AT THE START OF 2003, Shaun Micheel did something he had never done before to begin a year on the PGA Tour: he played good golf. In his five previous years on tour, he had never had a top-10 finish before July. By early March, he had two: a tie for 10th in Los Angeles and a tie for eighth at Doral. The money for those two weeks got him off to the fastest start of his career by far, but they also made him feel good about his game, because both events are played on high-quality golf courses.
“Riviera [Los Angeles] is obviously one of the better courses we play,” Micheel said. “There have been U.S. Opens and a PGA there. Doral may not have quite the reputation it did twenty years ago, but it is still a place where you have to hit good shots in order to compete.”
The timing for an early hot streak could not have been better. Stephanie was pregnant and due in November, which meant she would have to give up practicing law at least for a while. Job security for Shaun was clearly a good thing, and the fast start meant not having to spend the summer and fall worrying about another trip to Q-School.
“I had become a better player and maybe more important a better putter,” Micheel said. “My first few years on tour, there were times I hit the ball well enough to really compete, even to win, but I never did. Every player will tell you the same thing: when you putt well, everything else in your game seems to go better, because you feel less pressure to get the ball close on every hole. Once I started to make putts with some consistency, I felt a lot more relaxed on the golf course.”
He began the year by making eleven of twelve cuts, a far cry from his first two years on tour when he had made nine cuts total—in forty starts. When he finished 13th in Washington and 10th in Hartford, Micheel did two things: wrapped up his card for 2004 and earned a spot in the PGA Championship. That was a big deal.
“One thing people don’t understand is that it’s hard to get into major championships even if you’re playing on the tour,” he said. “The Masters takes about ninety players, so essentially you have to have won a tournament or be in the top 50 in the world to have a chance to get in. The U.S. Open and the British Open only have a handful of players who are exempt, and everyone else has to play a 36-hole qualifier, which is a crapshoot. That’s why every year, you see club pros and amateurs making it into those events while established tour players don’t. I’m not saying that’s wrong; that’s what makes them open championships. It just means that being on the tour, unless you are one of the top guys, doesn’t guarantee you anything.”
The PGA Championship is the most accessible of the four majors to those who play the U.S. Tour. Micheel just about clinched his spot with his performance in Hartford, because it put him in the top 70 on the money list for the twelve months that ran from the end of the Buick Open in 2002 to the end of the Buick Open in 2003. He was 68th on that list and sweating just a little bit when he finished tied for 24th at the Buick. That allowed him to hang on to his spot. Just making the field meant a lot to him. He had never before played in the PGA, just two U.S. Opens.
After Buick, he played at the International outside Denver. He finished tied for 60th and flew directly into Rochester to begin preparing for the PGA. Stephanie, who was by then six months pregnant, was going to work on Monday and Tuesday and planned to fly in on Wednesday to be there when the championship began.
Micheel liked the golf course right from the start. He knew it was going to be a week that put a premium on driving the ball in the fairway, because the rough was cut high, and a missed fairway was likely to mean a lost shot. That was fine with him. He was driving the ball well and felt good about the way he was putting.
What’s more, it was hot. In fact, on Wednesday, there was a power outage that left a lot of the city without electricity. Micheel was concerned about Stephanie having to sleep in an un-air-conditioned room, but the hotel never lost power. On the golf course, the heat didn’t really bother him. “When you’re from Memphis,” he said, “you get used to playing in the heat.”
Micheel was paired on Thursday morning with Kevin Sutherland and Jeffrey Lankford, one of the club pros, a comfortable pairing for him. The weather was still sticky and humid, with temperatures approaching ninety degrees. He was very happy to piece together a solid round of one-under-par 69. That put Micheel in a tie for sixth place. Rod Pampling and Phil Mickelson had opened with 66s, and Billy Andrade, who had gotten into the field at the last possible moment as the fifth alternate, had shot 67. Two major champions, Mike Weir and two-time U.S. Open champion Lee Janzen, were one shot further back.
Micheel was one of seven players at 69. The group also included Vijay Singh and Chad Campbell, who, in a poll of PGA Tour players done by Sports Illustrated a few weeks earlier, had been chosen as the next player expected to win his first major title. Campbell was twenty-nine and, like Micheel, had never won on tour and had never contended in a major, his best finish being a tie for 15th at the British Open a month earlier.
But Campbell had been a hot player all year, having finished second twice, with four other top-10 finishes, including a sixth at the Players Championship. A Texan who was very comfortable playing in heat, humidity, and wind, Campbell was clearly considered an up-and-comer by other players on the tour. Micheel wasn’t mentioned in the poll.
