’s an exaggeration, but there’s a lot to it. Sure, we’re all friendly to one another and we get along. In fact, most of the guys out here are good guys. But when you get right down to it, do any of them really give a damn about Mike Donald?

“Of course not. Why should they? They’ve got lives of their own and problems of their own. The only ones who really care about you are your family and I don’t have any family out here. I’m not complaining. I enjoy spending time alone, I really do. But it can be a very lonely life.”

It had gotten extremely lonely for Donald in 1991. For years, Fred Couples had been one of his best friends on tour. They had come up through the ranks together, and even after Couples had become a star, they had stayed friends. Couples was one of the few players who had called Donald during his mother’s illness to see how she was doing. Given Couples’s famous aversion to the telephone, Donald was touched by the fact that Couples had picked up the phone to call him.

But Couples had gone through a divorce in 1992 and was now traveling most of the time with his girlfriend, Tawnya Dodd. There wasn’t as much time for friends as there once had been, and although Donald would never admit it, he missed that friendship. What’s more, when a player is going badly and gets down on himself and on tour life the way Donald had, other players can sense it and feel it. They don’t want to pick up those vibes themselves, so they tend to steer clear. Donald knew he was giving off negative vibes at the end of 1993, but he couldn’t stop himself.

“Every week I show up and say, okay, new start, let’s have a good attitude and get something going,” he said as the end of the year closed in. “Then something goes wrong on Thursday and the next thing I know I’ve put up another goddamm seventy-four and here we go again.

“There’s part of me that wants to quit, go home, and not pick up a golf club for a long time. But there’s another part of me that says this is what I do best and this is what I want to keep doing.”

On the first night back at school, Donald and one of his old friends, Lance Ten Broeck, walked into a bar to have a quick beer before turning in. When the owner of the bar saw Donald, he stopped dead in his tracks.

“Hey, Mike Donald!” he shouted. “Mike Donald! God, I’ll never forget that Open back in ’90. I watched every second of it, every single second. It almost killed me when you lost that playoff!”

Donald had heard this speech in various forms before. Most of the time, he smiled, thanked the person for remembering, signed an autograph, and promised to do better the next time. Now, though, back in school for the second time in three years, he looked at the man, smiled wanly, and said, “Almost killed you?”

Players call the Q-School finals the Fall Classic, a term more readily associated with baseball’s World Series. The World Series is watched by millions, the Q-School by a couple hundred. And yet the pressure that is palpable, even to a spectator, is extraordinary.

The golf course is almost eerily silent, a silence that is only occasionally broken by a cry of anguish, a scream of pain, or the plunk that a thrown club makes when it lands in a water hazard.

There are no scoreboards, no microphones in the cups to make the ball rattle for TV, no white paint inside them to help the camera pick them up. There are no gallery ropes, because there is virtually no gallery; no concession stands, souvenir tents, or ticket takers. And there isn’t single corporate tent or logo anywhere in sight.

There is also no computerized scoring system, which means that at the end of each day, players, families, and friends gather around a large scoreboard set up near the 18th green at the host course and watch as the scores trickle in and are posted by hand. Once all the scores have gone up, everyone stands around analyzing and interpreting what it all means and what needs to be done the next day. Then they go home to worry about it and hope they can sleep.

The Q-School finals last six days. During the first four days, the players are spread out over two golf courses. After seventy-two holes, the field is cut to the low 90 scores and ties, and the last two rounds are played on one course. The host course in 1993 was the Jack Nicklaus Resort Course that is part of the sprawling PGA West complex. La Quinta, about five miles away, was the second course.

The Q-School is grueling not only because it is six days long, but because of the mental strain on all the players. They all know they are one step from the promised land of The Tour, but they also know that most of them won’t get there. Even though most players use carts, the pace of play is brutally slow. On tour, the average round for a threesome is about four and a half hours. At Q-School, it is closer to five and a half.

“Just wait till the last day,” said Paul Goydos, who was in the finals for the third time. “You’ll see guys absolutely freeze over one-foot putts. They won’t be able to draw their putters back.”

To Goydos, surviving the school was important. He was twenty-nine and had a wife, a three-year-old daughter, and a one-year-old daughter. But his route to this point had been so different from most players’ that he was able to joke occasionally about the nerves and the tension he was feeling.

“I never expected to get to this level in golf,” he said. “I didn’t think about it seriously as a career until a couple of years ago. Other guys will tell you they’ve worked their whole lives to get on tour. I can honestly say I haven’t.”

