THERE WAS ONE MAJOR championship left in 2003. It would be played three weeks after the British Open, with the tour making stops in Hartford, Connecticut (Greater Hartford Open), Grand Blanc, Michigan (Buick Open), and Castle Rock (outside Denver; the International) before almost all of the top 136 players in the world headed for Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester, New York, for the PGA Championship.
The reason that most of the top 136 players were in the field and not 156 was because the PGA of America, which runs the championship, still reserves twenty spots for club pros—men who spend much of the year giving hackers lessons and selling clothing and golf equipment out of their pro shops. When someone in golf wants to put down a club pro, the phrase frequently used is “sweater stacker.”
Once upon a time, all golf pros were club pros in some way, shape, or form. Not until Arnold Palmer brought big money into the game in the 1960s did those good enough to play on tour no longer feel the need to work as a club pro part of the year. The PGA Tour’s qualifying tournament is still referred to as “Q-School” because when it first began there was a classroom element to the event, as those training to play golf for a living also needed to train to run a small business.
It was the PGA of America that ran the tour until 1968, when the touring pros broke off and formed the PGA Tour. To this day, many people do not understand how different the two organizations are. Members of the PGA Tour are focused on one thing almost all the time: improving their golf games. Members of the PGA of America almost never get the chance to work on their golf games because they spend so much time working on the golf games of those who aspire to someday break 100.
But the PGA of America still controls one of the four major championships (and the Ryder Cup), and that’s why twenty club pros get to tee it up with the stars once a year. This galls many tour players because, inevitably, a number of good players don’t get to play in the PGA Championship.
For a long time the presence of the club pros was the least of the PGA Championship’s ongoing issues. Even though it had a glamorous list of past champions, from Walter Hagen and Gene Sarazen and Byron Nelson and Sam Snead to Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player and Tiger Woods, it had always been the fourth of the four majors.
“Hey, that’s life,” David Duval once said. “If you’ve got four majors, one of them has to be number four.”
Unless you are in danger of no longer being number four. During the 1980s, there was actually talk that the PGA Championship might cease to be a major. Those running the tour were constantly insisting that the Players Championship had become more important than the PGA because it “belonged” to the players and had a stronger field. When Jack Nicklaus launched the Memorial Tournament in 1970, it was clear that he intended it to be considered a major championship eventually. That was why he modeled so much of the tournament and its trappings on the Masters.
As recently as 1990, the possibility that the PGA Championship might cease to be a major lingered. In 1987, the tournament was played at PGA National in Palm Beach in brutally hot conditions on greens that completely baked out in the heat and the humidity. Jim Awtrey, who was then the PGA of America’s CEO, frequently told the story about standing near the 18th green and seeing someone rowing a woman in a raincoat out to the scoreboard that floated in the lake to the right of the 18th green. As soon as the woman got out of the boat, Awtrey understood what was going on: one of the local sponsors had hired her to put up scores—in a bikini.
“I knew at that moment,” Awtrey said, “that this was a championship that was in trouble.”
It got worse three years later when the PGA Championship was scheduled to be played at Shoal Creek Country Club in Birmingham, Alabama. The PGA was always searching for new and different venues because it didn’t want to copycat sites chosen by the USGA for the U.S. Open. Shoal Creek was one of those relatively new courses. The golf course had gotten good reviews when it had hosted the event in 1984—helped by the fact that Lee Trevino won—so the PGA decided to go back just six years later.
Not long before the tournament, Hall Thompson, the club president, was asked in an interview what would happen if an African American ever applied for membership at Shoal Creek. That would never happen in Birmingham, Thompson responded.
A firestorm ensued. There was talk of boycotts, of moving the championship, even of canceling it. Eventually, a local African American businessman was recruited to become an instant member at Shoal Creek, and the tournament was held, but the memories lingered.
As it turned out, Shoal Creek was a turning point for the PGA. A decision had been made after 1987 to seek out more classic venues. In 1991, John Daly made his Cinderella out-of-nowhere run from ninth alternate to PGA champion at Crooked Stick. Two years later, playing at Inverness—a past U.S. Open venue—Paul Azinger outdueled Nick Faldo and Greg Norman down the stretch, beating Norman in a playoff to win his long overdue first major title.