Micheel’s 69 was satisfying because it was a long, tough day on a difficult golf course. “The one thing you learn out here is that the only thing you can do on Thursday for sure is knock yourself out of a golf tournament with a bad round. A good round assures you of nothing, not even making the cut. Still, I felt as if I was playing well, and, if nothing else, I was in good position to make the cut.
“That was my goal coming into the week: make the cut. After all, I’d only made one in a major, and then see what happened on the weekend. I was at the point where I really wanted to win a golf tournament—any golf tournament—but the thought of winning a major had never crossed my mind. After all, I’d only played in two of them at that point.”
By the time he teed it up on Friday afternoon, it was apparent that the cut number was going to be high. There was just enough of a hot breeze blowing through the golf course that the greens had gotten dry and hard, and absolutely no one was going low.
The two Thursday leaders, Mickelson and Pampling, were both struggling. Pampling would shoot a 74 to finish at even par, Mickelson one shot higher than that. Weir managed a one-over-par 71, while Janzen shot 74. Andrade shot a solid 72, which meant he and Weir were the only players in the field under par as the afternoon wave moved around the golf course. Tiger Woods, who had opened with a 74, made no move at all, shooting a 72 that left him two shots inside the cut line (eight-over-par 148) and nine shots behind the leader.
That leader was Micheel. With his putter working well all day and with the help of a number of excellent up and downs after missing greens, he worked his way around the golf course in one shot less than he had needed on Thursday. The two-under-par 68 put him at three under for 36 holes and gave him a two-shot lead on Andrade and Weir. Pampling was at even-par 140, and a host of players, including Mickelson, Ernie Els, and Chad Campbell, were a shot further back.
Being in the lead meant that Micheel was invited into the interview room. The only other time he had been in an interview room had been at the 2002 B.C. Open. This was a little different.
“I remember it was huge; that was my first impression,” he said. “There were a lot of guys there. They sort of wanted to know my life story in twenty minutes.” He smiled. “I’m generally shy. But once I get going on something, I can’t tell you what I had for dinner in under twenty minutes.”
Being in the interview room made Micheel keenly aware of where he was and what was at stake. Still, he wasn’t about to get carried away after 36 holes. If nothing else, the way he spent the evening brought him back to earth if he needed to be brought back to earth.
“Steph needed a prescription filled,” he said, laughing. “We ordered room service for dinner, and then I went out to find a drugstore to get the prescription. There wasn’t a lot open. It took a while. I remember thinking, ‘Well, Mr. Glamour, here you are leading the PGA, and look at you.’ I was tired by the time I went to bed. Fortunately, I could sleep in since my tee time was so late.”
Micheel’s tee time was 2:50 in the afternoon, so he had plenty of time. He spent that morning watching golf on TV before leaving for the course. As soon as he and Stephanie got out of the car, he noticed a half-dozen camera crews in the parking lot waiting to record his “walk” into the clubhouse.
“I felt kind of silly, to be honest,” he said. “I told Steph that I figured this was the opposite of a perp walk.”
His nerves were churning as he warmed up, but once he got on the golf course he was just fine. Andrade was a good pairing for him. Although he was a very good player who had won four times on tour, Andrade wasn’t a superstar like Woods or Mickelson or Els.
“I think if I’d played with one of those guys, I’d have been really nervous,” Micheel said. “I knew Billy was a good player and his rep was as a good guy to play with. That helped relax me.”
Andrade is, in fact, one of the friendlier, more outgoing players on the tour, and his small talk and one-liners were the perfect salve for Micheel. “Billy was great the whole day,” he said. “Even when he struggled that day [shooting 72], he never lost his sense of humor, never got tense—or at least didn’t seem to me to be tense. I think his attitude helped me a lot because I had certainly never been in that position before.”
In fact, Andrade knew very little about Micheel and didn’t consider him a serious contender to win the tournament. “I knew of him a lot more than I knew him,” Andrade said. “I knew he’d been on tour for a while, and I had heard he was a solid player. But I also knew he had never been anywhere close to contention in a major before, and history says that guys who lead majors after 36 holes who have never contended before tend to fade.
“Honestly, I thought of myself, not Shaun, as the leader, and guys like Els, Weir, Mickelson, and Woods—the name guys—were the ones I had to try to stay ahead of to win.”
Micheel had been in one weekend final group—on Sunday at the B.C. Open a year earlier. But this was a lot different: much bigger crowds, a sense that he was playing for history, and the knowledge that every swing he took was being seen on national TV.
Fortunately, he got off to a good start, bouncing back from an opening bogey to get on a roll and make birdies at seven, eight, and nine, finishing at five under for the championship. Another birdie at 12, a long par save from 20 feet at 13—after his third shot flew the green and he appeared to be dead—and one more birdie at 15, and he was at seven under par and had a four-shot lead on the field.
