EPILOGUE

THE PGA IS THE LAST TOURNAMENT for which all the big names turn out, although the next two weeks provide most of them with lucrative warm-down events: the International and the World Series of Golf. The World Series is supposed to be a major event, an invitation-only tournament for those who have won tournaments around the world (thus the name) but its importance has been watered down by two nearly identical tournaments: the Tour Championship in October and the Tournament of Champions in January. The money at the World Series is huge and the big names all play, but the intensity level is no different than at a regular tour event.

Once the World Series is over, most of the stars go home, picking and choosing an event or two to play in during the last two months of the schedule. The PGA Tour in September is a stage where the spotlight has been turned off. The purses are smaller—from Milwaukee to Texas the seven events average just under $1 million in purses as compared with a little more than $1.2 million per week from January through August.

Network TV, not wanting to compete with pro and college football, goes home for the winter. ABC televises two days of the Greater Milwaukee Open and the final day of the Tour Championship. Other than that, it is ESPN or no television at all. Four of the six tour events not on television at all take place in September and October.

For most people, unless the Ryder Cup is being played, golf goes away in the fall. They may read a paragraph or two in their local newspaper telling them who won in Milwaukee or in Coal Valley, Illinois, or in Endicott, New York, but that is about it. They will pay more attention in November and December when the made-for-TV events start popping up because that is when the Shark and Freddie and Nicky and Els and the other glamour names are likely to start showing up again.

But even if the public is largely unaware of it, there is very important golf being played in conjunction with the turning of the leaves. Desperate golf. In many cases it is golf played by men fighting for their professional lives. Each week the faces look a little more tense, the Thursday and Friday threesomes become a little more quiet. The saddest sight of all is that of the longtime tour player walking up to a tour official and saying very softly, “Have you got a Q-School application handy?”

The battles are waged at many different levels in the fall. At the very top of the money list, a couple of players may be fighting for the money title, the Vardon Trophy, or the player-of-the-year award. They tend to focus on the Tour Championship, which is played the last week in October with thirty players splitting up $3 million.

In 1994, Nick Price had locked up player of the year the moment his last putt dropped at the PGA, but if anyone had any doubts, he erased them in September by making the Canadian Open his sixth title of the year. Even so, Greg Norman still led the Vardon Trophy race and had an outside chance of catching him for the money title going into that last week at the Olympic Club in San Francisco, the site of the 1994 Tour Championship.

Father down the list, a number of players scrambled to try to make the top thirty on the money list. For someone who had not won a tournament, making the top thirty was doubly important. Not only did it put you into the Tour Championship—where last place was worth $48,000—it put you into the 1995 Masters. That was why Davis Love III was so disappointed when he missed the cut in Las Vegas—a tournament he had won a year earlier—and dropped from twenty-ninth on the money list to thirty-third. Vegas was the last full-field week of the year and everyone knew that the number thirty-one player on the money list would get into the Tour Championship since José María Olazabal, number four on the list, was not a PGA Tour member and therefore would not play.

If Love had been able to get in, even at number thirty-one, he would have needed to pass only one player to make the top thirty. As it turned out, he finished $766 behind Mark Brooks, who was thirty-first with winnings of $474,831. What made it all even more painful was the memory of the one-shot penalty he had called on himself at the Western Open. Without that penalty, he would have made the cut there and a minimum of $2,000. That money would have been enough to get him by Brooks and Craig Stadler, who was thirty-second. Thus, Love ended the year knowing he needed a victory in the first three months of the new year if he wanted to play in the ’95 Masters.

“It’s been a long year,” he said. “I’ve got to go home, figure some things out, and get off to a good start next year.”

One thing he would go home and figure out was what golf clubs he wanted to play with. He was now convinced that he had to make the move to blades, even though he had three years left on his contract to play Tommy Armour investment casts.

Love’s 1994 ended—for all intents and purposes—at the Masters. Going into that tournament, he had played eight times and made eight cuts. He had a second, two fourths, and a sixth, and had made more than $334,000. After missing the cut at the Masters and being as upset as he had ever been about a golf tournament, he never finished in the top ten again; he missed seven of his last twenty cuts (more than in 1992 and 1993 combined), and he lost confidence in his putter and his long irons.

The only saving grace of the last few months was his play in the inaugural Presidents Cup and in the World Cup. He won four matches and tied another and was the anchor in the United States victory over the International Team in September. In November he and Couples won the World Cup for the U.S. for a third straight year. Even so, it was the first time in five years that he did not win a tournament. Two years after winning almost $1.2 million and finishing second on the money list, Love wasn’t anywhere close to being the kind of golfer he wanted to be or had the potential to become.

