Kevin Kisner is crouched behind a 15-foot putt on No. 18 at PGA West’s TPC Stadium Course. His brown eyes scan the slight downhill slope, left to right. To get here, the 27-year-old took an aggressive line on his approach shot, just clearing the pond that has swallowed dozens of Pro V1x’s over the past five days. Kisner birdied this 439-yard par four three days ago. Now, the four-time all-American out of the University of Georgia is desperate—he needs to do it again. Standing 50 metres away atop a water-starved grass hill is Kisner’s father, Steven. He’s the man in the crisp-collared blue golf shirt with the tightly crossed arms, the one holding his breath.
If this putt drops, Kisner’s driving a Mercedes at Tour stops next season, he’s lunching on filet mignon, staying in swanky resorts and playing the best courses in the world with Rory and Tiger. If it doesn’t, he’s renting a crappy compact car, eating at Subway, travelling across small-town America on his own dime and sharing a room at a Travelodge with a buddy because one of them landed a sweet deal on Priceline.
Kisner takes a deep breath. He shifts his shoulders in his grey-and-white Nike golf shirt with a single red stripe. Then he takes his putter back and sends the ball hurtling toward the hole.
There is no test in sport more cruel than the PGA Tour’s Qualifying School. A 14-round grind that feels like Groundhog Day, it can catapult one man to the penthouse and leave another in tears, questioning his future. At any point along the way, a five-footer that lips out or an errant drive can be the difference between a shot at fame and life as a little-known journeyman. Here, in La Quinta, Calif., is the final of the three-stage process, a six-day, 108-hole marathon that sees the top 25 earn the ultimate prize: a PGA Tour card. A field of 172, whittled down from 1,588 applicants, has made it this far. All 172 swings are the stuff of envy. Twenty of these guys have won on Tour before and six are ranked among the top 60 in the world. But this is not a tournament that rewards past performance. Just ask Jeff Gove, who has two top-10 PGA tour finishes on his resumé. “It’s whether you can get hot this week,” says the 41-year-old matter-of-factly. This is Gove’s ninth Q-School. He’s come up short in each of the previous eight.
For the young guys, Q-School is the ultimate lottery ticket, a giant step closer to one day donning a Green Jacket. For the veterans, it’s more like being on life support. They’re here because they didn’t play well enough on Tour last year to retain their card with a top-125 finish on either the money list or in FedExCup points, or they’re trying to play their way back after time on the Web.com feeder circuit, or elsewhere. “This is not where you want to be,” says Billy Mayfair, 46, a five-time Tour winner.
Asking a player if he ever thought he’d have to earn his way back to the big leagues through Q-School is a touchy subject. “I think it’s a bad question,” says Camilo Villegas, the once-promising Colombian who was ranked as high as No. 7 in the world. Villegas is speed-walking back to the clubhouse, chest out, after a first-round two-under-par 70. “I mean, surprised because of what? Life has a lot of corners, takes a lot of twists.”
In five days, Russell Knox will know exactly what that feels like. The 27-year-old Scot is here because his rookie campaign came more than $130,000 short of the $647,510 he needed to earn a sophomore stint on Tour. Knox is on his cellphone near the practice green after carding a final-round 69, a solid three under par on this balmy December day. But it doesn’t make up for his fourth-round 73, or his even-par second round. Knox’s 14-under-par total doesn’t come close to catching South Korea’s Lee Dong-hwan, the winner at 22 under. “I lost my job today,” Knox says. Q-School is a ruthless boss.
But it’s one that many will be sad to see go. This gruelling test as a direct path to the big leagues is done—the 2012 edition is the last to offer a PGA Tour card as a reward. (Q-School will instead offer status on the Web.com Tour.) Since 1965, it has been the maker of Cinderella stories. This is how, in 1992, a supply teacher with a good handicap from Long Beach, Calif., named Paul Goydos first made it on Tour, where he’s won twice. And how Rickie Fowler came straight out of college with his bright orange pants to capture rookie of the year honours in 2010. Q-School is also the maker of epic collapses, like Roland Thatcher’s in 2001. Needing a par on the final hole to earn his card, the Hampton, Va., native flew the green, bounced his ball off a cart path and onto the clubhouse roof. The triple bogey cost him a year on Tour. “There’s drama here you can’t get anywhere else,” says Brad Fritsch of Manotick, Ont., the lone Canadian to earn a top-25 finish this year.
And because it’s the finale, it drew an incredible cross-section of talent. There’s Si Woo Kim, a 17-year-old from South Korea who is missing more than a week of high school to compete (spoiler alert: It was worth it). And Tom Pernice Jr., 53, who turned pro more than a decade before Kim was born and has earned nearly $15 million on Tour. There are a slew of guys like 30-year-old Vince Covello, who has spent his career slugging it out on mini tours. Shaun Micheel, who won the PGA Championship in 2003, is also here. So is Todd Hamilton, who won the Open Championship a year later in a four-hole playoff with Ernie Els at Royal Troon.
