This coming Monday, the Kelseyville High School golf team, the 2009 champions of the Coastal Mountain Conference South, head to the ultra-exclusive Meadow Club in rural Marin County. The KHS golf team will be playing in the rarified air of the Tournament of Champions, one step removed from advancing to the NCGA NorCal Championships the following Monday at Butte Creek Country Club in Chico.
The Kelseyville team is a unique one in small-school circles in that its top three players are all scratch golfers. KHS has had a number of talented teams over the years, but it has never had three top golfers from the same grade level play all four years together the way Jonathan Bridges, Hipolito Perez Jr. and Nick Schaefer have. In most other years, any one of the three would have been the top player on a championship squad.
This Monday, the three KHS seniors along with junior Tyler Drake, sophomore Liz Berry and freshman Wyatt Ferrell, will find themselves trying to advance out of a section field that includes DeLaSalle, Cardinal Newman, Marin Catholic, Piedmont, Windsor, Urban, Justin-Siena and 12 other top-notch teams. Hopefully, they”ll take a few moments from the golfing stress of Monday to look around, enjoy the beautiful setting, and remember how much fun this four-year journey has been for them.
Of course, golf can be a chore to a gifted young golfer, especially when the direction the child gets from his parents is flawed. Hipolito, Jonathan and Nick all enjoy positive support systems from their parents. Golf is a game that they”ve all played well from a very young age onward. Yet it still remains a game to them, not some perverse quest to gain a college scholarship or to become a meal ticket to a parent who lives vicariously through their exploits.
The most obvious example of parental heavy-handedness in the world of golf is the bizarre and sad case of Sean O”Hair, the winner of last weekend”s Quail Hollow Championship on the PGA Tour. In fact, unlike Schaefer, Bridges and Perez, Sean O”Hair never got to enjoy his senior year of high school with his friends and golfing teammates.
O”Hair is 26 years old and has been playing professional golf for the past 10 years. His father, Marc O”Hair, had a so-called “master plan” to turn him into the next Tiger Woods ? whether he wanted to or not. A successful businessman in Lubbock, the elder O”Hair sold his business in 1998 for just less than $3 million. Sean completed his junior year at Brophy Prep in Phoenix that year, and then in rapid succession he dropped out of school, turned professional as a 16-year-old, and relocated to Florida to take lessons from well-known golf instructor David Leadbetter. His father also signed his 16-year-old son to a series of contracts that would require Sean to repay his dad once he hit the big time. The elder O”Hair has often contended to journalists that he “invested” $2 million in the development of his son”s career.
Beginning in 1999, the 16-year-old O”Hair was a regular at PGA Tour Qualifying School. He failed in his first five attempts to get through the rigorous Q School grind. He played on some of the most minor of the minor league golf circuits such as the Gateway T our and the Cleveland Golf Equipment Tour. He jumped around the country, teeing it up in such places at Midland, Texas; Creswell, Oregon; Newton, Kansas; and Harrison, Tennessee.
Aside from being way too young to be playing for a living against hard-nosed veteran professional golfers, Sean also had his overbearing father to deal with. One of his father”s questionable motivational ploys was to punish Sean for a bad round by making him run at the conclusion of play. The formula was that if he finished 4-over-par that day, then he”d have to run four miles. Can you imagine the pressure on a 16- or 17-year-old who is 2-over-par after 14 holes and yet is trying to force birdies so that he can cut back on the after-round mileage? Golf is a hard enough game and professional golf is beyond the scope of what an amateur golfer can ever imagine. Somehow through it all, Sean O”Hair didn”t become totally stark-raving mad or fall to the impulses to drink or drug abuse. Somehow ?
Four years into his bizarre quest for greatness, Sean met his future wife, Jackie, an accomplished college golfer. Sean broke away from his father, married Jackie, and had the loving support of his in-laws and grandparents. Also, as brutal as the experiences of being the lone teenager among men must have been for him, by the time he was 21 years old, he did have five years of experience as a professional golfer and had improved.
O”Hair finally got through Q School in 2004 and had a breakthrough win at the John Deere Quad Cities Classic in July of 2005. The win gave him exempt status on tour through 2007. He also started working with Sean Foley, who rebuilt his swing to better control his distances and ball flight.
Nowadays, Sean O”Hair is finally entrenched on golf”s center stage. He won the PODS Championship in March of 2008. Earlier this year, he lost a battle to Tiger Woods at Bay Hill. Last week”s win at Quail Hollow, the third of his young career, put him in select company along with Adam Scott and Sergio Garcia as the only 20-somethings with three victories on the PGA Tour. Expect that O”Hair will probably get to the next level and start contending in majors as well as becoming a frequent participant in Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup matches.
More amazing than the win and the million-dollar bank account is the fact that Sean O”Hair was able to extract himself from a very negative and unhealthy environment during his teenaged years. His golf game is one of true talent. His currently happy lifestyle goes hand in hand with his professional successes. You need a lot of luck to survive in the world of professional golf. Sean O”Hair is a very lucky man.
