9

WHO’S THE BOSS?

AS THE TEN PLAYERS taking part in the Hope Shootout made their way down the first fairway, Peter Jacobsen, one of three players wearing a wireless microphone, asked Scott Simpson—for the benefit of the crowd—if he had talked to his friend Bill Murray recently.

The quiet, dignified Simpson and the slapstick Murray might have seemed like an odd couple, but they had been partners the last two years at Pebble Beach. When the Murray–Deane Beman skirmish became public, Simpson had been asked if Murray’s antics ever bothered him. Quite the contrary, Simpson answered. He said he enjoyed every minute of the experience and hoped that Murray would continue to play in the tournament. Of course Murray had left Pebble Beach vowing never to return unless Beman was gone. “I am demanding Deane Beman’s resignation,” he said as he departed the premises.

Simpson laughed when Jacobsen brought Murray up and told him he thought he was doing just fine. “By the way,” Jacobsen asked, “has Deane resigned yet?”

Everyone got a yuck out of that one. What they didn’t know was the answer was yes. Beman had resigned.

He had been under siege since Murray-gate at Pebble Beach. Most of his players had sided with Murray. Most of the media sided with Murray. Most of America, it seemed, sided with Murray.

Beman will always insist that the timing was a coincidence, but a week after Pebble Beach, during the Hope, he sat down with Dick Ferris, the chairman of the tour’s policy board, and told him he was quitting. He had already hinted to the board that he might not return after his current term as commissioner expired at the end of 1995, but now he had decided he didn’t want to wait even that long. He wanted out as soon as a suitable replacement could be found.

“I’m going to be fifty-six in April,” Beman said. “If I want to play the senior tour, I need to get going as soon as possible.”

No one doubted that Beman wanted to play golf. He had always been a very good player, a U.S. and British Amateur champion who had gone into the insurance business rather than turn pro after college. But at twenty-nine, even though he was making a lot of money, the itch was still there. He turned pro and spent six years on tour. He played well, winning four times, but was never as successful as he wanted to be—or thought he should be.

Beman had the same drive and fire that Palmer and Nicklaus had, but not the talent. It galled him that he couldn’t play at their level, and he never completely gave up the idea that he was as good as they were. When Joseph Dey, then the commissioner of the still-young PGA Tour, approached him about the possibility of succeeding him, Beman said no. “I still had more to do as a player,” he said. “I had been hurt and I wanted to come back and prove I could still play.”

He did that late in 1973 when he won the now long-extinct Robinson Open. The commissioner’s job was still open. He called Dey. “If you still want me,” he said, “I’ll take the job.” They still wanted him, intrigued by his background as both a player and a businessman. On March 1, 1974, Beman became commissioner. He was thirty-five, an age when a lot of players still have their best golf in front of them.

“I only wanted to keep playing if I thought I could win major titles,” he said. “If I had thought I was going to win a major that year and two the next year and another one the year after that, I would have kept playing. But I knew that wasn’t likely. I decided if I couldn’t be the best player, maybe I could be the best commissioner.”

Almost from day one, he was a controversial figure. He made sweeping changes, moving the tour’s headquarters to Ponte Vedra in a brilliant land deal (he bought several thousand undeveloped acres for one dollar) and built the first Tournament Players Club there adjacent to the new tour offices. He turned the tour from a small business into a big one, buying up land to build Players Clubs around the country, making corporate deals, and eventually expanding the regular tour while creating the senior tour and then the Hogan (now Nike) Tour.

He brought corporate America into golf in a big way, got his tournaments on television constantly, and increased purses in leaps and bounds every year. The tour grew, a lot more people made a lot more money, and Beman became a wealthy man himself, negotiating an annual $2.2 million compensation package for himself when he signed his last contract.

The fact that Beman was making $800,000 more annually than Nick Price had made as the tour’s leading money winner in 1993 galled some players, but most of them grudgingly gave him his due, conceding that he had brought golf into the big time.

But it was always that—a grudging concession. Beman was bright, sharp-witted, and a smart, tough negotiator. But he simply wasn’t comfortable with people. His humor always seemed forced and, even though he had been a very good player, he was never—ever—one of the guys.

As a player, Beman had been a grinder: someone not blessed with great ability, but a bulldog competitor with a work ethic that made him play better than he should have. To be called a grinder in golf is high praise because it means you have used all the talent you have.

Great players can be grinders. Tom Kite and Curtis Strange are probably two of the great grinders in history, men who got every last ounce out of their golf just by dint of hard work. Others, with less talent than Kite and Strange, also rose above what they should have been by putting in endless hours on the range.

In fact, most players who last a long time on tour are grinders to one degree or another. For every Palmer, Nicklaus, Watson, or Norman, there are hundreds and hundreds of grinders. The best of them are the ones who have long careers.

What Deane Beman did was make the PGA Tour safe for grinders. He created the all-exempt tour in 1982, meaning that instead of only sixty players being exempt for the entire year, 125 players were. That meant more than twice as many players started each year knowing they had a safe place on the tour. He gave older players a second life with the senior tour and a lot of players—young and old—a fall-back place with the Hogan Tour.

That didn’t always thrill the stars. Palmer and Nicklaus almost led an insurrection in 1983, thinking that the tour should just run golf tournaments and not be in the golf course and marketing business. Beman beat back that charge by creating—almost overnight—the tour’s first annual report, which showed everyone else just how much money the tour’s aggressive approach was making for the nonmillionaires. Nicklaus and Palmer backed off.

Beman fought a lot of battles, got nicked up on occasion, but usually emerged as strong as ever. Until he took on Karsten Solheim. The story of the tour’s lengthy fight with Solheim over the square grooves he put into his Ping clubs has been the subject of millions of words of debate, not to mention millions of dollars in lawsuits. The best way to boil it down is this: Beman didn’t want players using Solheim’s square grooves on tour because he—and many others—believed they allowed players to put too much spin on the ball. He banned the grooves. Solheim took him to court and, after a long, bitter fight, the tour settled out of court in the spring of 1993 at a reported cost of about $7 million. The grooves stayed.

Beman and the tour tried to characterize the settlement as a compromise. Most compromises don’t cost $7 million. Everyone else in golf chalked it up as a major loss for Beman. There were even rumors that one of the provisions of the deal was that Beman would resign within a year. Beman hotly denied that rumor whenever it came up. “That’s a damn lie,” he said on the afternoon of March 1, 1994. Beman almost never uses profanity, especially in public, unless he has been severely provoked. The notion that Solheim had something to do with his departure was severely provocative.

