BETTER LUCK THIS YEAR?
Steve Wheatcroft is back for another shot at Glen Abbey after the one that got away.
A year ago, on the final hole of the RBC Canadian Open, Steve Wheatcroft figured he was on the verge of living out a dream.
Instead, he was plunged into a nightmarish detour through a golfer’s version of professional hell. Needing to get up and down for birdie from the bunker behind the 18th green at Glen Abbey Golf Course to force a playoff with eventual winner Jhonattan Vegas, Wheatcroft was considering an even better alternative.
“I said to (caddie Michael Zuleba), ‘This is a very makable bunker shot,’ ” Wheatcroft recalled.
But far from holing it — a result that would have given the journeyman pro his first PGA Tour win and entry into the Masters, among many perks — Wheatcroft thinned his shot over the green and into the pond. It was ugly, heartbreaking stuff.
And the untimely flub didn’t simply cost Wheatcroft the tournament. It cost him his full-time job. By Wheatcroft’s calculations, even if he’d blasted out of the bunker and missed his birdie putt, he would have finished tied for second, earning enough money to keep his full 2017 playing privileges.
Instead, after taking his penalty stroke and missing an ensuing putt, he finished tied for fifth. At season’s end that difference of about $230,000 (U.S.) in prize money left him with conditional PGA Tour status — meaning he’s playing a limited schedule of 17 or 18 tournaments this year instead of the full-time load of 26 or 27.
It was stiff punishment for one mistake. And Wheatcroft was understandably despondent.
“My mindset for the next couple of hours after that tournament was, ‘Why me? Why would that happen to me? Why couldn’t I just get a good lie for once and capitalize on it,’” Wheatcroft was saying this week, standing on the range at Glen Abbey. “I’ll be honest. It took a while to get over it. That one stung for quite a while.”
He found no mercy on social media, where he was mocked as a choker who made like a weekend duffer when the pressure was on. But a year later, Wheatcroft laid some of the blame on course conditions, saying he was a victim of a bad lie in a bunker bereft of sand.
“There wasn’t any sand there. And I didn’t realize it. Every tour pro in the world knew except for me,” Wheatcroft said. “I watched it in slo-mo. I hit the shot I was trying to hit. I was trying to hit a little chunk and run. You can see I hit about six inches behind the ball, and the club just completely skipped. It was more like hitting it off the cart path. I thought it was going to be a soft bunker the club would slide into.”
As if to bolster Wheatcroft’s case that a shoddily kept course was the culprit, the intervening year has seen Glen Abbey undergo a major refurbishment of its bunkers. Tournament organizers, mind you, insist Wheatcroft’s misfortune was not the impetus for that work, which Andrew Gryba, the course superintendent, said had been planned a few years in advance.
“I was in that bunker about five minutes after (Wheatcroft) made that shot, and there was sand there,” Gryba said. “I think it was a playable bunker. I think a lot of people played that bunker and managed to get up and in. And Steve had his troubles.”
Wheatcroft, in a lengthy interview, ultimately acknowledged that he didn’t lose the tournament on Sunday’s 18th hole (although Zuleba, in his boss’s defence, pointed out that K.J. Choi, a renowned bunker player, fell victim to a similarly thinned shot from the same 18th-hole bunker at last year’s tournament).
After replaying the unfortunate sequence of events in his head “900 times,” Wheatcroft said he figures he actually lost his way on Nos. 16 and 17. On 16, a birdie-able par five, he short-sided himself with a wayward five iron and settled for par. On 17, a relatively short par four, he buried a wedge into a bunker and made bogey. Those lamentable holes came after he drained a 25foot putt for birdie on No. 15 to pull into a tie for the lead.
“At that point my mind started wandering a little bit to, ‘Holy cow.
“You can go from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows, and it doesn’t take much.” STEVE WHEATCROFT ON HIS 2016 OPEN DISAPPOINTMENT
This is my day. You’re going to win this thing,’ ” he said. “You need to just think, ‘Next shot.’ ”
Not that Wheatcroft’s friends on the PGA Tour — fellow residents of Jacksonville, Fla., like Vijay Singh, Matt Every and Jonas Blixt — showed much sympathy. The very next week, at an event in Hartford, the barbs started flying. When Wheatcroft hit a shot into a bunker in a practice round, his playing partners promptly started running in different directions, as if fleeing an impending bombardment.
“It was like, ‘Hey, you need a bunker lesson?’ or ‘Careful, there’s a bunker 400 yards away,’ ” Wheatcroft said with a laugh.
Did the jokes come too soon?
“A little bit too soon,” he nodded. “It’s very tough love out here sometimes.”
Thankfully Wheatcroft doesn’t take himself too seriously. His social-media feed is home to the occasional bit of self-deprecating deadpan. (“If anyone wants to learn how to shoot 75 every day, I should be teaching at a nearby venue soon, and would love to share my experience!” went a Twitter post back in May). A native of Pittsburgh, he acknowledged a recent defeat in a golf match with Ben Roethlisberger, the Steelers quarterback.
“(Roethlisberger) beat me out of $20. He shot 69 from the white tees. I shot 66 from the back tees, and I gave him 10 shots. So that didn’t add up very well for me,” Wheatcroft said.
And yet he carries on. Already this week Wheatcroft, whose best finish on tour this year is a tie for 10th in Memphis last month, has returned to the scene of his greatest professional disappointment and hit mul- tiple balls to kick-in range of last year’s 18th-hole pin placement.
“Different sand, though,” Wheatcroft said. “I was like, ‘See, that shot is that easy.’ You can chunk it. You can catch it thin. And it runs right down to the flag. I knew I did everything correctly.”
Everything, of course, except earn his first PGA Tour win — an oversight he hopes to correct in what he billed as a “redemption week” at Glen Abbey, where the tournament begins Thursday.
“(The Sunday of last year’s RBC Canadian Open) was one of the greatest days of my life for 15 holes. And all of a sudden, it turned into one of the worst days,” Wheatcroft said. “It’s a squirrely game. You can go from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows, and it doesn’t take much. But bad break, bad shot, bad whatever. I didn’t get it done. It’s a lesson learned. I can either curl up in a hole and never be seen again, or try and come back fighting and hope something good happens.”