Nick Price won at Southern Hills a year later, and Davis Love III won at Winged Foot in 1997—both had been U.S. Open courses. Woods won dramatically in 1999 and 2000. By then, all the talk about the PGA Championship being supplanted as a major had quieted down. It was still number four, but it was, without doubt, number four. The PGA Tour began trying to sell the notion that the Players Championship was now the “fifth major.”
This led to a classic quote from 1988 PGA champion Jeff Sluman: “There are only four items on the Grand Slam breakfast at Denny’s,” he said. “Not five.”
Oak Hill was where Sluman, a Rochester, New York, native, had grown up and had learned the game. His pro then and the pro at Oak Hill in 2003 was Craig Harmon, one of the four teaching Harmon brothers who were the sons of Claude Harmon, the pro at Winged Foot in 1948—the year he won the Masters.
Oak Hill had plenty of history. It was designed by the Scottish master designer Donald Ross and was usually talked about in hushed, reverential tones by those in golf. It had hosted three U.S. Opens (1956, 1968, and 1989) and a PGA—1980 when Jack Nicklaus won the last of his five championships. It had also hosted the Ryder Cup in 1995. It was considered a classic golf course, greatly respected by the pros and, in a sense, a respite from two relatively untraditional sites: Olympia Fields, which had produced almost embarrassingly low scores for three rounds during the Open in June, and Royal St. George’s, one of the least popular British Open sites among the players.
Oak Hill was not a golf course anyone was likely to complain about, although in 2003 the weather was surprisingly hot and humid in mid-August when the players began arriving to play practice rounds and get ready for their last major of the year—or, as the CBS marketing people had come to call it, “Glory’s Last Shot.”
It was, without question, Tiger Woods’s last chance to salvage his year. He had finished tied for fourth at the British Open, easily his best performance in a major championship in 2003. He was still in the midst of his swing change and was working more and more with Hank Haney. There hadn’t yet been a formal announcement, but everyone in golf, including Butch Harmon, knew the two were working together.
“I knew they’d been working together when Tiger told me we were done at Muirfield in ’02,” Harmon said. “I could tell just by looking at his swing.”
In his previous six years on tour, Woods had failed to win at least one major only once—in 1998 when he was going through his first major swing change while still working with Harmon. He then had won the PGA in 1999; the U.S. Open (by 15 shots); the British Open (by eight); and the PGA again in 2000. He had started 2001 by winning the Masters, and then had started 2002 by winning the Masters and the U.S. Open.
Going into the 2003 PGA, Woods had gone five straight majors without a win. The only “drought” he’d had that had lasted longer had been after his win at the ’97 Masters, when he had gone ten straight majors without a win.
Because Woods had played well at Royal St. George’s, the consensus during the pretournament run-up was that he was now ready to win again. He had finished second to Rich Beem in the 2002 PGA, and most people believed he would turn a bad year (for him—he had still won four tournaments) into a good one by winning the PGA.
One person who arrived in Rochester without any such expectation was Shaun Micheel. He was, as the cliché goes, just happy to be there. He was thirty-four years old and had been on and off the tour since first getting through Q-School in 1993. His two biggest wins at that moment were the 1998 Singapore Open and the 1999 Nike Greensboro Open. He had played in exactly two major championships in his life: the 1999 U.S. Open at Pinehurst, where he had missed the cut, and the 2001 Open at Southern Hills, where he had tied for 40th place. His highest finish on the PGA Tour had been a tie for third in 2002 at the B.C. Open.
“Should have won that,” Micheel said. “I had a three-shot lead on Sunday and finished bogey-bogey. That hurt.”
If Micheel hadn’t been a golfer, he probably would have been a pilot like his dad, Buck. Many of his boyhood memories are of his father leaving on trips that would take him to three continents in a week.
“The good news was that when he was home, it was usually for a long time,” he said. “That gave us a chance to spend time together.”
