Golf Score Saver

Two Masters ago, I think it was. Eamon, my friend from Ireland, had spent the morning wandering around the National, marveling at the practice-round crowds and getting the lay of the land. “I walked the front nine,” he told me outside the door of the press building, “and I spent an hour in Amen Corner. Spectacular! But now maybe you could show me your favorite spot to view the action.”
Always happy to oblige a County Mayo man, I led Eamon back up the hill past the fabled oak tree and the ranks of the entitled seated under green-and-white umbrellas. “Here it is,” I said, ­stepping up behind a two-deep line of suntanned spectators standing on the grassy bank behind the 10th tee. “You’re so close that you can read the time off the caddies’ Rolexes. And believe me, there’s no more beautiful sight in golf than a perfectly hit four-wood tracing a draw across the sky before plunging down this hill between the pines.”
Beaming, I turned to him. “Isn’t it great?”
That’s when I noticed that Eamon’s nose and spectacles were about four inches from the left shoulder blade of a beefy fan wearing the red and black of the Georgia Bulldogs.
“Of course,” I said, “It helps to be six-foot-seven.”
I tell that story whenever a Masters virgin solicits my opinion on the best places to go once that precious badge has been secured. For while it’s true that I’m well into my third decade ­covering golf’s most exclusive major, my point of view—both literally and figuratively—may not be universal. Do you really want to know, for instance, that I usually take my third-round power lunch par moi-même at the Chick-fil-A on Washington Road?
You do? In that case, I’m happy to give you a virtual guided tour of my Augusta National. Let’s start with the two-year-old, Tom Fazio–designed driving range that runs parallel to Washington Road. I spend roughly 20 minutes every morning watching the pros warm up, and I do most of that watching from the patrons’ sidewalk that parallels the target field. I do this for two reasons. One, as a reformed range rat, I fairly drool over this glorious practice ground, which marries the functionality of a lesson tee to the aesthetics of London’s Kew Gardens. Two, I can’t get enough of the short-game practice area, which challenges players with the same slippery slopes and Colgate-white sand they’ll encounter on the course. This is where you’ll see Tiger practicing one-handed chips and Phil performing his 360-degree putting drill.
When I’ve had enough preamble, I cut through the Pinkerton-guarded lobby of the press building and emerge in the pines on the right side of the 1st fairway. I never, I repeat, never join the throng at the 1st tee, where spectators are packed so tightly that they have to alternate breaths. Nor do I carry one of those canvas-backed ­aluminum chairs for greenside viewing. I count on my height, my wiles and my experience to afford me the best sight lines.
I walk up the tree line, pausing only to watch pertinent approach shots and putts, and I don’t stop until I reach the fairway bunker on the right side of the par-5 2nd hole. I linger there. It’s fun to watch players hit their fairway metals and long irons down to an amphitheater green surrounded by deep bunkers and vocal spectators. If I’m lucky, I get to watch some wretch self-destruct in the flowered ditch across the fairway, a spot the pros call the Delta Ticket Office. (“Because if you drive it there, you’ll be flying home on Friday.”)
I linger again, but just briefly, beside the 5th hole. Playing uphill with a fairway that tilts left, Magnolia, as it’s called, is probably the worst spectator hole on the course. What’s appealing is its relative solitude and the fact that you can one-up other badge holders by talking about it the way adventure travelers brag about their trips to Ladakh. “I saw both of Nicklaus’s 5th-hole eagles,” is the golf equivalent of, “I hooked the Loch Ness monster,” and you get extra points for knowing that Jack holed both of his mid-iron approaches during the 1995 Masters, when he was 55.
The point of all this walking and climbing is to get me to my favorite viewing point, which is the grassy bank behind and above the tee at the par-3 6th. Described in a 2009 Sports Illustrated article as “Augusta National’s most thrilling spectator perch”—never mind by which writer—the 6th tee provides a penthouse perspective on one of golf’s more intimidating short holes.
“From the treetop tee,” SI’s astute correspondent continues, “golfers launch iron shots over a ravine so deep that it conceals a busy crosswalk and hundreds of spectators seated on a grassy slope. The slippery green provides most of the terror—downhill three-footers can turn into uphill ­30-footers—but I prefer the tee box. Stand close and you can pick up snippets of conversation as the players wait for the green to clear; and when they finally strike their shots, you can almost feel the club in your hands as your eyes follow the ball all the way down.”
