17

NIKE DAZE

IT IS ABOUT FIVE HUNDRED MILES from the first tee at Oakmont Country Club to the first tee at Prestonwood Country Club in Cary, North Carolina.

In a golf sense, the distance is closer to a million miles. While the members at Oakmont were taking back their golf course from the millionaires of the PGA Tour, the members at Prestonwood were making way for 144 members of the Nike Tour, a group whose total net worth was probably slightly higher than that of Ernie Els.

In strict golf terms, this was not an exaggeration. While Els had left Oakmont with a check for $300,000 as the Open winner, the field that gathered at Prestonwood for the Nike Carolina Classic would play for a total purse of $200,000.

And they would play very hard for that money.

The Nike Tour, originally called the Hogan Tour, was created by the PGA Tour in 1990 to give younger players a proving ground where they could sharpen and improve their games until they were ready for, as Brian Henninger liked to call it, “the big boy tour.”

The big boys are Hyatt, Marriott, and the Ritz; Nike is Budgetel and Motel Six. The big boys are The Palm and Ruth’s Chris; Nike is McDonald’s and Hardee’s. The big boys are New York, Chicago, L.A; Nike is Raleigh, Knoxville, Shreveport.

In all, the concept had worked… sort of. The new tour was thriving, even though the Hogan Company had been forced to drop out after 1992 and had been replaced as title sponsor by Nike. Purses had risen on the tour from a total of $3 million in the first year to almost $5.7 million in ’94. Most tournaments the first year had been fifty-four holes, with purses ranging from $100,000 to $150,000. Now most tournaments were seventy-two holes with prize money of $200,000, and a season-ending championship with a $225,000 purse had been added.

There were glitches. The goal was to have at least thirty tournaments each year, but in 1994, sponsors had been rounded up for only twenty-eight. And while the tour had certainly become a place for younger players to hone their games—John Daly, Jeff Maggert, Tom Lehman, Mike Springer, Brian Henninger, and Paul Goydos are some of the players who came up the Hogan/Nike route—it had also become a fallback for older players who had lost their PGA Tour cards. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, unless the older players became too prevalent. In 1994, the Nike top ten included players like Chris Perry, Tommy Armour III, Skip Kendall, Jim Carter, and Jerry Haas. Only Kendall was under thirty at the start of the year—and he turned thirty in September. All of them had been on tour and had lost their cards. In all, seven of the top-ten money winners were former tour players.

The goal for players on the Nike Tour is simple: get out. No one wants to be referred to as a Nike Tour veteran. The top-ten players on the Nike money list get big boy cards for the following year. The first are totally exempt, the next five are fitted in with the Q-School graduates. Those who finish eleventh to twenty-fifth go straight to the Q-School finals. And twenty-sixth to fiftieth in Nike world gets you straight to the second stage.

In short, everyone is playing more for the escape route than for the money.

Jeff Cook certainly felt that way. He was beginning to feel like a Nike veteran, and it was not a feeling he enjoyed. He had come back from overseas to join the Hogan Tour in 1990. Three years later, he had gotten his card and had played with the big boys in 1993, finishing 164th on the money list. That put him back in Q-School, where his three-putt bogey on the 107th of the 108 holes had left him one shot away from getting his card back.

Cook had considered returning to the Asian Tour, one of many overseas proving grounds available for nontour players, after Q-School but decided to take his medicine and go back to Nike because he thought that was still his best route back to the tour. He also decided that he needed to improve his golf swing and had gone to see David Leadbetter.

Cook’s friends were surprised when they heard that Cook was working with Leadbetter. For one thing, Cook had never been very big on lessons. He was self-taught as a kid and, although he had worked at times with different people, he had never been the type to seek out a guru. The other surprise was that Leadbetter, teacher to the stars—Faldo and Price—would have time for Jeff Cook. He did, though, and Cook, for $150 a lesson, went to work with him.

At first, he thought he had found golf nirvana. Leadbetter told him he hadn’t even scratched his potential and that he didn’t think he would need as much work as some other players did because he seemed to understand the golf swing quite well. Cook was like a little kid with a new toy.

Only the toy proved difficult to use. The changes Leadbetter wanted weren’t easy to execute, and Cook’s game seemed to be going in the wrong direction. When he told Leadbetter that, the teacher told him, “You may take two steps back before you take three forward.”

