Life on the road flies by. Days become weeks. Weeks blend into a month. Blink, and I’m in a different city. Time, merely a reference point, whizzes by. It’s almost August.
A steady recipe of: flight, practice round, prep work, tournament, hoteling, googling, yelping — an attempt to become local as a professional nomad. Just to do the same thing in a new place the following week.
As I’m writing this, I’m jammed into the floor between two queen beds in my hotel room. Dirty clothes: everywhere. My bed: unmade. A few empty water bottles: scattered across the floor. Clear plastic bags with “3M Open” plastered on them, shrinking the real estate on the counters. The state of my hotel room: the perfect metaphor for my mind… A big, jumbled mess masquerading as slightly structured.
This is the Tour life.
We are currently in week 5 of 6 to close out the regular season. We finished 26th in Detroit. And we’ve missed every cut since.
We couldn’t find any mojo at The John Deere. Louisville didn’t give us any love. Tahoe was a tough pill to swallow. And in Minneapolis, we just couldn’t put the pieces together.
I’d heard horror stories of missing cuts in bunches, but I’d never lived through it. The hopelessness. The consuming nature of it. Well, that’s four in a row for us, a career high. And looking back, the most frustrating thing is that we had great chances at all of those events.
At the John Deere, we played the easy holes poorly. In Louisville, it was a late string of bogeys after a brilliant front 9 on Friday. In Tahoe, it felt like we were going to do it. Three consecutive birdies late on Friday to get to the number, only to follow it up with a debilitatingly painful bogey on 16, followed by a chip on 18 that squared up the flagstick and popped out to an inch.
Back-breaking.
At times, this profession can seem like a vacuum of hope, kicking you while you’re down. When you’re in a funk, the little things become magnified. Every small miscue feels like the golfing gods working against you. Just when you think you can’t go any deeper, you find a shovel.
This week in Minnesota? A lack of momentum and a costly double in round two. That’s all it takes. Nothing too far off, just not on. What feels like solid golf can be boiled down simply: not good enough.
The line out here is fine.
Missing cuts is easy. A few bounces the wrong way. An off week with your ball striking. A few short putts missed. You’re packing your bags, changing your flights, and leaving town with a bad taste in your mouth. But most of the time, it leaves me with one prevailing thought: Man, it didn’t even feel like we played badly. It feels close.
That’s the side of pro golf that goes unseen.
You see the guys raising the trophy above their heads on Sundays. The private jet rides. The guys making a putt worth $500,000 on the final hole to finish in 2nd place. The guy who shoots a Sunday 62 to finish inside the top 5. They only show you the good.
But what you don’t see are the guys trying to survive out here. That’s us right now.
Every shot feels life or death. Every bogey feels crippling — every birdie, a life raft that could get us to the weekend. Every Friday, a frustrated handshake with each other as we now have to figure out what to do for the next 48 hours that doesn’t involve blowing our brains out. You see, this is professional golf. The lonely nature of the beast. The man in the arena. The man continuing to get knocked down, trying to find out if he can somehow stand back up.
That’s golf.
The silver lining in all of this? Our fortune will inevitably turn at some point. Hard work usually wins in the end. Preparation typically prevails. And (somehow) remaining positive/optimistic is paramount. And I say usually/typically because sometimes, you work your ass off and still fail. Therein lies the beauty in all this. Not all hard work stories end in glory. Isn’t that what makes for a great adventure? Not knowing how it ends. Not knowing if everything you’re working towards will fail spectacularly or somehow defy the odds.
The last month has been a massive kick in the nuts. Every practice session riddled with frustration. Every Friday, a funeral. But we keep showing up. We keep putting the work in. And every Monday, hope is restored. Every Thursday, a new chance to change our lives.
Man, I can’t wait to get back to work tomorrow.
Peace,
Drew Murdock aka Murda
