Green feeling better, mentally and physically
| ESPN.com's featured players |
|---|
|
ESPN.com will be tracking the progress of three players throughout Q School week. Ken Green, 46, is a five-time champion on the PGA Tour, but hasn't won since 1989. He finished 233rd on the 2004 money list. Brian Kortan, 33, played in seven Q Schools without reaching the final stage before earning his first tour card on his eighth try last year. He finished 200th on the 2004 money list. Tim O'Neal, 31, was on the cusp of reaching the tour in 1999. On the final hole of Q School, needing only a bogey to secure his card, O'Neal made triple-bogey. This is his first trip back to the final stage since then.
Here's how these three players fared in Thursday's second round:
Second round: 77 (+5) Overall: 145 (+1) It's been said over and over again: Q School is a marathon, not a sprint. Those words can only leave Green optimistic about the next four days after shooting nine strokes worse in his second round than he did on Wednesday. Currently, he is four strokes out of the top 30. "I just need to be more carefree and calm myself down. The putter is working. I just need to get my head straight." -- Green
Second round: 70 (-2) Overall: 138 (-6) Kortan followed a first-round 68 with a second-round 70, good enough for a share of 12th place so far. He made three birdies, but the most exciting surely came on the 15th hole, where he sank a monster 80-foot putt. "That one went through a couple zip codes. I was just trying to two-putt. I got lucky and it went in. In this game, you take the good with the bad. And that one went our way." -- Kortan
Second round: 74 (+2) Overall: 142 (-2) O'Neal is known as a streaky player, but his play was inconsistent on Thursday at the much tougher Stadium course. He carded four birdies, six bogeys and eight pars, but stands just one stroke out of the top 30 through two rounds. "This is one of those courses where you can't hit it bad and score well. I struggled a bit. But hopefully this will be my bad round. Now I've gotten it out of the way." -- O'Neal |
If only it were that easy. If only the voices in Ken Green's head, the demons that scream he not only won't make a golf shot, but can't make a golf shot, would go away as soon as he asked. Then life would be so much simpler.
Instead, they've nearly taken away his golf career and almost cost him his life. They've left him sitting in the garage with the door down and the car running, hoping he would die. They've left him bending over a three-foot putt, shaking from the tips of his toes to the ends of his fingers, humiliated at the emotional mess he has become.
And now, this week, they are the biggest obstacle standing between the 47-year-old's hopes of returning to the PGA Tour, where he was a five-time winner in the late-'80s, and spending a season on the Nationwide Tour, golf's minor league circuit, anxiously counting the days until he turns 50 and can play on the Champions Tour.
"I guess if I went to Freud I could be called a psycho," Green said. "But I don't have a problem admitting the truth. It will come down to whether the demon children are on vacation or whether they're here to haunt me. It pretty much boils down to that."
In Wednesday's opening round, Green was cruising when he came to a hole he's always hated -- the 16th at the Jack Nicklaus Tournament Course. The voices appeared, but Green fought them off, escaping with par en route to 4-under 68, putting him in a share of sixth place overall.
One day later, "the children" showed up full force, rattling Green's confidence en route to a 5-over 77, the third-worst round of the day of 169 competitors.
In 24 hours, he went from T-6 to T-103.
"In a nutshell, the children woke up and played hard today," Green said afterwards. "It was all I could do to keep fighting them. It's a never-ending war."
Green talks about his mental nightmares as openly and comfortably as he discusses the movie he rented the night before. He says it's the only way. He compares his troubles to Rick Ankiel and Mark Fidrych forgetting how to throw strikes in baseball, or Ian-Baker Finch and David Duval forgetting how to putt on the golf course. He's seen the experts, he's talked to the shrinks and he's come to one overwhelming conclusion: The final round of this battle is one he has to fight primarily on his own.
Green's problems began in the late-'90s, when he trudged through a brutal divorce and custody battle. He lost his wife. His children. His money. His tour card. And, most of all, his confidence. He considered suicide -- pills, carbon monoxide, anything to make the emotional pain go away.
The more problems he had off the course, the more of a mental mess he became on it. Eventually, the demons showed up on each and every shot, crawling into Green's mind and screaming at him before every shot from tee to green.
"Those suckers transformed me from a fearless golfer to a coward puppy," Green said. "I never had a prayer. I could have bent over and hit a two-footer with my hand and told you I was going to miss."
He was a far cry from the confident, go-for-broke man known as much for his bright green shoes and tell-it-like-it-is personality as his golf game. This was a man who won five times on the PGA Tour from 1985 to '89, who played on the '89 U.S. Ryder Cup team. A man who shared a beer with Arnold Palmer during the '97 Masters and was fined by the PGA Tour 23 times for various transgressions.
The man who always did things his way couldn't do them any way.
"He was Charles Barkley before Charles Barkley," said Peter Kostis, CBS golf commentator and Green's coach for 21 years. "But sometimes, the guys that have the highest level of confidence are the ones that fall the hardest."
In 1999 or 2000 -- Green doesn't remember the exact year -- he sat in his Dodge Durango, closed the garage door, left the car running, opened the window and took a deep breath. Then he thought better of it.
After visiting various psychologists and psychiatrists, he was diagnosed with clinical depression. He started taking medication for the disorder and by 2003, said he beat the demons and was feeling great.
Mentally, that is.
After making three of the first five cuts in the 2003 season, Green's back problems resurfaced and he was forced to sit out the remainder of the year.
The hibernation away from golf led to an infestation in his head.
"Those little devils are something," Green said. "I had gotten rid of them and then their children came back. The children aren't as bad as their parents. I think I'm going to kill them a little faster than the parents, but it's still a struggle. They're still causing problems."
In 2004, Green made the cut in just four of his 18 starts, while withdrawing from four tournaments and getting disqualified from two others. Part of that was his back and the fact that he could only practice for 20-30 minutes before the pain was too much to overcome; the other part was his lack of confidence.
He thought about quitting, about getting a job for a couple of years until he's eligible for the Champions Tour. But just last week, after four years of doctors struggling to figure out what was wrong with his back, an MRI revealed the diagnosis: chronic arthritis up and down his spine. Though there isn't an all-out cure, doctors pinpointed the four vertebrae that were giving Green the most trouble and froze the adjacent nerves so that he couldn't feel the pain.
It provided instant relief and gave Green added inspiration heading into this week's Q School.
"You don't know how bad you feel until all of the sudden you remember what normal is," Green said. "I was like, 'Why don't you just do my whole spine?'
"It's mind-boggling. And I do believe that a better back will help me get rid of the children."
Next to former U.S. Open winner Scott Simpson, Green is the second-oldest player at PGA West trying to obtain his tour card. Most players are young enough to be his son. But Green doesn't care. He has one goal in mind -- victory.
He knows he isn't going to compete with guys like Vijay Singh and Tiger Woods on a week-in, week-out basis, but he still has the dream. With everything he's gone through, on and off the course, he wants to win on the PGA Tour one more time. He wants to stand on an 18th green, hold a trophy high above his head and know that the demons are dead, once and for all.
"I wouldn't mind the failure if it was my game or if it was my swing" Green said. "But because it's mental, I can't stomach that. That's what hurts so much. That's what pisses me off, gives me the sleepless nights, the crying spells and all the depression. But it's also why I won't give up.
"I want to win again."
Wayne Drehs is a staff writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at Wayne.Drehs@espn3.com.