The stakes are different for all 172 players. For Villegas, who has conditional status on Tour in 2013 thanks to three wins during his seven-year career, and for Hamilton, who can play on the European Tour, being outside the top 25 isn’t as crushing a blow as it is for others. Like Colorado’s Shane Bertsch, a 42-year-old father of two who was a PGA Tour rookie in 1996 and wishes he hadn’t bought a hot rod back when times were good. Bertsch hasn’t been sleeping well this week. He can’t get breakfast down. The past two years on Tour, he’d wake up at 6 a.m. and crush bacon, eggs and oatmeal before teeing it up. “This is tougher,” says Bertsch, who wears the tan of a man who’s been at this a long time, a bright white forehead hiding beneath his black TaylorMade hat. “You get more nervous as you get older because you know how much is on the line. This affects my family, our future. I just want stability.” Being away from his wife, Monica, and daughters Brianna, 10, and Stella, 6, is the hardest part of the job, but it’s a lot easier when he has a chance to bring home a $1-million cheque.
What’s on the line is the difference between playing an event for a total purse of $500,000 in the minors and playing for $4 million in the bigs. It’s having a sponsorship deal mainly in the form of clubs and clothing worth $25,000, or a standard PGA variety, worth $150,000. “It’s the chance to make a couple million next year with a good year,” Bertsch says, “as opposed to having a great year and barely breaking even.” At week’s end, the soft-spoken, likeable journeyman falls two strokes shy of the million-dollar option.
Bertsch, once a promising junior tennis player who even took a game off future world No. 1 Andre Agassi in the early 1990s, has been to the Q-School final 12 times, starting in 1994. Ask him to guess how many and he says seven. Then his eyes roll up, his forehead wrinkles and he guesses nine. Close enough. Nobody knows their number around here. Jeff Klauk doesn’t even want to think about it. Here for the ninth time (though he thinks it’s his sixth), he’s 0-8, and after a four-over 76 on day two, he’s had it. Klauk knows how lucrative life on the PGA Tour can be: He earned $1.24 million during his rookie season in 2009, just three years after he was diagnosed with epilepsy. Last year, he was recovering from brain surgery and made only four starts and $12,855 on the Web.com Tour. That barely covers Q-School; the final stage costs $3,500 just to tee off. Add caddie fees, flights, hotels and earlier stages, and you’re over $10,000 in a hurry.
Klauk is walking off the Stadium Course the day after his 35th birthday and his hands are in the air in disgust. “It’s just a tournament!” he barks, when asked what it is about the event that makes it so tough. “I have never played well here. In all the years, never come close. Never come close.” Will he miss Q-School? Klauk just laughs.
You can’t deny the charm of this tournament, though. It’s unlike any other PGA production because it’s not a production at all. This week, there are ropes around only four of the 36 holes on the two host courses, so if you want to high-five Hamilton and ask him what it was like to kiss the Claret Jug, the opportunity’s yours. Power saws and oldies tunes blast from the orange-roofed bungalows that butt up against the courses. The galleries are tiny, the biggest crowds in the first five days numbering only about 15, all following Villegas in the hope, no doubt, that he might drop into Spiderman mode to read a putt. None of the fans paid to watch, either. Caddies routinely have to ask people to keep quiet because there’s a tournament going on—it’s that easy to forget. Aside from the volunteers in pale green shirts, it really doesn’t look that way. During the second round, Kris Blanks, a PGA rookie in 2009, was lined up for a putt when a man watching in a golf cart with a tiny white dog came barrelling down a hill, nearly ending up on the green. Turns out his foot got stuck on the accelerator. “We’re like, dude, what?” says a grinning Blanks, who has the best sunglasses tan in the field. “It’s different out here.”
There are no leaderboards in sight on either course, no sign of where a player stands during his round. Guys don’t know until they check online or walk by the giant scoreboard near the clubhouse that’s filled out diligently at the end of each round by a man who must have the finest handwriting in the state of California. It’s why four-time PGA Tour winner Heath Slocum walks off No. 18 with two of his fingers crossed. (That didn’t work; he came up two strokes short.) Billy Horschel, who’s playing in his fourth straight fall classic, refuses to check the leaderboard all week because he doesn’t want to scare himself. (That did work; he finished fourth.)
While the surroundings aren’t indicative of Q-School’s importance, the play is. Every shot counts. And you can’t afford mistakes. Edward Loar made a string of them, and in less than 10 minutes, his dream was crushed. The six-foot-four Texan was in third place heading into the final round at PGA West, on his way to earning a second straight stint on Tour through Q-School. He was humming between shots and saying “Hi” to people he didn’t know along the way. Loar, 35, was the feel-good story at Q-School in 2011, a man who’d slugged it out for 11 years as a pro before he made the big time. But this time, he came undone.
