White Bucket Hats and Confidence - Part Three

Woods, Duval, Mickelson and Leonard realized early that the game was more than just a game. They also realized it afforded them a magnificent opportunity. Leonard was so affected by his junior days he now helps organize the annual AJGA Justin Leonard team event in Dallas. Mickelson contributes in a similar way. He hosts the Phil Mickelson junior Championship, held on four courses in the San Diego area each summer. Duval's recent remarks about the Ryder Cup revenues were not so he could line his own pockets. He wanted some of the money to go to the Jacksonville area to help connect kids with the game in junior golf And the Tiger Woods Foundation might be the best single pilot program that affords anyone with dreams and a swing a chance to play.

The AJGA starts with starters saying, "Play away, please," but between the innocent invitation and the 18th hole is a competitive skirmish. "I was friends with kids off the course, but on the course I wanted to beat their brains out," said Trip Kuehne. Typical AJGA Tournaments have kids from more than thirty different states represented. In the 1980s a kid from Mannheim, Pennsylvania, like Jim Furyk, met kids from Dallas like Justin Leonard, Cade Stone and Trip Kuehne. And kids from Houston like Tina Trimble got to know players from Delray Beach, Florida, like Michelle McGann. Not many other sports created a junior amateur landscape quite like this. It became a melting pot of swings, personalities and abilities. Mickleson would sit and watch the likes of Seve Ballesteros and say, "Someday I'm going to play like that. Someday I'm going to win that trophy."

There was a sense that this competition kindled a respect for the game, which allowed him to test his game against the very best. Mickelson went so far as to wear long pants to play junior matches. Ninety-degree heat, and 16-year-old Phil Mickelson was playing the part of a professional golfer. Duval let his game talk one victory at a time. Woods did not just play junior golf, he lived junior golf. He carved a way to dominate, digesting each player he played with, each course he played on and came to understand the nuances along the way. Leonard, Duval, Woods and Mickelson are proving to the world that golf is a game that can never be mastered, but they are going to push their abilities to the limit. They are the masters of the millennium. Their vision to excel beyond their own expectations makes them hungry in a sport that only rewards one thing success. Seven-figure endorsement deals make it easy to put the tee in the ground, but knowing that the small, dimpled sphere must travel 7,000 yards with a purpose makes it a little tougher to draw the club back.

The mastery of the game has become one of the toughest skills in sports today. Hitting a Randy Johnson fastball, returning a Pete Sampras serve and beating Dominic Hasek gloveside tests skill. But, for a minute, forget titanium shafts, super-charged golf balls and turf equipment. The 20th century closes with a drum roll. The last part of the decade has been a parade of young players staking claim to the notion that the torch is being passed from players like Nicklaus and Watson to the next capable generation.

Time has ticked away decades, years, months, days, hours and minutes.

Since the very beginning in 1934, when Sam Snead turned professional at the age of 22 and when Horton Smith, at the ripe age of 25, won the first Masters. That same year, Paul Runyan was crowned the first leading money winner on the PGA Tour. His take was $6,767, but a statement issued by the PGA in its very first year of existence may have had a more profound impact. These were the days of the depression, the most economically critical days the nation had ever endured, and in February, the PGA asked that golf professionals give free lessons to children to help popularize the game. The idea was to get the kids involved so that they could mature with the game.

The '30s was a grand decade. Gene Sarazen's double eagle on 15 won the Masters in 1935, and the youngster Smith returned the favor the next year. They were the "kids" back then, with nicknames just like today's players. There was "Sir Walter" (Walter Hagen) and "the Squire" (Gene Sarazen). Bobby Jones, Frances Ouimet, Snead and Ben Hogan are now simply legends. As the game enters the new millennium, there is another marked change. A game that builds bridges, built firmly on tradition, is celebrating a renaissance of the younger player. The next generation of the PGA Tour has the equipment like no generation before. These new golfing greats have empowered their will to succeed just like the young players who came generations before them. The names on the leader boards are changing with each passing Tournament. Instead of Watson, Miller, Nicklaus and Floyd, names like Mickelson, Woods, Leonard, Els, Duval, Furyk and Westwood are appearing with regularity. Snead was honest at the 1997 Masters when he predicted Tiger Woods would "be great in three or four years." Instead, it was the year he Toured the dogwoods in record-breaking style.