March 1, 1994, was Beman’s twentieth anniversary as commissioner. The tour had finished its West Coast swing with Scott Hoch—the man best remembered for missing a two-foot putt that would have won the Masters in 1989—winning at the Hope, and Craig Stadler—who had won the Masters in 1984—winning the Buick Invitational in San Diego.

Florida was next for four weeks, beginning in Miami at the Doral Ryder Open. For most of the top players, the beginning of the Florida swing is the time to begin preparing for the Masters. That is one reason why Doral always draws a strong field, and 1994 was no exception: Nick Price, Greg Norman, Nick Faldo, and Fred Couples were all playing. About the only big name missing was Phil Mickelson, who had played San Diego since it was his hometown and was taking a week off to go skiing.

Doral was also the site of the first 1994 meeting of the tour’s policy board, scheduled for Tuesday, March 1, at 7:30 A.M. The agenda was expected to take up most of the morning. It was all pretty routine stuff: a report from the golf course properties advisory board; three items on the subject of TV and marketing; a lengthy report on tournament administration and membership. Also to be addressed were three Nike Tour topics and two from the senior tour. That would be followed by an update on progress of the World Golf Village and reports from audit and treasury and, finally, PGA Tour charities.

They would probably be finished by lunchtime, meaning that the four players on the board—Jeff Sluman, Brad Faxon, Rick Fehr, and Jay Haas—would have plenty of time to get in an afternoon practice round.

Four men walking into the room knew that the meeting would not be as routine as everyone else thought: Beman, Dick Ferris, deputy commissioner Tim Finchem, and communications director John Morris. When the minutes had been read and approved, Beman stood up, cleared his throat, and said quietly, “There’s something I’d like to say to you all before we continue.”

He nodded at Morris, who began passing out copies of Beman’s letter of resignation. Beman waited a few minutes to let everyone read what the letter said, then spoke briefly about why he was stepping down and how much he had enjoyed the job. Ferris had already put together a search committee, which he would head himself, to find Beman’s replacement. Beman wanted Finchem, his right-hand man for five years, to replace him. But he knew it would not be an easy or simple process to get him the job.

By the time the meeting was over, word was beginning to spread around Doral that something momentous had taken place. Morris told his two on-site staffers, Marty Caffey and Wes Seeley, to assemble the media for a 1 o’clock press conference. The subject, they were told, was a nonagenda item that had come up during the policy board meeting.

“Deane’s resigning,” Iva Green of the Associated Press said as soon as word about the press conference came down. “What else could it be?”

Nothing. Shortly after 1 o’clock, Beman, most of the board, and quite a few staff members arrived at the upstairs ballroom that had been converted into an interview room for the week. Beman, dressed nattily in a blue blazer with a blue shirt and a red-and-white polka-dot tie, stood at the entrance to the room for several minutes awkwardly exchanging small talk and jokes with reporters and staffers. He looked tired, even a little bit nervous.

Morris went through a routine with the media similar to the one that he had gone through with the board. The letter of resignation was passed out, and Morris read it aloud. Beman took the microphone, applauded by the board members and staff members.

“I’ve enjoyed every minute of it,” he said. “But I’m not getting any younger and, in my opinion—and only my opinion—it is time to get on to another phase of my life.”

He went on to talk about what he planned to do—play the senior tour and design golf courses—and about how he had come to this life-changing decision. When he started to talk about his pride in what golf stood for, he began to get emotional. His voice caught just a tiny bit, but he went on. Someone asked him about what qualities the search committee should look for in a successor.

Beman got one sentence into his answer before Ferris interrupted. “Um, Deane, I think I should say a few words, um, right about now, if you don’t mind.”

Whether Beman minded or not clearly didn’t matter to Ferris. He walked to the podium and did everything but shove Beman aside. Beman forced a smile, then stepped away. It was probably the first time it had occurred to him that he was no longer the man in charge. Ferris, all bluster and bombast, read a patronizing statement about Beman’s accomplishments while everyone squirmed uncomfortably. Whatever anyone in the room thought about Beman, this wasn’t fair. He should have been allowed to make his exit on his own terms without someone pulling a grandstand act and treating him like a hired hand.

When Ferris was finished, he and Beman answered a few more desultory questions and then they began a walk-through on the putting green and the range. By now everyone knew what had happened. The news wasn’t shocking, but it was stunning. Twenty years is a long time. To almost every player on tour there had been only one commissioner: Beman. As Beman and Ferris approached, each player stopped what he was doing to shake Beman’s hand and say thanks or good luck or we’ll miss you. Ferris stayed close to Beman almost as if making sure nothing untoward was said by anyone.

This wasn’t a day for that. The stubborn little grinder had never been able to compete with Nicklaus or Palmer on the golf course. But there was no doubting the fact that he had created a legacy for himself in the game anyway, one that would last for a long, long time.

The search committee gave no time frame for when it would come up with a replacement, but there was no doubt that Beman wanted the process to be as swift as possible. When a staffer walked up to him that afternoon and asked, “How long, Commish?” Beman said, “I’ll be out of there within thirty days of the new guy being named.” He smiled. “I’ve got a lot to do.”

He had already done plenty.

Later that same afternoon, with players huddling in groups of three and four to discuss Beman’s departure and what it would mean, Nick Price and his caddy, Jeff (Squeeky) Medlen, headed for a corner of the range to hit some balls. Price had played only one tournament so far in 1994—an overseas event—and Doral would be his PGA Tour debut.

Price lit a cigarette, took a few quick drags, then handed it to Medlen. He took out his wedge and began lofting short shots in the direction of a nearby flag.

He had hit four balls when the first equipment representative walked up. He just wanted to say hi, congratulate Price on being player of the year, and tell him if he could help, to give him a call.

Price stopped what he was doing, leaned on his club, and chatted. How was the family? Did you have a good winter? Two kids now, right?

The man moved on. Price hit two more balls. A local TV reporter moved into his vision. He was sorry to interrupt, but would it be a problem to get him on camera for a live shot, just for a minute, even thirty seconds, in a little while. “How soon do you need me?” Price asked.

Thirty minutes. Fine. Where? The man pointed to a camera at the far end of the range. “Send someone for me when you’re ready.”

Price hit another wedge shot. Now a tournament rep was standing over him. Was Price planning to play in their event this year? No? What a shame, you know how much we love having you and our fans are crazy about you.

“You have a great event, I’ve always loved playing there,” Price said. “It just didn’t quite fit this year and I feel badly about that.”

Maybe next year then?

“Oh, absolutely, very possible.”

They would check with him later in the year, maybe call. Anything they could do, please let them know.

Price nodded again. “Anytime, Bob,” he said, using the man’s name for a third time. Price never forgets a name and never fails to use it so the person he’s talking to knows that he remembers him.