A lot of that time was spent on the golf course. The Micheels lived near the fourth hole of the Colonial Country Club, which in those days was the host course for the annual PGA Tour event played in Memphis. “I grew up with the PGA Tour literally in my backyard once a year,” Micheel said. “I couldn’t get enough of hanging around during tournament week. I was never into autographs; I just wanted to be around for the golf.”
Micheel’s parents had grown up in Nebraska, and his father had been in the Air Force as a code breaker. “I like to tell people he was a spy,” Micheel said, laughing.
After retiring from the air force, Buck Micheel worked first for a company that flew in and out of places like Vietnam and Laos—during the Vietnam War. He moved to a company called Shawnee Air and settled in Orlando in the late 1960s.
That was where Shaun was born, in 1969. His sister, Shannon, came along two years later. Not long after that, a new company called Federal Express, which had a start-up fleet of three airplanes, was looking for pilots. Buck Micheel was hired as one of the company’s first pilots. Soon after that, the family moved to Memphis, and Buck and Donna Micheel bought the house at Colonial and settled in with their two young children. In those days, the tour stop in Memphis was known as the Danny Thomas Memphis Classic. Although the Micheels didn’t belong to Colonial, Shaun played part of the course almost every evening once he got hooked on golf.
“When I was little, my dad would take me with him a lot when he went to play,” he said. “I always thought he did it because he felt bad about being on the road so much flying. Now that I have my own kids, I know he did it because he liked the time with me. I loved being there right away, although when I was little it was mostly about driving the cart.”
Buck Micheel was a very good player, a low single-digit handicapper, and he won a membership in a club across the street from Colonial during a member-guest tournament drawing. Later he joined a club in nearby Germantown because a lot of his pilot buddies lived up there and were members. Often, he would take Shaun to play with them.
“I loved that,” he said. “I probably played more with my dad and his friends when I was young than with other kids because not that many of my friends played. I’d play with him when he was home, but when he wasn’t I’d go out on the course at Colonial late in the day and play my own little course. I’d start on the fifth tee and then play two, three, and four. That way I never encountered any members because no one teed off that late, and I never got hassled about being out there. I’d usually come in at dark when my mom or my dad came out in the backyard and called for me.”
By the time he was thirteen, Micheel was becoming a very good junior player. His handicap dropped nine strokes that summer. “I can’t remember if it was from 12 to three or from 10 to one,” he said, laughing. “But I do remember I became a good player.”
At fifteen, he gave up playing high school basketball, even though he loved it, because he knew golf was what he wanted to do, in terms of both college and a career. He enjoyed competing, and he also enjoyed playing on his own at Colonial. “I liked playing in competition a lot,” he said. “But I also enjoyed being off by myself and playing or practicing. I liked the solitude.
“Once I got a good look at the pros and what they could do, I was hooked. Every year I’d spend the week of the tournament hanging around at the club, watching everything the pros did. I knew then I wanted to be a part of what they were doing, even though it seemed like a million miles away from me at that point. I’d like to think that I had other interests then and I have other interests now, but golf is what I’ve loved doing and being a part of for as long as I can remember.”
He was an outstanding junior player while in high school and was recruited by many of the top college programs. He almost went to Kentucky because he enjoyed his visit to the school so much. Steve Flesch, to this day a good friend on tour, was his host and took Micheel to a basketball game between Kentucky and then top-ranked University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
“I thought the whole thing was great,” he said. “I knew that was where I wanted to go, and they were offering me a full ride. So, I committed. A few months later, I got a call from the coach saying that a player on the team who he had thought was going to flunk out had actually stayed eligible. He didn’t have a full scholarship to offer. So, he offered me a half ride instead.”
That spring Micheel was playing in a local tournament in Memphis the same week that a major college tournament was being played nearby. Indiana was in the tournament, and IU Coach Bob Fitch came over to watch the juniors. After seeing Micheel play, he invited him to visit Indiana.
Micheel agreed. There were no basketball games being played, but he loved the school anyway. And he knew Indiana played pretty good basketball too since the Hoosiers had beaten the UNLV team he had seen on his winter visit to Kentucky and had gone on to win the 1987 national championship.
