The PGA Tour returns this weekend following its Thanksgiving-Christmas hiatus. The Tournament of Champions plays out at beautiful Kapalua in Hawaii. It’s a limited-field event featuring everyone who won on tour during calendar year 2015. It’s a nice weekend for fun and sun for the professionals. Those with families enjoy it even more. There is no cut and if you come in last, you pocket earnings near $100,000.
The TOC has been a regular on the PGA Tour since it commenced in 1953. As you can imagine, its perpetual trophy reads like the World Golf Hall of Fame with past champions such as Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, Gene Littler, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, Johnny Miller, Tom Watson, Lee Trevino, Tom Kite, Phil Mickelson, Tiger Woods and Ernie Els. In its earliest years, it was contested at the Desert Inn Country Club in Las Vegas, then moved to LaCosta in Southern California for 30 years, and finally relocated to Kapalua in 1999.
For the past decade or so, the TOC has failed to sustain the prominence that it held during the game’s golden era of the 1960s and 1970s. Although they are past champions and were winning on a regular basis, more often than not Tiger and Phil chose to forego their invite to Kapalua. Tiger, who normally began his season at San Diego, and Phil, who usually started his season in Palm Springs, were continuous no-shows. Going to Hawaii didn’t fit into their personal schedule. To put it crassly, they didn’t need the money. This year, the game’s newest stars, namely Jordan Spieth, Jason Day and Rickie Fowler, are in the TOC field. Only Rory McIlroy will not be teeing it up in Hawaii. It’s nice to see that the new breed still finds winning a new experience and plays as often as it does.
Of course, for anyone who has ever been around highly competitive and highly successful golfers of note, a good majority of this group carry themselves in a self-absorbed manner, whether they are competing in the U.S. Junior or the U.S. Open. As a longtime high school golf coach, I’ve always had an appreciation for those really talented junior golfers who somewhere along the line played on their local Little League team, or, even better, were the backup shooting forward on their high school basketball team. I think that is one of the things that has helped to balance Jordan Spieth, having been a team sport athlete as a kid.
The reason I mention all this is because Shane Ryan has just written a most interesting book about his full year of following the PGA Tour. It is titled Slaying the Tiger (Ballantine Books $29). Ryan started his season in the autumn of 2013 in Turkey, followed the tour through the West Coast, Florida, and the Masters in the spring, went to Pinehurst, Liverpool, and Louisville for the major championships of the summer, and concluded his year at the Fed Ex Cup playoffs in New York, Boston, Denver and Atlanta. After that it was onto the Ryder Cup in Scotland. Week in and week out he followed the tournaments and tried to not only get to know the game’s professionals, but also tried to get a grasp upon what makes them tick. While that season featured wins by Martin Kaymer in the Players and the U.S. Open, a pair of major triumphs by Rory McIlroy at the British Open and the PGA, a second Masters green jacket for Bubba Watson, Billy Horschel’s Fed Ex Cup run, and rebellion at the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles, the merits of Shane Ryan’s year-long journey is his ability to get inside the mind and the mentality of some of the game’s top linksters. In some well-known cases, it is not a pretty picture.
Typically we see the professional golfer as a performer, as an entertainer. We usually only see them at their best, on Saturday and Sunday when they are somewhere near the top of the leader board. We don’t see them on the range, in the locker room or at the press tent. We don’t see them shooting 77 on Thursday. Members of the PGA Tour are seen in a fairly wholesome light. They don’t smoke on camera such as Ben Hogan used to do, they don’t throw clubs the way Tommy Bolt did, and, except for Tiger, they don’t throw out vulgarities to galleries filled with women and children. Nevertheless, some of the game’s most well-known professionals have flaws. I’d still want them on my Ryder Cup team, I just wouldn’t want to be their partner.
One of the more interesting portrayals by Ryan in the book is that of Patrick Reed. Reed won a World Golf Championship event that year at Doral and immediately announced he was one of the top five golfers in the world. Reed is definitely a major talent among the 20-something set, knows how to win, and showed by his performance later that season in the Ryder Cup that his game can stand up to the utmost pressure.
Outside the ropes he carries heavy baggage. He played one year at college golf powerhouse Georgia but was removed from the team following his freshman year. He landed on his feet at golfing mid-major Augusta State and led them to an NCAA title during his sophomore year. He did the same as a junior, culminating his NCAA match play career with a perfect 6-0 record. He was an All-American. Yet regardless of his successes, he was greatly detested by his teammates and fellow competitors. There were allegations of cheating. After winning their first NCAA title, Reed’s teammates tried to get the coaching staff at Augusta to remove him from the team. He was considered a full-blown egomaniac and a braggart. He doesn’t communicate at all with his parents and even went so far as to have them removed from his gallery at the U.S. Open that year at Pinehurst. On the plus side, he is a family man and close to his in-laws.
Another interesting case study was 23-year-old Frenchman, Victor Dubuisson. Victor was a winner on the European Tour at that tourney in Turkey and was a Ryder Cup star later that September. Dubuisson generally refuses to talk to the press, has put forth off-base biographical information about leaving home and school as a 10-year-old to raise himself on his own, and is also completely estranged from his parents. By the way, his parents did happen to raise him into his high teens as based upon their junior golf photo gallery on Facebook.
Next week we’ll continue with a review of Shane Ryan’s new book, Slaying the Tiger. He has some interesting insights into the personalities of Bubba Watson, Matt Every, Keegan Bradley and others. And by the way, if you’re beginning to think Ryan’s book is a hatchet job on PGA Tour golfers, you’ll find that his interviews with golfers such as Rickie Fowler, Jordan Spieth and Jason Day feature good people who are insightful and probably better grounded than most.