By now Medlen was rolling his eyes. They had been on the range thirty minutes and hit eight balls. Someone from the tour approached wanting to know about a junior clinic at the Players Championship. Was it still okay with him for Tuesday afternoon with Greg Norman?

“Absolutely,” Price said. “If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know.”

The staffer walked away shaking his head. “If they were all like that,” he said, “this would be the best job in the world.”

They weren’t. No one in golf is like Nick Price. If you took a poll among everyone connected with the tour—players, sponsors, reporters, staffers—and asked who is the nicest man playing the game right now, the vote would be almost unanimous. If a few didn’t vote for Price, it would be because they didn’t know him or because they picked him second just to be different.

“My mother always taught me to treat people the way I would like them to treat me,” Price said. “Most of the time, people mean well. There are times when you have to say to fans or people who really don’t understand what we do, ‘I’m really sorry but I’ve got to get my work done now.’ When that happens, I try to make it clear that I’m not giving them the runaround, I just can’t talk to them right that second. And I hope the day will never come when another golfer thinks he can’t come up and speak to me. I would hate that.”

Price wasn’t the least bit shocked that afternoon at Doral when he found himself inundated by sales reps, tournament reps, corporate reps, media, and the inevitable autograph-seeking volunteers.

On any Tuesday or Wednesday on tour, the range looks like the exchange counter at Macy’s on the day after Christmas. All the various reps know that most players will show up to hit balls sooner or later, so they camp out there and wait. They will check with players who use their equipment or wear their hats, visors, or shirts, to make sure they have everything they need. They will flirt with players they don’t have, knowing that no contract is forever. Tournament reps do the same thing. They ask players who are committed to their event if there is anything they need help with and try to twist an arm or two among those who aren’t planning to play. There are also local TV crews looking to grab players and set up a shot with golfers in the background.

For the big-name players, the circus atmosphere can be a problem. Most try to deal with all the various requests and well-wishers either at the beginning or end of their practice session, hoping most people will get the message to leave them alone when they’re working.

Because Price has a reputation for being cooperative and easygoing, people are less hesitant about approaching him. And, having been away from the tour for four months, he knew Doral was going to be full of distractions. He had won four tournaments in 1993 and the player-of-the-year award. As the year went on, the demands for his time had increased. A couple of times, he crashed.

It happened first at the Masters. Having won the last major of 1992—the PGA—and the first big nonmajor of 1993—the Players—he had arrived at Augusta as the favorite and simply didn’t handle the distractions and demands and pressure. He missed the cut. Then, at the Tour Championship in San Francisco, he went into the week with a slim lead over Greg Norman and Paul Azinger for both the player-of-the-year and the money titles.

He played poorly, never made a putt, and, uncharacteristically, blew up on the golf course Saturday when he couldn’t even scare the hole with his putter. “The worst I’ve ever behaved in my life,” he said later. “I wanted it so much and I saw it all slipping away. I handled myself very badly.”

He still won both titles because Azinger didn’t play any better than he did and because Norman, leading the tournament with three holes to play, collapsed, finishing 6–5–5 to lose to Jim Gallagher Jr. by one shot. That was the difference between Norman being player of the year and Price winning the award.

“To be honest, Greg lost it more those last three holes than I won it,” Price said. “I was thrilled to win in the end, but not with the way it happened. That’s one of the reasons why I want to really play well this year. I don’t want to be a one-year wonder. I want to build on what I did in ’93 and be a better player this year. I still don’t think I’ve reached my potential as a player. That’s what’s driving me now, wanting to still get better.”

It has always been that way with Price. His demeanor can be deceiving. For all of his kindness and gentility, Price is as driven as anyone in the game. He has never been satisfied with his status. He was good enough as an amateur to qualify for the British Open at eighteen and to reach the quarterfinals of the British Amateur that same year. He came home devastated he hadn’t done better. He improved steadily in his early years on the European Tour but was convinced he needed a brand-new swing when he was twenty-five. He became a steady moneymaker on the U.S. Tour in the 1980s and was frustrated because he had won only one tournament. When he started to win tournaments, he thirsted to win a major. When he won a major, he wanted to be the best player in the world. Now, as the world’s best player, he wants to win all four majors and be remembered as one of the game’s greats before he is through.

Where that kind of drive comes from is always impossible to analyze. But Price’s journey to the top of the game is completely different from that of anyone else playing golf. His parents were adventurers, both British citizens who volunteered for the Indian Army in World War II. He was a major in the infantry, she was a lieutenant in the nursing corps. They met in India, were married, and had a son, Kit, in 1946.

When war broke out on the Indian-Pakistani border in 1947, they got on a mail ship with their infant son, intending to go to Kenya. But when the boat stopped in Durban, South Africa, for several days, Raymond Price ran into an old friend who had settled there after getting out of the military. He decided to stay and got into the clothing manufacturing business. A second son, Tim, was born in 1950 and Nick in 1957. Four years later, hearing stories about a brand-new “land of opportunity,” Raymond and Wendy Price took their three sons to Rhodesia and opened a clothing factory.

It was Tim who introduced Nick to golf. He was fifteen and needed a caddy, so he took his little brother with him to the golf course. Since Nick was left-handed, he played with the one lefty club the boys could find. When their mother realized how much the boys liked golf, she decided to buy them a set of clubs—one set. Since all the new clubs were right-handed, Nick had to learn that way. For years, he held the club crosshanded.

Raymond Price died of lung cancer when Nick was ten. His memories of his father are vague, but he does remember the smoking. Everyone in Rhodesia smoked, or so it seemed, and Price became a smoker very young, following in the footsteps of his brothers. They have both now quit, as has his mother. Nick still smokes, which doesn’t make anyone in his family happy. He constantly vows to quit, but hasn’t yet. “I know I have to stop,” he said. “I don’t want to leave my kids the way my father left us. But I’m not quite ready.”

Once he learned a proper grip and stance, Nick was a natural on the golf course. By sixteen, he was certain he wanted to be a pro. He was so certain that he took an extremely unusual step. This was 1973 and there were still two different-sized balls used in golf: the smaller ball, which was used in amateur tournaments around the world and in many pro tournaments in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and the larger American ball, which was always used on the PGA Tour. The smaller ball, naturally, traveled farther. A player using it against a player using the bigger ball had a distinct advantage.

Price abandoned the small ball even though he knew it would lessen his chances of winning junior and amateur tournaments. “I knew I wanted to be a pro and I thought this was the best way to prepare,” he said. “At times, it was frustrating, but when I did turn pro, the transition was easier for me to make than for some others because I had already been playing the big ball for a few years.”

