Slaying the Tiger Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by Shane Ryan

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BALLANTINE BOOKS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ryan, Shane.

  Slaying the Tiger : a year inside the ropes on the new PGA tour /

  Shane Ryan.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-553-39066-7

  eBook ISBN 978-0-553-39067-4

  1. Golf—Tournaments—United States—Anecdotes. 2. PGA Tour (Association)—Anecdotes. 3. Golfers—United States—Anecdotes. 4. Ryan, Shane—Anecdotes. I. Title.

  GV970.R92 2015

  796.352'640973—dc23 2015010411

  eBook ISBN 9780553390674

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  eBook design adapted from printed book design by Susan Turner

  Cover design: David G. Stevenson and Michael Boland

  Cover photographs: © AP Photo/John Bazemore (Rory McIlroy); Press Association via AP Images (Dustin Johnson); AP Photo/Chuck Burton (Rickie Fowler); AP Photo/Mark Duncan (Patrick Reed); AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko (Bubba Watson); AP Photo/Gerald Herbert (Jordan Spieth); Nick M. Do/Getty Images (silhouette)

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Epigraph

  November 11, 2013: The Mysterious Frenchman

  Chapter 1: Antalya, Turkey

  February: The West Coast Swing

  Chapter 2: Pacific Palisades, California

  Chapter 3: Tucson, Arizona

  March: One Month in Florida

  Chapter 4: Palm Beach Gardens, Florida

  Chapter 5: The Villain

  Chapter 6: Doral, Florida

  Chapter 7: Orlando, Florida

  April: The Holy Land

  Chapter 8: The Masters

  Chapter 9: A Few Thoughts on Augusta National

  Chapter 10: One Last Moment at Augusta

  Chapter 11: New Orleans, Louisiana

  May: The Southern Pass

  Chapter 12: Charlotte, North Carolina

  Chapter 13: Ponte Vedra, Florida

  Chapter 14: Fort Worth, Texas

  June: America’s Major

  Chapter 15: Beyond the Brand

  Chapter 16: Pinehurst, North Carolina

  Chapter 17: Bethesda, Maryland

  July: A British Midsummer

  Chapter 18: Hoylake, Merseyside County, England

  August: Last Chances

  Chapter 19: Akron, Ohio

  Chapter 20: Akron, Ohio

  Chapter 21: Greensboro, North Carolina

  Chapter 22: Louisville, Kentucky

  September: A Final Push

  Chapter 23: East Lake, Georgia

  Chapter 24: Wentworth, England, and New York, New York

  Chapter 25: Antibes, France

  Chapter 26: Auchterarder, County of Perth, Scotland

  October and Everything After

  Chapter 27: Seasons Change

  Photo Insert

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  My year on the PGA Tour began on Georgia’s barrier islands, in November of 2013, at the Sea Island Golf Club—a course built on the salt marshes near an old antebellum plantation, full of stately live oaks and Spanish moss. There, I watched twenty-eight-year-old Chris Kirk navigate a tense Sunday to win the McGladrey Classic. The man he beat on the final hole, forty-one-year-old Briny Baird, held the bittersweet distinction of leading the PGA Tour career money list among players who had never won an event, and that day likely represented his last real chance to hold a trophy.

  At the time, Kirk’s victory gave me a sense of optimism for this book. I had a theory: The 2014 season, which began in the fall, would bring a generational shift in professional golf. The old stars—including Tiger Woods—would fade, and a new class would emerge. It would be a year, I thought, that would change the face of the sport. Watching an up-and-comer like Kirk beat a veteran like Baird seemed like a positive sign: I was onto something.

  Of course, that hope existed beside fear: What if the old guard made a glorious last stand? What if Tiger won two majors, Phil Mickelson and Jim Furyk won the others, and Ernie Els won the Players Championship and the FedEx Cup? The whole project would be ruined, and I’d look back at Kirk’s victory in Georgia with bitterness—a sunny day in a year of rain.

