Golfers find limits week after week
Few dare to put together long streaks
Tournament golf can be a grueling job if taken in long stretches. That's why no one in this week's Masters Tournament field is carrying a long streak of PGA Tour appearances into Augusta National Golf Club.
Of the 97 starters in today's opening round, only Stuart Appleby and K.J. Choi have any significant streak to speak of. This will be their fifth consecutive event. Golfers teeing it up for the fourth consecutive week are Jose Maria Olazabal, Robert Karlsson and Jeev Milkha Singh.
After that, only nine players will be playing their third consecutive tournament.
Rich Beem, the 2002 PGA Championship winner, has played in seven events in the first three-plus months this season. That's a far cry from 2001, when he played 11 in a row.
"To this day, I have no idea how I did it," Beem said. "I know why I did it. I wasn't exempt, and I felt I was playing pretty good in the summertime, and there were a lot of tournaments coming up on courses that I really liked, and this and that.
"I just kept adding tournaments and adding tournaments."
Beem's caddie urged him to take the nearly three-month journey.
"He said, 'If you want to go play, I'm in, let's go,'" Beem said. "I wasn't married. I couldn't have cared less. I'm going to sit at home for a week or I'll go out and try to make some money for a week. So I decided to go make some money."
Beem played 31 times that season and earned $460,565 finishing 109th on the money list.
Beem said he and some fellow pros were talking recently about playing consecutive tournaments. The conversation turned to Woody Austin.
"One year, Woody Austin played 19 of 20," Beem said. "I'm sorry; that guy is angry after one event. I can't imagine how he was after that 20th event."
Actually, Austin was having the time of his life that year. It was 1995, and Austin had earned his tour card after practically giving up hope of making the tour. He had been working in a bank for most of the previous decade.
"It was my rookie year, and I was 31 and just happy to get out here," said Austin, a 13-year tour veteran who has played in one Masters, in 1996. "I wasn't going to stop. So I just kept on playing. I just wanted to play. It wasn't like I was playing golf from age 23 to 31. If I had been playing competitive golf then, I probably wouldn't have been able to do it.
"The fact I was working in a bank for eight years and wasn't playing that much golf, there was no way I was going to be tired."
Austin said he doesn't remember whether he played 19 out of 20 events during a stretch that year, as Beem recalls.
"It's possible; I definitely played a boatload my first year," said Austin, who teed it up 34 times that season. "When you're playing well, you just want to keep on going. I was so fresh, I just kept on playing."
In his sophomore season on the tour, Austin said, he started "picking and choosing" which events to play. He still averages about 30 events a year, but he's no iron man anymore.
"Nowadays, three in a row is more than enough," Austin said.
Masters rookie J.J. Henry played in six successive tournaments this season and has played in seven of the past nine entering this week.
"I'm just 31, and I like playing a lot of events," said Henry, who was one of the bright spots on the losing 2006 U.S. Ryder Cup team. "I play close to 30 events a year. Sometimes you have to suck it up and play a lot."
His streak stopped at six after the PODS Championship in early March when he "kind of hit a wall," Henry said.
U.S. Open champion Geoff Ogilvy knows the feeling. Years ago, he would sometimes play five events in a row, take a week off, then play the next five.
"I'm not going to do that again," he said. "I'm not too much fun after 10 or 11 weeks. Three in a row is probably my limit now."
Such stretches didn't affect his game, Ogilvy said.
"But by the end of the year you're so tired, you want some time off," he said.
Carl Pettersson played 11 in a row while a European Tour member in 2001. Like Austin, he was a rookie at the time and "was happy to be there."
"It does wear on you," Pettersson said. "Not so much your body but your mind. It's tough to stay focused."
Of the players who finished in the top 50 on the PGA Tour's money list in 2006, Tom Pernice Jr. had the longest run of consecutive events, eight. Pernice, who is playing in his second Masters this week, teed it up from New Orleans in late April through the U.S. Open in mid-June.
To stay fresh, Pernice said, he would try to take Mondays off if he could.
"It's something sometimes you've got to do," said Pernice, noting that NASCAR drivers "do it every week. They do it for 20 weeks in a row."
Pernice said that he stays in good physical condition and that he was "playing pretty good at the time, so I just kept playing."
Reach David Westin at (706) 823-3224 or david.westin@augustachronicle.com.