His progress was interrupted, first by his disappointment in the British Amateur in 1975, which caused him to seriously consider quitting—“I just didn’t think I would ever be good enough,” he said—and then by twenty-one months of mandatory service in the Rhodesian Air Force. Civil war had been a part of life in Rhodesia since 1965, the country’s blacks seeking independence from the British government, which had established apartheid in both Rhodesia and South Africa.

Price was drafted into the Rhodesian Air Force to fight for a cause he knew little about. “We were all brainwashed back then,” he said. “The government told us we were fighting against communism, which I suppose was technically true since the other side was getting money from the Soviet government because they couldn’t get it from anyone else.”

Only later, when he began to travel the world, did Price understand why the Rhodesian blacks fought so fiercely for the independence they finally won in 1980 when Zimbabwe was created with a one man, one vote government.

Civil war was a part of daily life in Rhodesia for most of Price’s boyhood. He remembers hearing stories about people he knew who had been killed and seeing war, and what it produces, all around him. He has often been described as a fighter pilot, but he says that is exaggerated. “I was trained, but I never flew operationally,” he said. “The saddest thing about being in a war is that the idea of people getting killed becomes part of your life. I never really faced death. I was in places where people did die, but I never had to shoot a gun.

“Being in the military changes you forever, though. It gives you discipline like nothing else can. When you have to be up at four o’clock every morning, bed made, backpack ready for inspection, floor area around your bed shined and cleaned, you learn about self-discipline. What we all used to do was clean the area around our bed, then put newspaper on the floor and sleep on it so we would have fifteen extra minutes in the morning since our bed was already made. You became close to people in a way you’ll never be close to anyone else ever again.

“The parties were the best parties you’ll ever go to because you became fatalistic. There was a chance you were going to die young, so you wanted to enjoy every minute you possibly could because you just didn’t know what was awaiting you the next day. That may sound melodramatic but there’s something to it. It wasn’t as if I was on the front line, I wasn’t. Still, casualties were low in Desert Storm but people did die. Sometimes, people forget that. I look back now and what I think about is the waste. Guys I knew who aren’t here who might have been great doctors or lawyers or scientists. War is a very great waste. You don’t see it that way when you’re young though. You think you’re fighting for a cause and in the middle of a great adventure.”

Later, when Price was asked during his early years on tour to talk about his military experience, he would dodge the question with a joke. “I tried to get out of the military by telling them I had a skin disease,” he would say. “When they asked me what was wrong with my skin, I told them bullets went through it.”

When he talks about the experience in a more serious vein, it is apparent that part of what he is today is because of what he saw growing up. When you have seen death up close, it gives you a greater appreciation for life. “I often stop and think about how fortunate I am, to have the family I have, the friends I have, the life I have,” he said. “It didn’t have to turn out this way.”

Price was twenty-one when he got out of the military. He turned pro almost immediately and headed for Europe. His first year there, 1978, was extremely difficult. He had trouble adjusting to the cold weather and, even though he played well enough to finish fifty-first on the Order of Merit (the European money list), there were times when he worried about running out of money. At one point, after missing several cuts in a row, he was down to enough money to make it through two more tournaments. If he didn’t play well in either, he would have no choice but to go home. He finished fourth the first week and third the next.

He improved rapidly the next two years and was eleventh on the Order of Merit in 1980. But he backslid in 1981 and went home to play the South African tour in the winter convinced he had to find someone to completely change his golf swing. Denis Watson, another Zimbabwan, had just finished his first year on the American tour. He had spent time that year working with David Leadbetter, also from Zimbabwe, someone Price had grown up with. Leadbetter had become a teaching pro and had set up shop in Florida. Watching Watson swing, Price could see he had made major strides.

Price called Leadbetter in January of 1982 and made plans to go see him in March. He ended up spending six weeks working with him. Leadbetter showed him his swing on tape, which horrified him—“I had about five different swing planes,” he said. “I knew it was bad, but I never dreamed it was that bad”—and began working with him to find the swing he needed to compete.

By the time he left Leadbetter, Price felt like a new player even though he felt he still had lots of work to do. Friends were amazed at what they saw when he returned to Europe and, that July, he almost won the British Open. “Should have won it,” he said. “I birdied ten, eleven, and twelve the last day for a three-shot lead. Walking on the thirteenth tee, I said to my caddy, ‘Well, that’s done it, now all we have to do is finish.’ ”

The minute he said that, Price was a dead man. He played the last six holes four over par and lost the tournament to Tom Watson by one stroke. It was a loss that would haunt him for years, but it also taught him a painful lesson about not taking anything for granted in golf, especially in a major.

He had already decided to take a shot at the U.S. tour before the British because he was convinced that he needed to compete with the world’s best players on a regular basis in order to become one of them. He made it through Q-School on his first try and then won the World Series of Golf in 1983, a remarkable victory for a rookie and one that was critical to his development as a player.

Since the World Series carries a ten-year exemption, Price didn’t have to worry about making the top 125 on the money list each year. He was already in. That meant he could experiment with Leadbetter and try new things without worrying that he was going to go into a slump that would cost him his card.

The next eight years weren’t easy. Price had flashes of brilliance: a course record 63 in the third round of the Masters in 1986 and a number of tournaments where he led early or charged late. But he never won. “I always threw in one bad round,” he said. “I hadn’t learned yet how to shoot seventy or seventy-one on the day I was going badly. It was always seventy-five, and that would be the difference between first and fifth or eighth.”

He had another chance to win the British in 1988, leading Seve Ballesteros by two shots going into the final round at Lytham and St. Annes. He shot 69 the last day, which should have been good enough to win except for the fact that Ballesteros, in one of the last great demonstrations of his wizardry, made shots from everywhere all day on his way to a 65 that beat Price by two shots.

“I knew after that tournament that my swing was good enough to win,” he said. “I hit the ball better than anyone that week but I was out-putted. After that I became much more conscious of my putting.”

He finally broke through in 1991 when he won the Byron Nelson in Dallas. That was the boost he needed. He won again before the year was over (at the Canadian Open) and finished a career-high seventh on the money list. He won twice more in 1992—including the PGA—and won more than $1.1 million. Then came the four victories and the player-of-the-year award in 1993. They were gratifying and enriching, but they left Price wanting more.

He knew that no matter how many times he won in Hartford or Dallas or Chicago or even Ponte Vedra that the measure of a truly great player is how he performs in the majors. While his good friend Norman sometimes rationalizes about his many near-misses in the majors, Price never hesitated to talk about the holes he felt still had to be filled. “A lot of guys win one major,” he said. “I want more than that. That was the disappointing thing about ’93, I was never in serious contention in a major. That’s what I want to change this year.”