  Over the next year, I embarked on a journey that took me to thirty tournaments, including all four majors and the Ryder Cup. I drove when I could—up and down the beautiful Pacific Coast highway in California, over the Colorado River and into Arizona’s stark Sonoran Desert, through congested Florida resort towns, from rust-belt Ohio to sweltering Kentucky, across the deep south from Augusta to Hilton Head to the sand hills of North Carolina, west through the primordial Louisiana bayous, and into the heart of Texas—and flew when I couldn’t, to Liverpool and finally to Scotland, where golf was born and the season concluded.

  Throughout my travels, I made it my goal to learn—to really learn—everything I could about the rising generation. Writers and broadcasters have made a habit of treating golf like a religion, complete with sacred grounds and mythical heroes. They may be right about the sport’s beauty and history, but I knew from the start that they were wrong about the people. Professional golfers are human beings, with all the vulnerabilities and flaws that come with the title. I knew that what happened to them on the course—successes and failures alike—was a result of who they were off the course. I needed to know where they came from, what motivated them, and how they behaved when the red light of the TV cameras went black.

  This book is a subjective account of what I saw that year—journalism mixed with opinion. Everything you will read is colored by my personal experience, and if that style offends you—as it seems, at times, to have offended the sport’s traditionalists—at least you can consider yourself warned.

  As for those young golfers, I found them to be as diverse and interesting as you’d expect from a group of men on the threshold of greatness. Some of them fascinated me, some amused me, and a few were little more than overgrown children. Discerning their true natures was often difficult, because rich athletes today travel with entourages designed to protect them from people like me. I began to feel like a spy, infiltrating layers of agents and coaches and caddies, hoping to smuggle a bit of truth. Where I found that truth, I’ve presented it without garnish; I never wanted to make a hero or a demon out of anyone, only to be honest.

  By midsummer, one anxiety disappeared for good. My theory about the rise of the young stars had come true—they were winning in droves, from the small tournaments to the majors. With a speed and urgency that I wouldn’t have imagined in my most hopeful hours, they began to claim the sport as their own.

  With each success, they struck a blow against the icon that had dominated golf for two decades, and whose legend threatened to overshadow it for two more. With each victory, and each rebel yell, they were slaying the Tiger.

  “Often people say, what is it that makes a champion? It’s an accumulation of many things. Talent? It’s something more than talent. It just doesn’t happen. It’s hard work. It’s a work ethic, it’s a big sacrifice. Patience is a big thing. You’ve got to have great nerves. It’s a puzzle, with many little things in it….

  The other thing is if we all knew, everybody would be a champion. There’s something called ‘it’ that nobody yet has been able to describe.”


  —GARY PLAYER

  1

  ANTALYA, TURKEY

  Victor’s Sunday

  Victor Dubuisson opened his eyes on that November morning in Antalya, Turkey—more than a thousand miles southeast of his childhood home in France, but on the coast of the same Mediterranean Sea—hoping for a career-changing victory. He rose in obscurity, ignorant of the season that awaited him—how he’d be shoved onto the biggest stages, paired with giants, and asked not just to walk alongside them, but to win. Ignorant, too, of how the next twenty-four hours would foreshadow the coming year, when a talented generation that had grown sick of waiting drove the sport madly into its new era.

  Only the most intense American golf junkies had ever heard his name, and even they couldn’t predict what his day would hold. The anonymous Frenchman, holding the first fifty-four-hole lead of his career—a significant five-shot advantage—was up against the likes of Ian Poulter, Justin Rose, and his idol: the man who had supposedly inspired his love of golf in 1997 with one of the most historic wins in the history of the sport; the man who became golf’s foremost icon, and the high tide on which golf had soared for more than a decade; the one who cast a shadow over the game, even when he was hobbled, even when he was absent; the man who would be chasing the young Frenchman on the final day—Tiger Woods.

