SWING AND A MYTH
No one without a country-club upbringing or NCAA scholarship ever makes the PGA Tour cut . . . but Toronto long-shot Ben Silverman wouldn’t quit
It was around the time Ben Silverman turned 16 that he declared it his life’s dream to become a professional golfer.
Optimists might have called him delightfully ambitious. Realists would have diagnosed him as highly delusional. There were, after all, more than a couple of issues with his stated goal. First, Silverman was a kid from Toronto whose chief athletic experience involved playing AA minor hockey for the Ted Reeve Thunder.
Second, and perhaps more worrying: Silverman wasn’t particularly good at golf.
In his first junior tournament, around the same time he was announcing his PGA Tour intentions, he remembers shooting a score of 118. That’d be 118 strokes for 18 holes — this at a time when more talented peers were firing rounds in the 60s and 70s.
“I’ll tell you what, I was trying on every shot,” Silverman said in a recent interview, thinking back to that 118. “I just wasn’t very good at that point.”
Fast forward 14 years or so and Silver- man, who turned 30 on Wednesday, is residing in the stratosphere of his dreams — enjoying his first few weeks as a PGA Tour member while playing in this weekend’s RSM Classic on St. Simons Island, Ga., where he opened with a round of 67.
Silverman clinched his tour card last summer with his first career victory on the Web.com Tour, the PGA Tour’s top developmental branch. That win, at August’s Price Cutter Charity Championship, helped him to a 10th-place overall finish on the Web.com money list, from which the top 25 finishers earn PGA privileges.
“It’s been a real long journey,” Silverman said.
It’s also been short enough, given his relatively late start, to make the story of his humble beginnings seem even harder to believe. Golf’s upper echelons, after all, are filled with child prodigies whose greatness seems a birthright. By way of comparison, at age 16 — the same age Silverman was shooting 40-something over par at his first tournament — world No. 2 Jordan Spieth was contending at a PGA Tour event as an amateur by shooting three rounds in the 60s.
And maybe Silverman, now listed at five-foot-10 and 160 pounds, wouldn’t have even tried golf if he hadn’t deemed himself too small for hockey around age 15.
“I wasn’t growing. And every once in a while someone could catch me off guard and knock the snot out of me,” he said. “I was worrying about getting hurt, and I was like, ‘I don’t think this is going to work anymore. I’ve got to find another sport.’ ”
Though he dabbled in ultimate Frisbee, volleyball and baseball, he found his ultimate calling after spending a week at a golf camp during a family trip to British Columbia. But he was hardly a son of the country club.
His father Howard became a GTA-based building contractor after retiring as a touring musician. His mother Maureen is a midwife. Parents to three other children with varied interests, neither knew much about golf.
But Ben immersed himself in the game. He worked for a time at a driving range, and as a salesman at Golf Town. A friend helped him secure a membership at Markham’s Mandarin Golf Club, where he practised and played incessantly.
“I was slowly, slowly improving,” he said.
After graduating high school he took a year off to practise even more feverishly, dropping his handicap from a 12 to a two in a matter of months. Only a couple of years after he shot that ugly 118, he was shooting in the 70s with regularity. Silverman found his way to Miami’s Johnson and Wales University, and later to Florida Atlantic University — playing at both schools without the benefit of a scholarship. While he played well, rising to become one of Florida Atlantic’s top players, he was hardly on anyone’s radar as a would-be careerist.
Still, Angelo Sands, Silverman’s coach at Florida Atlantic, said the player’s faith in his professional destiny never wavered.
“When he said, ‘I’m going to the PGA Tour,’ he made you believe it,” Sands said.
Belief, sadly, usually isn’t enough in golf. Going pro also requires a bankroll. After college, Silverman said a cousin gave him $5,000 to try his hand on a mini-tour.
“I played five tournaments and lost all that money. I was like, ‘I’m not ready for this,’ ” Silverman said.