Price was now living the life of a full-fledged superstar. He had bought Norman’s plane in the fall when Norman decided to buy a bigger plane, and he was planning to rent private homes at all four majors so that he and his family and friends would have room to spread out in a way that is impossible in even the poshest hotel.

He was also considering leaving IMG, which had managed him almost since the beginning of his career. Norman had left at the end of 1993 to start his own company and Price was wondering if going out on his own might not be the right way to go.

“IMG has always been very good to me,” he said. “We’ve had disputes, but they’ve been cleared up. They’re a very big company, though, and someone like Greg feels that he needs more personal attention than they can give him. I’m not at that point yet.”

That “yet” would turn out to be a key word.

Price didn’t come to Doral with very high expectations, and he was right. He played four mediocre rounds, never breaking par, and ended up tied for seventy-second place. He wasn’t panicking, though; this was only a warm-up. Faldo played even worse, missing the cut, and Norman, after barely making the cut, shot 69–67 the last two days to finish seventh.

This was the week when all the big news was being made off the golf course. Beman dropped his bombshell on Tuesday. Then, on Wednesday, while rain was washing out the Pro-Am (no refund of the $3,500 entry fee for the amateurs) came word that Phil Mickelson had broken his leg skiing. At twenty-four, Mickelson had been anointed as the Next Great American Hope. He had won a tournament while still in college and then had won twice in 1993, his first full year on tour. When he won at La Costa to start the year, he became the youngest player since (who else?) Jack Nicklaus to have won four times.

He would be out for at least eight to ten weeks, interrupting a year in which he had already won $315,645. That put him in second place on the money list ($5,000 behind the Gritty Little Bruin) at the end of the West Coast swing.

Mickelson’s injury meant that two of the best American players were now on the sidelines, since Azinger was in Los Angeles that week for his fourth round of chemotherapy. By Sunday, the list of missing Americans had grown to three. As he warmed up on the range for the final round at Doral, Fred Couples felt a surge of pain in his back and collapsed in agony. He had to be helped off the range to the fitness trailer, where he was worked on feverishly in the hope that whatever had tightened on him might loosen up and allow him to play.

A few minutes before his tee time, rules official Jon Brendle came in to see if Couples was going to be able to play. Couples asked him to wait a minute so he could see if he could stand up. He got halfway up, let out a scream, and collapsed. No one knew when he would play again.

Couples’s sudden absence meant that John Huston, his playing partner, would have to play alone. There was no time to re-pair and no one hanging around who could play as a marker for Huston. He ended up playing the first twelve holes alone before Brian Claar, who had played in one of the earlier groups, came back out to play in with him as a marker.

By then, the tournament had come down to two men: Huston and Billy Andrade. These two had followed similar career paths since joining the tour in 1988. Each had won two tournaments and been labeled a future star at one point in his career. Huston was almost thirty-three. Andrade had just turned thirty.

The phrase on tour for someone who shows great potential is “he’s got a lot of game.” (Conversely, if someone doesn’t look like a player, the phrase is “he can’t play dead.”) Huston and Andrade both had plenty of game. Andrade also had the kind of personality that would quickly make him into one of the game’s big stars if he could ever relocate the magic he had conjured up in 1991.

Andrade won twice that year—twice in a row. Once upon a time, players winning back-to-back tournaments on tour wasn’t that unusual an occurrence. After all, Byron Nelson won eleven straight times in 1945. But as more and more good players began appearing, winning two tournaments in a row became a rarity. In fact, when Price won the Hartford and the Western back-to-back in 1993, he became only the fourth player in the 1990s to win two in a row on tour. Hale Irwin had done it in 1990, winning the U.S. Open and the Westchester in consecutive weeks, and Davis Love had done it in 1992 at the Heritage and Greensboro. Irwin was a three-time U.S. Open winner, Love a Ryder Cup hero, and Price was a PGA champion and a player of the year.

That was fast company for Billy the Kid—or Chachi Chacherelli, as Sluman called him—but it was exactly where he wanted and expected to be.

Andrade first signed his autograph in sixth grade. Actually he practiced signing his autograph, killing time when class got boring by repeatedly signing his name the way he planned to sign it when he was a big star. At that point in his life he wasn’t certain what he was going to be a star in, only that he was going to be one.

By the time he hit high school he knew the answer: golf. He had played all sports until then, but kept getting hurt in football, couldn’t hit a curve ball in baseball, and didn’t have the size or quickness to progress all that far in basketball. He did continue to play basketball through high school, playing for a small Rhode Island prep school. At the end of his senior year, he was named all-state, which sounds impressive except for the fact that the “state” in question was a six-school prep league that, according to Andrade, “wasn’t exactly full of stellar players.”

Nonethless, the legend of his basketball prowess has followed him. To this day, the PGA Tour media guide mentions that he was an all-state basketball player in high school and most profiles of Andrade mention that he was quite a high school basketball player. “It got a little out of hand after a while,” Andrade said. “One of my cousins, who remembered that we were 2–18 my junior year, called me after one story and said, ‘What’s all this all-state basketball player stuff?’ ”

Andrade did average 20 points a game as a senior. “I shot fifty times a game,” he said. “Didn’t throw a pass the entire year.”

It was in golf where he really was a star. His grandparents had introduced him to the game as a kid and he fell in love with it, although he admits that for the first couple of years the game’s main appeal for him was driving golf carts. By the time he was in high school, when he wasn’t being an all-state guard, he was winning a lot of golf tournaments.

He chose Wake Forest over a bevy of other schools, partly because he loved the campus, partly because he was offered an Arnold Palmer Scholarship. There, he faced the first real crisis of his career when he finally decided he had to change his grip.

Although millions of dollars are spent every year on golf instruction and millions of words are written about the golf swing, there are really only two basics in the game: grip and stance. If you have a bad grip or a bad stance, your chances of playing the game well are severely diminished.

Almost everything else is based on feel, and small technical flaws really don’t matter. Tom Watson’s swing was always too long, Jack Nicklaus had a flying elbow, and Arnold Palmer looked like a corkscrew at the end of his follow-through. All three managed to play the game fairly well. The consensus among today’s players is that the two purest swings on the PGA Tour in the last ten years belong to Tom Purtzer and Steve Elkington. Each is a good player, but not anywhere close to being great. Elkington has won five times in eight years on tour; Purtzer five in twenty.

