Slaying the Tiger Page 8

  The cheers of “Go Dawgs!” came flying at Henley wherever he walked, and now they were louder than usual as he stood over his tee shot on the 15th, a 179-yard par-3. It was the start of a series of three holes known as the “Bear Trap”—named after Jack Nicklaus himself, who had redesigned the course in 1990. The murderous troika is narrow all the way, with water lining the right side of each hole, and the ubiquitous wind wreaking extra havoc. A statue of a bear on his hind legs greets you as you walk up to the 15th hole, along with a plaque featuring a quote from Nicklaus: “It should be won or lost right here.”

  Hopped up on adrenaline from his chip-in and smelling blood, Henley went right at the flag. The shot faded badly, and he didn’t even have to watch it land—he’d found the water. He failed to get up and down from the drop area, and the resulting double bogey looked like the end of his tournament.

  But the weirdness had just begun. On 16, Rory’s drive flew way left into a fairway bunker. With 192 yards to the hole, he left the ball out right, and it, too, found a home in the bright blue water. Like Henley, Rory couldn’t get up and down from his drop, and after having the tournament in his grasp, he was back down to -8.

  Russell Knox had double-bogeyed 14, relegating him to a -8 finish, and now Ryan Palmer had the lead at -9. When Henley made par on 17 and Rory bogeyed—“Put it in the drink, Rory!” someone had shouted, to general boos and a few guffaws—all Palmer had to do was par the 18th. He made a bit of a mess of the hole, but still gave himself five feet for his par…and missed.

  That left one group on the course. Henley found his brother Adam in the gallery between holes, high-fived him, and asked, “Having fun yet?” He’d been drinking water compulsively in the humidity all day, and he chugged another bottle while he waited to tee off. The clouds were low, the breeze whipped the palms behind he green, and in the lake to the right, four fountains spewed geysers around a Honda car that seemed to float on the water’s surface.

  Rory bombed his drive into the right fairway, leaving himself 236 yards to the hole, and Henley gave himself an even better angle on the left side. The 18th hole bends hard to the right by the green, even as the water encroaches into the turn. It meant that Rory would have to fly his shot almost entirely over water, and a couple of bunkers, to land the green. Henley had a much better angle, but his second shot stayed left, and wound up landing in a woman’s merchandise bag among the gallery. Rory stepped up next, and delivered what looked, at the time, like the shot of the tournament—a spectacular 5-wood that flew over everything and stopped on a dime, eleven feet from the hole.

  Henley barely got this third shot onto the green, and was lucky to escape with par after a solid fifty-seven-foot lag putt. The crowd’s attention turned to the icon; somehow, despite disasters on 16 and 17, Rory’s shot had given him an unlikely eagle putt to win the tournament.

  He missed—it just wasn’t his day. The tap-in for birdie completed an ugly round of 74, but he still held a share of the lead at -8. When Rory walked through the tunnel leading away from 18, they passed the tournament trophy, a giant ceremonial car key, and his fiancée, Caroline Wozniacki, decked out in yoga pants—“Good to see you,” “Good to see you.” Girls all around screamed his name, but he didn’t look up. Henley, unnoticed, slipped off to use the bathroom, but not before shooting a wide-eyed stare at Wozniacki.

  With darkness settling in on Palm Beach Gardens, four players—Rory, Henley, Knox, and Palmer—headed to the 18th tee for a playoff. The sloppy play continued. Rory found the back bunker on his approach and chipped over the green with his third shot, while Knox hit a rough lag putt and Palmer missed his birdie. Henley, the only player on the green in two, lagged his eagle putt to three feet, tipped his visor to his brother, and knocked in the birdie to win the tournament.

  —

  Henley’s win was the ultimate proof of the old adage—you don’t have to be perfect to win on the PGA Tour. Afterward, he stood with just a handful of journalists and friends at the scoring tent, while Rory commanded a huge audience on the other side of the path, his pale Irish face glowing in the bright lights.