Of course there are struggles and there are struggles. In his worst year, Love still won almost $500,000 in official money. Well below him on the money list was where the real heartaches came. The magic number for keeping your playing privileges for 1995 turned out to be $137,587. That was how much money Curt Byrum made to finish 128th on the money list. (Since three European Tour players were in the top 125, the cutoff number dropped by three places.)

Of the 125 who kept their cards, eighteen had come out of the Q-School in 1993—an increase from the twelve who had survived from the 1992 school. Two—Mike Heinen and Dicky Pride—won tournaments. Heinen made the most money of those eighteen, earning $390,963 to finish fortieth on the money list. Glen Day—who acquired the nickname “All,” as in Glen (all) Day, because of his (ahem) rather deliberate pace of play—was forty-fifth with $357,236.

Paul Goydos finished seventy-fifth on the list, making $241,107, nearly tripling what he had earned in his rookie year. He ended up with three top tens—including a seventh at the B.C. Open in September, his highest finish ever—and was in the top twenty-five nine times. He tired down the stretch, missing six of his last ten cuts after making eighteen of his first twenty-one. But he came away from the year feeling good about himself and about his golf.

“I think what I learned this year is that I’m good enough to play on tour for a while,” he said. “Before this year, I really didn’t know. I can still get better, a lot better, but I feel now as if I’m a pretty good player. I’ll never be a great player, but I can do okay.”

Goydos calling himself okay is akin to most people calling themselves the greatest. It had been a good year.

For his pal Brian Henninger, it was a fantastic year. He started out in no-man’s-land, having missed the top 125 by two spots and at Q-School by two strokes. That put him in the 126-to-150 category, meaning that he was in on the big tour some weeks, stuck on the Nike Tour on others.

By the end of the year he had made $294,075 to finish sixty-third on the money list. More important, his victory at Deposit Guaranty, rain-shortened or not, made him exempt through 1996 and got him into the 1995 Masters. Even a mediocre fall—he didn’t finish higher than twenty-sixth after his victory—couldn’t dampen his excitement about the year. Like Goydos, he had arrived. There was no reason to think he wouldn’t be on tour for years to come.

Of course he and Goydos, although friends, were quite different when it came to celebrating their success. All year Goydos had hoped that he would make enough money to get invited to Kapalua, the vacation/tournament played on Maui the week after the Tour Championship. He thought it would be a wonderful way to cap the year and give Wendy a much-deserved vacation. He was thrilled when he made the field.

Henninger also made the field. But he didn’t go. “Elk-hunting season starts that week,” he said.

Of course. So, instead of playing golf and snorkeling for a week on Maui, he headed off into the snow in Oregon with his brother to hunt elk. Who says golfers are faceless clones?

Billy Andrade and Jeff Sluman had gone on vacation before the season ended, taking their wives to Bermuda in late September along with Davis and Robin Love and Billy Ray and Cindy Brown.

Sluman’s mood that week would have been euphoric if golf had been the only thing on his mind. On the Sunday prior to the start of the trip, he had finished second in the B.C. Open, his best finish since the 1992 U.S. Open. Even though he shot 72 on the last day and lost by four shots when Mike Sullivan shot a remarkable 66, Sluman had to feel that the week (he led the first three days after starting with a 64) was proof that all the hard work was paying off.

But Sluman’s mind wasn’t really focused on golf. Five weeks earlier, on the day before the start of the Buick Open, he had gotten a phone call from Rochester: his mother had a spot on her lung. Being the husband of an oncologist, Sluman knew exactly what that meant. He withdrew from the tournament and flew home right away. His parents pushed him out the door to play the PGA the next week. His mom insisted she felt fine.

For a while she did feel fine. The week of the B.C. was especially gratifying since Rochester is only about 100 miles from the tournament site in Endicott, N.Y., and it looked for a while as if Jeff might be able to give her a victory. He didn’t, but he came close enough to know that “I put a smile on her face.”

Sluman finished the season with another top ten—seventh at the Buick Southern—giving him four top tens since the U.S. Open. He even thought he had a chance to sneak into the Tour Championship if he played well in Texas and Las Vegas. “I hit the ball well both weeks,” he said. “But I putted like Bozo the Clown.” He ended up fifty-ninth on the money list with $301,178 up thirty-four spots (and $114,000) from 1993. Not as good as he wanted, but a noticeable improvement.

“All I know is, a year ago I wondered if I would ever hit another fairway,” he said. “Now, I honestly think I’m going to win out here again and I know I’ve got my swing back where it should be. All of that makes me feel a whole lot better about the game.”