How soon would the steps forward come? It was hard to say. It could be a month, six months, a year. By the time the weather turned hot, Cook felt like he was out of time. He liked Leadbetter and appreciated his making time for him, but he was hitting the ball worse, rather than better. When he and Henninger roomed together in April at the Nike tournament in Shreveport, Henninger was appalled by what he saw.

“You’re all messed up with all this mechanical [read, Leadbetter] stuff,” Henninger told him. “You have a good golf swing. Have faith in it.”

Cook wanted to have faith in Leadbetter. But by June, he was eighty-third on the Nike money list and going nowhere fast. He decided it was time to listen to Henninger and his own instincts. He would bag the Leadbetter drills and all the mechanical moves he had been trying to make. He couldn’t be Nick Faldo. The next best thing was to go back to being Jeff Cook.

It worked during the first round at the Carolina Classic. The tournament did have one thing in common with the Open—brutal heat. Cook, playing early, never came close to a bogey all day and shot 66. That put him in third place, one behind the co-leaders. It also put a smile on his face for the first time in a while.

“You know, sitting and watching Brian on that last day in Atlanta was great and awful at the same time,” he said that night. “I mean, I was so nervous and excited it was like I was playing that eighteenth hole with him. But it also made me realize that I wasn’t playing that eighteenth hole. I was sitting in Greenville, South Carolina, at another Nike Tournament and I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be out there on the real tour, which is where I honestly feel I belong.

“I know I’m good enough to play out there. I had chances last year to break through and just didn’t do it. That’s no one’s fault but my own, but I want to get back there and have a chance to prove myself—more for myself than for anybody else. I just turned thirty-three in April. The time for me is now. It has to be.”

Cook is not like Henninger. He doesn’t burn to be a star. He doesn’t lie awake in bed at night after a bad round beating himself up. Perhaps that is because he considers himself lucky to have gotten as much out of golf as he has; perhaps it is because he has beaten cancer. Perhaps it is just different personalities. Cook would like to play well; Henninger needs to play well. Henninger’s ultimate goal is to win consistently on tour; Cook’s is to return to Indiana University as the golf coach.

Cook certainly didn’t want to be back on the Nike Tour, driving his car from event to event, playing for 20 percent of the prize money he had played for the year before. He had played with Tom Watson and Tom Kite in 1993. During the first two rounds at Prestonwood his playing partners were Tad Holloway and Tom Scherrer. There are no gallery ropes on the Nike Tour because they aren’t necessary. Walking the fairways at a Nike event feels a little bit like being at Q-School. It is quiet most of the time. The only sounds are of golf balls being hit, often followed by shrieks of pain or groans of disgust. The overall feeling is one of loneliness.

That feeling may explain why the Nike Tour had twice as many participants in its Bible study group most weeks than the regular tour. The need to feel as if someone was watching over you seemed to be stronger on a tour where—at least in a tangible sense—almost no one was watching.

Cook wasn’t a Bible study participant. All he wanted was to play good golf. But it wasn’t easy. On day two at Prestonwood, he started fast, with two birdies in five holes, and led the golf tournament. Then it all fell apart. His putter went south for several holes. He bogeyed five of the next seven holes, three-putting three times. By the time his putter came back to life, he was hitting the ball all over Prestonwood’s wide fairways and needed the putter to salvage pars. A 10-foot par putt at the last hole went in, giving him a 75 that left him four shots behind the leaders, Skip Kendall and Patrick Bates.

The weekend didn’t go much better. Cook shot 70 on Saturday but faded to 76 on Sunday. There isn’t as much cash to spend on the Nike Tour on Sundays as there is on the regular tour, but Cook spent some. While Kendall was holding up the $36,000 first prize check, Cook was walking out the door with $1,390 to show for the week, having finished in a tie for twenty-sixth place. Sadly, that wouldn’t be anywhere close to his worst week. By year’s end, he would miss nine of twenty-four cuts.