My sentiments exactly. In fact, I find the tug of the 6th tee to be so strong that I have to limit myself to 30 minutes per visit, lest I lose the thread of the actual competition.
But what, you ask, of Amen Corner? Where does an accredited scribe position himself to witness Larry Mize’s stunning victory chip-in on 11 or Fred Couples’s Velcro-aided par on 12 or Phil Mickelson’s off-the-pine-straw-through-the-trees miracle six-iron on 13?
Honest answer: at a table in front of a 60-inch flat-screen in the press-building lunchroom.
Two reasons for that. One, writers covering the Masters tend to swarm around the high-def displays on Sunday, lest we miss what CBS is showing live to the world. Two, my tower is gone.
O.K., it wasn’t my tower. Painted Masters green and situated between the 12th tee and the 13th fairway, it was a mini-grandstand atop a steel pole that working press badge holders accessed by means of a steel ladder. The view was not only sensational, it was also panoramic. I’d have Seve Ballesteros arm-pumping his way across the 11th green to a deafening roar. I’d have Tom Watson and Ian Woosnam taking practice swings practically under my nose on the 12th tee. Across the pond I’d have Greg Norman and a handful of marshals searching for his ball in the shrubbery behind 12 green. Farther right I’d see Ben Crenshaw teeing off from that private patch of lawn that is the 13th tee, and if I turned around I’d have a down-the-barrel view of Chip Beck preparing to hit his third, with a wedge, into the sprawling grandeur of the 13th green complex and surrounding grandstands.
“That tower,” I told anyone who would listen, “is the hands-down, don’t-argue-with-me, best spot in the world for watching tournament golf.” And nobody argued with me.
But a few years ago, after the course had endured one of those off-season Fazio stretchings dictated by changing times, I strolled down to Amen Corner and then stopped, blinking in disbelief. My tower was gone—uprooted and cast aside like some pesky weed. I couldn’t even pinpoint the spot where it had stood. The terrain had been reconfigured to provide more space for seated patrons and enhanced security for the golfers. Which I recognized as a good thing, once I had stopped bawling.
So these days, although I no longer describe Amen Corner as “dead to me,” I spend little time there. You’ll find me behind the green at the par-3 16th, where a tall man can always find an unobstructed view.
At the end of the day, as you know, it comes down to the final pairings playing number 18. Spectators are at a serious disadvantage on this hole, which starts way down in the valley and doglegs right steeply up to the clubhouse. If you’re down low, you can’t see what’s happening at the green. If you’re greenside, you miss the tee shots and you probably can’t see the players in the fairway.
Well, you can’t. But I can see everything, including some spectacular sunsets, from my bench, 20-foot-high in the reporters’ tower, just left of the green.
Trust me, it’s great.
 

For sixteen players, including 1982 champion Craig Stadler and last year's winner, Charl Schwartzel, the Masters has been their only victory in a major.
Herman Keiser, 1946
Replay: A year after being discharged from the Navy, Keiser, 31, was nearly broke when he arrived at Augusta. He took the lead on the 3rd hole of the first round and came to the 72nd hole leading Ben Hogan by a shot. Keiser three-putted for bogey, but Hogan missed a two-footer for par, and Keiser won for the first time on the PGA Tour.
Postmortem: Keiser won twice more in '46. The next year he played in the Ryder Cup and had another victory-the last of his career. Within a few years he was off the Tour.
Claude Harmon, 1948
Replay: The 31-year-old Harmon tied the tournament record with a nine-under 279 and set a Masters record with a five-shot margin over Cary Middlecoff.
Postmortem: The head pro at Winged Foot in suburban New York City, Harmon is the last club professional to win a major. He tied for third at the 1959 U.S. Open at Winged Foot and three times made the semifinals of the PGA Championship, which was then a match-play event.
Art Wall, 1959
Replay: In the final round Wall, 35, was five shots behind with seven holes to play, but he birdied five of the last six to shoot 66 and win by one over Middlecoff.
Postmortem: Wall won three other Tour events and the Vardon Trophy that season and was the Tour's player of the year. He finished his career with 14 Tour titles.
Gay Brewer, 1967
Replay: At the 1966 Masters, Brewer missed a six-footer on the 72nd hole, then lost a playoff to Jack Nicklaus. In '67, at the age of 35, he rebounded by birdieing the 15th, 16th and 17th in the final round to win the green jacket by one over Bobby Nichols.