  —

  I didn’t know Victor yet, and I couldn’t guess how his story would come to fascinate me in 2014. To call the quiet Frenchman inscrutable would be underselling the point—the man was a sphinx, and arranging the puzzle pieces of his life would prove to be a huge challenge. Information of any kind was hard to come by, and on the rare occasions when an interesting nugget slipped through the cracks, you couldn’t trust it. Every quote, and every biographical detail, only deepened the mystery.

  A French journalist, for instance, warned me that he liked to exaggerate, and I should have heeded those words when I sat down to hear Dubuisson speak later that season. At Donald Trump’s Doral, Florida, resort, the twenty-three-year-old—with his shoulder-length hair, scruffy goatee, and sleepy eyes—told a room full of reporters that he had more or less finished school by age ten, and spent all his time at the golf course. When a puzzled journalist asked about his parents, he said they weren’t around, and then refused to elaborate.

  The story shocked us, and if I had paused to really consider the information, it might have triggered my bullshit detector. After all, he came from France—still, at last check, a participating member of the modern world, and not a place where a ten-year-old vagabond can quit school, live alone, and devote himself to the lonely pursuit of golf. But my skepticism failed me, and I jotted the words in my notebook, happy for a precious sliver of biographical detail.

  At that point, I still believed that any golfer not named Tiger Woods was a boring country club kid with no personality. I wasn’t alone. This is a persistent image, and it’s even cultivated by the people in charge. Golf doesn’t need to be cool. The game’s keepers want the faintest hint of the reckless and rash to attract new fans, but not so much that it costs them the old ones. Caution is paramount.

  Considering this, you can’t blame me for assuming that the players themselves followed the same formula: offbeat in superficial ways, maybe, but safe and boring in all the ones that matter.

  I was wrong. The truth is that professional golf, which exacts a greater psychological toll than any other sport, attracts a motley crew of neurotics. The human landscape of the PGA Tour is strewn with egomaniacs, obsessive-compulsives, manic-depressives, ADHD cases, narcissists, and zealots.

  The question is, how did they get this way? Were the players always screwy, and did their afflictions prepare them perfectly for a sport that rewards a certain amount of mental imbalance? Or were they promising youths with bright futures who had their brains twisted into strange shapes by the prolonged tortures of an unrelenting game?

  Whatever the case, I believed Dubuisson’s latchkey tale, and so did everyone else. It was odd, yes, but nobody questioned its essential truth. Honesty is at the core of golf’s image, and who could believe this blushing Frenchman was anything other than scrupulously honest? Anyone who saw him perform in front of a microphone—painfully shy, mumbling every answer, eyes fixed on the floor—would know he was incapable of fabricating even the faintest show of enthusiasm, much less an entire childhood. Clearly, young Victor was not trying to mythologize himself; he just wanted to get the hell off the stage. Why would he say something so provocative about his youth, and then refuse to elaborate, unless it was the truth?

  What I didn’t know—what would take a year to discover—was that when it came to Victor Dubuisson, simple explanations failed. He had his honest moments, but he could also distort and dissemble with the best of them, and the glare of the spotlight made him react in strange ways. He loved and hated this new attention all at once, and the more famous he grew, the more the balance tilted toward hate. I saw the early stages of this when I asked him what he liked to do for fun.

  “Like any young men do, I go to cinema,” he said. The barest hint of a smile, secretive and tight, had crept onto his face. “I don’t know.”

  “What’s your favorite movie?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he repeated, and the smile tightened.

  I smiled back, wondering if we had just shared some inside joke. I couldn’t quite understand. It would be months before I learned that when Victor smiled, there was nothing friendly about it. It was a sign of fear—of a bashful kid who senses someone probing into a private life he desperately doesn’t want to share. What seemed to me like an innocuous question, an icebreaker about movies, was to him a declaration of war. His smile was half defiance—“how dare you ask me a personal question!”—and half plea—“why won’t you leave me alone?” It was the smile of someone who had been cornered.