On No. 17, a 168-yard par 3 aptly named Alcatraz, the most unforgiving hole out here thanks to a tiny island green, Loar was in 24th, three bogeys and a double already under his belt. Then his nine iron off the tee hit a rock, jumped off another and into the drink. A double bogey later, Loar stared down No. 18, needing a birdie to clinch his card. The lefty drove his ball into the water again. He kneeled down, shifted his Ping hat on his head, and stared down at the grass through his orange-rimmed sunglasses. Loar didn’t need a leaderboard to know it was over. The 78 on his scorecard said it all. “It’s obviously a really hard day for everyone,” Loar says afterwards, voice shaking. By everyone, Loar means him, his wife, Melaney, and their 15-month-old triplets: Collins, James and William.
But at the same time Q-School breaks one man, it gives another a well-earned shot. “Jeff Gove! Jeff Gove! Jeff Gove!” The crowd is chanting as the journeyman from Seattle strides up to No. 18 wearing a massive grin. Gove walks with a slight limp and different-sized shoes (the left is nine, the right is seven and a half) because he was born with club feet, pointed straight down and turned in. Surgery corrected them when he was 12. They hurt after a day on the course, but you’ll never hear him complain. His father, Gary, a big guy with a booming voice, wells up as he watches Gove walk up to the green.
For the past five days, Gary has been living and dying with every shot. “It’s miserable watching,” he says. Gary was on his son’s bag back in 1994 when Gove made his Q-School debut as a 23-year-old. He missed earning a Tour card by two strokes that year and figured the next time he’d make good. He didn’t. And not in the six tries after that, either. Now, making his ninth appearance, nearly two decades since his first, Gove, whose dark hair is starting to grey under his black Titleist hat, now married and with three kids—Jacob, 8, Annie, 6, and Haley, 4—puts together six straight rounds worthy of a T10 finish and a PGA Tour card.
Gove steps up to his par putt, knocks it in the cup and looks to his parents and wife in the crowd after a fist bump with his caddie. Nobody gets more congratulations on the way back to the clubhouse than this guy. He can’t find words to capture the moment. “I’m not used to this,” Gove says, smiling. “I’m used to being disappointed.”
Last season, Gove struggled on the
Web.com Tour, and his $87,297 wasn’t enough to cover expenses and support the family. Since his rookie PGA season in 2000, Gove has bounced between the PGA and Web.com Tours. He’s had good years and bad. His eyes get glossy when he thinks about his family, all the nights away, all the missed cuts, coming home without a paycheque. “This is confirmation,” he says. “This makes it all worth it.”
Back on the 18th green, Kisner’s putt has rolled left and it’s headed back right. The weight is perfect. His teeth are clenched and his knees are bent, willing that ball to drop. The kid has been here before, twice. In 2009, following a standout college career during which he led the Georgia Bulldogs to the 2005 national championship, Kisner made the Q-School final for the first time. He finished 26th—one shot shy of the show, an experience he sums up in two words: “So brutal.” But in 2011, he saw the other side with a T11 finish. Fresh off his sophomore PGA season and now married to a fellow Bulldog named Brittany, Kisner’s back at Q-School because his earnings fell more than $300,000 shy of what he needed to keep his card. He got through the second stage with a convincing third-place finish at Redstone Golf Club in Humble, Texas, but if he finishes outside the top 25 here, it’s back to the Web.com Tour. “You don’t get paid anything to play out there,” Kisner says, his born-and-raised South Carolina drawl slow and steady. “But they treat you like you’re a king on Tour.” If this putt drops, the kid is royalty.
As his ball edges toward the hole, Kisner raises his putter in the air and watches the ball roll—right past. He puts his left hand on his forehead, his right hand still holding a waving Odyssey putter. The ball stops two inches beyond the cup, one inch right. After tapping it in, Kisner takes off his white Nike hat, shakes hands with his caddie and playing partners and lets out a deep breath as he walks up the grass hill to the scoring trailer. He doesn’t ask to see where he stands on the leaderboard while he’s signing an even-par 72 on his scorecard. He doesn’t want to know yet. After nine pars coming home, he isn’t optimistic.
Kisner drops heavily into a golf cart headed for the clubhouse and pulls his iPhone out of his pocket. He checks the leaderboard. “It’s not enough,” he says, head down, eyes fixed on the screen. For the second time, Kisner is one shot shy of his card. “It’s not enough,” he repeats. He puts the phone back in his pocket.
It’s a quiet cart ride. When he arrives at the clubhouse, Kisner spots an open cooler full of beers. He politely asks if he can help himself, then cracks a Bud Light and chugs half. He wishes he hadn’t been aggressive and found water on No. 3, but it’s too late, and there’s no use second-guessing now. After all, there are too many “what ifs” through six rounds.
His dad, Steven, is standing nearby, straight-faced, hands behind his back, waiting for his son so he can take him out of here. He was by Kisner’s side last March, best man at his wedding, and the only family member watching here today. Before he leaves, Kisner grabs another Bud. He walks over to his father, beers in both hands. They don’t exchange words, there’s nothing to say. Steven rubs his son’s back and they walk slowly together, straight to the parking lot, straight out of here.
This article originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine.