Dusti Watson is 22 years old, weighs less than Arnold Palmer’s short irons and plays with golf balls bearing the logo of his only commercial sponsor-Dave’s Autobody in Galesburg, Ill.
But Dusti is a pro. And he is playing on a tour.
Not “The Tour” as in the Professional Golfer’s Association’s tour, where the greatest players in the world compete for millions of dollars on the best golf courses in the country.
Nor is the young Galesburg golfer on the Nike Tour, which is considered professional golf’s Triple-A league.
No, Dusti’s tour is more like golf’s IOU division.
Watson and about 220 hard-traveling tour mates play not with PGA cards, but with learner’s permits and debtor’s notes. On the Hooters Jordan Tour, golfers who usually have been playing longer than they have been shaving compete for gas and Whopper Combo money on courses that sometimes are just a few meadow muffins short of a cow pasture-links that, like the players, are trying to earn respect, or at least a few extra bucks.
This then, is where very good golfers who hope one day to qualify for the PGA Tour learn to survive in the grinder of professional golf.
Golf? A grind?
Consider that unlike jet-setting PGA pros, players on this tour travel cross-country jammed to their visors in six-cylinder suitcases. Unloved by deep-pocket sponsors, they sleep on the cheap, eat on occasion and lug their own clubs unless their wives, girlfriends, buddies, dads or moms volunteer.
“I just drove 473 miles from Galesburg, got out of the car, threw on my spikes, and played a practice round. I still don’t have a place to stay tonight because I forgot to call ahead for housing,” Watson said on the first day of a week in which he would just miss qualifying for the Bud Light Golf Classic on the Hartland Public Golf Course in Bowling Green.
“I missed the cut by two shots, which was pretty disappointing since I was hitting the ball so well,” he said later.
Failing to qualify for a Hooters Jordan tournament puts a hurt on a player that runs deeper than his pride. “If you don’t make the cut you are out your $500 and your expenses for the week,” said Watson, who is a golf pro on a bag boy’s budget.
It costs $900 to join this tour and about $500 to enter each of its 20 tournaments. It is less costly than the PGA, but these golfers don’t have nearly as much to play a round with. Last year, the PGA’s leading money-winner, Nick Price, banked $1.4 million. The big winner on the Hooters Jordan Tour, Charlie Rymer, took home $46,600.36.
“That’s why we say we’re not `professionals,’ we’re `po’fessionals’,” said Watson, whose own earnings on the tour this year total only $1,162.50.
Budgets are as big as birdies for Dusti and his Hooters Jordan tour mates. He travels, eats and sleeps on a self-imposed weekly allowance of $200, which may explain why, at 5 feet 8 inches, Watson weighs only 125 pounds.
“If I could get to 150, I think it would really help my game,” he said. “I’d like to gain weight but I can’t.”
Unlike more established professional golfers who have wealthy backers, Watson pays his own way with help from his parents, Dick and Barb, from Dave’s Autobody and from well-wishers back at Lake Bracken Country Club in Galesburg.
“In my spare time, I try to make a little money working with my Dad in his business, tuning pipe organs for churches and funeral homes,” said Watson, who has reason to believe that his future might not necessarily lie in organs.
Biggest enemy: Nerves
A competitive golfer since he was 5, he became the youngest ever to win the Illinois State Junior Amateur Golf Championship in 1987 at 15. He received a golf scholarship to Western Illinois University in Macomb, where he won nine intercollegiate tournaments. Golf Week magazine once listed him as one of the top 15 college players in the country.
But playing for a paycheck as a pro has proven tougher for Dusti, who joined the Hooters Jordan Tour in April and so far has qualified for only two of 13 tournaments. “I’m the first to admit it, I get nervous. I’m fine on Thursday (in practice rounds) but come Friday, I get gas,” he said. “You’d think that having played since I was 5 years old, I’d have it beat. But that’s golf.”
Officials of the Hooters Jordan tour said Watson is learning the most important lessons it provides: that there is more to professional golf than a sweet swing and dead-on putts. Before PGA stars John Daly and Lee Janzen-two of this tour’s most celebrated alums-ever teed off at a Masters, they, too, had to learn to handle distractions by playing golf in the minors.
“All the guys out here have smooth golf swings, it’s he who learns to quiet his mind and conquer his fears that goes on from here,” said T.C. “Rick” Jordan, who, as founder of this tour, is recognized as patron saint to the putting poor.
A multi-millionaire who can’t seem to shuck his training as a social worker, Jordan, 54, has defied good sense and dropped nearly $7 million of his own money into the tour because he believes that exceptional golfers, regardless of economic status, should be given a clear shot at the big time.
