IT ALL BEGAN TO hit Shaun Micheel when he walked into the scoring trailer. No round of tournament golf is officially complete until a player signs his scorecard. Since a player’s official card is kept by the other player in his twosome, it is incumbent on a player to be absolutely certain that he checks the card carefully.
Anyone who knows anything about golf history knows there are sad stories about players failing to check their cards carefully enough and signing for incorrect scores. Once a player signs his card, the score he signs for is his official score. If he mistakenly signs for a lower score, he is disqualified. If he signs for a higher score, that becomes his score.
The most famous wrong-score incident was the Masters in 1968. In that instance, Tommy Aaron, who would go on to win the Masters five years later, was keeping Roberto De Vicenzo’s scorecard. On the 17th hole, De Vicenzo made a birdie three and finished the day tied with Bob Goalby, meaning the two men would play off (in those days 18 holes on Monday) for the title.
Except that Aaron had written down a four for De Vicenzo on the 17th hole, and De Vicenzo didn’t catch the mistake. He signed the card and officially finished one shot behind Goalby. Ironically, it was Goalby who never completely got over what had happened. For years he felt as though he was not treated as a true Masters champion, which was unfortunate since he had nothing to do with what had happened.
Nowadays players have plenty of backup and checkpoints to make sure nothing like that can happen. They keep their own scorecards unofficially, and there is a walking scorer with each group who records each score hole-by-hole and inputs it into the computer scoring system. Most players will check their own card, then ask the walking scorer to read them their scores hole-by-hole, then they will finally check all of that against the official card.
As soon as Micheel sat down and began going through his card, he was almost overcome by the thought that he was going to sign for a wrong score. He went through the card he had kept, the walking scorer’s card (read to him from the computer), and Campbell’s card. He reread the scores to himself and then read each number aloud to confirm that the numbers on the card kept by Campbell were consistent with what everyone else had. Then he sat down and wrote out his scores hole-by-hole on a blank scorecard and compared them to what was on his official card to be absolutely certain he had it right.
Finally, cautiously, he signed the card. When it was done, he sat back in his chair completely drained and exhausted. “I swear that was more nerve-racking than hitting the seven-iron on 18,” Micheel said. “The guy taking the scores drew a smiley face around my score and wrote down next to it, ‘First place.’ That was when I started breathing again.”
Having signed his card correctly, he was fitted by CBS with an interrupted feedback (IFB) earpiece, because the network was hoping to hook him up with his parents before going off the air. That never happened, in part because Micheel had taken so long to sign his card. Still wearing the IFB that would never be used, he was escorted back to the 18th green, which had now been taken over by the suits of the PGA of America, all eager for their moment on camera during the awards ceremony. M. G. Orender, the president of the PGA, was so intent on making sure his official spiel got on the air—“On behalf of the twenty-eight thousand golf professionals who make up the PGA of America and work to grow the game of golf,…”—that Micheel almost false-started on several occasions, reaching for the trophy thinking Orender was finished. Not quite.
Finally, they handed Micheel the trophy, and he happily kissed it.
Throughout the telecast, Jim Nantz had referenced the fact that Micheel was planning to take the following week off so that he and Stephanie could look for a bigger house to accommodate Dade’s impending arrival. “They may have to find one with room for a trophy room too,” Nantz said on several occasions.
“That Wanamaker Trophy would take up a lot of space,” Lanny Wadkins added at one point.
Not exactly. The Wanamaker Trophy never leaves the possession of the PGA of America, much like the Wimbledon trophies, which are handed out on center court, then instantly taken away from the champions and returned to their case once the new names have been engraved on them. Like Furyk and Curtis, Micheel would have the option of having a smaller (90 percent) version of the trophy made for his trophy room at a cost of about $40,000.
After the ceremony, Micheel went through his postround media paces and returned to the clubhouse for a toast from the Oak Hill members and the PGA of America (fortunately, all twenty-eight thousand men and women who work to grow the game were not present). Then he and Stephanie had to retrieve their luggage from their courtesy car because they were turning it in, a decent trade since the PGA had a chauffered limousine ready to take its place.
“It was a little bit eerie when we went to the car,” Micheel said. “It was probably ten o’clock—at least—by then, and the lot was completely empty except for our car, which was parked at the far end because I’d been the last one to get there, being in the last group. It felt like we had parked the car about a year earlier, not nine or ten hours earlier.”
Everything was piled into the limo, and Shaun and Stephanie and a friend from Memphis who had flown in to fly them home joined them. As soon as they were in the car, it occurred to Shaun and Stephanie that neither one of them had eaten since before the round had started. “We were starving,” Shaun said. “It was 10:30 on Sunday night. There weren’t a lot of options. And I knew room service at the hotel would be closed when we got back.”
