PLAYER RECORD
1 PGA Tour win: 2013 Wells Fargo Championship

A CLEAR VISION

LINKS PLAYERS MAGAZINE, 2015 ANNUAL EDITION
By Jeff Hopper

I was in the second grade and it was Valentine’s Day. I got home from school after all the fun stuff, passing out Valentines with all the other kids. I had all this candy—a bunch of chocolate. We were watching TV in my parents’ room, and I decided that I wanted to make my mom something special for Valentine’s Day.
We had a little walkway into our house, so I thought I could build a nest. I would put some PVC pipe around it and some bears in it and some candy hearts and stuff.

I went into the garage by myself, where I had a little tool kit. They were real tools. The saw was like a foot long, but it was a real saw. I found some PVC in the corner of the garage and I started to saw it in half. I cut into it, but it wouldn’t come apart, so I hit it into the ground and it broke. A piece came off and grazed my eyeball. I remember just screaming.

When Derek Ernst tells this story now, it’s not dramatic. Even for a 24-year-old, it happened a long time ago. What intrigues him more is the way doctors still look at his eye.

“The eye doctors like it because there’s a scar down the middle of your eyeball,” he laughs. “They love it. They try as good as they can to get me to see out of my right eye, but they say I only see about 50 percent of what other people see. If I cover my good eye, I can walk around, but it’s very, very blurry.”
And there you have a professional athlete. One who makes his money by making putts, a skill that at the PGA Tour level would seem to require world-class depth perception. Except Derek Ernst has almost none.

You do, of course, learn to cope. To walk without running into furniture. To drive without rear-ending the car ahead of you. Even to hit long putts close.
“I’ve only played golf with my eyes the way they are,” Ernst explains. “I don’t know any other way to do it.”

Fortunately, that’s taken him quite a ways so far. Twice Player of the Year in the Mountain West Conference, 2010 runner-up at the US Public Links Championship, and 2013 winner on the Tour at the Wells Fargo Championship, Ernst is assembling a résumé that calls for attention. Until it comes, Ernst is working very hard at three things: understanding his game, assembling the skills that improve it, and building a character that holds up under the demands of the arena.

In the beginning, Ernst was like a lot of healthy kids, playing whatever game the uniform called for. “When I was in elementary school, my dad said, ‘You’ve got to pick a sport, every season, no matter what it is.’” So he did. Football fell away for want of more size, but baseball, tennis, and golf remained. Tennis was the first of those to get jettisoned, then in seventh grade, he was drilled by a fastball. “Right in the ribs. I couldn’t breathe for over a minute. They brought the ambulance and everything. I said, ‘I don’t know if this is for me. I’d rather just play golf and not get hurt.’”

So golf it was. And when you’re willing to practice like a maniac—and not just the proverbial one—chances are good you’ll enjoy success.

“I won junior tournaments, I won amateur tournaments, I won college tournaments, eventually on the PGA. It was a collection,” Ernst explains. “Every tournament is a test to see where you are. Then you go out and try and improve on it. You go out every day and play nine holes to see where your game is, then you go out and you work on it. The next day you see where your game is, then you go out and you work on it. Always evaluating yourself, that’s how you get better.”

Of course, nearly every tour player, whether or not it’s a big enough tour to catch on TV, is working hard at what they all call “the dream.” Can I get to the big Tour? Can I win there? Can I win more than once? Can I win a major? There’s always another step, always a bigger challenge.

So here is Ernst’s goal: to get one percent better every day. It’s an idea he attributes to tennis great Andre Agassi, and Ernst follows the idea with a dreamer’s question: “If you do that every single day, who knows where you’ll be in two years?”

How does he do it? Well, if you have even one lazy bone in you, you might not want to hear it. “If I’m really going to practice,” he begins, “I’m going to spend five or six hours a day. Maybe play nine holes. I work on hitting balls, short game, bunker shots, not just good lies—give yourself difficult shots. The ball above your feet, the ball below your feet. You’ll still find shots you’ve never had before. It’s like a lot of sports. To get good at something, you have to put a lot of time into it.