Goydos grew up in Long Beach, the youngest of three boys. His father was a former navy chief who became an administrator at Long Beach State University. Goydos took up golf after being beaned in the head three times in one Little League baseball game. His father had some old clubs in the hall closet, left over from his navy days, that had gone unused for years. Goydos pulled them out and began knocking whiffle balls around the backyard. Eventually his parents bought him a series of six lessons at a nearby municipal course and he got hooked on the game.

“My parents bought me a $20 monthly ticket at this muni-course that was called the boneyard because almost everyone who played there was so old,” he said. “I was the only kid there. I’d just stand around the first tee waiting for the starter to hook me up with some old guys so I could play.”

He was always good, but never a star. His high school golf coach was married to the golf coach at Long Beach State. She talked him into giving Goydos a scholarship and he lived at home while he was in college because his parents lived a block from campus.

During his senior year, he began to have trouble with his hands. They would swell up on him to the point where he couldn’t make a tight enough fist to grip a golf club. The pain and swelling stopped when he didn’t play, so after reaching the third round of the U.S. Public Links Championship at the end of his senior year, he quit the game, got his degree in finance, and began looking for a job.

He had met George Madak, a local mortgage broker, at the club where Long Beach State played its home matches and he went to work for him. Madak had a daughter named Wendy, a pretty blonde who taught kindergarten. She liked Goydos’s dry sense of humor and he liked everything about her. They were married on New Year’s Eve in 1989.

By then, Goydos was playing golf again. When the mortgage business began to die in 1988, Goydos began working part-time as a starter at a nine-hole golf course to supplement his dwindling income. On a slow afternoon he found himself leafing through a golf magazine and saw an ad for oversized grips, designed for people with arthritis. He wasn’t certain if his problem was arthritis, but he decided the grips were worth a try and ordered a set.

He hadn’t touched a club for close to a year, but when the grips allowed him to play pain free, he started to play again. He entered several mini-tour events in California as an amateur and played well enough that Doug Ives, a local newspaperman who ran the mini-tour, urged him to turn pro.

Since Goydos had never declared himself a pro, he hadn’t collected any prize money that summer. But Ives had kept track of what his winnings would have been and allowed him to apply that money to his entry fees for the following summer. He turned pro, played well again, collected his money, and decided to give Q-School a try in the fall of 1989.

The first stage in his region was at Fort Ord. Goydos shot 70 the first day, signed his scorecard, walked outside, and felt the ground start to shake. It was the San Francisco earthquake. “San Francisco was eighty miles from Santa Cruz, where the quake actually hit; we were thirty,” he said. “I figured, that’s it, they’ll have to call this thing off. There was no electricity anyplace, the aftershocks kept hitting constantly, and the only food, electricity, and water was through the backup generator they had on the army base. It was ridiculous.”

They played, though, and Goydos ended up winning in spite of the fact that he was up running for doorways several times a night when the aftershocks hit. He went to the second stage and missed making the finals by a stroke—losing in a nine-man playoff for the last seven spots. “The last guy to get in was Ed Dougherty,” he remembered. “He made a forty-footer and I missed from fifteen, then he got his card and made five hundred grand the next three years.”

Goydos had no card and nothing approaching five hundred grand. After he and Wendy got married, she suggested he do some substitute teaching in the Long Beach city schools. The money was decent—$110 a day—and the work was from eight to three, leaving afternoons free for practice.

A lot of substitute work in public school systems is in the inner city, and Goydos spent a lot of time teaching kids from the tougher neighborhoods. It opened his eyes to a lot of things. “The life we lead on tour isn’t real,” he said. “We’re in our own little world out here, and most people don’t understand how horrible things are outside that world. Golf, for some reason, is recession proof. I would hate to have to go back and look for a job in Long Beach right now.”

Goydos had his adventures as a teacher. One morning one of his eighth-grade students came to him and said he had a problem. “What’s the problem?” Goydos asked.

“I think my friends and I just killed someone.”

It had been a street fight that got out of hand. Goydos stayed with the youngster through the hearing process and was glad when he was cleared of wrongdoing. “Most of the time, these aren’t bad kids,” he said. “They’re just in a very bad situation.”

On another afternoon, during a recess, Goydos was in the schoolyard watching a group of kids play basketball. A fight broke out in the housing project across the street and a man ran out of one house, heading straight for the schoolyard, followed by another man who was shooting at him. The gunshots began spraying the schoolyard and everyone hit the deck for several terrifying minutes. The man was finally disarmed with no one injured.