“The only reason I hesitated at all was that I was really interested in aviation, in flying,” Micheel said. “I had already gotten my pilot’s license my senior year in high school, and I knew Illinois had a really good golf team too, and they had an aviation major. I asked Coach Fitch about it, and he said, ‘Oh, well we have aviation here too.’ ‘Perfect,’ I thought. So I signed to go there.”
As it turned out, Indiana did have an aviation program: it was called ROTC. That summer, Micheel won a major national junior tournament. His phone started ringing off the hook with scholarship offers. But he had already signed with Indiana and had no intention of reneging on that commitment.
“Going to IU was one of the best decisions I ever made,” he said. “It wasn’t all smooth sailing, but it was definitely a great experience.”
He was good enough to play right away, and he did well academically, although finding a major wasn’t easy. At first he wanted economics but ran into a problem many athletes run into: a professor who wouldn’t reschedule tests that were missed to travel to an away game or, in this case, a golf tournament. The same thing happened in biology, so he finally settled on general studies, where he could pick and choose courses that fit with his golf schedule.
“It was important to me to get my degree,” he said. “That’s why I went back in the fall of ’91 to finish up. I knew I wanted to play golf for a living, but I had no idea if I would be good enough. Doing well in college is a lot different than doing well on tour or even making it to the tour. A lot of very successful college golfers never even make it to the tour.”
Fitch retired after Micheel’s sophomore year and was replaced by Sam Carmichael, who was the Indiana women’s coach and a good friend of Bob Knight. Carmichael brought a lot of Knight’s intensity to his coaching, which was a lot different from Fitch, who often sent the players out in carts to practice and figured those who wanted to play would be those who put in the most time.
“Sam was a lot like Coach Knight,” Micheel said. “It was his way or the highway, no doubt about that. He knew what he was doing, and we eventually became good friends. But it wasn’t easy at the start.”
In fact, Micheel came very close to quitting the team his junior year. Indiana was playing in a tournament outside Baton Rouge, and Micheel called Stephanie Abbott to see if she wanted to come to have dinner before the tournament began. Abbott had also grown up in a house at Colonial (her family lived on the 16th hole), and she and Shaun had known each other as kids. She was now a freshman at LSU, and she and Shaun dated occasionally. This seemed like a good chance to spend some time together.
Stephanie drove up with one of her friends and arrived at the team’s hotel a little earlier than expected. “I was in the shower getting ready,” Micheel remembered. “So the guys let her and her friend in so they could wait until I was ready. They were sitting there, and Sam walked by. The curtains were open—no one was trying to hide anything—and he saw these two girls sitting in the room.
“He went ballistic. He came in and started screaming at Stephanie and her friend for being in the room. Then he screamed at me, basically accused me of trying to sneak girls into the room. I said to him, ‘Coach, you don’t know me very well if you think I’d do that,’ and we really went at it. I was angry because he was questioning my integrity. He was just angry.”
Micheel’s teammates talked him out of doing anything rash, and he figured out how to deal with Carmichael’s intensity and temper. “The problem was I had a temper too,” Micheel said. “Sometimes it was an oil and water mix. But I did play well those two years.”
He was the Big Ten champion as a senior and a first-team All American. He got his degree in December 1991 and headed straight to South Africa to play for a couple of months. “Fascinating trip,” he said. “Talk about a culture shock. It was right at the end of apartheid, but the way they still treated blacks at times was just awful.
“I remember we went to one club to play, and we asked about getting caddies. They took us over to a pen where they had them all locked up and let a couple of them out to work for us that day. I almost got sick when I saw that.”
He came home and played minitours in Florida for the rest of 1992, rooming with Doug Barron, a boyhood friend, who would also make it to the tour. Micheel won his first tournament by winning a nine-hole playoff. “I remember it was just about pitch dark when we finished,” he said. “They’d already told us this would be the last hole we played. I won $3,000. Felt like I’d struck it rich.”
His first chance at Q-School came that fall when he went to the Country Club of Indiana for first stage.
