It’s an all too familiar golfing tale. A world class professional golfer is on golf’s center stage and suddenly it all goes amiss. He can no longer make cuts, no longer compete on any sort of professional level, major or minor, and his game is gone, never to be found again. He’s not an aging veteran nor is he suffering from injuries or illness. What he once had has disappeared.
Ian Baker-Finch of Australia won 18 times as a professional golfer on the American PGA Tour, the European Tour, the Japan Tour and the Australasian Tour. At age 30 he captured his first major championship, winning the British Open at Royal Birkdale in 1991. He set the table for that great win by shooting a front-nine score of 29 during the final round on Sunday.
Four years later, Baker-Finch was paired with Arnold Palmer. Arnie was playing in his final competitive round at the 1995 British Open at St. Andrews. With thousands looking on and with millions watching on television, Ian hit a wild duck hook that crossed the first fairway, then crossed the 18th fairway, and rolled out of bounds adjacent to the Russacks’ Hotel. His tee shot was a mere 140 yards off line. From that moment until the 1997 British Open, he missed 29 consecutive cuts. Following a 92 at Royal Troon in the ’97 Open, he withdrew from the tourney, entered the locker room and burst into tears. His playing career was over.
Anthony Kim was a college phenom who played on the Walker Cup team as a 20-year-old. He turned pro the following year, and finished tied for second in his first PGA Tour event at the Texas Open. He won twice on tour in 2008 and finished sixth on the money list. That year he played on the winning Ryder Cup team. He was at Harding Park in San Francisco the following year as a member of the victorious Presidents’ Cup team. He won the Houston Open in 2010. Yet he started to complain about nagging injuries and he became known for his late nights at Las Vegas casinos. Suddenly Kim was no longer on the PGA Tour. He hasn’t played in a tour event since 2012 and the Golf Channel has reported that he no longer plays golf on any level.
Baker-Finch and Kim are just two notable examples of outstanding professional golfers who had it one day and then lost it all suddenly and without warning. Whether it’s their swing or their mentality or their lack of a work ethic, the biggest end result is that they lose their confidence. They are no longer the golfer they once were. Their fall is most dramatic.
Up until last Sunday people were pretty much saying the same thing about Vaughn Taylor. An honorable mention All-American at hometown Augusta State, Taylor turned pro as a 23-year-old in 1999. He spent a couple of years on the minor league Hooters Tour and won four times. In 2003 he won the Knoxville Open on the Nationwide Tour (now the Web.com Tour) and graduated to the PGA Tour at the start of the 2004 season. His rookie year was a very good one as he captured the Reno-Tahoe Open in August, winning in a four-way playoff over Hunter Mahan, Scott McCarron and Stephen Allen. The following year he repeated the feat and won a second tour title at Reno-Tahoe. Vaughn Taylor was an up-and-coming golfer of note on the PGA Tour.
Taylor kept riding the wave. In 2006 he was on the Ryder Cup team. In 2007 he had a top-10 finish at the Masters. He had a minor hiccup in 2008, struggled most of the year and finished 132nd on the tour’s money list. Yet he worked his way back onto the tour in 2009 and lost in a six-hole playoff to Matt Kuchar at the Turning Stone Open. The following year he had six top-10s, lost in a playoff to Anthony Kim at Houston, and finished 35th on the money list.
Then it all went south. He was 116th on the tour’s money list in 2011 and barely kept his exempt status. In 2012 he was 136th, in 2013 he was 155th, and suddenly he was no longer a member of the PGA Tour. He failed to get through Q School that fall. He only got into a handful of events the following year and finished 243rd on the Fed Ex Cup points list in 2014. From 2013 onward, Taylor was only able to get into tournaments that couldn’t fill their fields. He got in those events by route of the “past champions” category. He had no status and would usually get in as an alternate after an exempt player withdrew at the last moment. In 2015 he played in 12 tournaments, mainly those held opposite the majors or the World Golf Championships. His game had deserted him, he was floundering with a total lack of confidence, and he was almost 40 years old in the new world of Jordan Spieth, Jason Day and Rory McIlory.
Because it’s contested over three courses, the field of 180 professionals at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am is larger than the typical winter fields of 144 golfers and the summer fields of 156 contestants. Even so, Taylor was on the alternate list as of the Sunday of tournament week. However, an opening came up and he flew from the Web.com Tour tournament in Columbia (yes, the one in South America) to the Monterey Peninsula. Vaughn opened up with a 70, shot 68 on the second day and carded a third-round score of 67 to make the 54-hole cut by nine strokes. He stood at 10-under-par entering final-round play at Pebble Beach, six shots behind crowd favorite and three-time Pebble Beach champion Phil Mickelson.
Playing one hour ahead of Mickelson, Taylor carded a 7-under-par 65 to vault atop the leader board. Mickelson, Jonas Blixt, J.B. Holmes, Freddie Jacobson, Hiroshi Iwata, Justin Rose, Roberto Castro, Billy Haas, Jimmy Walker and Matt Jones still had lots of holes to play, plenty of enough time to run down Vaughn, but none of them could. Mickelson was the last man standing, but he power-lipped his 5-foot birdie putt on the final hole, carded a 72 for second place, and a greatly surprised Vaughn Taylor was suddenly a winner on tour after an 11-year victory drought.
Taylor is now exempt on the PGA Tour through 2018. He has been able to add $1.26 million to his bank account. He has gone from 447th to 100th on the World Golf Rankings. In March he will be celebrating his 40th birthday. In April he will be returning to the Masters in his hometown of Augusta, Georgia for the first time since 2008. Because he had to wait around for the Pebble Beach awards ceremony Sunday evening, Taylor missed his flight from San Jose to Los Angeles. Not a problem as his Pebble Beach amateur partner, Gregg Ontiveros, the CEO of Group O, gave Taylor a lift to Los Angeles on his private jet. One just never knows about how things are going to turn, but it definitely seems as if life is looking up for golf pro Vaughn Taylor.
