National Post (National Edition)
REWRITING HIS STORY
ONCE CONSIDERED A GOLF PHENOM, RUDOLPH III FINDS HIS STRIDE AT U.S. SENIOR OPEN QUALIFIER
FIRST PLAYOFF HOLE ❚ Harry Rudolph III, San Diego: 4 (par)
❚ David Bartman, Los Angeles: 4 (par)
Before pooh-poohing a U.S. Senior Open qualifier you ought not to poohpooh anyway, consider that Harry Rudolph III on June 14 represented a cherished vein of all human possibility. He embodied a concept stuffed with hope: that humans might take an old talent off the shelf after real life has shoved it aside, dust it off and venture anew — even if it happens to be golf, that pristine ogre.
Rudolph, 51, didn't mull that from shot to shot at San Diego County Club — and thank goodness for that — as he and David Bartman chased one available spot in a 2021 U.S. Senior Open that started Thursday in Omaha, Neb. He just played and chatted, chatted and played.
“This is a guy I've known from junior golf,” Rudolph said in an interview at Grand Del Mar Golf Club. “We hadn't seen each other in a long time. You're kind of catching up, which is weird. You're in a playoff with them, but you're catching up. `What have you been doing the last 10 years?'”
“Yeah,” Bartman said by telephone. “He's had a long and interesting golf career from the time he was 16 years old.”
Rudolph mentions age six as when he first got tangled, on courses and in conversation, with fellow San Diegan Phil Mickelson. They would tussle as nationally prominent teens with reporters bird-dogging, as in 1987, when Rudolph won a second straight sectional title after Mickelson tried a boldness on No. 18 that smacked the top of a cart shed on its way out of bounds.
Mickelson gained stratospheric golf renown, but many, many more excellent players toil in the vastness of qualifying for this and qualifying for that, so here were Bartman, sanguine with remaining an amateur, and Rudolph, dreaming again of professionalism while having birdied the final two holes of the round to reach the sudden-death playoff.
“There were probably, I would guess, 20 people” watching, Bartman said, and he laughed when he said, “They were all rooting for him.”
SECOND PLAYOFF HOLE ❚ Rudolph — 4 (par) ❚ Bartman — 4 (par)
By the late 1990s, when Rudolph cold-turkeyed his bid to make the PGA Tour, his “love-hate” with golf had teetered toward the right side of the hyphen.
“I was definitely burned out, when I quit,” Rudolph said. “I was burned out on golf, burned out on travel, burned out on disappointments and kind of beating your head against the wall. And then you're seeing your buddies ...”
There they were, some of them, such as eventual 2003 U.S. Open champion Jim Furyk, Rudolph's college teammate at Arizona, grappling with the beast but doing so on tour.
Yet most others weren't, if we're counting, and it can be hard to pinpoint why.
“To constantly have to (qualify again) for the next year, that wore on me,” Rudolph said, wearing a golf shirt from venerable Firestone Country Club in Akron.
But “that's the brutal part of the game, and I also think it's the beauty of the game, which is you have to earn it every week.”
In the sloppy parlance of sports chatter, he remained entwined with Mickelson, especially locally.
“It's a very interesting situation,” said Shawn Cox, director of golf at Grand Del Mar, where Rudolph also teaches, “because the older you get, the more you realize how incredible in the history of golf Phil Mickelson is . ... It's easy to feel beat up and you didn't accomplish much, but then you have to look and say, `I'm comparing myself to one of the top 10 players in the history of the game.'”
“There's a guy (Rudolph) that was one of the best junior golfers in San Diego,” said Jason Peterie, a San Diego golf instructor who has known Rudolph forever. “Then he goes to college, he was in front of Jim Furyk on his team. The thing with Harry, his game, hitting-theball-wise, I always thought he would be on tour.”
But this would be a story much more relatable than that, so Peterie continued: “It's a journey. It's like life. You have your ups and downs. `Do I want to keep doing this?' I was just rooting for him, and all of a sudden, I heard he got into this six-hole playoff, and I was like, `Oh, my God!'”
“I got married,” Rudolph said. “I had kids (now aged 17 and 15). I bought a house, and then I threw my work into my dad's coffee shop. My brother and sister and I ended up buying the business from my dad.
“And I was in the restaurant business for 20 years.”