He didn’t throw any clubs when it was over on Sunday or pout or vow never to play the game again. But the grind was wearing on him. He wondered why golf was so hard right now. “This is typical of the way things have gone for me,” he said. “If I hit the ball well, I can’t putt. If I putt, I can’t hit the ball.” He smiled. “I guess that sounds exactly the same as every golfer who has ever played the game. I know I can play. I know I’m better than the eighty-third best player on the Nike Tour. I’ve been up there with the big boys and I still believe I’ve got the game to play with them. But saying it and doing it are two different things.”

He climbed into his car. He was going home for a week to Indianapolis and then to the next tour stop in St. Louis. There were a lot of miles ahead.

Mike Donald missed his driving days. Of course that didn’t mean he drove when he was on the Nike Tour. It just meant that when he looked back on his early days on tour, the memories made him smile.

“I remember one year I left Florida to drive to California a couple of days before New Year’s,” he said. “I spent New Year’s Eve in the middle of a blizzard in an $18-a-night motel room in Odessa, Texas. I’ll never forget sitting there watching the ball come down in Times Square with nothing but snow outside the window. But I didn’t mind. I was on my way to start the year playing golf and I was psyched, excited. All that mattered was getting to the next tournament.”

Donald had played a lot of golf since then and, since his famous “almost” at the U.S. Open in 1990, not very much of it had been at a level he liked. When the Q-School ended his 1993 on one more sour note, he decided to go home, throw his clubs in the back of a closet, and not even think about golf for a long time.

A long time lasted ten days.

For all his talk about walking away and not needing the life on tour anymore, Donald was, at heart, a golfer. He was no different than Curtis Strange, who often said, “You know, I tell people I’d never stay out here and struggle, but the truth is I probably would. Golf is what I eat, drink, sleep, and dream about. I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

Donald had never done anything else and, still eighteen months shy of his fortieth birthday, had no reason to think it was time to do something else. Still, he dreaded writing letters asking for sponsors’ exemptions again the way he had done in 1992, and he knew that he wouldn’t get nearly as many positive responses as he had gotten back then. “I mean, how many times can you say to a guy, ‘Sure, come on back’?” Donald said. “There are young players out here who probably deserve the exemptions more than I do.”

Donald knew he would get into some tournaments without asking for an exemption. As a player who had won on the PGA Tour he still had playing status as a past champion and smaller events like Hattiesburg, the B.C. Open, the Hardee’s Classic, and the Buick Southern Open would probably be available to him. So would Anheuser-Busch, the tournament he had won. Anything else would come from sitting down at his little computer and writing letters. Even after that, Donald knew that if he wanted to play a full schedule, he would have to go the Nike route.

Like Henninger, he was confused about which tour to focus on: Did he play on the big tour every chance he got and just play a few Nike events to stay sharp, or did he go the Nike route all the way and hope he could finish in the top ten and get back his playing privileges that way?

“Something has to happen this year one way or the other,” he said in February. “I can’t just go on in limbo, and I certainly don’t want to play Nike full-time when I’m forty. I mean, sooner or later, no matter how much you want to play you have to look in the mirror and say it’s time to go home.”

The first five months of the year didn’t provide much evidence that Donald was turning it around. He got into Pebble Beach and L.A. and missed both cuts. He got into his hometown tournament, the Honda, and made the cut—ending a string of thirteen straight misses that dated to the previous July—then shot 78 on the third day and finished tied for fifty-ninth.

He tried the Nike Tour after that and finished eighth in his first tournament, the Louisiana Open. But it was hard to stay enthusiastic walking the empty fairways and showing up each week in a locker room filled with strange faces.

About the only thing Donald seemed able to get in buckets was publicity, whether he wanted it or not. In February, he was the subject of a lengthy New York Times profile written by Larry Dorman, chronicling his life and times since the near-miss of 1990. That story led to several calls from people who thought he needed financial backing to get back on tour. The story said he had lost his sponsors—meaning his club, ball, and cap deals. Many readers thought that meant he was without financial backers. Donald had three offers from potential “sponsors” in a week. One guy wanted to sell 500,000 $1 shares in Mike Donald.

Donald thanked them all, explained that what he needed was a few more birdies, not a few more bucks, and went back to work. Then came a phone call from CBS Sunday Morning. They had read the story too and wanted to do their own piece. Donald never says no to the media; it just isn’t in his nature to say no to people. This time he said no. He’d had enough, he told the producer; he was flattered by the interest, but he just didn’t want to go through recounting the whole story again. The producer persisted. Politely, Donald said no, absolutely not.