  I didn’t put it all together until another French journalist, who had been tolerated by Dubuisson after good rounds and scorned after bad ones, laid it out for me.

  “You saw Victor smiling at you?” he asked. I nodded. “It means he doesn’t like you.”

  A truer picture of Dubuisson would take months to emerge, but in the meantime, we printed what we thought we knew: Eccentric Young French Golf Hermit Quit School at Age Ten, Lived Alone, Hates Media, Especially French, May Be a Deranged Paranoiac. In the golf world, that passed for a salacious story.

  —

  Even if he wasn’t a household name, Dubuisson’s résumé pegged him as a future star in Europe. Since turning pro in 2010 after reaching the number 1 amateur ranking in the world, he had managed twelve top-ten finishes on the European Tour. In the midst of this rapid ascent, he set the course record at St. Andrews, the most famous track in the world, with a 62, and by November 2013 he had earned more than one million Euros in a season. His résumé grew, and all he lacked was a win.

  As he approached the putting green before his final round in Turkey on that fall morning in 2013—Dubuisson walks with a slow, duck-footed shuffle—he saw his idols spread out before him: Tiger, Rose, Stenson, Poulter. He already knew this was the biggest day of his career, but their presence hammered the point home.

  The nerves hit hard on the first tee, but beneath it all were the seeds of confidence. His game had been sharp all week, and his lead was huge. With a good round—hell, even a decent round—nobody could catch him. As he prepared for his opening drive, he hoped simply that the first few holes would pass with no mistakes.

  —

  Nine holes later, he had yet to make a birdie. That was the bad news. The worse news was that his playing partner, Poulter, had made three of them to reach -19, and Justin Rose had made four, plus an eagle, to climb up to the same score. Tiger Woods had made three of his own, but a bogey kept him at -17, while Jamie Donaldson lurked at -16.

  The good news was that Dubuisson had not made a bogey either, and his overnight lead had kept him two shots clear of the field at -21. Not the ideal start he’d envisioned, b
ut he was heading into the back nine with a lead.

  A driver at the tenth, a short par 4, ended up in a bunker near the green, and though his angle wasn’t great, he nearly holed his wedge. A short putt gave him his first birdie of the day, and a bit of relief. But the field kept coming. Poulter birdied 11 to cut the lead to two, and when he bogeyed 12 to give it back, Rose was ready with a birdie of his own on 13 to reach -20. Jamie Donaldson, meanwhile, had taken flight on the back nine, with four birdies propelling him to -19, three behind the leader.

  The dreaded moment finally came to pass on the par-3 14th. After missing the green with his tee shot, Dubuisson discovered his ball in an awful lie, from which he had no recourse but to hack out to fifteen feet. As he was preparing to putt, a roar came from somewhere ahead. Victor didn’t know it, but Jamie Donaldson’s tee shot on the 16th had just gone in the hole. The ace sent the Welshman to -21. When Dubuisson’s par putt sailed past the hole a moment later, forcing him to settle for bogey, he had officially blown his cushion.

  Before he could catch his breath, Justin Rose birdied the 16th, and the three golfers now stood knotted at -21. Four holes remained.

  —

  Losing the big lead had a paradoxical effect on Dubuisson—it calmed him down. The burden he’d carried all day was gone; now he could just play.

  His second life began on the 15th hole, a 337-yard par 4. After watching Poulter hit a drive to the front of the green, he pulled his own driver and launched a long, straight bomb of his own. It showed tremendous nerve at a critical time, and with his next shot, a chip that stopped three feet from the cup, he displayed the pinpoint short game that would make him famous later that year. He knocked in his birdie putt, and followed that by stiffing an iron into the par-3 16th, leaving himself ten feet for another birdie. He two-putted for par, though, and after his drive on the 17th, Jamie Donaldson finished his round with yet another birdie, tying for the lead at -22 with a brilliant Sunday 63.