Postmortem: Brewer made the '67 Ryder Cup team but had only one more victory on Tour, at the '72 Canadian open.
Bob Goably, 1968
Replay: The record book says Goalby, 39, edged Roberto De Vicenzo by a shot, but the two should have gone to a playoff. After completing his final round, De Vicenzo signed for a wrong score. He shot a 65 with a birdie 3 at 17, but his playing partner, Tommy Aaron, mistakenly put him down for a 4 on the hole, and a 66. Thus, De Vicenzo had to accept that score.
Postmortem: Goalby never contended in another major, but he did win three more Tour events, bringing his career total to 10. He and De Vicenzo have remained friends.
George Archer, 1969
Replay: After hitting his second shot at the par-5 15th into the greenside water hazard, the 30-year-old Archer pitched to 10 feet and made the par putt. That up and down preserved his one-shot victory over Billy Casper, George Knudson and Tom Weiskopf.
Postmortem: Archer had three other top 10s in majors, and he won 12 Tour events and 19 Champions tour titles over his long career.
Charles Coody, 1971
Replay: Coody, 33, led after a first-round 66 and was tied for the lead with Nicklaus after 54 holes. In the final round Coody birdied 15 and 16 to beat Nicklaus and Johnny Miller by two strokes.
Postmortem: The Masters was Coody's third and final Tour victory, though he won five times on the Champions tour.
Tommy Aaron, 1973
Replay: Trailing by four after 54 holes, Aaron closed with a 68 to win by one over J.C. Snead.
Postmortem: The Masters victory was the second and last Tour triumph of Aaron's career, and he never had another top 10 in a major. He won once on the Champions tour.
Craig Stadler, 1982
Replay: Stadler began the final round with a three-shot lead and was ahead by six when he stepped on to the 10th tee. But Dan Pohl made a back-nine charge while Stadler limped home with four bogeys, including a three-putt from 30 feet at 18 that dropped him into a tie with Pohl at four-under 284. Stadler won by parring the first playoff hole, the 10th, after Pohl missed an eight-footer for par.
Postmortem: Stadler won three other tournaments and led the Tour in earnings in '82. He went on to have 10 more top 10s in majors, the best being a third at the '88 Masters.
Larry Mize, 1987
Replays: A little-known one-time Tour winner from Augusta, Mize, 28, holed a six-foot birdie putt on the 72nd hole to make the playoff with Seve Ballesteros and Greg Norman. Ballesteros was eliminated on the first extra hole, and on the second Mize made what is arguably the most dramatic pitch-in in golf history-a 140-foot shot from right of the green.
Postmortem: Mize was sixth on the '87 money list, but over the next two decades he never finished in the top 10 in a major and won only two more Tour events.
Ian Woosnam, 1991
Replay: In a taut final round Woosnam, 33, became the fourth consecutive European to win the green jacket. he holed a six-foot par putt at the 18th to edge José María Olazábal, who bogeyed the hole, by a shot.
Postmortem: Woosnam's victory validated his No. 1 World Ranking. He won once more in '91, on the European tour, and finished with 28 career titles on that circuit.
Fred Couples, 1992
Replay: In the final round Couples pushed his tee shot at the 12th hole, and his ball landed on the closely cropped bank in fron of the green-normally a fatal mistake. Instead, the ball trickled a few feet, then miraculously stopped short of Rae's creek. Couples, 32, pitched on, made par and won by two over Ray Floyd.
Postmortem: In 1992 Couples finished atop the money list and for the second consecutive season won the Vardon Trophy and was named player of the year. Over the next 17 years Couples won six more Tour events.
Mike Weir, 2003
Replay: After holing a seven-footer for par on the 72nd hole, Weir, 33, parred the first hole of a playoff against len Mattiace to become the first Canadian to win a major and the first lefthanded Masters champion.
Postmortem: Only two of Weir's eight career Tour titles have come since his Masters victory, the last being the 2007 Fry's Electronics Open.
Zach Johnson, 2007
Replay: All week the short-hitting Johnson, 31, laid up on Augusta National's par-5s, yet he was 11 under on those holes for the tournament. His one-over 289 total matched the highest-winning score in Masters history.
Postmortem: Johnson has won five times and averaged $ 2.8 million a year since putting on the green jacket, but he has finished in the top 10 in a major only two other times.