But no one succeeds without a decent grip and stance. That’s the first thing every pro teaches, and the best ones, once they see that a kid with talent has that right, will pretty much leave him alone. Sure, Paul Azinger’s grip looks different, but his stance is perfect and his grip isn’t so far awry that he can’t get the club back into the proper position—although he has had a tendency to lose the ball to the left at times during his career.

When Andrade first started playing with his grandparents, he used a baseball grip because he didn’t know any better and it was comfortable. Later, he took a couple of lessons and learned a proper golf grip but still had a very strong—too strong—grip that caused him to hook the ball a lot more than he wanted to. His natural talent and feel for the game allowed him to overcome that all through high school, but when he got to college he knew he was going to have to make a change.

To be that good a player, especially when you are thinking about a pro career, and make a radical change in your grip can be traumatizing. Andrade knew his golf would get worse before it got better and he was nervous, even though everyone whose opinion he respected told him he had to make the change if he wanted to have a future in the game.

His savior turned out to be Jesse Haddock, his college coach. Haddock is one of college golf’s legends. He had been at Wake Forest for so long there are people who think the school’s buildings were constructed around him. He can be as tough and mean as any coach around. When Curtis Strange was at Wake, Haddock spent three years telling him he wasn’t any good, didn’t work a lick, and never would be any good.

But when Andrade faced his grip crisis, Haddock stuck with him. He told him to make the change and not worry about his spot in the lineup, that he would keep on playing him no matter how much his game might suffer. Andrade made the change during the winter, spent a lot of time shoveling snow off the driving range so he could hit balls in January and February, and was relieved and amazed at how quickly he was able to make the adjustment. It was at the end of that spring that he began to think he had a realistic chance at a pro career.

“Until then, I just wasn’t good enough,” he said. “It would be easy for me to say, ‘Well, my education was important so I stayed in school,’ but the truth is I didn’t have any choice. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have left anyway because education was always very important in my family. My grandfather always used to tell me, ‘You have to hit the books because that’s the only way to find out what’s in them.’ I didn’t find out until I was older that he had gone to Bates College on a baseball scholarship and flunked out and that’s why it was so important to him. The odds are I wouldn’t have left, but the fact is I never had to make the decision.”

Wake won the national championship Andrade’s senior year—coming from sixteen shots behind on the last day to do it—but Andrade decided to play amateur golf for one more year and go back to school for a fifth year to get his degree. That turned out to be a critical decision in his life because if he had turned pro that summer and not gone back to school in the fall of ’86 he might never have met Jody Reedy.

Andrade was lonely that fall since most of his class had graduated in the spring. He was complaining to a friend about his lack of a social life and the fact that he didn’t have a date for homecoming. His friend mentioned a sorority sister of hers who had just broken up with someone. She thought they might hit it off and, besides, she said, you two look a lot alike.

Sort of. They both have brown hair and brown eyes and they both have a gleam in their eyes that hints at a good sense of humor. Billy is boyishly handsome; Jody is girlishly pretty. Billy has a better golf swing; Jody looks a lot better in shorts.

Wake is a small school. Billy went to a football game that weekend and had someone point Jody out to him. Jody already knew who he was from a ceremony at which the golf team had been honored. A few days later, Billy was sitting in a local deli when Jody walked by.

“Hi, Billy,” she said.

He turned around, smiled, and apparently not the least bit surprised that a stranger knew his name (he was, after all, a big golf star), said, “Hi, Jody.”

He was leaving town in two days for a golf tournament in Venezu ela. Was she, by any chance, free for dinner the next night? She was. Billy was elated until it hit him that that next night was game seven of the American League Championship Series between his beloved Boston Red Sox and the California Angels. He would have to miss the game or miss the date. He opted to miss the game.

“I knew if I went away for two weeks without going out with her that she would be going out with someone else by the time I got back,” he said. “Wake is just that kind of school. I made a reservation at the best Italian restaurant I knew and figured I’d just have to deal with missing the game.”

When he showed up to pick her up the next night, she was watching television. Specifically, she was watching the Red Sox and Angles. “You know, if you’d rather just order a pizza and watch the game, that would be fine with me,” she said.

He was tempted—really tempted. But no, he had to make an impression. And watching a baseball game and munching on a pizza wasn’t the way to do that. They walked to his car and, much to Jody’s surprise, Billy opened the passenger door. “Since he was from the North, I wasn’t really expecting that,” she said. “I was impressed that he was such a gentleman.”

She was less impressed when he got in, slid across the seat to the driver’s side, and waited for her to climb in. “The door on this side has been stuck for months,” he explained.

At the restaurant, Billy wanted to order linguine with clam sauce but decided against it because he didn’t think that garlic on his breath on a first date was a great idea. Jody ordered the linguine with clam sauce.

“I was hooked,” he said.

So was she. They made a date to go to a football game when he got back from Venezuela. Soon after that, Billy called his older sister and told her he thought he was in love. “Whatever you do, don’t tell her that,” his sister ordered. “You’ll scare her off.”

Right, he said. Absolutely not. That night he told her.

Billy went to Q-School the next winter and passed with flying colors. He returned from the second stage at Pinehurst and proposed. They were married the following summer and spent almost no time at home during the first few months of their marriage. Trying to hold onto his card, Billy played the last thirteen tournaments of the year. He missed—finishing 134th on the money list—but that stretch did answer one question for the Andrades: Jody was not going to survive slogging around after Billy every week.

“I think it took her about a month to be sure,” Billy said. “But there wasn’t any question that she wasn’t going to be happy following me around a golf course every day or going shopping. I mean, this is someone who got her degree in economics and now has a master’s. When she was a senior, she won some big economics award, and at the dinner, they asked each of the winners to talk a little bit about what they were going to do after graduation. One guy is going to Harvard for his MBA, another is going to Georgetown law school. Jody gets up and says, ‘I’m going out on the PGA Tour with my husband.’ Let’s face it, something was wrong with this picture.”

Billy knew Jody wasn’t going to be able to deal with thirty weeks a year on tour. He also knew that their marriage wasn’t going to work if they were apart thirty weeks a year. He came up with a compromise idea: what if she could work the weeks she was on tour? He had gotten to know Chuck Will, the associate producer of CBS’s golf telecasts. Maybe he could find work for her.

He could. “You want to work for me?” Chuck Will said when Jody Andrade presented herself to him at the CBS trailer one afternoon. “Fine. You’re hired. Get me a cup of coffee.”

Jody’s career with CBS almost ended at that instant, but she bit her tongue and quickly learned that Will’s bark was a lot worse than his bite. Will figured out pretty quickly that this wasn’t someone cut out for go-fer work, and Jody quickly was moved through the ranks to the job of announcer’s assistant. She was so good that CBS asked her to work on tennis at the U.S. Open and if she would be interested in moving to New York to work full-time for the network in marketing.