“It wasn’t that big a deal,” Goydos said. “It’s not like the guy was shooting at us. He was just shooting.” Just not the kind of shooting most professional golfers are exposed to.

Goydos returned to the California mini-tour in the summer of 1990 and struggled. He was down to his last $800—with his first child on the way—and used it to pay the $400 entry fees for the last two big events of the summer, the Long Beach Open and the Queen Mary Open. “If something didn’t happen at one of them, I was through,” he said. “We’d have hung by a thread until fall when I could start subbing again.”

Something happened. He won the Long Beach Open and $20,000. “It felt like all the money in the world,” he said, laughing.

The victory kept him playing until Q-School rolled around again. This time he made it through the first two stages but shot “a million” in the finals.

“I played the last two days with Dudley Hart and Mike Standly,” he said. “They were both twenty-two and right out of college and they both made it. I was twenty-six, married, and had a kid. I started thinking, you’re too old to be bumming around as a part-time golfer. Maybe it’s time to look for a real job.”

But by making it to the finals he had qualified to play part-time on the fledgling Ben Hogan Tour. The PGA Tour, believing that a proving ground was needed for young players, started the Hogan Tour in 1990. The prize money was a tenth of that on the regular tour—or, as the Hogan players called it, “the big tour”—but it gave players who didn’t make the big tour a place to play and sharpen their games without having to go overseas.

The first seventy players who miss the cut at Q-School are exempt for the Hogan Tour. Goydos hadn’t even made that group, so he had only a partial exemption, meaning he figured to get into only a handful of Hogan Tour events. He wasn’t even going to bother, but the first two events were in California and Arizona, so he figured he might as well play if he got in. He made $800 the first week, then got in the next week as the last alternate. He birdied the last three holes on the last day and made $8,000.

That windfall put him high enough on the money list to make him exempt for most events on the Hogan Tour. The Goydoses decided it was now or never. Wendy quit her job, Paul bought a Cherokee, and the whole family—Paul, Wendy, and their infant daughter, Chelsea—set out to see the country. Goydos ended up playing twenty-five events in 1991 and made $30,000 to finish thirty-ninth on the money list.

The only real setback came when Goydos woke up one morning, looked out the window, and saw nothing in the parking space where he had parked the Cherokee. “Did you move the car?” he asked Wendy.

“No.”

“Well, someone did.” The police found the car—abandoned—a week later.

The $30,000 just about covered travel expenses and also made him exempt from the first stage of qualifying at the 1991 Q-School. The second stage was at his favorite golf course, Fort Ord. “I figured I was a lock to make the finals,” he said. Not quite. He ended up as first alternate and flew to Greenlefe in central Florida because he had been told that first alternates always got in. Not always. “They said it was the first time in history everyone showed up.”

His place on the Hogan money list left him partially exempt again starting 1992. Again, he thought seriously about getting a job. But his golf was improving steadily, he hadn’t had any pain in his hands, and he wanted to give it one more try. But time was really running short. Wendy was pregnant again, and it was a sure bet that they weren’t going to be able to live out of the Cherokee with two little children. Since Wendy had given up her job, money was even tighter than it had been before. Goydos went back to subbing in January and February and waited to find out if he would again get in at Yuma as an alternate the way he had the year before.

Wednesday night, word came. He was in. The family hopped in the Cherokee, made the drive overnight to Yuma, and arrived in the middle of a hailstorm. There was no chance to practice Thursday and no chance to find a caddy so Wendy carried the bag.

Goydos won. The Cherokee went back into full-time service. By the end of 1992, Goydos was seventeenth on the Hogan money list. That put him straight into the 1992 Q-School finals. He was also a vastly more experienced golfer than he had been during his first trip to the finals two years earlier. He had played in fifty tournaments in two years and had learned how to deal with pressure and with mistakes. He kept his cool for six days, didn’t let the frigid weather at the Woodlands (outside Houston) bother him, and cruised home in eighteenth place. At twenty-eight, about to become a father for the second time, he had made it to the big tour.

But for how long?

Goydos showed up for his first tournament in Hawaii wondering how he would fit in on tour. He went to the range late one afternoon and began hitting balls. A few yards away, he noticed someone else hitting balls. The guy was tall and blond and had a swing that looked like it had been chiseled to perfection for years. Goydos was transfixed, watching one rocket after another.