Trevor Immelman, 2008
Replay: Immelman, 28, led or shared the lead after each round while becoming only the second South African to win the Masters, joining Gary Player. Immelman won by three shots despite shooting a 75 on Sunday, which tied him with Arnold Palmer (1962) for the highest score in the final round by a Masters champion.
Postmortem: In the four years since his victory, Immelman is winless with only four top 10s on Tour.
Charl Schwartzel, 2011
Replay: Having begun the final round four shots back, Schwartzel, 26, another South African, became the first Masters champion to birdie the last four holes in the final round.
Postmortem: Schwartzel played well in the other three majors in 2011-tying for ninth at the U.S. Open, finishing 16th at the British and placing 12th at the PGA-but he has yet to win again.

Craig Stadler teed off an hour ago, yet there he is, bigger than life—bigger­ than you remember him—in front of the ShankMeister.com tent at the Newport Beach Country Club. This smiling Walrus is a cardboard facsimile: The real Stadler is feeling rather less cheerful on this overcast day. He is out on the course, driving the ball well enough but three-putting right and left and generally playing himself out of contention on the first day of the Toshiba Classic, a popular stop on the Champions tour.
Now in its third year, ShankMeister hopes to become a kind of eBay for golfers. Never mind that Stadler grew up in ritzy La Jolla, Calif., or that his hobbies have included hunting in Argentina and collecting fine wines. With his gruff charm and offensive lineman’s build, the Walrus has long had a blue-collar, Walmart appeal. It makes sense that his bejowled mug would be the face of a website catering to bargain-hunting golf junkies. While the golfing masses may not remember all 13 of his PGA Tour victories, they know those triumphs include a major, clinched on the first playoff hole at Augusta National Golf Club 30 years ago.
Whom did he beat in that playoff? “I go to golf shows all over the country, and that’s a trivia question we ask,” says ShankMeister’s Drew Hester. “Nobody ever knows the answer.”
 
Dan Pohl was simply happy to be invited to the 1982 Masters. He was only a few years removed from earning his PGA Tour card, at the 1979 spring Q school; from qualifying on Mondays and living out of his van. The first time he made a cut, he recalls, he finished outside the top 70 and was handed a check for $ 18. Damn straight he cashed it.
Pohl could always drive the ball a mile. At the 1976 NCAA tournament Jay Haas of Wake Forest was putting on the 407-yard 12th hole at the University of New Mexico Championship course when he began backpedaling, amazed. A wind-aided drive had rolled a few feet past the cup. The ball belonged to Pohl, a junior at Arizona.
“I started 5, 4, 2,” says Pohl, “and that was my game.” A three-sport star at Mount Pleasant (Mich.) High, he came to golf relatively late. In those early years he was a beast off the tee whose game deteriorated the closer he got to the cup. So he slaved away on his short game and got better. Pohl got into the ’82 Masters by virtue of his third-place finish at the previous year’s PGA Championship. Of course he had watched the Masters on TV, and he had a healthy respect for it. “But I didn’t get the tingling sensation that some of the Southern guys got when they talked about Augusta,” he says. Rather than walk around like a worshipper in a cathedral, he yukked it up during practice rounds with fellow Maxfli golfers Hubert Green, John Mahaffey and Fuzzy Zoeller, who had won a green jacket three years earlier in his first trip to Augusta. “We had a lot of laughs, even as I was learning the course,” says Pohl.
Most of what he learned was rendered moot by the storms that lashed Augusta on Thursday and Friday. It was the coldest, wettest, foulest Masters in memory. How miserable was it? On Thursday, Jack Nicklaus, with a three-under-par 69, was the only player in the 76-man field to break par. “Everybody was in survival mode,” says Pohl, who opened 75–75. Though he was only six shots back of Stadler and just 21 players stood between him and the lead, Pohl had dramatically scaled back his expectations. But his parents, Howard and Deloris, had made the trip from Mount Pleasant, as had one of his four siblings, Larry, and Dan’s wife, Mitzi. (They divorced in 2010). Dan still hoped to do something special for his people. Playing euchre on Friday night in the family’s rented house outside town, he was reminded that he could still make a nice check, could still play well enough to get an exemption into the following year’s event.
The forecast calls for rain, which could be why there are more trees than people out for the first round of the Toshiba. Stadler, Jim Gallagher Jr. and Peter Senior are being followed by a gallery of perhaps a dozen.