Jody was happy with the part-time work. It was not the most intellectually challenging job in history, but she enjoyed the rush of live TV and the fun of the little soap operas that are a part of any traveling carnival.

“It wasn’t something I wanted to do forever,” she said. “But at twenty-two, it was terrific.”

Most important, it meant that she could be with Billy on tour for fifteen to twenty weeks a year without losing her mind. That also made Billy’s life easier because he didn’t have to worry all day whether Jody was bored out of her mind waiting for him to get finished at the golf course.

He survived his return trip to Q-School, finishing third at the 1988 Fall Classic, and improved steadily the next two years, making more than $200,000 each year to establish himself as one of the game’s future stars.

Then, in a two-week period in June 1991, the future became the present. Andrade hadn’t even planned to play in the Kemper Open that year. He didn’t like the Tournament Players Club at Avenel, the new golf course in Potomac, Maryland, that had replaced fabled Congressional as the tournament site in 1987. The course change saved the tour lots of money (since it owned Avenel it didn’t have to pay neighboring Congressional’s hefty rental fee) but angered a lot of players who considered trading Avenel for Congressional akin to trading Yogi Berra for Yogi Bear.

But Andrade changed his mind about playing the Kemper when he forgot to enter the Byron Nelson and had to sit out a week in May he hadn’t planned to sit out. The Avenel golf course had been improved considerably in the four years since it had opened, and Andrade felt comfortable from the first day, when he shot 68. The course was playing fast and easy and scores were frighteningly low. Andrade shot 64–64 the next two days and was 19 under par with three holes to play on Sunday. That put him in second place, behind his pal Jeff Sluman, who was in the clubhouse at 21 under.

He birdied 16 and 17, then made par from the bunker at 18, to finish tied for first. Sluman was waiting for him when he came into the scorer’s tent. “Make sure you add ’em up right, Chachi,” he said, since Andrade hadn’t signed his card yet.

In the playoff they went back to 17, a par-three with water in front of the green. Andrade had stuck a five-iron eight feet thirty minutes earlier. This time he hit it six feet. Sluman’s shot also flew right at the flag and Andrade walked off the tee thinking one of them would make a birdie putt here and it would be over. The next sound he heard was an “aaahh” from the crowd. Sluman’s ball had come up just short and gone in the water.

He had won the tournament and $180,000. His only concern was Sluman, who had been one of the players who had taken him under his wing almost from day one on tour—“Little guys have to stick together,” Sluman said—and now had been denied his second tournament victory by his young pal Chachi.

Andrade lost sleep worrying about it that week. He was concerned that it might affect his friendship with Sluman. He walked into the fitness trailer at Westchester the next week and found Sluman lying face down on a rubdown table. Nervously, he tapped him on the shoulder. Sluman picked his face up, looked at Andrade, and said, “I still don’t know how that fucking ball went in the water.”

Andrade breathed a sign of relief. Then he went out and won Westchester. “I was exhausted on Thursday, but somehow I shot sixtyeight,” he said. “After the round I was out on the range and Jay Haas came up and asked me how I played. I told him and he said, ‘You know, Billy, the best time to win your second tournament is the week after you’ve won your first.’ ”

That thought stayed in Andrade’s mind all week. It almost made sense. Having won a tournament and all that comes with it—the two-year exemption, a spot in the Masters, the World Series of Golf, and the Tournament of Champions—he had absolutely no pressure on him to perform the next week. Some players are so exhausted and elated that they slam their trunks the next Friday without a second thought. Andrade realized after his good start Thursday that Haas might be right.

He hung around the lead the next two days and then got one more boost on the 18th tee Saturday afternoon when he heard Brad Bryant, who was leading by two shots at the time, say to his caddy, “All I want to do is make birdie on this hole and then hope for a rainout tomorrow.”

In other words, Bryant—who had not won on tour—thought his best chance to win the tournament was to not play on Sunday. It didn’t rain Sunday, and Andrade, pumped and full of confidence, roared past Bryant and everyone else, shot 68, and won by one. Two weeks, two victories, and $360,000 in the bank.

And a phone that wouldn’t stop ringing. When Jody called in to check messages on Monday night, there were more than a hundred messages on the tape.

At first it was nice, wonderful in fact. Andrade went to the U.S. Open the next week, and as soon as he arrived he was approached by a U.S. Golf Association official. Could he come to the media tent for a pretournament interview?

He sure could. The official asked him what would be convenient. Andrade suggested the next morning at 9 o’clock. The official looked at his schedule. Sorry, Nicklaus is coming in then. Okay, how about 10 o’clock? No, we’ve got Faldo then. Fine, 11? Sorry, Watson.

Andrade threw up his hands. “You tell me when,” he said. Well, could he come that afternoon at 4 o’clock, right after Seve and just before Palmer?

“Right after Seve and just before Palmer,” Andrade repeated. “Yeah, I think I can handle that.”

He missed the cut at the Open that week, but what the hell, he was on a joyride now. He and Jody took two weeks off and had a great time celebrating their sudden success. They laughed about that first date when Jody had asked Billy what he wanted to do after he graduated and Billy answered, “I’m going to be a professional golfer.”

Jody’s response had been direct. “That’s nice,” she said. “But what else will you do?” Now they had a definitive answer to that question: become rich beyond their wildest dreams. “The week after Westchester, the guy who handled Billy’s money at IMG called and said, ‘Jody, you guys have $360,000 sitting here, what do you want me to do with it?’ And I said, ‘I haven’t the faintest notion.’ ”

Billy went to a Red Sox game one night during their vacation, and Sean McDonough and Bob Montgomery had him come up to the TV booth to do a couple of innings with them. His signature, now perfected, was very much in demand. It was all so much fun.

When Andrade got back on tour, everyone wanted a piece of him. His offers for outings and overseas tournaments and sponsorships quadrupled. Everyone wanted to talk to him or have their picture taken or just have him say a few words to their little corporate group.

Yes, yes, yes, Andrade said. And then yes, yes, and yes some more. He said yes in part because all sorts of money was being tossed in his direction. Beyond that, though, he didn’t want to say no to anyone. “I’m a pleaser,” he said. “I want everyone to like me. I mean everyone. I’ve always been that way. I don’t like to say no and have people think I’m big-timing them or something.”

Sometimes pleasers end up pleasing everyone but themselves. Andrade did so much the second half of ’91 and early in ’92 that he seemed to be constantly tired the next year. He changed club companies for big money and wasn’t comfortable with the new clubs. The contract was voided and he went back to his old clubs, but the upward curve he had been on for three years had turned the other way. He wasn’t awful in ’92, but he slipped from fourteenth to seventy-sixth on the money list, had only two top-ten finishes, and went from $615,765 to $202,509 in earnings.