“I don’t remember the exact details because I’ve blocked it from my mind,” Micheel said. “But I think I bogeyed the last three holes to miss by one. That really hurt. Up until then, I still felt invulnerable. I was just climbing up this ladder step-by-step to get where I wanted to go, and then all of a sudden I took a hard fall. It took me a little while to get over that one.”
The following year he decided to play on what was then the T.C. Jordan Tour. (Today it is the Hooters Tour.) The money wasn’t much, but the T.C. Jordan did have the advantage of feeling like a real golf tour. The events were 72 holes, and the players traveled—almost always by car—from small town to small town, learning about life on the road and how to prepare to tee it up every Thursday.
Micheel’s dad had put together a group of sponsors for his son among his pilot friends in Memphis; they were floating about $25,000 for Shaun to live on, which made another year of playing for relatively small purses both possible and bearable.
The highlight of that year had nothing to do with golf. Micheel and Barron were playing in a tournament in New Bern, North Carolina. On Tuesday morning, they were walking to their cars in the hotel parking lot, when they became aware of an out-of-control car hurtling past them on the road near the hotel.
“I’m not sure what drew our attention to it, but there was this loud noise,” Micheel said. “I looked up and saw this car go by and then literally become airborne. I knew that the road there dead-ended at the Neuse River, so I took off running right away. I’m not sure if I heard the splash or not, but when I got there, the car was in the water and clearly starting to sink.
“Someone else who worked at a gas station that was right there had either heard the noise or seen the car and had come running too. We both just looked at each other for a second and then started to take off our clothes. I took off everything but my boxers and dove in. It wasn’t something I thought about; it was just something I did.
“We got to the car and the windows were open—I guess they didn’t have air conditioning; it was August and very hot. There was a woman in the front seat and a man in the backseat. The other guy started working to get the woman out, and I went to get the man.
“I remember that he couldn’t swim and he was panicked, so I kind of had to fight him at first. Fortunately, the water wasn’t very deep—maybe six feet—so once I got him out of the car, I was pretty sure we were going to be okay. By the time we got to shore, a bunch of people were there to help.”
The two people in the car were an elderly couple who had apparently been on the way home from the grocery store. Micheel never actually spoke to them because they were both taken away in an ambulance even though they checked out just fine.
“From what I gathered later, they were on their way back from the grocery store and missed the turn just before the dead end. I guess when the lady who was driving saw the barrier, she tried to hit the brake but somehow hit the accelerator, and that’s why they were going so fast when they got to the water.”
When the story made the local paper in New Bern, Micheel instantly became a local hero. The T.C. Jordan Tour didn’t draw big galleries, but many of those who did come out made a point of finding him to tell him how proud he should be of what he had done.
“I remember playing well that week,” he said. “I had a chance to win on Sunday but didn’t. I never thought of myself as heroic. I’m proud that at a moment like that, I responded in what turned out to be the correct way. I didn’t panic, and I didn’t freeze. I think most people would want to do the right thing at a moment like that, and I’m glad that I did. But I never thought of myself as a hero.”
The local branch of the Sons of Confederate Veterans felt differently. The following year, they awarded Micheel their Award for Bravery at their annual dinner. “All I remember about that night is that they all showed up in their uniforms,” Stephanie Micheel recalled. “I was proud of Shaun for what he did, but that night was, let’s say, different.”
Shaun and Stephanie still joke about the episode and the dinner. “Like I said, I’m very proud of what Shaun did,” Stephanie said. “But it does crack me up sometimes when they put his name up on the scoreboard. Today [the Honda Classic in 2009] he’s playing with Joe Ogilvie and Jonathan Byrd. Joe’s name comes up and his bio says, ‘Won his first tour event in Milwaukee in 2007.’ Then for Jonathan it says, ‘Three-time winner on tour, three-time All American at Clemson.’ Up comes Shaun, and it says, ‘Winner of 1994 Sons of Confederate Veterans Award for Bravery.’ It’s as if he never played golf. I don’t mind it; I just find it kind of funny.”