“If I were to put it in percentages, it would be about 20 percent of the time hitting balls, 50 percent of the time putting and short game, and 30 percent of the time playing—actually getting out on the course and testing myself. Every one does something different. You’ve got to know… do you feel better after you hit a bunch of balls, do you feel better after you go and play 18 holes? It’s how you feel, how you know yourself. Are you getting more out of which one?”
There is also the matter of purpose. Ernst does not lack for that. “It’s all about creating consistency, knowing where the ball’s going to go nine out of 10 times versus five out of 10 times.”

It’s no surprise that Ernst is so mindful of all these details and the desires that push him to attend to each one. He’s been serious like this for years, sobered by family and faith. As in his golf game, there have been times of testing, times of doubt, but he is committed to doing what it takes to get stronger.

“I was born in a Christian home,” he says in reflecting on his foundations. “My dad was a strong Christian and I loved him, but when you’re six or seven years old, you just do what your parents say. When I got older, though, I didn’t want to go to church as much. I was more into sports and hanging out with my friends.”

Come high school, Ernst found himself at a local church where the music appealed to him. “I’m really a big music guy. It just moves me. When I hear the music, I get into it.”

One week, the kids went off to camp and Ernst joined them. “At camp, I felt as close to God as I’d ever felt before. We were singing ‘Mighty to Save,’ I think, and I got down on my knees and started crying. I was only 17 at the time. I grew up knowing Christ, but I never pursued him; I never knew what to do exactly. I got some people around me who helped with that, who pushed me to where I needed to be. That’s where I felt like I really started dedicating my life to God, those last years of high school.”

College brought its challenges, including friends who pushed him to party—hardly an oddity when you go to school in Las Vegas. “I tried to take the times when people were hanging out, drinking and smoking, and I’d try to consume that with people who loved God. You become like the five people you hang out with the most. Look at those five people, what are they doing? Because that’s where you’re going to be in a couple of years.”

The PGA Tour itself has become a place where people are of great significance, and by this we’re speaking not only of the athletes. Players have teams and support networks that help them manage their own little corporations. In a clinical sense, the player is the product and the team helps develop and market that product. So besides the often visible caddies, there is also an agent, a swing coach, a fitness trainer, a sports psychologist, and more. Zach Johnson, for one, hires a consultant to interpret the many stats the Tour produces and help design a workout and practice program to improve in weak areas.

Beyond this business layer are a player’s friends and family. If he is married, his wife may frequently travel with him and help with accommodation and meal arrangements. Parents and in-laws might walk inside the ropes or even assume double-duty as a caddie. College friends may show up for the weekend, or a child the player has befriended as part of a local hospital visit or charity outreach.

For a player like Derek Ernst, these people occupy the core of his development. When he won on Tour in 2013, virtually no one was looking for it. Despite his exceptional pedigree—including 11 appearances in USGA events by the time he had graduated from UNLV—Ernst had done little to make himself recognizable on Tour since he’d quietly slipped through Q-School the fall before. He’d missed the cut in five of his previous seven events, finishing no better than a tie for 47th the week before at the Zurich Classic. He left New Orleans buried on the alternate list to get into the Wells Fargo.

But the greens were bad at Quail Hollow that week, as ugly as any player could remember at a Tour venue. One by one, players withdrew from the competition until Ernst’s name came up. He would play the tournament with some of the game’s best names on its young trophy: Tiger Woods, Vijay Singh, Jim Furyk, Rory McIlroy.

“I got there on Tuesday in the late afternoon,” he recalled last fall, “and played nine holes, the back nine. That’s all I got to play. Then I walked the front nine. That’s all I got to do.”