  Even in defeat, and even in doubt, Rory maintained his aura. He resonated in a way that you could feel. And even in triumph, Henley seemed somehow diminished by comparison. When the winner walked away, I wondered if that essential fact could ever change. One day, I thought, as I watched him go, maybe you’ll move that needle, too. If they ever let you.

  5

  THE VILLAIN

  Patrick Reed

  If you were on the lookout for a tournament that could serve as a catchall metaphor for the Changing of the Guard—how Tiger gave way to Tiger’s Children, and how the generation he inspired is mercilessly ushering him out of the game while he fights a losing battle against time and karma—then the place to be in 2014 was the WGC-Cadillac Championship, where sixty-nine of the best players in golf came to do battle at Trump National Doral’s redesigned Blue Monster course. They made up one of the toughest fields of the season, all of which was pure satisfaction to the Gray Monster himself: Donald Trump, the tournament host.

  On that Sunday, in the second-to-last group, you could watch Tiger tee up on number one, three shots off the lead and fixing to prowl like the old days. Red shirt, black pants, slim and fierce. And if you looked to his right, to the putting green about thirty yards away, you’d see Jason Dufner stop everything to watch the spectacle unfold. It’s hard to ignore Tiger anywhere, but Sundays find him at his most essential, striding like a Colossus down the fairways he’s owned for the better part of twenty years, trailing an afterglow of awestruck spectators. He commands an energy unlike anything the sport has ever seen or may ever see again, and he carries himself like a man born to the role. The announcer on the first tee puts an added emphasis on the name, the people erupt, and the noise settles into reverie as he addresses the ball. All eyes are on him.

  With one exception. Look past Dufner, farther down on that same putting green, and dig the chunky kid wearing headphones—they’re blaring “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragons—hunched over his ball, facing defiantly away from the icon. He’s wearing the red-and-black combo, too, as he’s done since age ten, in homage to the man on the tee. You’d guess that the moment might be too big for the kid; that he’d wilt in the presence of his hero. But that’s only if you didn’t know Patrick Reed.

  * * *

  Q: Do you think the media’s making you out to be a villain?

  REED: Yeah. For sure.

  Patrick Reed: Twenty-four years old, built like Babe Ruth—short, heavy, with a barrel-chested frame that makes you think “stocky” and “powerful” rather than “fat”—quick to anger, even by pro golf standards, and a born winner.

  Those are the descriptions that come to mind when you study Reed’s résumé and watch him on the course. He recently became just the fourth player in the last two decades to win four times on the PGA Tour before his twenty-fifth birthday. The other three are Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, and Sergio Garcia—names that demonstrate the lofty company he keeps.

  With Reed, though, success is never simple. There has always been something a little off-key brewing beneath the surface of his story—a swirl of rumors dating back to his college days, when he lasted a year at Georgia before transferring to Augusta State and eventually facing his former school for the national championship.

  The more Reed won on Tour, the more inevitable it became that his complicated history would return to haunt him. Finally, after the biggest win of his career at the Cadillac Championship last March, ESPN’s Ian O’Connor dragged some of the skeletons from the closet in a Masters-week story called “Patrick Reed’s Turbulent Rise.” O’Connor’s research, spanning courthouses and coaches and parents and former college and high school teammates, lifted the veil, at least slightly, on Reed’s youth. The story made it clear that his peers had never really liked him, especially at the college level. A new picture of Reed emerged: brash, arrogant, abrasive, unapologetic, driven. He tur
ned potential friends against him, and he never seemed to care about the consequences—at least not enough to change.

  In terms of the nitty-gritty details, O’Connor couldn’t quite pierce the wall of silence put up by the very same people who seemed to despise Reed. A citation in an Athens courthouse revealed that Reed had been arrested for intoxication his freshman season, but if that was the standard for a villain, half of the country would be doomed. The reason why Georgia coach Chris Haack had kicked Reed off the team remained a mystery, as did the ensuing troubles at Augusta State, which head coach Josh Gregory and Reed’s former teammates kept close to the vest.