Shaun and Stephanie started dating again in the fall of 1993, soon after Shaun’s heroics in New Bern, this time on a serious basis. “We’d known each other so long and we’d dated on and off, but it had never been serious because it had always been long distance,” he said. “But at some point, I guess we decided we really liked each other.”
He made it through the first two stages of Q-School that fall, meaning he would at the very least have a chance to play on the Nike Tour in 1994. The Q-School finals were in Palm Springs that December. His parents and sister came to watch him play. On the sixth and final day, Micheel played his best round of the week and shot 67 to move up from well outside to right on the qualifying number.
When his score went up, people came up and congratulated him. Micheel knew that the low 40 players and ties made it to the PGA Tour. He had moved into a tie for 37th place with nine other golfers. “I was so excited because I’d made it,” he said. “Then I heard someone say, ‘The playoff for all players tied for 37th place will begin on the 10th tee in fifteen minutes.’ I was like, ‘Playoff, playoff? I thought I was in, I thought I’d made the tour. We have to play off?’ ”
He was working himself into a panic when someone told him the playoff was just to determine the players’ rankings. They were all on the tour, but as the last guys in from Q-School, they wouldn’t know week to week (especially on the West Coast) if they were high enough on the exempt list to get into tournaments. Thus, figuring out who was number 37 as opposed to who was number 46 was significant.
“At that moment, it didn’t matter to me at all,” Micheel said. “All I knew was I had made the PGA Tour. I was so loose when we played the 10th hole that I hit two perfect shots, made the putt for birdie, and got the 37th spot. After everything I’d been through, that seemed easy.”
The family was so exhausted and drained that the postround victory celebration took place at a Wendy’s. “None of us had the strength to do anything else,” Micheel said.
Back home, Stephanie was just starting law school and told her friends that the guy she was dating had made it to the PGA Tour. “A few months into the season, some of my friends told me that everyone thought I was lying because no one could find his name in the results,” she said. “No one knew how to spell Micheel.”
The results they would have found had they known how to spell Micheel were not especially encouraging. Like a lot of tour rookies, Micheel was completely overwhelmed by life on the tour.
“I think it’s something almost every young guy goes through,” he said. “I wasn’t yet twenty-five when I got out there, and I knew absolutely no one. I never felt like I belonged. I can remember walking onto the range and seeing Nick Price and Greg Norman and thinking, ‘What in the world am I doing out here with these guys?’ I remember I hit the ball pretty well at times that year, but I could never make anything happen scoringwise. I just felt as if I was out of my league.”
One reason Micheel didn’t know anyone was that very few of the players with whom he had played junior golf, college golf, or minitour golf had made it to the tour. “Phil [Mickelson] was there, but I barely knew him. We had roomed together once at an event, but we just didn’t travel in the same circles. When he came on the tour, he had already won an event while he was in college, so he was playing in the tournament winners category right from the beginning. I played in the last group of the day a lot.
“It wasn’t as if people weren’t nice to me; they were. I’m just not the kind of guy who can walk into a room and start making friends. I’ve always been more of an observer: walk into a room and watch people. That’s just me. If I’d been more outgoing, it might have been easier.”
From his spot as the number 37 player coming out of Q-School, Micheel ended up getting into nineteen tournaments that year. He made only four cuts, and his highest finish was a tie for 26th at the Deposit Guaranty Classic, an event that was held opposite the British Open back then, meaning that most of the top players weren’t entered. Of the last eleven tournaments he played, that was the only one in which he made it to the weekend. His highest finish in a full-field tournament was in Houston, where he ended up tied for 55th.
“I remember when I made it through Q-School, my dad saying to me that as excited as he was and as proud as he was, he wasn’t sure that a year on the Nike Tour to get experience wouldn’t be better for me at that point. I remember that same year David Duval didn’t make it through Q-School, and he went on and had a great year on the Nike and later said it was an important learning experience for him at that point in his career.
“My attitude then was that I wanted to play against the best, and I thought the best way to learn was by being up close with the best, week in and week out. But after a while, when you just feel overwhelmed, I’m not so sure it’s still a learning experience.”