Who is that guy? he wondered. I’ve never seen him in my life and I can’t come close to hitting a ball like that. If everyone out here is this good, I’ve got no chance. Absolutely no chance.

Discouraged, Goydos picked up his clubs and started back to the clubhouse. As he walked by the golden ball striker he happened to glance at his bag. The name on it was Payne Stewart. Wearing a baseball cap and regular clothes on a practice day instead of his trademark knickers, Stewart had looked like everyone else on tour looks and not like Payne Stewart. Goydos breathed a huge sigh of relief. “I already knew I couldn’t beat Payne Stewart,” he said. “I could live with that.”

He missed the cut in Hawaii—“by a million”—but made the cut the next week in Tucson, curling in a six-foot putt on the 18th hole that just caught the edge to get in on the number. He played well on the weekend, made $8,000, and began to think that maybe he could play with the big boys.

It wasn’t easy. He made a reasonable number of cuts, but had trouble when the pressure began to build on the weekends. Getting the putter back on a four-footer was a lot tougher on Sunday afternoon than on Thursday morning, especially when every shot was worth a couple grand.

His goal at the start of the year had been to make the top 125 and keep his card. But as the year drew to a close, it became apparent that the top 150 was more realistic. If he did that, he would at least be straight back into the finals at school. The pressure kept building.

At the Southern in early October, he needed one birdie on the last three holes to make the cut and didn’t get it. A week later, at Disney, he shot 66 the first day but gagged the last nine holes on Saturday (the tournament cuts after fifty-four holes), shot 38, and missed by one again. Another miss at Texas and there was only one tournament left—the Las Vegas Invitational.

Las Vegas is one of two ninety-hole tournaments on tour. The cut comes after fifty-four holes. With nine holes left, Goydos knew he was in trouble, needing at least three birdies, maybe four, to get to the number. He got two, but came to the last hole knowing he needed one more birdie to have a chance. He hit his third shot to 10 feet and drained the putt for birdie.

Still, he wasn’t sure if he was in because the tournament is played at three sites the first three days and scores are tabulated at only one. He called the press room at the host course and reached Chuck Adams, one of the tour’s media officials.

“Chuck, I want to find out if I made the cut,” he said.

Adams looked through the computer and found Goydos at four under par. The cut, he knew, was five. He also knew how desperately Goydos needed to make the cut.

“Paul, I’m really sorry,” he said. “It looks like you missed by one.”

Even though he knew that had been a possibility, Goydos was stunned by the finality of it. “So the number went to six,” he said. “I had really hoped it would be five.”

Now it was Adams who was stunned—or at least confused. “Paul, the number is five,” he said. “You’re at four.”

Goydos’s heart leaped. The computer was wrong! For some reason, his final birdie wasn’t in there yet. “Chuck, you’re sure the cut is five?”

“Positive.”

Goydos explained to Adams that his score in the computer was wrong. A few minutes later, when his scorecard—which was his official score—reached the scorekeeper, it confirmed the computer’s error. Goydos lived to play the weekend.

Deep down he harbored a long-shot hope to shoot lights-out the last two days and blow by enough people to make enough money to make the top 125. Tenth place, worth $35,000, would have done it, but Goydos would have had to shoot 133 the last two rounds to get there. That didn’t happen, but he did shoot 68–72, good enough to give him a tie for forty-third and earn him $4,760 for the week. That put his winnings at $87,804 for the year, which put him into 152nd place on the money list. Since two of the players ahead of him, Bernhard Langer and Nick Faldo, were members of the European tour, he was exactly 150th on the list among PGA Tour members, meaning he was the last player exempt from the first two stages of the school.

In all, Goydos had finished sixteenth in earnings among the 1992 Q-School graduates. “It was a strange year,” he said. “There were times when I was absolutely convinced I was the worst player in the history of the game. Then I found out that everyone feels that way at one time or another. I know so much more about golf and about the tour now than I did a year ago, it isn’t even funny.

“That’s the weird thing. I don’t know if I can get through the school again, but I’m convinced if I do I’ll be a much better player next year because of what I’ve learned this year. The question is, can I survive the school? I think I can, but you never know. There’s no logic to that thing. You just have to hope you can get through six days without a disaster.”

The disaster that Wendy Goydos had worried about on the 13th hole on the third day of Q-School had been averted. In fact, after getting his tee shot to within 10 feet, Paul made his putt for birdie to get back to even par. He bogeyed the next hole when his drive landed in the middle of a divot but birdied 18 for an even par 72. That left him at two under par 214. He was tied for sixty-eighth place. Not brilliant, but a long way from needing to panic.