Sadly, the news off the golf course wasn’t nearly as good. On December 9, after the family had spent Thanksgiving together, Sluman’s mother died. It was, to say the least, a tragic loss for Sluman but as 1995 began, he was trying to move ahead the way he knew his mom would have wanted.

“I miss her every day,” he said. “And I don’t expect that to change or want it to. But I do feel like she’s still alive in the sense that I can still hear her voice and remember her smile and all the things that made her happy. As long as I feel that way, she’ll always be with me.”

Sluman hadn’t told very many players about his mother’s condition but Linda had told Billy Andrade. When Andrade heard the news, he jumped on a plane and flew to Rochester for the funeral. When Sluman greeted him, they collapsed into each other’s arms and Sluman said, “It was great of you to come.”

“I had to come, Jeff,” Andrade said. “Your mom did my wash.”

It was exactly the right thing to say. Sluman remembered his mom doing Andrade’s wash during the B.C. Open and the memory made him laugh.

Andrade had also ended the golfing year on an up note, thanks to a third-place finish in Vegas. He had played indifferently most of the fall, unable to get his game back to the level he had reached when he almost won at Doral. But after spending some extra time working with his teacher, Rick Smith, he put together five straight rounds in the 60s at Vegas and was briefly tied for the lead on Sunday afternoon.

He couldn’t quite keep up with the birdie barrage put on by winner Bruce Lietzke and runner-up Robert Gamez, but finishing 24 under par, even on a relatively easy course, was an encouraging way to finish the year. He won $342,208 to finish forty-eighth on the money list—eight spots lower than he had finished in 1993. Still, he felt as if he wasn’t that far off.

“Money is great,” he said. “But winning is what it’s about out here. I just have to keep working and keep believing in myself.”

One reason Andrade would like to have won was that a victory in Vegas would have put him in the Tour Championship and the Masters. He had missed playing in the Masters in 1994 and had been in the Tour Championship only once—in his double-win year of 1991—and he felt as if that was an elite group he should belong to at the end of each year.

Paul Azinger had been in every Tour Championship since the event had been created in 1987. As late as August, when he made his triumphant return to the tour, he held out hope that he might get hot in the fall and still sneak into the event. Not surprisingly it didn’t turn out that way. His shoulder was sore—from lack of work, nothing more serious—after the Buick Open and the PGA, and his instinct was to just sit out the rest of the year and start all over again in 1995.

But his shoulder started to feel better in mid-September and he changed his mind, entering both the Southern Open and the Walt Disney World Classic. He actually played pretty well in both events, tieing for nineteenth at the Southern and for thirty-third at Disney. Encouraged, he entered both Texas and Vegas, still hoping a couple of high finishes might keep his Tour Championship streak intact.

He never got to the starting line in either tournament. This time it was his back that flared up. Again, he decided not to push it. His year really was over. In all, he made $13,422, exactly $1,445,036 less than he had won in 1993. And yet, without question, no one was more of a champion on tour in 1994 than Paul Azinger.

Curtis Strange had won the Tour Championship in 1988, becoming the first man to make more than $1 million in a single season as a result of that victory. He qualified for the event again the next year, but hadn’t been close since then.

In 1994, he had a chance. And if it had been a priority, he might have qualified. He had made a little more than $368,000 going into the fall and was thirty-first on the money list. But he played in only three more tournaments—skipping his usual trip to Disney when he was invited to play at St. Andrews in the Dunhill Cup—and ended up forty-first.

Strange took some heat in the media for accepting the invitation to Dunhill after skipping the British Open. Dunhill is a team event, three-man teams representing their countries with every player given a guarantee just for playing. Many saw Strange’s decision to play in the IMG-run event (he is an IMG client) as a cop-out after not playing the British.

Strange saw it differently. For one thing, he planned to play in the 1995 British Open—which is at St. Andrews. For another, he was able to take his oldest son with him and show him Scotland in an atmosphere far more relaxed than a British Open week. What’s more, if money was all Strange cared about, he would have played Disney and a couple of other events to try and lock up a spot in the Tour Championship, which carries a $48,000 guarantee and the possibility of winning $540,000 at week’s end.

In all, Strange had to feel happy with 1994. It was his best year since 1989, and he had a real live chance to win the U.S. Open. Most important, Sarah felt almost entirely recovered from her bout with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and the two of them were closer than they had ever been.

“We both learned a lot of things about each other this year,” Sarah Strange said. “And almost all of them were good.”

