Firefighter Parziale’s burning desire to succeed rewarded with Augusta outing
In a Masters week that is hardly lacking in storylines, it may well be a little-known firefighter from Massachusetts who provides the most enchanting alternative to the inferno whipped up by the golfing heavyweights converging on Augusta National.
Four years since he was forced, penniless, to turn his back on the lower end of professional golf, Matt Parziale arrives here with his father as caddie and the knowledge that, no matter how intense the pressure may become this week, it will be nothing compared to the day job.
Parziale is an amateur living a professional dream, a golfer so giddy about his Masters inclusion that in December he described his invitation as his “best Christmas present ever”. After receiving a letter of congratulation from Tiger Woods, his inspiration, Parziale said he was “almost shaking”.
For context, it is worth noting that Parziale, of Ladder Company 1 in the City of Brockton Fire Department, is so far removed from golf ’s glitterati that he celebrated the biggest win of his amateur career by racing home for the next day’s shift. “I got home around 2am,” he said. “Then I was at work at 7am.”
Parziale, 30, is here courtesy of victory last year in the US Mid-amateur Championship, which will also carry him to the US Open. He has reached the big time at last, having abandoned the lower levels of the professional game because, as he puts it, he “was not making any money”.
He will be backed by a sizeable fan club this week, all of whom will be wearing hats bearing the same ‘Mattsters’ slogan.
Still, this is serious business, and Parziale has taken a period of leave in order to avoid injury. Firefighters, he says, get “a little banged up”.
The preparation time has included playing the course here five times, and shooting a feature for ESPN in which his father, Vic, who was also a Brockton firefighter, breaks down in tears at the thought of walking the course together. Vic recently retired, but not before being sent on the same firefighting job as his boy. Father and son stood together in the smoke and flames, and now they will stand together on Augusta’s fairways and greens.
“The first thing he said was that he didn’t think he could caddie at the Masters,” Parziale said. “I said, ‘What do you mean’? He said he couldn’t read the putts. But he hasn’t read a putt for me in 12 years. I don’t know why he’d start now.” Brockton, a blue-collar area, has been nicknamed the ‘City of Champions’ following the success of its two most successful sporting sons, boxers Rocky Marciano and Marvin Hagler. Parziale is surely unlikely to join them as a ‘champion’, in its most literal sense, but that will not prevent him trying to blaze a trail of his own.