While Gallagher and Senior lay up with their second shots on the par-5 3rd hole, Stadler laces a three-wood onto the green, a spectacular shot. He makes birdie but gives the stroke back on the next hole. His tee shot at the par-3 settles in the fringe beyond the green. After chipping poorly, he tosses his club in the air, then spikes it like a volleyball player. Walking to the next tee, he makes a paddle of his right hand and smacks his ball into a lake.
Making his way to the clubhouse after a three-over 74, Stadler seems less angry than resigned. “That’s about what I shoot these days,” he says. “I play like I feel.”
How do you feel?
“S—–,” he says. But at least he cracks a smile. He had a hip replaced two years ago. “The hip’s fine,” he reports. “I’ve got a bulging L4, and it’s whacking my sciatica. My right foot is going numb right now. Actually the left one is too. It’s lovely.”
He’s struggling, admits his longtime caddie, Jeff Dolf. “I don’t know if he expects a whole lot [from himself] right now, and that’s part of the problem,” Dolf says. “He needs new shafts in his irons, but he won’t listen to me. He’s too stubborn.” Two days later Stadler will shoot an 83, making him nostalgic for that 74.
Stadler’s crankiness has rubbed off on Dolf, who has some parting words for a reporter. “Get my name right if you use it,” he says. “The last time someone quoted me they had me in there as Jack Dolf. Try saying that fast, three times in a row.” While the caddies around him crack up, Dolf is not amused.
On the patio outside the clubhouse the Walrus warms up while talking about his days playing mini-tours in the mid-1970s. Whereas Pohl piloted that van to Monday qualifiers, Stadler crisscrossed the country in an orange Camaro, making $ 2,702 in 1976, his first year on the Tour. By ’82 he had arrived. He opened the season with a victory at the Tucson Open, and also took second-, fourth-, fifth- and sixth-place finishes into that year’s Masters. He was on fire.
Those flames were extinguished by Thursday’s Old Testament rains. Stadler opened with a 75–“a horrible start”—but rebounded with a Friday 69. “I don’t remember what I shot on Saturday,” he declares. (It was a masterly 67.) Going into the final round, he led by three over Seve Ballesteros and Jerry Pate, with Raymond Floyd and Tom Weiskopf another stroke back. Hardly anyone was talking about Pohl, even though he’d had a pretty fair Saturday himself.
 
Pohl spent moving day with Tom Watson, the defending champ—“a great pairing for me, ’cause we both play fast, we both played aggressive.”
There was a fearlessness to Pohl’s game that carried over to his sartorial decisions. Google “Dan Pohl, Oak Hill.” No less arresting than his clubhead speed and powerful impact were the slim-fit, pink bell-bottoms he rocked at the 1989 U.S. Open.
Pohl would win twice on Tour, have 70 top 10 finishes and pocket more than $ 3.1 million. But he began to have success only when he learned to control that aggression. Leading the 1979 Western Open by three on the final day, he got so hopped up on adrenaline that he started “driving through fairways and flying wedges over greens.” He tied for third.
He shot 37 on the front nine at Augusta on Saturday—not great—but knew enough to play it safe on 10, 11 and 12. “You always felt as if you simply wanted to get through those,” he says. “Just get your par and see what you could do with 13 and 15.”
His second shot on the par-5 13th was a long iron to within 18 feet. He made the putt for eagle. His pitching wedge on the par-4 14th flew past the hole, spun back and dropped in. Another eagle. After birdieing 15, he hit “probably my best shot of the week” at the par-3 16th—a high, cut six-iron that stopped 21⁄2 feet past the hole. Another bird. By this time the Michiganders in his gallery were getting loud. Pohl parred the last two holes, matching Stadler’s 67. By playing 13, 14, 15 and 16 in six under, Pohl set a Masters record for a four-hole stretch that still stands.
Yet none of it mattered, really, because Stadler pulled away on Sunday, making his way to the 10th tee with a six-shot lead over Ballesteros, Weiskopf, Tom Kite and the fellow who didn’t seem to belong in that illustrious company. As Stadler’s then wife, Sue, said to a friend on the course, “Isn’t it nice that Dan Pohl is playing so well?”
Indeed, during a bogey-free round Pohl had five more birdies on his way to another 67. Weiskopf blew up with two triples. Ballesteros and Kite failed to charge. Playing three groups behind him, Pohl recalls, “Stads started dripping oil.”
