Most of them wait, sometimes forever, for their number to be called. Then they see if they can shoot a low enough score to step out of the crowd for good. That's the way it happened at the last PGA Championship for a career frat boy named Rich Beem. His shots found flagsticks the way lightning can, he made every putt he had to make and he stared down Tiger Woods on Sunday and won.
That's the way it happened for a little left-hander named Mike Weir, one with a ton of Hogan in him, at this year's Masters, when he made all the gut-check shots he had to make down the stretch, all through his bag, somehow turned all six- and eight-footers on the back nine at Augusta into tap-ins and finally beat Len Mattiace in a play-off to win himself a green jacket.
Your number gets called. You shoot a low score and now you're a big guy. The question is: Can you can stay one?
What do you do after you have the day of your life?
It all happened for David Toms at the 2001 PGA at Atlanta Athletic Club. And it really began to happen for him on Saturday instead of Sunday, before Toms laid up on the last hole and then wedged in like a total champion and made the par putt to beat Phil Mickelson by a stroke.
David Toms hit his lightning-bolt shot with a five-wood on the par-three fifteenth hole on Saturday, the ball coming off his clubface hot and hitting the flagstick hot and going right to the bottom of the hole. He will never know what would have happened that weekend if his ball hadn't hit the stick just right, if it had been an inch either way and gone over the green, which is what it looked like it would do when it landed. Except that's not what happens when it's your day and your time in golf. Your turn to be a big guy.
Sometimes when your number gets called, it's the lowest one out there.
Number one.
"It was the timing of it," Toms says now, nearly two years later. "It was late Saturday, it was a major. It was the stage, with millions of people watching. It was the moment. You hit a shot like that, you realize it's gone in the hole, you see the reaction around the green, and you can't help it: You think, 'This might be my week.'"
It was his week. He had been a solid player for a while. He had won tournaments and a pile of dough. There was nothing flashy about him, or colorful. When he put the ball in the fairway off the tee, he had a chance, because he could put it close with his irons and he was a finisher on the greens. He was an LSU guy, and everybody remembered the time he made them crazy in the gallery by winning in New Orleans. He was a star that week but never a star anywhere else, even if he was still young. Nobody was calling Toms the best player to never have won a major. That title belonged to Mickelson. Then he made that hole in one on number fifteen. He could easily have made bogey. Or par. Instead he went from one behind to one ahead with that one swing. There was still a long way to go, but everybody knows how important belief is in golf, and in that moment, David Toms began to believe.
"It's the same for everybody, isn't it?" he says. "No matter what's been happening, you make one shot or birdie or putt and it gets you thinking, 'Now I'm on my way.'"
He was on his way to winning the one-week lottery. He kept going after the fifteenth on Saturday. He's kept going ever since. Sometimes the guy who wins the major turns out to be Wayne Grady, which means one PGA is as good as it gets. Grady fell right back into the pack and stayed there—though even he gets introduced as a major champ the rest of his life.
It hasn't been like that for Toms. He didn't win a tournament in 2002, but he had a dozen top-ten finishes and finished fourth on the money list. Early this year he was runner-up to Tiger in the WGC-Accenture Match Play, falling behind by four holes after the morning round but staying in there all day until he finally lost two and one. Then he won at Wachovia, making a tough course look easy in rugged conditions—until he made a crazy eight on the last hole after he'd gone into his victory lap. And he hung around at this year's Masters, which finally came down to Weir and Len Mattiace (who thought Sunday was his moment until the seventy-second hole when he hit a drive toward the site of Martha Burk's demonstration) before finishing eighth. You can book this now: Toms has more than one major in him.
"There were years when I knew in my heart that I was better than my record," he says. "Now I believe I'm as good as my results."
Toms pauses, then says: "It's amazing, really. You spend so much of your life dreaming about where you want to be, where you want your game to take you. Trying to prove you're one of those people, one of the top guys. Then you get on the kind of roll I did at the PGA, and all of a sudden you start to think of yourself as one of those guys. And what you find out, more than anything else, is how much you like it."