“It’s a hard way to make an easy living,” he said of professional golf at the minor-league level, where even those who try and fail get something valuable from the experience.
“Later, when they are selling insurance they will be happier doing it, because they won’t be thinking that they might have become a professional golfer if they’d only given it a shot,” offered Jordan, a contemplative sort, who views golf as a metaphor for life, with nicer landscaping.
Impressive list of graduates
His goal is for the PGA to one day allow the top performers on his tour free admission, as does the Nike tour. “I love to create things and if I can make this self-sustaining and the players can make money on it, it’ll be a valuable asset to the world of golf,” he said, noting that what is good for the world of golf is good for the world in general.
“When this country was at the top, when the U.S. was king of the hill, nobody touched us in golf,” Jordan opined. “Now we’ve become a nation of takers instead of givers, and . . . it just seems that America needs to beef up its competitive spirit as far as golf goes.”
Make no mistake about it, the Hooters Jordan Tour has become competitive. Fifteen of its former players qualified for the PGA last year, bringing to 93 the number of its alums who have made it to the big league. In fact, during one four-week period last May, four of his tour’s alums-Mike Heinen, Daly, Neal Lancaster and Tom Lehman-won consecutive PGA tournaments, Jordan noted proudly.
As a former member of the University of California tennis team, Jordan seems an unlikely guru to professional golf’s working class, particularly since he could easily afford to do nothing but play golf at Pebble Beach, the oceanside course not far from his home in Carmel, Calif.
Jordan grew up in an affluent family but, as a child of the ’60s, didn’t pay much attention to his trust fund. Instead, he joined the Peace Corps after college in 1964, and later went into social work, making about $850 a month.
In the early 1970s, Jordan’s grandmother died, and he could no longer pretend to be a working stiff. Not with $5 million dumped into his account, courtesy of family ties to the Smith, Kline and French pharmaceutical giant.
“In the ’80s, if you had some money you could make some money,” he said. And so he did. Over the next decade, Jordan turned his $5 million into about $50 million, mostly by investing in California real estate and restaurants. That fortune attracted the usual opportunists, including some promoters who convinced Jordan to invest $500,000 in their golf mini-tour.
Jordan had become an avid golfer and he liked the idea of giving skilled but unpolished players cash incentives to develop their games. But he didn’t like it when he learned his partners “had a lot of cousins on the payroll.”
Deciding that he liked the concept, but not the company, Jordan rid himself of the partners in 1989 and set about losing his money on the minor-league golf tour all by himself. “I spent the next four years trying to prove that we weren’t hustlers and that we paid our bills,” he said.
Investing in dreamers
Often in those early days, Jordan fronted entry fees for players rich in talent but otherwise poor. One of them was Daly, the rough-edged, grip-it and rip-it pro who has become a hero to hurricane-force hackers everywhere.
“Everything he is today, he was then, although he wasn’t in therapy when we had him,” Jordan said of Daly. “He always liked to drink-in the early days, we all drank together-but he didn’t cause problems on the golf course and he didn’t inflict his problems on us.
“Now he is a shot in the arm for the dreamers on our tour. And you have to be a dreamer on this tour,” said Jordan, who still provides financial assistance and even buys cars for needy players he admires.
Over the last decade, Jordan’s investment in dreamers, and the plummeting value of California real estate, has cut his net worth back down to nearly that of his original inheritance, he admitted.
“This (tour) is what I would like to do forever, but lots of times guys who start something are not the guys to finish it,” he said. “I thought some smart CEO would have picked up on this a long time ago. Maybe I’m the only one with the vision, or maybe I’m just crazy.”
To help him carry the load, last year Jordan brought in a sponsor-partner that has no visible ties to golf but boasts a well-endowed marketing budget. The Atlanta-based Hooters Restaurant chain, known, and in some quarters reviled, for its cleavage-heaving, frat house ambiance, claims that 50 percent of its clientele is obsessed with golf too.
And while officials of some host golf courses balked at Hooters as a co-sponsor, eventually they were persuaded to see the attributes of the alliance. “We took them to one of the Hooters restaurants and we convinced them that what you see there is not anything you don’t see at the beach,” Jordan said.
By increasing the tour’s purse and dispatching “Hooters girls” as hostesses for tournaments, the new sponsor has boosted the profile of Jordan’s tour-and added to the distractions for the often lonely guys who play it.
“Some guys have picked up Hooters girls; I haven’t been so fortunate,” said Watson, who, like most on the tour, is single. “I’ve met a few girls at courses on the tour. You say, `I’ll see you next year.’ And that’s it. That’s the way it works with this kind of lifestyle. A lot of guys have a tough time.”
In the early days, players on this tour were prone to partying right up to tee-off and often returned to the bar after the last putt of the day dropped.