Through 11 holes the Walrus was four up. When he made his third bogey in five holes at the 16th, his lead had dwindled to one over Pohl, who was in the clubhouse at four under.
Pohl still couldn’t quite convince himself he might win this thing. After parring 17, the Walrus needed only a par at the final hole. But as Dan Jenkins wrote in that week’s SI, his 30-foot downhill putt “was uglier than his golf bag back in 1979 when it advertised Taylor’s Prime Steaks.” Stadler’s six-footer for par “didn’t even scare the cup.”
Sitting at the edge of the practice green with his Michigan crew, Pohl heard a loud, mournful OOOoooooh, from the direction of the 18th green. He reached for his golf glove.
He had been chatting with his family, doing a little putting. “Then all of a sudden,” he says, “I was over on the 10th tee for a playoff.”
Number 10, a.k.a. Camellia, then a 485-yard par-4, is historically one of the toughest holes at Augusta National. Players must hit a second shot—often from a downhill lie—into a long, narrow, elevated green. Both men hit driver, six-iron. Stadler slightly chunked his second shot but got lucky: His ball went straight at the flag, stopping below the hole in the middle of the green. Pohl’s second shot settled “on a little moundy area,” he says, on the right edge of the green, 30 feet from the hole. Stadler rolled his putt to tap-in range. Thoroughly flummoxed by the mound, Pohl left himself an eight-footer, which he pulled. “I tried to jam it in and simply didn’t make it,” he says, his voice trailing off.
“Would Johnny Miller say I choked my guts out?” he asks now. “Probably. Because that’s the kind of thing he says.” Pohl would beg to differ. Choking means losing control of one’s nerves and emotions, he points out, “and that never happened to me.”
“To this day, considering the way I played Saturday and Sunday, I have no gripes,” he says. In fact Pohl’s weekend total of 134 was four shots better than anyone else’s in the field. He was one of only four players to shoot under 140 over the final two rounds. “I had nothing to be disappointed about, nothing to be demoralized about,” he adds.
After a pause, however, Pohl tells the truth: “Of course, in the same breath you think, Damn! How many times do you get a chance to win the Masters?”
That was it for Pohl. He tied for eighth a year later but never contended again in five trips to Augusta. By the late 1980s his back was in full rebellion: He needed a five-hour operation to repair damage done by a chipped vertebra. By the time he left the game in 2009, he’d had 11 surgeries.
But as he ticks off the corporate outings and course design and business ventures that have come his way since he stopped competing—“I’m not changing my spots so much as I’m adding spots to my coat”—he sounds . . . energized, vital, happy.
 
Three decades after the fact, Stadler is asked how winning a major—that major—changed his life. Befitting the face of ShankMeister.com he steers clear of anything that might be construed as profundity. “The phenomenal thing about it is, I can go back to play Augusta National whenever I want,” he says. “It’s a wonderful opportunity.”
Sitting on the patio, he crunches some numbers in his head, then concludes that he has played the course around 150 times. At 58 he knows there will come a time when tournament officials will take away his Masters invitation. He hasn’t made the cut since 2007, has been a stranger to the top 25 since 1992. But he’ll be back again next week, teeing it up for the 36th time.
“And it’s still incredibly cool,” he says, “turning onto Magnolia Lane.
 

It is a lovely Southern night, the kind that songs are written about. The sky is dark and clear, dotted with stars and splashed by the Milky Way. A light breeze carries the scent of languid Lake Hartwell, invisible in the darkness a short distance away. The night is calm and beautifully silent.
Or it would be, if not for Kyle Stanley.
A deep-throated­, reverberating clink! shatters the serenity. Someone is hitting the absolute bejeezus out of a titanium driver. Clink! There’s another one. Clink! And another.
There is no silence in this secluded corner of the Clemson campus. And no night, either. Stanley, soon-to-be Phoenix Open winner, is pounding tee shot after tee shot on a field-of-dreams practice range beneath a bank of lights once used for RV parking at Tigers football games.
During his three years at Clemson, Stanley turned midnight golf sessions into a ritual. It wasn’t unusual for Stanley, whose long legs and lean physique make him look taller than his actual six feet, to keep swinging past 1 a.m. His routine was to join teammates for an hour of afternoon practice or maybe a few holes of golf, then leave to finish schoolwork. He returned to hit balls in solitude, or with Clemson coach Larry Penley. “It was quiet there, freaky quiet sometimes,” Stanley says of the late-night sessions.