Everyone kept waiting for someone else to make a move, but no one did—except for Chad Campbell who was piecing together the best round of the tournament three groups ahead of Micheel and Andrade. By the time they reached the 16th hole, Campbell was in the clubhouse, having shot a five-under-par 65 that put him four under par for 54 holes. Campbell had birdied the 15th and then made a long birdie putt at the difficult 18th. Still, Micheel had a three-shot lead, and Mike Weir, at one under, was the only other player in the field who was under par. By now, Micheel was fully aware that he was not only leading the PGA but that there really weren’t very many players close to him.
Whether it was a glance at the scoreboard that showed only two players within seven shots of his lead or just being tired, Micheel stumbled for the first time all week on the finishing holes, making three straight bogeys. The last one dropped him back to four under par and into a tie for the lead with Campbell. Even so, he had shot a solid one-under-par 69, a pretty good day of golf given that he had never been in contention in a major or even an important tour event.
“The finish was disappointing,” Micheel said. “It wasn’t so much that I gave up the lead as the fact that I just didn’t play those holes very well, and I didn’t feel like there was any reason or any excuse not to. It was hot and I was tired but so was everyone else out there. Still, I walked off the golf course thinking I was tied for the lead, and Mike [Weir] was the only player within three shots of us. I knew, even though Chad had shot the 65, that going really low on the last round of the PGA on this golf course would be tough, so there really weren’t that many players in a position to catch us. My feeling was if somebody did that, well, good for them. My job was to keep playing well and just let the chips fall.”
One person who felt that Micheel had done his job well that day was Andrade. “He was a better player than I expected,” Andrade said. “A very good ball striker, and he did a great job getting it up and down when he had to. I know he was disappointed the way he finished, but those last two holes were so tough that a bogey was almost like a par.”
The irony in Micheel and Campbell being in the last group on Sunday went beyond the fact that neither had won a tournament yet. They were often mistaken for each other because they looked very much alike, though Campbell was taller and huskier than Micheel.
“When Chad was playing well in the spring, I had people come up to me and say, ‘Nice playing last week,’ on a couple of occasions, when I hadn’t played well or hadn’t played at all,” Micheel said, laughing, after the round was over.
He went straight from the interview room back to the range and hit balls until dark. It was after nine o’clock by the time he and Stephanie made it back to their room. Once again they ordered room service. “I got the same guy on the phone every night,” Micheel said. “He was very nice, but I’m sure he must have thought we were weirdos or something, never going out to dinner.”
In fact, since Micheel had been asked where he had been eating and had answered “room service” and had told the story about his friend who answered the phone, several media outlets tracked the guy down the following day to get him to talk about his new friend who was tied for the lead in the PGA. He reported that Mr. Micheel was a very nice guy. Film at eleven.
Saturday night wasn’t a lot different from Friday, except that Micheel didn’t have to tour Rochester looking for a drugstore. Much like Ben Curtis a month earlier, a lot of his focus as he went to bed that night was on the first shot he would hit the next afternoon.
“I knew I was going to be nervous standing on that tee,” Micheel said. “But I knew Chad would be nervous too. He hadn’t won a tournament either. In fact, the only person who was close to us who had any experience contending in a major was Mike [Weir], although I guess Ernie [Els] was only five shots back. Still, he was going to have to go low to catch us, unless Chad and I both blew up. I just had this idea that if I could get that first shot in the fairway, my nerves would clear and would turn into adrenaline instead. That was what had happened Saturday. I knew I’d be more nervous on Sunday, which made the first tee shot that much more important.”
Micheel had actually killed time on Saturday by watching the classic golf movie Caddy Shack. On Sunday, with a 3:05 tee time, he and Stephanie left for the golf course a little earlier, and again the TV crews were there waiting for them. CBS actually showed them walking through the parking lot in slow-mo. “It was a long walk,” Micheel said, laughing. “We were the last ones to get there, so we had to park at the far end of the lot.”
While Micheel and Campbell went through their warm-up paces, Stephanie chatted briefly with Pam Campbell, who had flown in the night before to be with her husband on what might be a life-changing day.
Because the two players leading the tournament were virtual unknowns, CBS played up two major themes in the hour before the final tee time. First, someone making a move from behind: perhaps Weir, maybe Els or Vijay Singh (six shots back) or Phil Mickelson (seven back). When Mickelson drained a 45-foot birdie putt on number one, Jim Nantz immediately compared it to the 80-footer he had made at Augusta on number two back in April and wondered if this would launch a Mickelson rally. Bogeys at number three and number four quickly quelled that talk, and Mickelson limped home with a 75. His only move was backward.