“I remember one kid missed the cut, went out and picked up a gorgeous girl in Stillwater, then got pulled over by the cops and discovered he was with the mayor’s daughter,” Jordan recalled. “If there was bad luck to be had that day, he found it.”
As the tour’s stakes have gotten higher, so have the costs of running off-course, Jordan’s players said. “I cleaned up my act after my first year,” confessed Steve Davalos, 24, a San Francisco native now in his second year with the Hooters Jordan Tour. “I don’t drink anymore and I don’t smoke anymore. I found it was too hard to get up in the morning. Now I read books and go to movies at night.”
Davalos also restricts his travel between tournaments to after dark because, typically for players on this tour, his vehicle is sub-par. “I have a 1986 Chevy Cavalier that I put 30,000 miles on last year,” he said. “It has no air-conditioner so I drive at night to avoid the million-degree heat.”
A long and winding road
The Hooters Jordan Tour begins each April and ends in early October. It hooks and slices across the country from Douglas, Ga., to Albuquerque, to El Paso and Rantoul, Ill., to Alachua, Fla., and assorted greens in between.
“The worst drive I’ve had on the tour was a 12-hour trip from a tournament in Dalton, Ga., to one in Albuquerque,” Watson said. “I hit the `seek’ button on my radio to find a station and it couldn’t find anything.”
The hazards of the road are often worse than those on the course. A high percentage of the tour’s players have had their cars stolen or broken into. John Dickson, a lanky and amiable 25-year-old out of Johannesburg, South Africa, found his vehicle burglarized twice within two weeks, losing everything he owned except for two shirts and two pair of pants.
“But he is such an optimistic guy, he was just grateful that both shirts matched both pairs of pants,” said tour spokesman Lee Moore.
For all of its rigors, the Hooters Jordan Tour now attracts more players than it can accept. Hundreds are turned away. Those who make the cut range from young guns fresh off their college courses, to late-bloomers chasing a dream, to former PGA players trying to get back in the groove.
“I’m one of the oldest guys out here and I’m carrying my own bag for the first time in 15 years,” said Steve Thomas, 38, a long-driving, vexed-putting pro who has yo-yoed between golf’s minor and major leagues over 18 years.
“I’ve never had a real job,” he said. “My dream is to get back on the PGA Tour and to win the Masters. And as long as there is a Hooters Jordan Tour where I can get my game in shape, I’ll be around.”
One golfer’s shining moment
For every seasoned but scrambling pro like Thomas on this tour, there are scores of fresh-faced PGA aspirants such as Dusti Watson and his tour friend and fellow Illinoisan, Matt Ewing.
Known on the tour as “Corn-Bred,” Ewing is a 27-year-old, 6-foot, 215-pounder, who was raised on a 2,000-acre hog and grain operation along the Mississippi River near Seaton.
A former golf team ace at Illinois State University, Ewing has been a professional since 1989. He spent some time knocking around a mini-tour in Florida and living in a cat-infested, plumbing-free garage there before joining the Hooters Jordan Tour this year.
This summer is the first that he has not gone home to help his father bale hay, he noted. But on Memorial Day weekend, Ewing made hay for the first time in a professional golf tournament. And he did it in a manner unique to golf in the minor leagues.
It happened at the Coca-Cola Classic at the Belwood Golf & Country Club in Natchez, Miss. Going into the 18th hole, the strapping Ewing, who is missing the tip of one finger as the result of a farm accident, had a one shot lead over Dennis Zinkon, 33, an Ohio native and one of this tour’s hottest players.
Before Ewing could complete the final hole of the tournament, a lightning storm struck, halting play. Nearly three hours passed before play was resumed just before dark.
As the sun fell, Ewing bogeyed the 18th hole, putting him into a tie with Zinkon. There was pressure to end the tournament in a tie. But Zinkon, Ewing and tour officials pushed for a playoff hole and got it-under the lights.
The fairway was almost totally dark when the two hit their tee shots on the par-4 hole. Ewing hit the green in two and was just 15 feet from the hole. Zinkon was farther away and just off the edge of the green after two shots.
The golfers walked to the green to putt for the money. And then there was light.
“They pulled two cars and three or four mowers up to the edge of the green and turned the headlights on the hole so we could see to putt,” Ewing said.
He missed a birdie putt by inches, but Zirkon bogeyed the hole, giving Ewing his first win on the tour, along with $15,000 in prize money, and a well-lit memory that will be difficult to surpass, whether he goes on to win dozens more pro golf tournaments or whether he goes back to the farm without winning another.
“I still haven’t cleaned the mud off my shoes from that round,” said Ewing two months after the Natchez win. “It seems like a dream. I don’t want to wash it away.”
