Tales from Q School: Inside Golf's Fifth Major by Feinstein John

Author:Feinstein, John [Feinstein, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: SPO000000
ISBN: 9780316005586
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 2007-05-02T04:00:00+00:00

IN KINGWOOD, TEXAS, there were no fewer than nine former winners on the PGA Tour playing, not to mention Brian Watts, the near British Open champion. One player who wasn’t in awe of the competition was Ron Whittaker. He had too much on his mind to be awed.

Like Jaxon Brigman, Whittaker had gone to a great golf school: Wake Forest. In fact, Whittaker appeared to have been born to play at Wake and on the tour. Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, he was the nephew of Lanny Wadkins, a Wake Forest alum who went on to win twenty-one times on tour. His first golf lesson, at the age of two courtesy of Uncle Lanny, was from another Wake alum: Arnold Palmer. Whittaker grew up with golf and Wake Forest, and it only seemed natural when he was recruited by the school and enrolled in the fall of 1990. His game continued to improve in college, and by the time he graduated (unlike a lot of Wake’s stars, including Palmer, Wadkins, and Curtis Strange, he did graduate), he had played well enough to be convinced he could be a pro. He spent 1995 playing mini-tour golf. At the end of the year, he finished tied for 37th at Q School, having made it through all three stages to land on the tour at the age of twenty-four. Life seemed pretty easy at that point. “Piece of cake,” Whittaker said, smiling. “To me, it seemed a natural progression: play college golf, go through Q School, and then play on the PGA Tour for the next twenty years before you retire to your mansion and your yacht.”

Things turned out not to be quite that easy. Whittaker made a measly $29,656 as a tour rookie, which put him 224th on the money list. By the end of 1996, he understood that the tour was a lot tougher than he had imagined, but he felt that he had learned a great deal and had improved as a player. “I wasn’t all that upset about it,” he said. “I was learning my trade: golf courses, how to compete, how to travel. I figured it was all part of the process.”

He wasn’t even that upset when he made it to the finals at Q School but didn’t get his card back and ended up on the Nike Tour. He played reasonably well in 1997, finishing 46th on the money list, but again failed to get through finals. “That was probably the first real disappointment,” he said. “I’d made it once, I was now two years older, and I really thought I was good enough to get back on tour at that point. By then, though, I knew there were a lot of good players who had been up and down [between] the two tours, so I kept telling myself it wasn’t a big deal.”

It became a bigger deal at the end of 1998, his third full season as a pro. Instead of improving his position on the Nike money list, Whittaker dropped and had to go back to the first stage of Q School.

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