John Cook hadn’t been through anything quite as traumatic as Strange, but he had dealt with the worst slump of his career and had finally come to grips with his relationship with his father. He had a superb summer, finishing in the top ten six times in seven tournaments. That included a fifth at the U.S. Open and a tie for fourth at the PGA.

He didn’t play well in the fall and, like Strange, fell short of making the Tour Championship, ending up thirty-seventh on the money list at $429,725. The summer had sapped him, but for the right reasons. He had played a lot of high-pressure, high-stakes golf and had acquitted himself well.

“I’m really getting to the point where, a couple of years from now, I may want to cut back on my schedule,” he said. “Maybe play only fifteen times a year. Early in the year, I was beginning to think the game might cut me before I was ready to cut it. At least now I know I can still compete out here for a few more years. It’s a relief.”

Tom Watson turned forty-five on September 4, and having earned $380,378 in just fifteen tournaments, he had no doubts about his ability to continue to compete and play well on the tour. He felt good enough about his game that he briefly considered changing what had become his fall ritual—going home to be with his kids when they returned to school—because if he had changed plans, he probably would have qualified for the Tour Championship for the first time since 1987, when he had won the inaugural version of the event.

In the end, though, he decided to stick to his original plan. His last tournament of the year was the International. Resting in the fall had worked well for him the previous year, so why not rest again? At forty-five, the last thing in the world he wanted to do was overplay.

The question for Watson as 1994 ended was exactly the same as it had been when 1994 began: could he find a putting stroke that would get the ball in the hole on Sunday afternoon? Clearly, that was the only thing keeping him from breaking his seven-year victory drought. Just as clearly, he wanted to win badly enough that he might show up on tour in 1995 putting cross-handed, one-handed, left-handed, or—believe it or not—with a long putter. Watson is extremely traditional, extremely proud, and extremely stubborn. But the near-misses in 1994, most notably that last torturous day at Turnberry, made him think about taking the plunge.

“I watch him hit the ball and then I watch him putt and I just don’t get it,” Nick Price said. “If you aren’t getting the ball in the hole, you have to try something else. He’s just hitting the ball too well not to win out here. It’s gotten to the point of being painful to watch at times. I wish he would try something different.”

In the end, he didn’t. Tom Watson is very stubborn.

For Janzen, 1994 was a strange odyssey. It started terribly, came together with a brilliant two-week rush, and then faded into mediocrity again almost as quickly.

After a fourth at the Kemper and a win at Westchester in back-to-back weeks, Janzen played twelve more times before the year was over and failed to finish higher than thirteenth. Although he insisted the hernia operation he had in July didn’t affect his play—he missed Memphis and then missed the cut his first week back at the Buick Open—it seems likely that it was just enough of a problem to keep him from getting back to where he had been during his two-week hot streak.

He finished the year thirty-fifth on the money list with $460,331, not exactly a terrible year, but enough of a drop that some golf writers were already labeling him a one-major wonder who would never be heard from in an important tournament again. Other players didn’t buy that theory. The consensus remains that Janzen, who turned thirty during the World Series of Golf, will show up on some important leader boards in the near future.

The same could probably be said of Nick Faldo, Tom Kite, and Greg Norman. All three flirted with contention at the majors during 1994, but none was ever right there at the finish. Each had a fourth-place finish (Kite at the Masters, Norman and Faldo tieing at the PGA), and Kite had three top tens, Faldo and Norman two.

Norman won the Vardon Trophy for the lowest scoring average on the PGA Tour, finished second on the money list, and didn’t miss a cut all season. He had eleven top-ten finishes in sixteen tournaments, an extraordinary run of consistent golf, and for the second straight year, won well over $1 million. Kite was no slouch either with more than $700,000 in earnings and eight top-ten finishes.

Faldo won a tournament in Europe and made a firm decision (as did Ernie Els) to play on the PGA Tour in 1995, being convinced that the best way to prepare for the majors is to play against the best competition as often as possible.

All three men conceded that they could hear little clocks ticking in their heads. Kite turned forty-five in December, Norman turned forty in January, and Faldo would be thirty-eight in July. That didn’t mean any of them was being fitted for a walker, but it did mean that time was a factor.

“If you had the same sense that the clock is ticking when you were twenty-four that you have at forty-four, you would probably have been a lot more intense down the stretch in big tournaments back then,” Kite said. “But that’s impossible to do. When you’re young, you think you’ll play forever. You think you’re bulletproof.”

Norman claimed he couldn’t wait to turn forty because he remains convinced he will play his best golf in his forties. Given his conditioning and the success so many others have had recently in their forties, there is no reason to doubt him.