Stanley found the chatter and commotion of team practice distracting. His full-blown golf obsession made him feel like Marlene ­Dietrich — I vant to be alone.
Sometimes, campus security would drop by to ask: How much longer? Penley always gave the same answer: “We’re almost through.”
Stanley and his coach still laugh about that because Penley’s reply was a convenient lie. Stanley is the opposite of Mr. Almost Through. He’s Mr. Two More Buckets of Balls. On the PGA Tour, Stanley is Vijay Singh 2.0, the ­hardest-working­ man in golf, same as he was at Clemson, where he was Captain Midnight meets the Lone Ranger as played by Ben freakin’ Hogan.
This is how a golfing prodigy from Gig Harbor, Wash., a small, picturesque town on Puget Sound, ended up in South Carolina when he had a smorgasbord of scholarship ­offers from which to choose. “You could light up the range like a football field,” says Stanley. “That was a real selling point.”
Stanley realized he wouldn’t have to stop working on his game because of a nuisance known as sunset. Those Southern nights, sweet and soft, would belong to him.
Kyle Stanley was a big name in the small world of amateur golf. He won the Ben Hogan Award as the outstanding player in the college game as a junior at Clemson, and he piled up amateur titles and played on the winning U.S. Walker Cup team in 2007 with the likes of Rickie Fowler, Dustin Johnson and Webb Simpson.
Initially this year Stanley became a big name on the PGA Tour for all the wrong reasons. At Torrey Pines, with his ­seven-shot lead in the final round cut to three, he needed only a double bogey at the par-5 18th for his first professional victory. He hit a perfect drive, a perfect layup and a perfect wedge shot. Except the combination of slope and spin caused that perfect wedge shot to suck back and trickle off the green and into a pond. Then it got ugly. Stanley hit his fifth shot beyond the pin, three-putted for an 8 and lost in a playoff to Brandt Snedeker.
Remarkably, that crushing defeat was all but forgotten a week later when Stanley rallied from an eight-shot deficit on the back nine, hit clutch shots on the closing holes and won the outdoor party known as the Waste Management Phoenix Open.
After the Torrey Pines disaster, Kyle’s father, Matt, remembers dinner with his wife, Michele, their daughter Kristen, Kyle and two others. “The text messages started rolling in, and boy, that was something,” Matt says. “We heard from everyone we ever knew. He got all this support, felt all this love, and it really opened his eyes. For Kyle, it turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to him.”
It was reminiscent of another failure, the time Kyle missed the cut in the Washington state high school championship, an event he presumed he would do well in, maybe even win. The drive home from Spokane was a long one, but it gave father and son time to talk. Matt reminded Kyle that Tiger Woods, whose picture hung in Kyle’s room, had a reputation as one of the game’s hardest workers. The implication was that young Kyle wasn’t working hard enough.
Point taken. Almost overnight, perhaps foreshadowing the way he rebounded after Torrey Pines, Kyle devoted himself to the game. Even now, Matt can’t tell the story without getting choked up. “It was a mature decision for a young kid,” Matt says. “He would do his homework, then go out on the course when nobody was playing. He’d take a couple of big flashlights and put them on the green so he could chip and putt after dark. I was very proud of him. He found his passion.”
Maybe that explains the note in an old Clemson media guide listing Singh as Stanley’s favorite player. He laughed when it was pointed out that Singh is nobody’s favorite golfer. “Yeah, I suppose it’s an odd pick, but it’s his work ethic,” Stanley says. “I modeled myself after him a little bit.”
Stanley weighed in at 137 pounds when he arrived at Clemson in 2006. Three years later he was 172 pounds with minimal body fat — strong and, for a golfer, ripped. “I had never spent any time in a gym,” he says. “I made it part of my routine.”
He is seen as stoic and quiet. Mostly he’s shy and not as socially comfortable as some of the others. He admits to an obsession with golf. He didn’t attend a single party while in college, and he only went to a football or basketball game when the golf team was being honored. When he says, “I didn’t really know my teammates,” the tone of his voice hints at regret. He says he has learned there’s more to life than golf on the PGA Tour, and the pairing before this season with Brett Waldman, one of the most outgoing caddies on Tour, was an instant success.
“He’s coming out of his shell,” Waldman says. “He has made a transformation in the short time we’ve been together.”