“I haven’t done anything great, but I haven’t done anything horrible yet either,” he said. “I’m hitting the ball well. If I get my putter going just a little, I’ll be okay.”

For Goydos that qualified as a comment of unparalleled optimism. In a sport where everyone gets down on himself, Goydos stands near the top when it comes to getting down. One of his good friends on tour, Patrick Burke, is always telling him to “have some cheese with all that whine.”

Goydos knows Burke is right. “I do whine all the time,” he said. “But I’m getting better. I’ve actually admitted to playing well a couple times this year.”

Goydos was standing behind the 18th green waiting for his friend Jeff Cook to putt out. It was shortly after 4 o’clock by now and the temperature in the desert was plummeting as sunset closed in. Still, Goydos waited to find out how Cook—playing three groups behind him—had done.

Cook, Goydos, and Brian Henninger had all been rookies on the big tour during 1993. They had known each other from the Hogan Tour and, since they were all going through a similar experience, they kept track of one another as the year wore on.

On the surface, they had little in common. Goydos was the kid from the city with the dry wit and the somewhat skeptical view of the world at large. Henninger was just the opposite, born and raised in Oregon with a love for the outdoors and a wide-eyed, upbeat approach to life. Goydos played poker when he had free time; Henninger went hunting with his brother. In a moment of complete rapture Goydos was apt to say something like “I played okay”; Henninger had tears of joy in his eyes when his wife dropped him off before his first round on tour. Henninger was a year older than Goydos but looked as if he should be getting ready to go back to college in the fall.

Cook, at thirty-one, was the oldest of the three but the only one who was still single. That was a statistic not likely to change in the near future for the simple reason that being single was too much fun for Cook to give up. Cook had traveled the world to play golf and had many stories—some of them even true—about his adventures. He came across as the ultimate carefree bachelor, the rare exception to the tour rule that says there’s no time to have a good time.

But there was also a serious side to Cook. He had overcome dyslexia as a kid to earn a scholarship to Indiana and a degree in business. On Christmas Eve of 1991, he had discovered what turned out to be testicular cancer, a finding made even scarier by the fact that his father had died of cancer at the age of forty-seven. He had surgery and returned to the Hogan Tour six weeks later.

What the three of them shared was a desire to continue playing a sport that had never been thrust upon them. All were essentially self-taught. They had been shown a grip and a stance as kids and then gone off to play. Because he focused on tennis as a teenager, Henninger was only a five-handicapper when he decided to try to walk onto the team at Southern California. Cook’s scholarship to Indiana was for academics, not golf.

Of the three, it was Henninger who had seemed most likely to avoid a return trip to the school. In July, he had finished tied for fourth at the Western Open, shooting 68 on the final day even though he had to deal with the pressure of being paired with Fred Couples. That check—$52,000—had put him over $90,000 for the year and seemed to seal his spot in the top 125. But after another top-twenty finish at New England two weeks later, Henninger’s game went south. He began playing to make the cut rather than just playing, a sure way to ensure missed cuts.

Like Goydos, he had gone to Vegas needing badly to make the cut. He had earned $110,000 for the year, and it looked like $118,000 would make the top 125. That meant he needed a top-thirty finish to avoid the school. Like Goydos, he birdied the 18th hole on Friday to finish five under. There were no computer glitches with his score, but since he had played early in the day, he spent the afternoon pacing his hotel room, wondering if five under would be good enough to make the cut.

He and his wife Cathy had planned the trip as a fun week together. Their four-month-old daughter, Carlin, was home with her grandparents and this was the Henningers’ first chance since her birth to spend some time together and relax without worrying about middle-of-the-night feedings and diaper changes.

“Poor Cathy,” Henninger said later. “We were supposed to be having a good time and I’m pacing up and down losing my mind.”

Every so often, he would call the course to check. For a while, five looked safe, then, no, it might be six. Finally, just before nightfall, he found out he was in. Still, that was a long way from the top thirty. A couple of late bogeys the next day meant a 72, and Henninger figured he needed to shoot 66 on Sunday to have a chance. He was wrong, 67 would have made it. Since he shot 77, it was a moot point.

He finished with a double bogey and a headache. Cathy, who had walked every step of the way with him, wondered if the double bogey might have killed his chances. “Don’t think so,” Henninger said. “My chances died a lot earlier than that.”