The kind of money Andrade was making at the age of twenty-seven, especially at a time when the economy in New England was in a deep funk, was bound to cause some jealousy. When Billy and Jody went north for the summer the next year, they began to hear wild rumors. One had them getting divorced, another had Billy’s parents getting divorced. One day Billy even heard from a friend that his father was telling people that he and Jody were about to split.

“I don’t know what it is about New England, maybe it’s the curse of the Red Sox, but people can be very, very negative,” he said. “When I first started on tour, people would ask me what I was going to do when I didn’t make it and had to come home. Then, when I did make it, I started hearing all this crazy stuff about my personal life. It hurt—a lot. I mean, if you want to say I’m an overrated golfer or I can’t make a putt, fine, I can deal with that. But leave my family alone.”

The money and the jealousy and the wild rumors were the least of Andrade’s worries by the end of the year. After his success in ’91, he and Jody had bought a house in Atlanta (that was one way to spend some of the money) and had decided to start a family the following year. In the fall, Jody got pregnant and Billy stopped caring all that much about what was wrong with his golf game. Life was wonderful again.

Two days before Christmas, Jody didn’t feel very well. They went to the doctor the next day. She had lost the baby. Like any young couple, the Andrades dealt with the trauma by trying to look ahead and by listening to all their friends and family and the doctors who told them this was not an uncommon occurrence and the next time everything would turn out all right.

Billy played better the first six months of ’93, but by July, Jody hadn’t gotten pregnant again. “I was freaking out,” she said. “I was convinced I was never going to get pregnant again. I just wasn’t handling it all very well.”

Just before the British Open, Billy sat Jody down and told her he understood how she was feeling and her anxiety was understandable. But he was twenty-nine and healthy and she was twenty-seven and healthy and it hadn’t been all that long and she needed to relax and not obsess about getting pregnant again. He knew that was a hard thing to ask her to do, but he thought it would be healthy for both of them if she made a conscious effort not to be so hard on herself every month.

She knew he was right, and she vowed to not freak out the next month if she wasn’t pregnant. But when she did her pregnancy test the first week in August, she freaked out anyway—she was pregnant. She had to fly to Grand Blanc, Michigan, that afternoon to meet Billy at the Buick Open. When she told him the news that night, they both agreed that—unlike the first time—they wouldn’t tell anyone until the first trimester had safely passed.

Times were tense during the next two months. After starting the year off well, with five top-ten finishes during the first four months of the season, Billy had hit the worst slump of his career. He missed seven straight cuts from July until late September and was more uptight on the golf course than he had ever been in his life.

“Every week I would start out saying, ‘Okay, let’s have fun playing this week,’ ” he said. “Then I’d miss a putt early, catch a bad break, make a bogey or a double bogey someplace, and boom! I’m not having any fun.”

Very few golfers like to talk about slumps when they are in the midst of them. “It’s as if talking about it makes it real,” Jody said. “If you keep on saying, ‘I’m hitting the ball okay,’ you don’t have to face up to the fact that you just aren’t playing very well.”

Jody could see that Billy was uptight, but experience had taught her not to push him. And yet, she remembered what one of her friends, Cathy Wiebe, had told her about her experience in 1991, when her husband, Mark, had played poorly and lost his card. “She finally sat him down and said, ‘I can’t not talk about this anymore.’ I was certain Billy was going to come out of it because I wasn’t ready to think, what if? It’s the unspoken terror that everyone has out here.”

Billy wasn’t in danger of losing his card because he had played so well the first half of the year, but he was baffled by what was happening. Finally, late in September ’93, Jody decided it was time for her to say something. She knew Billy respected a lot of people he had worked with on his game: his teacher, Rick Smith; his psychologist, Bob Rotella; his friends on tour like Sluman and Love and Brad Faxon. Maybe, Jody suggested, Billy should just be Billy Andrade for a while and not be all the things people suggested he should be. She wasn’t putting down his friends and advisers, but she thought he had too many thoughts in his head, too much clutter.

“The Billy Andrade I know is a great player,” she said. “Just be him for a week and see what happens.”

Andrade left for the Buick Southern Open the next night with that thought in his head: “I’m Billy Andrade and I’m a good player.” He made the cut with ease to end the streak, then shot 67 on Sunday to come from behind and tie with four other players for first place. John Inman won the playoff, but the streak was over. He was still a good player. Two weeks later, he finished third at the Texas Open. That put his earnings for the year at $365,759, his second best year on tour.

More important than that, the first trimester had come and gone without incident. Andrade could now tell the whole world that he would be a father in April.

At Doral, Jody was a month from her due date and in no condition to walk the golf course. But she was there with Billy’s parents and he felt good from the very beginning of the week. Doral is one of the tour’s traditional golf courses, the Blue Monster, so named because the courses are color-coded at Doral and the Blue becomes a monster when the wind kicks up.

It was brutal on Thursday, with gusts up to 50 miles per hour. Only three players broke 70. Andrade wasn’t one of them, but he was right at 70, tied for fourth. A 68 the next day tied him for the lead, and a 66 Saturday sent him home with a two-shot lead on the field.

This was what he had been waiting for since the back-to-back wins. “I can’t wait to win again,” he said often, “because this time, I know I’ll handle it better.”

He handled the front nine just fine on Sunday, with a one-under-par 35, and still led by two. But an ugly bogey at 10, at almost the same moment that Huston was birdieing 13, suddenly dropped him into a tie for the lead, and another Huston birdie put him behind. Huston was brilliant, finishing with a 66, nailing a 10-foot par putt at the 18th to stay two shots ahead of Andrade.

Three groups behind, Andrade knew he had to birdie both 17 and 18 to tie. Difficult, but not impossible. When he hit a gorgeous eight-iron to three feet at 17, it looked like he was halfway there. Only the putt didn’t go in. It slid left all the way and never touched the hole. Andrade stood there frozen in shock. He was still in a semi-coma when he hooked his tee shot at 18. That led to a closing bogey, which knocked him down to a tie for second with his old friend Brad Bryant.

It was a downer for Andrade even though he picked up a check for $123,200. He had wanted to win, to feel that rush again, to be back in that group that won golf tournaments. He had come close, but he still wasn’t there.

Cameron James Andrade was born on April 5. It took an emergency C-section and a few scary moments to bring him into the world, but he arrived healthy and happy. Not winning Doral meant that his father didn’t get into the Masters and was home that week. The Masters could wait until next year.