Stanley, who does a killer Borat impression, says with a laugh, “It’s really an act.”
His sunglasses and facial hair — not quite a beard — give Stanley an older, almost menacing air and a damn good poker face. Asked if the story that he slept with his clubs during his junior days is true, he says, “Oh, yeah.” Upon further prodding, he seems wary, as if he has revealed too much. The story: He had lost a big tournament due to poor putting, so Washington coach Matt Thurmond suggested that Stanley make his putter his best friend, take it ­everywhere, even to bed. He went a step further, sleeping with his entire set. The next week he won an American Junior Golf Association tournament. Draw your own conclusion.
“I don’t do it anymore,” Stanley says sheepishly. “I mean, it’s not like I tucked them in or anything.”
 
The victory in Phoenix got Stanley into the Masters and cast the spotlight on a player who may be the next big thing. At 24, he already has a trail of admirers.
During the second round in Phoenix he played a key second shot at the par-5 15th hole, which has virtually an island green. It was a two-iron­ from the rough, 246 yards to the front, 270 to the middle. “He flew it 250, it rolled to 20 feet, and he made the putt for eagle,” says Waldman, who has been looping on the Tour for 10 years. “Nobody else I’ve worked for could’ve hit that shot.”
Tom Lehman, the 1996 British Open champion, was paired with Stanley last year at the Mayakoba Classic. “It’s windy,” Lehman says, “and he’s hitting these laser beams about 10 feet off the ground. Holy smokes, it’s impressive. So I ask Kyle, ‘Is that your normal ball flight?’ He says, ‘No, I hit it high.’ I say, ‘Oh, that’s not very high. When did you start hitting that shot?’ Kyle says, ‘This morning.’ ‘Have you ever hit that shot before?’ ‘No.’ ‘So this is your maiden voyage hitting those low shots?’ He goes, ‘Yeah.’ I’m sold—this guy is good.”
During the off-season­ Stanley and his swing coach, Mike Taylor, went to the range at Berkeley Hall, Stanley’s home course near Hilton Head Island, to work on distance control with his wedges. Taylor, wearing a baseball glove, positioned himself 70 yards away to field Stanley’s shots. They added 10-yard increments per session, out to 120 yards.
“In an hour and a half,” Taylor says, “the most I ever had to move was 15 feet.”
James Sieckmann works with Stanley on his short game, everything from wedge play to putting to reading greens. He is equally impressed with Stanley’s long game. “Kyle’s driving reminds me of Greg Norman,” says Sieckmann, whose brother, Tom, played 17 years on the PGA Tour. “I remember watching Norman at Firestone. When everyone else would lay up with a three-wood on those dogleg fairways, he’d smash driver into a 15-yard wide neck with no fear. That’s Kyle. He’s amazingly straight for how far he hits it.”
At Doral, Stanley was paired in the first two rounds with Alvaro Quiros and Gary Woodland. “It was Home Run Derby,” Waldman says. Stanley held his own with the two bombers. His power was also on display at the final hole in Phoenix. He and Waldman decided the best strategy was to take the water hazard guarding the left side of the fairway out of play by blasting driver over it. The carry was 316 yards.
“No problem,” Waldman says.
Larry Bobka is a tech expert at Titleist who makes sure the company’s staff players are happy with their equipment. He has seen Stanley many times. Bobka has the eye of a savvy craftsman, and he closely watches a player’s launch ­window — that is, the trajectory of the ball immediately after it leaves the club face. For most players, a pitching wedge will launch a ball higher than, say, a three-iron.
“But Kyle’s shots all go through a tight window,” Bobka says. “They don’t change. I worked with a guy in 2000 who was pretty good, and he had that same tight window.”
That player? Tiger Woods.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) – The appointment of a new chief executive at IBM has revived the debate over Augusta National's all-male membership just one week before the Masters.
IBM hired Virginia Rometty as its CEO this year, which could mean a break in recent tradition for either side. The last four CEOs of IBM have been members of Augusta, but the club has never had a female member since it was founded in 1933.
Martha Burk led an unsuccessful campaign 10 years ago for Augusta to admit a female member. Hootie Johnson, chairman at the time, said the club would not be pressured ”at the point of a bayonet.''
Burk says Augusta National and IBM now are in a bind. She says IBM could end up undermining its new CEO if it doesn't fight for her admittance.