THIRD PLAYOFF HOLE
❚ Rudolph — 4 (par) ❚ Bartman — 4 (par)
If you must spend a big chunk of life at work — and everyone must — it's hard to beat an authentic workplace such as Harry's Coffee Shop in La Jolla, that San Diego area of beauty and more beauty. It's the kind of place that helps make a neighbourhood a neighbourhood. Rudolph's parents founded
Harry's in 1960, and all nine of their children, with Harry sixth, worked the counter at some juncture. Rudolph's father had been a Brooklyn Dodgers bat boy, and the restaurant walls show Ebbets Field, the World Series-winning 1955 Dodgers, a tribute to the Negro Leagues, a photo of the elder Rudolph with Willie Mays “circa early 1970s.”
Its bubbling humanity makes it a fine dwelling for any of those humans with a dream tucked away someplace — and that would be almost all humans. And as Harry III reflects now, he says, “I might not have the life I have now,” and, “You kind of have to go through what you went through when you were younger to be what you are now.”
He tried a comeback early last decade, hoping to make the developmental tour, but the expense of it always howled.
“And,” Peterie said, “he'd still go out to La Jolla (Country Club), the guy's not even playing, he'd still shoot 66.”
And every so often, some chum would ask, “Are you going to give it a go?”
FOURTH PLAYOFF HOLE
❚ Rudolph — 4 (par) ❚ Bartman — 4 (par)
Bartman had been hanging in with some righteous up-and-downs, such as a 25-footer from just off the fringe, while Rudolph relished the competing and would say, curiously, “I probably had to play myself out of competition to appreciate it again.”
Having given it a go again in July 2019 as he neared 50, he darned near had reached the PGA Tour Champions (formerly the Senior Tour) from its teeming qualifying school that December.
He had earned a domain little-seen yet churning on many an American Monday: single-round qualifying for the payday senior events of subsequent weekends.
By mid-June, he had tried four times in 2021: in Tucson, Naples (Fla.), Atlanta and Des Moines. He had missed qualifying by one shot in Des Moines. He had reeled in Atlanta enough to recall fearing falling in the water while hitting a shot on No. 2.
“You've basically flown 3,000 miles across the country and spent two or three days preparing and within 30 minutes you're just basically done,” he said.
He had learned the nuances, how some guys brim with hope while some guys seem annoyed that golf, once so kind to them, has hurled them into this realm. How some finish a bad front nine and exit, which Rudolph sees as respectful toward playing partners. How being your own travel agent is time-gobbling and how lacking airline status can mean “mostly middle seats on Southwest Airlines.”
There's a flight, a time adjustment, a course adjustment, a sole round.
“It would be like interviewing for a job every Monday and hoping you get hired for one week . ...
“Your interview just cost you money and time and took away from your family here.
“I'm not saying, `Feel sorry for me,' or anything. That's just what it is.”
FIFTH PLAYOFF HOLE ❚ Rudolph — 4 (par)
❚ Bartman — 4 (par)
Rudolph and Mickelson play rounds together when the latter reaches town. Because their days with the beast date back to when technology didn't butt into everything, when golf balls didn't fly so, before the changes felled some players, Rudolph said, “He and I kind of speak the same language together,” in what Rudolph calls “that pursuit of a perfection that's unattainable.”
SIXTH PLAYOFF HOLE
❚ Rudolph — 3 (birdie)
“On the last hole he hit three perfect shots,” Bartman said. Rudolph struck a “sick” wedge — his word — to three feet and birdied. Bartman almost holed out himself and weeks later sent well-wishes to the “super-nice guy” who edged him. Word began spreading, as from San Diego golf instructor and fixture Bob Townsend, a witness to the six-hole marathon.
“My heart was racing,” Peterie said. “I was so ecstatic.”
“His dedication over the last couple of years,” Cox said, “and going out there and doing the Monday qualifiers, you know, the golf gods shined down on him and paid him back for all his hard work and his true love for the game. It just put a smile on my face” because Rudolph had “searched diligently to get better.”
He would play Omaha, his first major. He would have a practice round there with Furyk, first time in forever. But for now, on this everyday Monday in June, he just got in the car and drove the 40 minutes up to the club to stay until sundown teaching a pupil, the aspiring collegian Arjun Rana from India.
“I guess there's an element where I'm trying to keep my blinders on and not get too excited about it,” Rudolph said.
“I probably learned that from my past, and I also know there's a lot of work to do. These are tremendous opportunities for a second stage in golf, and I'm trying to take advantage of them.”
He did say “opportunities,” plural.
That's because, with his mind perhaps eased in a game so familiar and so mysterious, he would appear one week later at Firestone, a qualifying spot for the 2021 Senior British Open.
Damned if he didn't qualify for that, as well.