Micheel ended up making $12,252 in prize money that year, which landed him in 247th place on the money list, a long way from the top 125. He went back to the second stage of Q-School and, still staggered by what had happened during the year, didn’t make it to the finals. That sent him back to the minitours for 1995.
“That may have been the most discouraging year of my golf career,” Micheel said. “Those first couple of years playing on the minitours, it was all fun. I was up and coming and still learning. But the old saying about, ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,’ is true. It was very hard to be back playing on that level after I’d been on the PGA Tour, regardless of how I’d done when I was on the tour. You get used to that lifestyle pretty fast. One minute I’m teeing it up against the best guys on the best golf courses, the next I’m back playing minitour events, driving from place to place in a Honda Accord my parents had bought for me.
“It was tough. I was down on myself. It didn’t get to a point where I thought about quitting, but I remember thinking, ‘This isn’t what I signed up for when I turned pro.’ ”
He managed to make it back to the Q-School finals at the end of that year, and, even though he didn’t make it back to the tour, he did secure a spot on the Nike Tour. “That was important,” Micheel said. “I needed to at least feel like I was making progress. And, even though I didn’t exactly tear it up out there the next year, at least I felt as if I could compete.”
He finished 82nd on the Nike money list that year, went back to Q-School, and this time cruised back to the tour. That was the year the sixth round was rained out in California, leaving a lot of players angry and upset because they didn’t get a chance to play their way inside the number on that final day.
“I remember one of the guys who was outside the number sitting around while it rained, saying how unfair it was because he had worked so hard to get to where he was,” Micheel said. “I understood his frustration. But all of us who were inside the number at that point had probably worked just as hard. The rain wasn’t anyone’s fault.”
Micheel went back to the tour in 1997 convinced that things would be different than in ’94, that he was more mature and more experienced and, as a result, a better player. He knew more guys than the first time around, and he did feel more comfortable. But he didn’t play that much better. He made five cuts in twenty-one tournaments, his highest finish a tie for 49th place at the Buick Open. Even though he made a little more money than in ’94 ($14,519), he actually finished three spots lower on the money list. Then, to make sure the year ended on the same down note as ’94, he again failed to make it through the second stage of Q-School.
He was beginning to feel like a hamster on a wheel, going round and round and always ending up back in the same place—a place he didn’t want to be.
He and Stephanie had been living together for a couple of years by then and had made the decision to get married in November 1998. She had graduated from law school and was practicing law in Memphis, and they agreed it was time to take the next step.
“I could have gone back to [what had become] the Hooters, I suppose,” Micheel said. “But I didn’t want to do that. Even though it was a tough time to do it, I decided to take a shot and go to Asia. I knew the competition was decent over there, and the money was better than the Hooters. I just wanted to try something different.”
He actually had to go to Q-School to get on the Asian Tour because the tour allowed only twenty non-Asians to be full-time players each year. “Had to go through two stages,” Micheel said, laughing. “I was stunned when I found out, but I had already committed to it mentally so I just went.”
He got through Q-School and played decently until the tour took its annual monsoon-season break. He flew home during the break to play some golf and to get married. While he was home, he played a round of golf with his dad and some buddies and shot 58.
“It wasn’t like I was playing a PGA Tour golf course,” Micheel said. “But it was a 58. That’s a pretty good round of golf under any circumstances. It gave me some confidence when I went back.”
The first tournament back after the break was the Omega PGA Championship in Hong Kong, which was a major on the Asian Tour.
During the pro-am, his first round of golf as a new husband, Micheel started out wearing his wedding band. “It felt really uncomfortable though, so I took it off after a few holes.” He smiled. “Once I took it off, I couldn’t stop making birdies. That was the last time I played with it on.” He ended up shooting another 58. All of a sudden he was making putts, something he had struggled to do throughout his pro career. With another confidence boost, he went out and won the tournament—his first win other than on minitours as a pro. Most important, he won $80,000. That windfall allowed him to finally pay off his sponsors and feel as if he could go forward as a pro without any help. By the end of the year he had finished third in the Asian Order of Merit and, for the first time in his career, had made some serious money, about $125,000 in all.