Henninger was in a foul mood when he left the golf course. He felt he had failed as a golfer, that he had let Cathy and Carlin down, and now he was going back to school. As he pulled around a corner, he saw a man sitting by the curb holding a sign: “I’m homeless, I’m hungry and I need help,” it said.

It wasn’t the first time Henninger had seen a beggar, but the timing shook him up. Here he was, driving a comfortable car, leaving a fancy country club to go check out of his four-star hotel, and he was feeling sorry for himself. He had suffered a setback and he was angry at himself for not dealing with the pressure of the last few months better. But he was convinced he would learn from the experience and, beyond that, his family wasn’t going to go hungry because of his failure. He and Cathy were still going ahead with plans to buy a house. Henninger wasn’t homeless, hungry, or helpless.

He was a very lucky guy. “Sometimes, you just need to be reminded,” he said. “Sometimes, I guess, we all need to be reminded.”

Jeff Cook wasn’t feeling very lucky when he holed out that afternoon on 18. Even after finishing 164th on the money list he had felt confident that he would get through the school again and back on tour. Like Henninger and Goydos, he was convinced that a year on tour had made him a better and smarter player.

Forced to go back to the second stage because he hadn’t made the top 150, he had cruised through, finishing sixth at a regional in which the top twenty-four players qualified for the finals. But he had arrived in Palm Springs fighting the flu. He had felt so lousy the first few nights that he had gone straight back to the condo he was sharing with Rick Dalpos—who was playing in his twelfth school—and gone directly to bed.

Even so, he managed a 72 the first day and a 70 the second. He felt better starting the third day and played his best golf, getting to three under through sixteen holes. Two pars would give him a 69 and, he knew, jump him over a whole lot of people.

On the 17th tee at the Dunes is a sign that says, “Rated one of the toughest holes in America.” Given what the players go through at Q-School it seems almost cruel to leave the sign up during the week.

The hole is a par-four that bends around a lake that runs along the left side all the way up to the green. It is a little bit like the 18th at the Belfry in that the player who plays safely to the right is going to have a long, tough second shot over still more water, while the player who tries to shorten the hole by cutting across the water runs the risk of getting wet off the tee.

Cook played safe on his drive, then pulled not one but two shots into the lake. By the time he had putted out he had a triple-bogey seven, and the three shots under par he had worked so diligently all day for were gone. He managed to par the 18th but came off the green feeling frustrated at a wasted opportunity.

“How’d it go?” Goydos asked.

“Even,” Cook answered. “I was three under until I made triple at seventeen.”

Henninger, who had played the back nine first and had just arrived from playing his last hole—the ninth—joined the group.

“Play any good?” Cook asked.

“Three under,” Henninger said, unable to suppress a smile. “You guys?”

“Even,” they both answered. Then Cook briefly retold his story about the disaster at 17. At no point had anyone uttered the words, “What did you shoot?”

Pros never ask that question. It is too dangerous because the answer can be embarrassing. Sometimes, when a player has done poorly and he is asked, “Did you play any good?” his answer will simply be no. Or, if it is a Friday—cut day—he may just say, “Trunk-slammer,” which means “I missed the cut, so I’m loading up my clubs, slamming the trunk, and getting out of here.”

If you have played well enough to answer the question, you never say, “I shot sixty-nine.” You say, as Henninger had, “Three under.” And, once you have established that you are solidly under par for a tournament, you drop the “under.” Henninger was now at seven; Goydos and Cook were at two. The “number” the next day—the score it would take to make the cut—would probably be either one or two.

At school, no one even wanted to think about a trunk-slammer. They had all worked too hard too long to get to this point. And the next year of their lives was hanging on how they played the next three days.

The three friends stood in the setting sun assessing where they were. They wouldn’t know exactly how they stood until they drove back to the Nicklaus Course and checked the scoreboard.

Henninger, at seven, was clearly in good shape. Cook and Goydos, both at two, were probably in solid shape for the cut that would come the next day, but would need to do some moving the next two days to get into good position for the final day.

When they all made the drive back to the scoreboard, their suspicions were confirmed: Henninger was now tied for eleventh, only five shots behind the leader, a Frenchman named Thomas Levet. Goydos and Cook were in a large group that was tied for 68th—two shots away from the top forty. The good news was that there was lots of golf to play. It was also, as Wendy Goydos might have pointed out, the bad news.