But can he beat Nick Price? Can anyone? That was the game’s most-asked question as 1995 began. No one dominates in golf the way a top player can dominate in tennis. But Price went into the 1995 Masters having won back-to-back major titles to close out 1994, a record total of $1,499,057 in official earnings for the year, and with a hunger that seems to grow, rather than dissipate, with each new accomplishment. He says he wants to become the fifth player to have won all four major titles, and right now he would seem to be the player on tour with the best chance to do that, even though Watson only needs to win a PGA to join the elite group.

One outgrowth of the Norman-Price versus Watson-Nicklaus Wednesday matches at the British Open and the PGA was a proposal for yet another made-for-TV event. This time, Price and Norman wanted to take on all challengers in match play, probably in some kind of thirty-six-hole format, with a corporate sponsor putting up big bucks for each match.

The germ of the idea actually began when Price and Norman sat in the clubhouse at Southern Hills having lunch after they had beaten Watson and Nicklaus in the rematch of their Turnberry duel. “We should do this all the time,” Price said to Norman. “This is great for getting you sharp, getting you ready to play.”

Price was thinking as a golfer when he made the comment. Norman, always thinking as a businessman, took the concept to the next step: one where there was money to be made.

One group that Norman contacted about the proposed matches was the Fox Television Network, which is owned by Australian media-magnate Rupert Murdoch. Before Norman and Fox were finished, the match-play concept had been scrapped.

In its place was a proposed eight-tournament, $25 million “World Tour.” The idea was to take the top thirty players in the world, throw in ten sponsor exemptions—to get names like John Daly into the mix—and develop a tour that would compete with—and no doubt damage—the PGA Tour.

Fox wanted in because it had decided, after purchasing the rights to the National Football League and the National Hockey League, that acquiring sports properties was the best way to build the network. Norman clearly wanted to be more than just the second-best player in the world; he wanted to be a mover-and-shaker, not just a golfer. This was his way of making that move.

The new tour clearly had the potential to make the very rich in golf even richer. It also had the potential to severely damage the fabric of the PGA Tour, since it is built on the notion that the stars will play at least fifteen tournaments—and usually between twenty and twenty-five—a year and that the weekly tournaments truly mean something to them as well as to the journeymen, who sometimes rise up and beat them.

There would be no one like Brian Henninger or Paul Goydos on the World Tour. There would be no rookies like Dicky Pride or Mike Heinen who would come from nowhere to win. The money—$3 million a tournament with $600,000 to the winner and $30,000 for last place—would become like Monopoly money. There would be no grinding to make the cut because there would be no cuts. Each player would be given $50,000 annually in travel expenses in addition to the guarantee of thirty grand a week just for showing up.

If all of this sounds familiar, it should. In the 1970s, professional tennis became a battleground with two separate tours competing for players. The money went higher and higher, and by the time the dust had cleared there were so many tournaments in so many places that almost no one following the sport could understand what tournaments mattered and what tournaments didn’t matter.

Top players didn’t even try very hard very often, and appearance fees skyrocketed so high (stars now routinely get $250,000 just to show up for some tournaments) that most tennis tournaments nowadays are nothing but glorified exhibitions for the big names. Golf has avoided that by maintaining the integrity of the week-to-week events with everyone playing toward a goal, whether it is winning player of the year, finishing in the top thirty, or keeping one’s playing privileges by making the top 125. The tour certainly needs its stars, and if they go off to play elsewhere eight weeks a year and either cut their schedules on the PGA Tour drastically (which would be against the current fifteen-tournament-minimum rule) or play in fifteen but only half-heartedly, or are banned from the tour if they sign up for the World Tour, the entire sport will take a major hit.

Golf does not need a so-called World Tour. It already has one in the four majors, a half dozen PGA Tour events that draw most of the world’s top players, the Ryder and Presidents Cups, and a small handful of important overseas events. Already, most of the world’s top players get together a dozen times a year. And when they do, the pretenders to their throne get a shot at beating them. The Fox/Norman tour would be elitist and would lack story lines like Mike Donald almost winning the U.S. Open or Tom Lehman coming from mini-tour exile to almost win the Masters.

The World Tour is strictly about making the rich richer and Greg Norman’s ego bigger. Finchem reacted quickly to the mid-November announcement, saying it was against the rules for PGA Tour players to take part in such a tour and, in his opinion, would hurt the game. By January 1, not a single player had signed up for the World Golf Tour and the idea, if not totally dead for 1995, was on life-support. Start-up was delayed until November 1995 at the earliest.

While Norman and friends wondered where their next few million would be coming from, Bruce Fleisher, Mike Donald, and Jeff Cook ended the season wondering where they would be playing in 1995.