In 1999, Micheel made it back to the Nike Tour and continued to play solid golf. He won for the first time on that tour in Greensboro and made $173,411 to finish ninth on the money list. That provided him with an instant spot back on the PGA Tour because the top-15 money winners on the tour advanced past Q-School and past go to collect not $200 but their exemption.
“I remember Commissioner [Tim] Finchem giving us all our [tour] cards on the 18th green after the [Nike] Tour Championship,” Micheel said. “It obviously wasn’t the first time I’d made it to the tour, but this felt special because I’d worked all year as opposed to one week to earn it. I think playing well on the Nike also made me feel like I was finally a good enough player to go out and have a chance to succeed against the big boys.”
The first half of the year didn’t go a lot better than his two previous years on tour had gone. He missed seven of nine cuts to start the year, his best finish a tie for 40th in Tucson. But things began to pick up slowly. He made five cuts in a row—by far his best streak ever on tour—even though he didn’t finish higher than 37th.
The breakthrough came in the searing late July heat at the John Deere Classic. On Sunday, Micheel played perhaps his best round of golf since his final round at the ’93 Q-School, shooting a 65 to rocket up to a tie for fifth place. Given that he had never before finished in the top 25 in a tour event, it was a massive confidence boost.
“I had been in position going into Sundays before, where a good round might not win the tournament for me but would get me a big check, and I’d never been able to do it,” he said. “Finally doing it helped a lot. After a while, you do begin to question yourself. Am I just not good enough to play with these guys? That week told me the answer was at least maybe.”
He went to Canada in late August and came back with a tie for 13th in Vancouver and a tie for 10th at the Canadian Open. That put him in position to retain his card if he could finish strong. He did—most notably with another tie for fifth, this one in Las Vegas. That check vaulted him comfortably inside the top 125 on the money list. He finished the year with $467,431 in earnings, good enough for 104th.
“At that point, my attitude was, ‘Okay, I know I can do it. No more going back to Q-School,’ ” he said.
It didn’t quite turn out that way. Micheel didn’t play poorly in 2001, but there was a distraction that was beyond his control. His mom had dealt with bipolar disease most of her life, and her meds simply weren’t working as well that year as they had in the past. Buck Micheel was winding down his career with FedEx but was still away for long stretches. Often the calls from Donna Micheel were made to Shaun, who would try to track his dad down through a special system FedEx had for emergencies.
“I’m not going to use that as an excuse,” Micheel said. “Everyone has family issues. But it was difficult at times. The next year my mom started doing a lot better, and my dad had retired and was home, and, coincidence or not, I played a good deal better.”
Micheel dropped to 136th on the money list at the end of ’01, meaning he would have partially exempt status the next year. He decided to suck it up and go back to Q-School to improve his position, and did so, finishing in a tie for 13th place. That meant he would get to play most weeks without hanging around hoping for withdrawals, which is the lot of most players in the 126 to 150 category. “It definitely turned out to be a good move going back,” Micheel said. “I didn’t enjoy it, but by then I was used to it. Plus, being in the top 150 meant I went straight to the finals and knew, even if I didn’t make it, I had some status on tour the next year. I think that relaxed me a lot.”
In 2002, Micheel had his first real chance to win a tournament—the B.C. Open. He led after 54 holes and was within a couple of shots of Jeff Sluman’s all-time scoring record for the event. But, as often happens to first-time contenders, he slipped on Sunday, bogeying the last two holes to finish tied for third. It was his highest finish on tour but disappointing nonetheless.
“There’s a difference between having a chance to win a tournament and being in position where you should win a tournment,” Micheel said. “I’d had chances before, times when if I had a good round on Sunday I could have come from behind to win. But this was different. I was in the last group, and I had a three-shot lead. I should have won.”
Still, the finish at B.C., along with a tie for fifth in Texas, wrapped up his card for 2003, allowing him to finish 105th on the money list. His goal going into 2003 was simple: keep your card two years in a row, and crack the top 100 on the money list.
Winning a tournament, which he believed he was capable of doing, would be a bonus.