  It was clear that the ESPN story had struck only a glancing blow—there was more here than a drunken night. As another media member put it to me, “That was as close as anyone ever got, and they didn’t get that close.”

  —

  From the start of my travels in a year on Tour, I found Reed to be one of the most compelling young golfers on the scene, and I tried to arrange an interview with him as early as January. He proved an elusive figure, even with a cooperative agent, but I finally sat down with him and Justine—his wife and former caddie, who had just given birth to their first child—at the Greenbrier Classic in West Virginia in early July. I held off on his college years as long as I could, but eventually I broached the topic. It led to an awkward exchange:

  ME: Did you read Ian O’Connor’s article?

  PATRICK: No.

  ME: I mean, a lot of people want to know—

  PATRICK: I talked to him about it.

  ME: You did talk to him?

  PATRICK: I think so, yeah.

  JUSTINE: Yeah, I read it.

  PATRICK: Yeah. Yeah no, it was at…

  JUSTINE: You read it.

  PATRICK: We were at Augusta, huh? He talked to me before he wrote it.

  ME: But you didn’t read it?

  JUSTINE: I think he read it.

  PATRICK: I think so, I don’t know. There’s so many articles…it’s so hard…

  JUSTINE: There’s so many stories. But I do recall that story.

  From Reed’s body language after I said O’Connor’s name, I sensed that he knew exactly what I was talking about. I didn’t blame him for his reticence—it’s not incumbent upon Tour players to provide unfavorable information about themselves. Total honesty can have a detrimental effect, and there was no reason for Reed to do my work for me.

  But I was curious to see his reaction to O’Connor’s story, and the fact that he had feigned ignorance until his wife essentially called him out was telling—it had hit home, and it was something he worried about. Before moving on, I brought up the idea that when you really looked at the story, there was nothing too damning beyond the kind of alcohol infraction experienced by hordes of college students every year—including myself.

  ME: But see, the interesting thing for me was…I mean, I’m someone who got arrested in college for shooting off a fire extinguisher. It feels like everyone I know does, so it felt like whatever he wrote wasn’t everything. It was like, “Oh, that’s it?”

  JUSTINE: It was everything.

  PATRICK: No, the article he wrote was everything. I mean, it’s…

  JUSTINE: There’s nothing else out there.

  Those responses came quickly, and reminded me of an old trope: The cop standing in front of a grisly car wreck, saying, “Move along, nothing to see here!”

  —

  Patrick Reed was almost literally born with a golf club in his hands. His father, Bill, worked as a medical sales rep, and he came to realize over the course of his business career that his bosses mysteriously formed strong bonds with employees who could break 80. With his wife Jeannette, a stay-at-home mom, Bill began to learn the game, and when Patrick was born they placed a set of plastic clubs in his crib.

  The Reeds belonged to the Dominion Country Club in San Antonio, and Bill and Patrick first played in a father-son tournament when the boy was three. Patrick caught his first glimpse of Tiger Woods at a pro-am when he was six years old, and though he couldn’t fight his way through the masses to get an autograph, a fascination was born—he idolized the consummate winner.

  Despite his age, Reed became addicted to the sensation of a great shot—those blissful moments when you couldn’t even feel the ball come off the face. He improved rapidly, began competing in youth tournaments, and even appeared on Saturday morning children’s TV programs to show off his skills.

  After a few years in Pittsburgh, the Reeds moved back to San Antonio, where Patrick would race home from school on weekdays to squeeze in a few holes. Even at a young age, he brought an unusual focus to the sport, right down to the smallest details. When he was ten, he stopped wearing shorts on the golf course because he saw that the pros had to wear pants. At his junior tournaments, in the brutal heat of midsummer, he’d be the only kid in khakis.

  Reed began to dominate the youth golf circuit in Texas, and his father placed him in higher age brackets. He had a few friends, but his dedication to golf, and the fact that the family kept moving while Bill climbed the corporate ladder, made him a natural loner.