Needing yet more practice, he worked part-time at a couple of different Florida golf courses, and played the Minor League Golf Tour, which bills itself as a lower-cost alternative to mini-tour life. Still, his eventual climb up the ladder — first to PGA Tour Canada and then to the Web.com Tour — would need a further financial injection. That came, in part, from Alan Appelbaum, a wealthy Florida-based bond trader and golf enthusiast whom Silverman met through Maccabi, the Jewish sports organization.
Appelbaum said he agreed to back Silverman about five years ago, putting up money every year since to pay for Silverman’s expenses. At first, Appelbaum had a trio of partners in the venture. Eventually those partners dropped out and Appelbaum, for a time, bore Silverman’s costs alone — this before scaring up another investor. Although Appelbaum, 70, said he wouldn’t comment on the nature of his outlay, golf in- dustry insiders say a year of modest living on the Web.com Tour can cost anywhere from $60,000 to $80,000.
Appelbaum, who previously backed pro golfer Bruce Fleisher “and four or five other guys who never made it,” said he was initially “reticent” to throw his financial heft behind Silverman. But after vetting Silverman’s potential with trusted teaching pro Wayne DeFrancesco, he was convinced to strike a deal that will see Appelbaum share in the net profit of Silverman’s career for a period of time should Silverman’s rise continue. And if it doesn’t, the losses will be Appelbaum’s alone.
“We’ve had a handshake deal the whole time. It’s, ‘If you make it big, then you can pay me back. If not, no harm done,’ ” Silverman said of Appelbaum. “He’s been incredible.”
Said Appelbaum, speaking over the phone from his Boca Raton office: “The most important thing is, I like Ben. If I didn’t like him — I don’t care how good he was going to be — I wouldn’t spend any money on him.”
Howard Silverman said he was skeptical at first when he heard about the wealthy man who planned to underwrite his son’s career.
“I didn’t think it was true. We came down to meet him. We had dinner. (Appelbaum) pulled me aside when we were leaving and he said, ‘I can see the concern in your eyes, but I just want to tell you, I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t feel your son was going to go all the way. He really has that extra something in his mindset and his personality,’ ” said the player’s father.
Ben Silverman cites “mental strength” as his athletic forte. That and a relentless positivity that he says stems from the unconditional support he’s received from his family. He and his wife Morgan have at times been partners on the course; she caddied for him on the Web.com Tour until she was 41⁄ months
2 pregnant with their son, Jack Palmer, who was born in July — an event that led to an uptick in Silverman’s on-course results.
“I don’t know what changed, but once that kid was born he started playing significantly better golf,” Appelbaum said.
If fatherhood has been good for his game, so has his father’s remarkable history. As a Toronto teenager in the 1960s, Howard Silverman’s aspiration of becoming a professional musician seemed downright fantastical to conservative parents who suggested he go to university and become a professional. And yet he came to tour the world as a drummer for jazz giants such as Dizzy Gillespie and Moe Koffman.
“My father used to say, ‘You can’t make any money as a musician,’ ” Howard Silverman said. “And I used to fight with that demon in my head all the time, that voice saying, ‘You can’t do it. You can’t do it.’ I had to say, ‘Screw it. I know I’m going to do it.’ I made up my mind at an early age I wanted to play with the best players in the world. And I did that.”
From concert hall to country club, like father, like son.
“Because my dad had that breakaway childhood . . . that definitely had a big impact on me growing up,” Ben Silverman said. “My dad just always pumped a ton of confidence in me, any sport I did. That’s the way he was. I just kind of grew up that way. I think that’s a big reason I am where I am. If I didn’t have the mental strength I have, there’s no way I would have made it to where I am with the skill set I have, going through the years. I was playing against everyone who’d grown up in country clubs. Almost everyone was way more talented than me in golf at that time. But I just didn’t care. I was just so determined to get better, and I think that’s won out.”
The realists, in other words, were wrong. And now the optimists see more upside yet.
“The ultimate would be winning on the PGA Tour,” Silverman said. “I don’t think anything crazy needs to happen for me to do that.”
Nothing crazier than the dream already fulfilled.
“I was playing against everyone who’d grown up in country clubs. Almost everyone was way more talented than me . . . but I just didn’t care.” BEN SILVERMAN