They found a Wendy’s, and the limo driver went through the drive-through window. “How he maneuvered that thing around those turns and through the lane and got the food, I’ll never know,” Micheel said, laughing. “I do think it was the best-tasting meal I’ve ever had.”
There were still quite a few people in the hotel lobby when they got back, and everyone began to clap when the Micheels walked in. People in the bar heard what was going on and came pouring out to join in.
“That was another really cool moment,” Micheel said. “It all felt so great that night. It still hadn’t occurred to me how much my life was going to change. Looking back now, it was a little bit like what my dad said after I made it through Q-School in ’93, that I had jumped higher than I expected to jump and the landing might be hard. All I’d wanted to do was win a tournament. The thought of how winning a major would affect my life had never crossed my mind.”
All their plans had changed. Because he was now the PGA champion, Micheel had qualified for the World Golf Championship event the following week in Akron. That meant the house hunting would have to be postponed. They flew home on Monday—Micheel’s friend let him fly the plane most of the way—and did laundry.
“I’d been away for most of four weeks,” Micheel said. “It actually felt good to do something mundane and normal.”
But there wasn’t much mundane and normal about the next few days. While Micheel was doing the laundry, his cell phone rang. It was Paul Stanley, the lead guitarist for the rock group KISS. Micheel had been a KISS fan since boyhood and had met members of the band once during a tournament in Greensboro. He had become friendly with some of the band members, and since the band’s manager was a big golf fan, they had exchanged numbers.
Stanley wanted to know if Micheel wanted to come to their concert in Columbus on Tuesday night. Since Micheel was going to be a couple of hours down the road in Akron, he said absolutely. When the folks at PGA Tour Productions, who were trying to line up a show segment with Micheel, found out, they asked if they could film Micheel hanging out with the band. Sure, come on ahead, was the response.
In a matter of forty-eight hours Micheel had gone from being the 169th-ranked golfer in the world to a major champion hanging out backstage with the members of his all-time favorite band.
He played reasonably well in Akron, finishing tied for 23rd. Three of the four newly minted major champions finished within a shot of one another: Micheel and Weir both shot 281 (one over par), and Ben Curtis ended up one stroke in back of them, a pretty good performance considering he spent Saturday evening getting married. Jim Furyk, who almost never finished out of the top 10 any week, tied for sixth.
It was in Akron that the changes in Micheel’s life began to hit him. His agent, Richard Gralitzer, had flown in to talk about all the new opportunities that were suddenly showing up on his radar. He was as much a friend as he was an agent, an accountant by trade who also handled Micheel’s business for him. Until the seven-iron landed on the 18th green at Oak Hill, that hadn’t been too difficult a job. Now, Gralitzer’s life had changed too.
“We were in my car talking about everything that was going on, and all of a sudden Richard started to lose it,” Micheel said. “He’s a guy with a family who had never traveled much as my representative because, to be honest, there wasn’t much need for it. Now, all of a sudden, people want a meeting here one week, there another week, and his phone won’t stop ringing. He just said, ‘Shaun, I honestly don’t know if I can do this. It may just be too much to handle.’ ”
“I felt bad for him because I knew he wanted to do the right thing and do what was best for me. But I don’t think he ever expected to be in this situation—representing someone who had won a major championship. It occurred to me in the car that my life had changed and the lives of a lot of other people had changed because of what happened at Oak Hill. Up until then, I’d been vaguely aware of it, but I was kind of joyriding.
“You know, hang out with KISS—cool. Have people want to talk to you in the media room—great. Sign more autographs than ever—fine. But this was different. This was sort of real life starting to kick in. I mean, the fact that people now wanted to pay me to do a lot more things was, obviously, a good thing. But it began to occur to me that it wasn’t quite as simple as it might have looked when I was watching other guys go through it.”
One guy who was going through it but on a different level was Furyk. He had already been considered an elite player before he won the U.S. Open, but he remembered what it had been like to come close to winning majors early in his career, even though he hadn’t won one then.
“I know this sounds strange, but I almost felt sorry for Ben [Curtis] and Shaun,” Furyk said. “I mean, that’s such a huge jump from never having won, especially for Ben as a rookie, to being a major champion. It’s like trying to jump up ten steps on a ladder by skipping the first nine. I can only imagine how overwhelming it was for them.”