The next day CBS called again. The producer understood why Donald didn’t want to tell the story again, but there were a lot of people out there who still hadn’t heard it. Donald gritted his teeth. No. “It’s been four years,” he said.

The phone rang again the next day. Donald probably should have taken his old pal Fred Couples’s advice and not have answered “because there might be someone there.” There was. The producer. Donald’s willpower broke. Okay, he said, he would do it. He hung up and immediately regretted saying yes.

The crew followed him around during the Honda Classic. Everywhere Donald went, a camera crew trailed him. He was embarrassed. Here he was in the field on a sponsor’s exemption and he had his very own network camera crew following in his wake. The piece ran on Masters Sunday. Donald was sitting in the living room with his father when the piece came on. He sat and listened for a couple of minutes, saw a shot of his mom in the gallery at Medinah, and decided he’d seen enough. He left the room.

His father told him the piece was well done, and when the producer sent him a copy of the tape, he did finally look at it. There were more calls after that, people wanting to help. Donald didn’t need help—except with his game. When, he wondered, would he begin to go forward with his life again rather than constantly being asked to go backward?

He had asked for a sponsor’s exemption for the Kemper Open, a tournament where he had often played well. Ben Brundred, the tournament director, was a friend, someone who had gone out of his way to help him in the past. Early in May, Brundred called to say he was sorry, but he didn’t have a spot for him. Too many young players needed exemptions. Donald understood. He thanked Brundred for considering him and made plans to play the Nike event in Ohio that week.

But just before he left for the tournament, Donald got another call from Brundred. There had been some late dropouts and a spot had opened up. Did he still want to play? You bet he did. Donald changed his plans and flew to Washington Tuesday afternoon. At that moment he had played in four big tour events all year, and the $2,387 he had made at the Honda was all he had to show for it.

He shot 71 the first day at the Kemper, nothing spectacular, but for the first time in what seemed like forever, he actually made some putts. It was a day that easily could have been another in a long line of 74s. He was encouraged. The next day was a little better—70. Not only did he make the cut, he made it with room to spare.

He started solidly on Saturday, but made a horrid double bogey at the easy par-five sixth hole, after pushing his drive into a creek. He took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his pants to try and slash the ball out. The ball never moved. Donald picked it up, dropped it—he was now lying four—hit his fifth shot just short of the green, then made a good up and down for seven. Watching all this, Mike Hulbert, his playing partner, shook his head. “Oh no,” he said, “not again.”

Like a lot of people on tour, Hulbert found it tough to watch Donald struggle. Only this time, it didn’t happen again. Donald made a good save for par at the seventh, then birdied the ninth. He salvaged 72 out of the day and stayed in contention. The next day, he got to four under par at one point before a double bogey at 17 knocked him back to two under. He had taken a risk at 17, going for a flag that was up front, close to the water. His thinking had been that if he made one more birdie, he would finish in the top ten and that would not only give him his biggest check in three years, but would automatically get him into Westchester the next week.

The double bogey cost him about $15,000, but he still finished tied for eighteenth and made $16,380. More important than any of that was the way it felt. He was a golfer again, hitting the ball the way he wanted to hit it, feeling as if he could make putts, getting that tingle of being in contention on Sunday for the first time in a long time.

“I’m not back yet, not by any means,” he said. “But this shows me I can still play the game, that I’m not just some guy who once had a good U.S. Open. It tells me that if I keep working, good things are going to happen for me eventually.”

The next day, he went to Westchester to play in the qualifying tournament and four-spotted. Then he played thirty-six holes of U.S. Open qualifying the next day. He didn’t qualify there, perhaps because he had played seven rounds of golf in six days after a full year of rarely playing more than two rounds in a week.

There was no doubt about one thing: Donald wanted to play golf. On the weeks that he couldn’t get in on the big tour, he played the Nike Tour. He began to make more cuts. Progress was slow, but there was progress. By summer’s end, he had played twenty-four tournaments—twelve regular tour, twelve Nike. Before the year was over, he would play in at least thirty events, as many as 90 percent of the players on tour.

He would put the clubs away again in December. Probably, for at least a week.