Woods, Leonard and Mickelson made their way from the junior game to the Crow's Nest at Augusta National. Duval went from king of the national junior scene to being named an All-American four straight years. His game developed thanks to a perpetuation of consistency. Each player went from the proving ground of junior golf to America's playground with conviction, and it all really happened in less than two decades. Mickelson has played in three Ryder Cups, Leonard two, Woods two and Duval, incredibly, just one. Will the new millennium mark the continued rise of this foursome at golf's defining level? Or will the crowd behind them surpass their hungry eyes?

Reflecting on a game is a difficult thing to do when the future is so promising.

In the mid-'80s, even golf ball companies developed a relationship with the AJGA. Enter a Tournament and get a dozen balls. The AJGA vans would load up their staff, hitch the trunk (nicknamed Ellie) to the van and travel down the road to the next Tournament. Packed deep inside Ellie were thousands of titleists. How many of these juniors would grow up hitting the golf ball with the Titleist label? Titleist CEO Wally Uihlein makes sure his company is involved with generations of players. The actual dollar signs, commas and zeroes involved in Leonard, Duval, Mickelson or Woods' deals are not public knowledge. Their agents are not quick to "divulge the deals." In 1989, Titleist became the AJGA presenting sponsor. "They really don’t make a big deal out of it," said Hamblin. "They just like being involved." It is amazing what a dozen golf balls do to the visage of a 15-year-old. Assistant executive director Pete Ripa said, "At each event we give them so many options (varieties of golf balls), it's like choosing a color of a Ferrari."

For this foursome, junior golf was an innocent playground where they developed as individuals and players. Duval's hottest summer for scoring was in 1989. At the AJGA event at English Turn, Duval shot 73 the hard way. He went out in 40 and brought it home in 33. In his group that day was Brian Bateman, who said, "He showed me something. A lot of guys would pack it in. He never gave up and he hasn’t stopped." Typical junior players can’t turn the tide like this foursome. And now they are spinning their tricks on the PGA Tour at the expense of some qualified veterans. Davis Love III knows it, Brad Faxon knows it; so do Tom Lehman and Greg Norman. How much more does it take before week after week the winner is "whatchamacallit, one of those young turks, hits it a mile, putts the eyeballs out of it, you know."

In 1999, Phil Mickelson almost met destiny at the U.S. Open at Pinehurst, Justin Leonard came oh-so-close to kissing the claret jug, again. David Duval had one sleeve in the green jacket in 1998 before Mark O'Meara decided to win one for the older guys. And Tiger Woods won his second major for the ages at Medinah.

Payne Stewart told Mickelson, "You'll get yours." Paul Lawrie said to Leonard, "You've already had yours." The golf demons have said to Duval, "You'll appreciate yours now that you have come close to tasting the nectar." And Woods may have arrived back from the woods, where he learned that distance is for long driving contests and that the real fun is in the short game.

This isn’t the future of professional golf. This is professional golf. The tide is starting to roll back in and the waves are about to pound the surf. What an awe-inspiring foursome. Jacksonville, Dallas, San Diego and Orlando. A mature left-hander with a Mickelsonian innocence; an organized tactician (Leonardo the great); a cerebral, plodding birdie machine (Groovy Duuvy) and a harnessed set of expectations, skills and emotions (Tiger Woods). What do these guys all have in common off the course? Very little. What do they share on the course? The rare ability to score. Forget sand saves, greens in regulation and that they were the youngest and fastest American foursome to earn a million bucks. These guys flat-out put the ball in the hole in fewer strokes than their contemporaries.

As the new millennium dawns, these four lead a pack of young players on Tour who have attitude and a decided experience fostered in the ability to play in professional events as amateurs. The game of professional golf doesn’t just bridge generations, it provides a wide, green fairway for young men to hone their game better than any other sport on the globe. It coddles and nurtures the youth like a sport that wants to build on its benchmark. It all started with kids yanking at their father's leg, saying, "Dad, I want to play in that." Junior golf is a bastion of innocence and etiquette wrapped tightly around tradition. It's about kids with smiles and loose swings. Some of them wear white bucket hats.