CBS’s second theme was history. Certainly Oak Hill and Rochester had both. Rochester had been the home of many famous Americans, including Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and George Eastman (the founder of Eastman Kodak). It had also been home to Walter Hagen, the first truly great golf pro. The Haig had won five PGA Championships among his eleven major titles.
There was more: Lee Trevino, a Texan like Campbell, had burst onto the golf scene by winning the U.S. Open at Oak Hill in 1968. Cary Middlecoff, from Memphis like Micheel, had won the Open at Oak Hill in 1956, beating Ben Hogan, another Texan, by one shot. Hogan had called Oak Hill’s first hole the most difficult opening hole he had ever played. He had bogeyed it on the final day in ’56, although most people remembered the two and a half foot putt he had missed on 17 as the difference.
While CBS killed time waiting for the leaders to tee off with a tribute to Hagen and the obligatory preround interviews with the leaders, Tiger Woods was doing his very best to get out of town—no matter its history—as fast as he possibly could. He was, truth be told, simply playing out the string on Sunday, having never even sniffed contention the entire week.
“The first couple of days, you sort of kept waiting for his name to pop onto a leaderboard,” Micheel said. “By Saturday night, it was pretty apparent it wasn’t going to happen.”
No one knew that better than Woods. He started the final day at nine over par with the usual talk swirling: “If he could shoot 61 and get to even par and the leaders went backward…”
And if cows had wings, they could fly.
Woods’s game was a mess. His swing was, to put it politely, a work in progress. He had no confidence in his putting. His game was so far out of kilter that the best thing he could say about the weekend after he had birdied the 18th hole was “I’m finished.”
To his credit, he kept his sense of humor. When he finally made a birdie on the 16th hole—only his sixth of the entire week—he did a fake fist pump. The two birdies on the last three holes allowed him to finish with a 73, meaning he had shot 74–72–73–73 for the week, 12 over par. That put him in a tie for 39th place, by far his worst finish as a pro in a major. He had never before finished outside the top 30.
“I made eighteen bogeys—exactly one quarter of my holes,” Woods said, shaking his head when it was finally over. “Basically I spent the entire week making 10-footers for par, or, if I didn’t make them, making bogey. That was pretty much the story.”
One statistic the CBS people dug out was telling. In 2000, the year he had won three of four majors en route to his “Tiger Slam,” which he wrapped up at the 2001 Masters, Woods had played his sixteen rounds in the four majors in a staggering 53 under par. In his six previous years as a pro, he had been over par for the year in the four majors just once: 1998, when he was going through Major Swing Change Number One and had failed to win a major. That year he was a combined seven over par in the majors. In 2003, in the midst of Swing Change Number Two, he was 18 over par in the four majors.
Woods was off the golf course, done with his interviews, and in the process of putting Oak Hill and Rochester in his rearview (airplane) mirror long before Micheel and Campbell walked onto the first tee. Other than Mickelson, just one player among those chasing had birdied the first hole—Tim Clark, another player without a tour win, who had stuffed a seven-iron to within two feet. Singh and Weir had both made bogey, and Els had made par only because his wayward drive kicked off a tree into the fairway.
Micheel could feel his heart pounding as he and Stephanie walked hand-in-hand to the tee, Stephanie peeling off to join the gallery, as he stepped inside the ropes. Campbell was up first, and his drive found the right rough. It wasn’t an awful shot, but Micheel knew any shot that made it to the thick stuff about five yards off the fairway was trouble. He also knew once he saw Campbell’s ball in the air that he wasn’t the only person feeling Sunday nerves at a major for the first time.
Micheel stood behind his ball while he was being introduced, and when his name was announced he took a deep breath, almost like a swimmer about to enter the pool. Like most of the players, Micheel used a three-wood off the first tee. The hole is a 460-yard dogleg left. It plays shorter if you can cut the corner, but there was risk involved in that, as Weir had discovered when his tee shot ended up in the trees.
The wind had changed overnight. A cold front had blown in, dropping the temperature into the seventies, with wind gusts up to twenty miles per hour. Everyone seemed to think that a blustery day favored Campbell, who had grown up playing in the winds of west Texas. The early advantage, though, went to Micheel, whose three-wood found the left side of the fairway, leaving him with a good angle to a back right pin.
“That was a big relief, finding that fairway, because it got a lot of my nerves out right away,” Micheel said. “After I hit that shot, it was like, ‘Okay, let’s just go play golf.’ All the waiting and the talking was over. Now it was time to just go and do my job as best I possibly could.”