It was enough. In a week when low scores were hard to find, Ernst made eight birdies in the opening round and found himself atop the leaderboard with McIlroy, Ryan Moore, and one of his own boyhood heroes, Nick Watney. Ernst actually hails from an unheralded golf hotbed in Central California. While Ernst was growing up playing the game in Clovis, Watney was garnering college golf honors at nearby Fresno State. The Tour’s Kevin Chappel also was a product of the Clovis schools and went on to play at UCLA, where he won the NCAA individual championship. Watney is nine years older than Ernst; Chappel, five. Unknowingly, their exploits in the junior and college ranks helped plant a vision in Ernst.

The following rounds at Quail Hollow demanded much of the players, but Ernst was among the survivors although he shot just 3-under total for those three days. He was joined in a playoff by Britain’s David Lynn, another non-winner on Tour. Ernst quickly made par on the first playoff hole, and it was enough to win.
The victory brought Ernst $1.2 million in earnings, but the real prize—as it always is for a young player—was the exemption. For the rest of the 2013 season plus the next two seasons, he would have full status on Tour. By the end of that year, having made just four other cuts and not finishing better than 44th, Ernst knew just what he needed to do: retool. And he knew his exemption afforded him time to do it.

“To get better,” he explains, “sometimes you’ve got to get worse.” Rebuilding takes time. But Ernst started by reassembling his team, carefully. He went back to his former swing coach and switched caddies and trainers. For the first time, he hired a mental coach. “I said, ‘Well, if I’m going to make changes, I should do it now, because next year (2014) might be a bad year,’ which it was. I struggled, but I expected it.”

As a Tour winner, his first start in 2014 was at the Tournament of Champions in Hawaii. It was ugly. He finished dead last in the no-cut event, nine shots worse than the player ahead of him. “Somebody said something about me in an article,” he remembers without fondness. “Just bashed me. Said, ‘He sucks. That thing was a fluke that he won. He’ll never even come close again.’ All this kind of stuff. They didn’t even know what was going on. I had changed everything. I had gained 20 pounds in training, I was working on a new swing, I had a brand new caddie I had never used before. It made me mad.”

But Ernst persisted. By year’s end he had strung together eight consecutive cuts made, a promising streak for a player who had never before made more than three in a row. He was pleased but a long way from finished. “I’m going to keep going with it,” he said with a reasoned hope. “I don’t want to just make cuts, but to seek top tens every week. Once I do that, then I’ll go top fives. Pretty soon I’m going to feel like I can win every chance I get. Eventually, I feel like I’m going to get there, because I know what it takes and I know how to do it now.”

A big part of the gain, Ernst knows, will come in building a character that supports his goals in the game. For that, he has people, too. One in particular is Pete Hiskey, the son of Links Players founder Jim Hiskey.

Pete became aware of Ernst when Derek won at Quail Hollow. During the TV interview after the win, Ernst jumped in with, “I want to thank my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.” It wasn’t something he’d planned on saying. “It just kind of popped out,” he says. “I felt like God was using me for his glory that whole week. It was just a cool feeling.”

So Hiskey tracked Ernst down several weeks later at the AT&T Championship, close to Hiskey’s home in Maryland. “Pete knew that I was a Christian, and he tries to help bring young people up. He and his dad and I went to lunch at the Corner Bakery. We’ve become great friends.”

And, as most friends do, they talk. “Pete is a huge help. I feel like there are some things that you don’t tell your parents. You want them to know that you’re an adult, that you have the ability to handle it. So you have other people. Pete is that guy. How do I handle this relationship with my girlfriend? How do I deal with this sin and that? He had all the answers to help me out. He’s been a big influence for sure.”

The next steps for Derek Ernst remain to be seen. The same could be said for any young player. But here is a young man who began 2015 with as many PGA Tour wins as Rickie Fowler and Jordan Spieth. Ernst may be less visible, but he’s no less committed. He wants to win again. And he wants to do it right, relying on his people and passing on what he’s been given by them.

“I love giving back,” Ernst says in thinking about his opportunities to help with Fellowship of Christian Athletes or the junior golf programs in his hometown. “It’s fun to give back because it’s not all about me being on the PGA Tour. It’s about friendship and love and faith and relationships that make the world go ’round more than money.”

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