Ben and Candace did hold their wedding as planned on August 23 in spite of all the “opportunities” IMG had to turn down on their behalf as a result. But Ben’s new notoriety forced them to make changes. Everyone who was invited was sent a note asking them to please bring their invitations because they thought crashers were not only possible but likely—especially paparazzi.
On the way from the church to the reception, Candace looked up and saw a local news helicopter hovering above them. “We had to have the limo go around the block to a back entrance so we could avoid the photographers,” she said. “A month earlier, no one had heard of Ben. Now it seemed as if everyone wanted a piece of him. It was really hard. We’re two quiet kids from the Midwest. We aren’t stars. We just wanted to enjoy the day with our friends.”
In the meantime, IMG had convinced Curtis that he should try to play on both the PGA Tour and the European Tour in 2004. As a British Open winner, he was exempt on both tours, and European tournaments were allowed to pay appearance fees. Sure, it would mean a lot of travel, but Curtis could now afford to fly first class, and seeing Europe would be fun.
“It wasn’t a decision that was all bad,” Curtis said. “I think Candace and I did enjoy a lot of the traveling and the sightseeing. We didn’t have kids yet, so it was fun. But it probably wasn’t very good for my golf.”
All four major winners were adapting to new lives as 2003 wound down and, for the most part, enjoying themselves. Each had had the best year of his life on the golf course, thanks in large part to his major victory.
Furyk finished the year fourth on the PGA Tour money list with more than $5.1 million in earnings. He won again—at the Buick Open—in July to, he felt, kind of back up his Open win. That victory was his ninth on the PGA Tour and put him in a position, at age thirty-three, where thinking he could rack up the kind of numbers that would make him a candidate for the Hall of Fame someday was certainly not unreasonable.
Weir finished one spot behind Furyk on the money list, winning just under $5 million. He didn’t win again after the Masters, but adding a tie for third at the Open and a tie for seventh at the PGA made him a legitimate candidate for Player of the Year. He would have been a lock winner if he had been able to catch Micheel on the last day of the PGA.
The voters went instead with—surprise—Tiger Woods, who won five times in spite of playing (for him) poorly in the majors. One year after going 1, 1, T-28, 2 in the four majors, Woods went T-15, T-20, T-4, T-39. In truth, Woods probably would have traded his year for Weir’s year in an instant, because one of Weir’s three wins was a major. But the voters went with quantity—and the Woods name—over quality and gave Woods the award for a fifth straight year.
Curtis finished 46th on the money list with $1.4 million, $1.1 million of that coming from the British Open. He had always had a reputation as a player who was very good when at his best, and there was no better example of that than the week at Royal St. George’s.
Micheel won a little more than $1.8 million for the year and finished 32nd on the money list, by far his highest finish ever. For him, the fall was truly a joyride because he didn’t have to sweat out making enough money to keep his card for the next year. All four players were exempt through 2008 thanks to their major victories. (Once upon a time, the exemption for winning a major had been ten years, but the tour had cut it in half because a lot of players believed that major winners sometimes lost their incentive when given such a long exemption.)
All four gathered in Hawaii in early December for an event called the “Grand Slam of Golf.” It was a 36-hole event put on by the PGA of America for the four major champions each year. Of course in 2001 Woods had won three of the majors, and in 2002 he had won two of them. A points system based on performance in the majors by nonwinners determines the other participants in years like that.
The Grand Slam was held on the island of Kauai, Hawaii, at a resort golf course. Furyk, who owned a home on Maui, brought his family. Weir did too. Ben and Candace Curtis came, but Micheel came without Stephanie. Dade had been born two weeks earlier, and it was too early for Stephanie and the baby to travel.
“I really had mixed feelings about being there,” Micheel said. “We were in this gorgeous place, and I had a spectacular room. When I walked in, I called Stephanie and, without thinking, started telling her how beautiful it all was. She said, ‘You know, I really don’t want to hear how beautiful it is there.’
“It hit me that she was missing out on something really cool, and I wished she could have been there. The timing just didn’t work out.”
Furyk won the event easily, beating Weir by eight shots, Micheel by 10, and Curtis by 11. No one was terribly concerned about the quality of their golf that week. It was all just another reward for what each had accomplished earlier in the year. For Furyk, there was one other piece of good news: when they gave him the trophy, no one told him that he had to have it engraved himself.
It was the perfect end—or close to it—to what had felt like a perfect year for all four men. Their futures had never seemed brighter.
“All I could think at the end of that year was ‘I can’t wait for next year,’ ” Weir remembered. “I really wanted to see if I could do it again. When you’ve done it once and had that feeling, you really want it again. I had every reason to believe I was capable of doing it again. I’m sure all four of us felt that way.”