Fleisher had hoped that making the cut at the PGA would provide a springboard to the strong fall he needed to keep his card. It didn’t work out that way. Fleisher made only two cuts in his last nine tournaments and was twenty-ninth the two weeks he did play on the weekend.

He kept slogging along, even with a bad shoulder, week after week, hoping he would catch fire someplace. Instead, he played himself into such a state of exhaustion that he had to withdraw from the Texas Open with two weeks left on the schedule. He turned forty-six that Sunday and tried to come back for one last try at Las Vegas. But with his shoulder killing him, he shot 72–74 the first two rounds and withdrew, knowing he had no chance to make the 54-hole cut.

That left him with winnings of $88,680 for the year, only $22,800 of it coming after the disastrous bogey that cost him the cut at the Players. He had been eight-for-eight making cuts going into that week. He was just five-for-twenty-one the rest of the year. Since he finished 163nd on the money list, he had to go all the way back to the second stage of Q-School. That was a long road back—four rounds at the second stage, then six more at the finals—to the big tour. But he survived, finishing seventh at the Q-School finals. He was back on tour for 1995 and one year closer to the promised land of the seniors.

Jeff Cook also found himself playing the second stage of the Q-School. But for him, that was a victory, since it had looked for much of the year as if he would be all the way back to the first stage. He struggled through most of the summer, unsure whether to abandon what David Leadbetter had shown him during the winter or stick with it, hoping for a turnaround. By the fall, he had given up on Leadbetter and was trying to find some consistency with his old swing. He improved slowly.

He ended the regular portion of the Nike Tour fifty-first on the money list. The top fifty get into the Nike Tour Championships. But Cook got in because Mike Brisky, thirty-fourth on the list, decided to play in the Texas Open on the big tour that week. Cook took advantage of his good fortune, playing his best golf of the year. He finished in a three-way tie for second, one shot behind winner Mike Schuchart, and jumped to thirty-fourth on the money list. That got him a free pass to the second stage (the top ten on the Nike list make the big tour; eleven to twenty-five go straight to the finals; and twenty-six to fifty go to the second stage) and gave him a big boost of confidence.

“I’ve struggled with my putting all year,” Cook said. “Now for the first time, I feel good about my swing and my putting. If I can keep that feeling at the school, I think I’ve got a good chance.” He cruised through the second stage and was back where he had been twelve months earlier: the finals. Once again though, he didn’t make it. Once again, at least for one more year he said, it was back to Nike land.

Mike Donald was certainly hoping to keep the feeling he had during the fall. He had bounced back and forth from Nike events to big tour events all summer. Late in August, he decided he was wasting his time in Nike events. “I wasn’t playing bad, I wasn’t playing great,” he said. “Every week, it seemed like I finished fifteenth. That wasn’t getting me anywhere.”

He decided he needed to focus on preparing for Q-School and called Paul Marchand, the Houston-based teacher he had worked with on occasion in recent years. They spent three days together, and Donald came away hopeful again. There had been times during his two-year slump when he had thought his game was coming back only to find that it wasn’t.

Much to his surprise, he received a last-minute sponsor’s exemption into Milwaukee. A 72 the first day was discouraging, but he hung in on Friday and came to 18 needing a birdie to shoot 68 and make the cut. It was late in the day, so there was no doubt what the number would be. Facing a six-foot putt, he rammed the ball into the back of the cup. Then he shot 65–70 on the weekend and finished eighteenth.

“It’s amazing how delicate the game is,” he said later. “If I miss the six-footer, I leave town down on myself, thinking, well, here we go again, playing just well enough to miss the cut. Instead, I show up Saturday feeling great and play great and end up leaving feeling like eighteenth was a great week. There was a time when making the cut on the number felt like a waste of time to me. Now I was really excited that I had hung in there and made it.”

He finished thirty-second at the B.C. Open, again coming back from a bad start (five over par after eight holes) to make the cut and went to the Hardee’s Classic feeling better than he had in three years. “There’s a huge difference between hoping you’ll play well and knowing you’ll play well,” he said. “Hardee’s was the first time in a long time I started the week knowing I was going to play well.”

He was right. He shot 68–66–64–67 and finished tied for third. The $58,000 check was the biggest he had cashed since the Open in 1990 and was worth more than he had made in all of 1993. He then played two more solid weeks, finishing nineteenth at the Southern and fifteenth at Disney.

In five weeks, he had made just under $100,000 after having made $70,000 in the previous twenty months. He had one tournament left—Texas—and knew he probably needed a top-ten finish to make the top 125. Maybe it was pressure, maybe it was just exhaustion after making five straight cuts, but on Friday, after an opening 69, he shot 75 to miss the cut, fading on the last nine holes.