  His obsession with golf deepened. His parents took him to junior tournaments both locally and across the country, and with the constant travel, Reed soon learned to adapt to new circumstances. He also spent a lot of his childhood sick—the frequent changes in climate and temperature meant a never-ending litany of colds and sinus infections.

  —

  Two of Patrick’s dominant personality traits emerged early, and both worried his parents. The first was his incredible capacity for rage. He expected so much of himself that when he went into a slump, he’d transform into a sullen powder keg of frustration and anger, to the point that his parents wondered whether he truly enjoyed the sport. Reed always insisted he was fine, but the explosions painted a different picture.

  The other problem was his outward shows of confidence, which crossed over into a cocky, arrogant tone too often for Bill’s liking. He knew his son’s success somewhat depended on this self-assurance, but when Patrick introduced himself to strangers by saying things like, “I’m Patrick Reed, and I’ll kick the shit out of you at golf anytime you want,” Bill also knew he had a problem. The issue was that Patrick’s obsession was all-consuming—he had no other interests, and though it made him one of the best juniors in the country, it also meant that his self-worth was entirely wrapped up in the game. Combined with a natural arrogance and a snarly demeanor, he had a knack for bad first impressions.

  But what was the solution? The difficulty, according to his parents, was that while they tried to keep him humble, everyone around them was telling Patrick how great he was. The constant praise made it difficult to regulate his behavior outside the home. They worried about burnout, but those fears never came to pass. They watched as other top-ranked junior golfers dropped out or peaked too early while Patrick surpassed them all.

  By the time he was fourteen, he was traveling on his own to AJGA tournaments and other major junior events, staying within the network of host families wherever he went. In those homes, meeting strangers, he mastered the language of grown-ups. Later, his coach Josh Gregory would laugh at the fact that despite all the troubles, you could always put Reed in a room full of adults and he’d be totally at ease, and totally charming.*1

  In eighth grade, Reed and Cody Gribble committed to the University of Texas and head coach John Fields, creating a bit of a stir. Though it had become common in big-time sports, they were the first golfers to declare at such an early age. Bill and Jeannette didn’t know if it was a smart move, but once again, Patrick’s will proved indomitable. The family had moved to Baton Rouge a year earlier, though, and by the time Reed entered high school, the commitment had already softened considerably.

  University Laboratory School, a prep high school on LSU’s campus, is generally reserved for the progeny of wealthy Louisianans—senators, governors, rich executives, athletes. The Reeds had no delusions about applying to
send Patrick there, but word came through the grapevine that maybe, yes, he should apply. Chuck Winstead, the LSU golf coach, knew about Patrick, who had just won the junior British Open in Liverpool, and though it was never made explicit, the Reeds came to understand that by getting Patrick into the school, the LSU golf program hoped to get a leg up in the recruiting process.

  In order to apply, they needed two letters of recommendation, and they knew nobody of any importance in Louisiana. Not to worry—they were told that this, too, had been settled. The application went in, Patrick was accepted, and it wasn’t until later that the Reeds learned about the letters. One came from a former basketball player, they told me, and the other came from Nick Saban, the football coach who would go on to win the national title at LSU that season—neither of whom they knew, and neither of whom knew Patrick.

  At U-High, as it was called, Reed had access to excellent college golf facilities. It was also where he met Kris Karain, a fellow student who became a good friend. The Karains turned out to play an important part in Patrick’s life—he later met Kris’s older sister, Justine, who was in school at LSU and Our Lady of the Lake College working on a dual degree (nursing and health administration). In time, she became his wife and caddie, and when she became pregnant in 2013, a third Karain—her younger brother Kessler—took over on Patrick’s bag.

  Reed won two state titles in Baton Rouge, and in O’Connor’s ESPN story, one of his teammates illustrates his demeanor:

  “If you ever challenged him at something, he answered it every single time,” [Darren] Bahnsen said. “In one practice round I hit a drive down the middle, about 275 yards, and felt good about it. Patrick said, ‘Man, that’s a good drive,’ and then he got down on two knees and hit his ball 10 yards past me. From his knees.”

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