WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
Gary Evans came so close to Major glory at Muirfield in 2002, but he’s focused on the future after returning to pro golf last year
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Sadly, it wasn’t to be, with Evans zig-zagging to bogey down 18 as he struggled to suppress the adrenalin surge of the previous hole, finishing one shy of the four-man play-off won by Ernie Els. Four years later, his main tour career was over, with Evans only returning to serious competitive action last year for his maiden season on the Staysure Tour.
In the interim, Evans has become known for his forthright views on social media, which those who follow his Twitter account will be all too aware of. We won’t be revisiting that old ground here in an interview that was a first for me in many ways – my first chat with Evans; a rare one-to-one laced with raw honesty; and, without doubt, the first interview I have ever conducted live from a poolside bar in The Seychelles, with both participants donned only in swimming shorts!
We start by touching briefly on his heart-on-sleeve honesty. “I think it has been a problem, yeah,” Evans replies when I ask if it has been a help or hindrance. “I think we live in a world where, unfortunately, you get to a certain level of success and you become bulletproof. It doesn’t matter what you do, you still get away with it. I have a hard time with that because I believe in the honesty and integrity of this sport.
“But I’m not getting involved in those arguments any more. It’s pointless getting into a battle that you cannot win and it took me a long time to learn that lesson. We live in a world where honesty and integrity are just memories of a bygone age, which I find really sad.”
Interestingly, that same honesty applies equally to Evans’ selfanalysis. He turned pro after the 1991 Walker Cup, finished 2nd at Q-school that year and then enjoyed an unbroken spell on tour from 1992 to 2006. He came perilously close to winning early on, finishing runner-up in the Turespana Open de Andalucia on just his third start. It perhaps seems harsh to say that was as close as it got, but Evans never bettered that result and is himself brutally honest when assessing his main tour career, despite injury also rearing its ugly head early on.
“If you look at the careers of Harrington, Mcginley and Clarke, I mean, these were all guys that I grew up with and played against, and I certainly was as good as them,” Evans tells me while reflecting on his debut season. “I broke my wrist at the end of my first year... if you think about it, I was lying 6th on the Order of Merit without a win after six months and I finished 35th after taking a month out at the end of the year.
“And I effectively played golf with a broken wrist for two years after that because I didn’t know I’d broken it. Confidence-wise and ability-wise, I certainly felt I had the game to be a top-20 player in Europe and maybe a top-40 or top-50 player in the world.”
That wrist injury forced Evans to change from a two-knuckle grip to a four-knuckle one, leaving him fighting a hook and searching for a way to still compete. “I had to completely learn how to play again, and confidence is everything in this game,” he explains. “Once you lose confidence, it’s very, very difficult to get it back. I think it was about 1998 or 1999 when I started hitting the ball half decently again. In 2002, 2003 I had a couple of very good years and then my shoulder went. I had to have shoulder surgery. Every time I kind of got going, something got in the way, and that’s life, you know – it’s one of those things.”
I ask if he was able to be as philosophical about it at the time. “Well no, you’re very bitter, aren’t you?” he replies. “You’re seeing all the people that you were beating regularly succeeding and you’re not. You’re not bitter towards them, you’re bitter towards the universe, thinking, ‘Why has this happened to me?’ I did feel the victim, which is never a good place to be. It took me a very long time to come to terms with that, which is why I see my career as a failure.
“A lot of my friends see it as a success, and you could very well say that – 15 years on tour and I got to travel the world and play with my heroes. Fabulous! I really enjoyed that and I’m very, very thankful I got the opportunity, but personally, I felt that my first career was a huge disappointment.”
“I did feel the victim, which is never a good place to be. It took me a very long time to come to terms with that”
A case of unfulfilled potential. When the second injury saw Evans slip to 222nd on the 2005 Order of Merit and 167th the following season, he decided to call it a day. “I’d just had enough,” he admits. “I needed to have a break. In retrospect, I wish I’d taken a year out and then gone back at it, but you make your choice, you live with it and you get on with it.”
For Evans, getting on with it meant 11 years advising Hugo Boss on its global sponsorship platform, scouting out new talent to represent the brand on tour. “We had a very clear strategy,” Evans explains. “It was all about age, talent, ability, their attitude, their desire to be a representative of a world-class brand and obviously what they looked like. We had some fantastic successes. I took it very seriously. I spent their money like it was my money – I wasn’t just throwing it around – and we went from an average of one and a half wins a year to six and a half wins a year from about 2010 to 2014.”
Coincidentally, that arrangement came to an end around the time Evans was turning 50, but the senior tour wasn’t really on his mind. “It was more my friends at Mill Ride Golf Club who were saying you’ve got to play the tour again,” Evans tells me. “But I genuinely wasn’t thinking about it that much.” Evans admits that the clubs had been hibernating for six months every year as golf reverted to a hobby rather than a profession.
Now, though, it is a profession once more, with Evans finishing 18th in his debut season among the over-50s. “The vibe on this tour is fantastic,” he tells me. “All the guys have obviously known each other for a long, long time. It’s much more relaxed, although we are still trying to beat the arse out of each other. I’ve really enjoyed it and played an awful lot of good golf. The only thing that’s killed me a little bit is that my short game is not as sharp as it used to be.”
It’s now 18 years since Evans’ famous brush with Major destiny at Muirfield, so I ask how often he revisits that day in his mind. “I honestly don’t really think about it anymore,” he replies. “Every now and again I’m asked to tell the story, and it was a great experience. It was very nerve-wracking.
“My caddie, Dominic Bott, and I had a plan – I came off the 6th green and said to him, ‘I don’t know what’s going on here, but don’t leave my side, don’t stop talking and don’t mention golf.’ He did exactly that. He was great – he kept me calm. On the rare occasions when I see a replay, the hairs on the back of my neck still go up when I see the putt go in on 17.”
‘What ifs’ are admittedly pointless but irresistible too, so I push Evans further by asking what if the second shot into the 17th green had been the first and he had then merely even just two-putted for birdie. “Well, I would have been three shots ahead,” he says, reminding me that he was coming from well off the pace and therefore finishing a long time ahead of the round-three leaders.
“It’s all hypothetical, but my demeanour was very consistent for the entire round, and it was only when I holed that putt on 17 that it changed, because I’d gone from losing The Open to potentially still winning it with a highly improbable par. Let’s say I made birdie on 17 and parred the last and posted that number – I might have been a little bit out of reach, but because I posted two less, it was reachable. And when it’s reachable, they’ll get you!”
Evans is now more focused on his senior tour career, where he can still shape the course of history. “I’m looking forward to the next few years and hope it keeps going the way it has gone,” he enthuses. “Hopefully, I might get the monkey off my back and finally win a darned event!”
It’s still uncertain what will remain of the 2020 Staysure Tour season when the coronavirus crisis has settled down, but hopefully there will be sufficient events for him to finally realise his potential.