That was a letdown. But he still finished with $119,065 for the year. That put him 141st on the money list, meaning he was straight into the Q-School finals and, perhaps just as important, as a top-150 player, he was guaranteed entry into fifteen to seventeen tournaments in 1995 even after playing poorly for a second straight year at Q-School.

“The best part is that I have hope again,” he said. “For a long time, I had no game and no hope and no answers. I went to Q-School last year having missed eleven straight cuts. My attitude was awful and it showed. Now I feel good about myself and my game again. I have a chance to compete. That’s all I can ask for.”

The year would not have been complete without another round of bizarre behavior from John Daly.

Throughout the World Series of Golf, Daly seemed intent on hitting into players in front of him. When he did it to Norman’s group on Thursday, Norman’s caddy. Tony Navarro, peeled back and asked Daly what the rush was.

“If you guys would get going, maybe we could play some fucking golf out here,” Daly told Navarro.

“Are you in such a hurry to shoot eighty?” Navarro asked, before turning around to rejoin Norman.

On Friday, it was Andrew Magee who was upset with Daly for not waiting until his group was out of range. Saturday passed with no new troubles, but things got worse on Sunday. Daly kept hitting shots into or close to the group in front of him, one that included a club pro named Jeff Roth, who had gotten into the tournament by virtue of his victory at the National Club Pro Championships. At the 15th hole, a reachable par-four for most players and especially for Daly, he pulled out his driver with Roth’s group still on the green.

“Maybe you ought to wait,” Neal Lancaster, his playing partner, suggested.

“Why?” Daly answered. “It’s a fucking par-four, isn’t it?”

With that, he blasted away, landing the ball pin-high, next to the green. When he came up to the green, Roth’s parents were waiting there to give him a piece of their minds. Daly turned to Roth’s mother and, repeating what had become his favorite line, said, “You know something, you remind me of my ex-wife.”

When the round was over, Roth and Daly exchanged angry words in the parking lot. Then Daly got into it again with Roth’s parents. Before anyone knew what was happening, Roth’s sixty-two-year-old father had jumped on Daly’s back and the two men had to be separated.

A few minutes later, when Curtis Strange finished his round, he walked into the locker room and heard several players talking about Daly’s antics on the golf course. He rounded a corner and found Tim Finchem talking to someone.

“You know something, Tim, I may be out of line saying this, but if you don’t do something soon, I’m afraid Daly’s going to end up in a fight,” Strange said.

Finchem smiled wanly. “Too late,” he said. “There’s already been a fight.”

Naturally, the incident made national headlines. Just as naturally, Finchem was circumspect about what he would do next, saying he would “investigate.”

The last thing anyone heard Daly say as he left that day was, “Fuck the PGA Tour. I’m sick of it. I’m outta here.”

Two weeks later, at a player meeting before the Canadian Open, the subject of Daly came up. Bruce Lietzke, the quiet Texan who has become a legend on tour by playing no more than sixteen or seventeen weeks a year and still remaining a consistent winner, stood when Daly’s name came up.

“Whatever you feel you have to do, Tim, you do it,” he said. “We all know this is a tough situation for you, but we’re behind you.”

The overwhelming sentiment in the room was anti-Daly. Most players felt he had used up more lives than a cat. And yet they understood that if Finchem simply brought the hammer down on him with a long-term suspension, sponsors would scream and many in the public would view Daly as a martyr, no matter how ludicrous that notion might be.

Finchem talked to Daly and his agent the following week. A compromise was reached: Daly and Finchem would announce that Daly had “voluntarily” decided to take the rest of the year off. “Voluntarily,” in the same sense that someone with a toothache “voluntarily” goes to the dentist. “John can come back to the tour as early as the Mercedes [Tournament of Champions] Championships in January,” Finchem said.

The phrasing was important. “As early as” clearly meant that his return was conditional and would be based on whether Daly finally got himself counseling and appeared—déjà vu—to be ready to act like an adult on tour. His “everyone picks on me” act had worn thin with most of his fellow pros.

A month after Finchem announced the “voluntary” decision, Daly was quoted in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as saying that the decision not to play the rest of 1994 was entirely his and had nothing to do with Finchem and everything to do with a sore back he had been nursing. If telling the truth was a criterion for Daly’s return, he was going to be in trouble.

He still managed to win sympathy from people. At the Tour Championships in San Francisco, Norman, who had been virtually frothing at the mouth at the mention of Daly’s name throughout the summer, was asked about Daly. Norman promptly launched into a monologue about what a fine young man Daly was, saying he was good for the game and he would do anything he could to help him in the future. No doubt he thought now that Daly had been quoted “out of content” in the British tabloids.

As it turned out, Daly had called Norman, apparently seeking forgiveness for his behavior during the summer and, after a forty-five-minute conversation, Norman had decided that Daly was his new best friend. Could their “friendship” have anything to do with both having multimillion-dollar deals with Reebok? Could it have been Reebok that “suggested” they chat? All one can do is speculate.

Daly returned at the Mercedes Championships saying he had learned his lesson—again. The saga continues.

As for the PGA Tour itself, it was a fascinating year. It began with Deane Beman as commissioner and ended with Finchem as commissioner. How different were the two men? On the Saturday of the Tour Championships, Finchem took several players to a Rolling Stones concert. Beman could not have handled all the noise.

There was a victory by a grandfather/TV announcer (Johnny Miller) and, for the first time ever, not a single victory in a major championship by an American. American stars were an endangered species. Azinger missed almost the entire year with cancer, Fred Couples missed most of four months with back troubles, and Phil Mickelson missed three months with both legs broken while skiing.

The second leading American-born money winner in 1994 was Tom Lehman, who five years ago was ready to quit to become a college golf coach. The top American was forty-three-year-old Mark McCumber, who, after going six years without a victory, won three times in less than four months, including the Tour Championship. Hale Irwin, who will be eligible for the senior tour in June, finished tenth on the money list. With half the total prize money, as many players (six) won more than $1 million on the senior tour as on the regular tour.

The Presidents Cup was invented in 1994 in about fifteen minutes. The tour decided it had to be up and running now in order to take advantage of Ryder Cup mania and to keep IMG from inventing a similar event. Even though Ernie Els didn’t play because he had a $200,000 guarantee to play that week in Europe, and Norman had to pull out because he got sick, the first Presidents Cup was successful enough that there will be a second one in 1996.

Many of the Americans didn’t want to play, but after considerable arm twisting by Finchem and his staff, all those who qualified showed up and, for the most part, enjoyed the week in northern Virginia, even though the tour put everyone up at a Hilton (corporate deal, of course) that was a forty-five-minute trip through brutal traffic from the golf course.

This time, no one raised any objections—political or otherwise—when both teams were invíted to the White House for dinner. Come 1995’s Ryder Cup, President Clinton and Paul Azinger (who was named an honorary co-captain of the American team when captain Hale Irwin qualified to play) will probably be the best of friends.

The Americans won the Presidents Cup 20–12, dominating most of the weekend, although there was just enough suspense on Sunday that Fred Couples’s nine-iron to two feet for a clinching birdie at the 18th hole in his singles match against Price was dramatic. Or at least almost dramatic since the U.S. probably would have won with or without his clinching shot, a few minutes later.

Fifty-nine golfers made more than $300,000 on the PGA Tour in 1994, ninety-one of them made more than $200,000, and 154 made more than $100,000. That’s pretty good money, even if it costs close to $75,000 a year to travel the tour, not luxuriously, but comfortably. In all, 328 players received at least one check on tour in 1994. That means less than half of them broke even for the year. And they were the ones lucky enough to play on the big tour at all.

Golf remains a life that makes a chosen few very rich, a reasonable number very comfortable, and about 150 of the several thousand who play it professionally a good living each year. The competition becomes more intense with each passing year. Succeeding on tour has never been more lucrative or difficult than it is right now. Just getting there is brutal.

It is impossible to forget the joy and the despair of the last day of Q-School. The forty-six who survived at PGA West in 1993 left that evening with a grand future in front of them. They were on The Tour. They would share locker rooms with Price and Norman, Nicklaus and Palmer, Azinger and Couples. All the big names, all the great tournaments. There was huge money to be made.

“It’s almost impossible to explain what this means,” said Brad Lardon, who had somehow made a five-foot putt on the last hole to get his card. “You grind and you grind for six days and if you make it, the whole world opens up for you.”

But that opening guarantees nothing. In January, Brad Lardon began 1994—like everyone else on tour—at zero. Ten months later, Lardon had played in twenty-one tournaments. He had earned $21,429. Like twenty-eight others who had left PGA West deliriously happy, he was going back to school.

Back to the grind. Those who made it through the grueling six days would joyously rejoin the big boys in January. All of them would be back to the grind.

In golf, there is no higher compliment than having someone say, “He was really grinding out there.” From Price to Mark Pfeil (the last name on the 1994 money list) they all grind. They have no choice. It is the only way to keep playing the game they love so much.