PLAYER RECORD
1 PGA Tour Champions Win: 2019 Dick’s Sporting Goods Open
BETTER LATE
LINKS PLAYERS MAGAZINE 2020 ANNUAL EDITION
You won’t find the Emerald Coast Tour on TV. It’s the low minor leagues of golf, where baby faces and range junkies compete for winners’ checks that don’t sniff the smallest payouts on the big tours. Call it the field of dreams if you want—if your dreams include sleeping in your car or subsisting on energy bars and cheap hamburgers. And we haven’t even started talking about the old men.
In the mid-1980s, when the PGA Tour took some of its most beloved stars—Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino, and eventually Jack Nicklaus—and planted them on the fledgling “Senior Tour,” the possibility of golfing rebirth was born in a hundred starry-eyed 40-somethings. A second chance? A new hope? Whatever you called it, a lot of guys who had once chased the biggest trophies in the world started practicing to chase a new set of prizes being given to the winners of the senior set. Here, golf’s golden handshake was created. If you were turning 50, you might find another arena for that competitive urge.
In the years that have ensued, the dominant names on what is now the PGA Tour Champions have shifted, from Irwin to Langer and now, it appears, to McCarron. But one thing that hasn’t changed is that fresh what if, custom made for erstwhile PGA Tour journeymen like Doug Barron.
Barron showed up at the Emerald Coast Tour’s kickoff event in March of 2019. His game, he thought, was in good shape, but it needed testing. Gulf Shores, Alabama, is seven hours’ drive from Barron’s home in Memphis, where he’d been financing his renewed dream as co-owner of a merchant services company. He’d tried teaching golf after his PGA Tour career stalled in 2009 and he’d missed too many cuts in 2011 and 2012 on the Korn Ferry Tour. That didn’t stick, though it helped with his own game. Now, at 49, Barron had a lot of unanswered questions. Chief among them was this: Could he hold his own against real competition? Gulf Shores was about to tell him.
It turned out Barron’s premonition was legit. He won that week, cashing a check for a less-than-whopping $6,500. Barron wasn’t relying on the income. What he was getting instead was a glimpse into the possibilities. In May he won again, then once more in June. Among the big-hitting young bucks, his game and his nerves were holding steady. Now, he needed to know, could those nerves stand a trip across the pond?
Barron would turn 50 in July, one day before the Senior Open Championship at Royal Lytham & St. Annes. “My confidence was just beaming,” Barron said, as well it should have been after his play on the Emerald Coast. “I couldn’t wait to turn 50, and I couldn’t wait to qualify over here. So I talked with my wife and got the price right for the trip, and I went over there.”
On the course, Barron kept rolling. He was medalist in the qualifier, then fired successive 69s to start the event. Four off Wes Short’s blistering 67-67 pace, Barron found himself clustered among major and senior major champions: Retief Goosen, Bernhard Langer, Darren Clarke, Paul Broadhurst, Miguel Ángel Jiménez. Maybe the air was too rare, or maybe the travels finally caught up with Barron. On Saturday, he shot 73. But so did Short, with Goosen and Jiménez struggling to 74s. The lead went to Broadhurst and his fine 67, but it was Langer who surged past them all with a Sunday 66.
And yet, quietly, there was Barron, the tour’s first-timer, going out in 31, holding his own on the back nine, and finishing in fifth place. His earnings? The equivalent of $58,663 US, the largest check he’d cashed from tournament golf in more than 12 years. Things were getting serious. So Barron set his sights on the Dick’s Sporting Goods Open, three weeks later in Endicott, New York, a familiar stop from his PGA Tour days.
Having given up his PGA Tour membership several years before, Barron had to pre-qualify, which meant showing up early the week before the event. Barron got through the pre-qualifier, then teed it up again at the full qualifier on Monday of tournament week, hoping to gain a spot in the field. He did. Now it was a matter of keeping that game hot.
On Friday, Barron made seven birdies. His 65 put him in the lead alongside Jiménez. On Saturday, the round was suspended after Barron and Jiménez had teed off at the fifteenth. When they returned the next morning, Barron finished off a 68, while Jiménez fell back. The newbie was alone in the lead, and he went back to take a nap before teeing off again.
The first hole at En-Joie Golf Club, where Barron had played eight BC Opens, asks the players a question: hybrid or driver? “I’m feeling good,” Barron says of the past as though it’s right now. “I got up there with a driver and hit it 60 yards from the pin. It’s a really tight hole and water is in play if you hit it too far, so I hit it just perfect.” The day was set.
Barron birdied three holes on the front nine, then finally took a look at the leaderboard at the twelfth. Freddie Couples. Barron had a good idea that somebody would come charging—“every week somebody shoots nine-under on the Champions Tour, so I was prepared for that.” This week’s somebody was Couples, the beloved smooth swinger who had posted a 15-under par total that left Barron looking up at one of the most famous names in golf.
But I felt like I was pretty hungry, and I had been working pretty hard. I had won three little tournaments against 20-year-olds, so that gave me a lot of confidence that I could go do this with these guys.But Barron had “an easy up and down for birdie” at the twelfth. He converted to tie Couples, made two more pars, split the fairway at the fifteenth, then somehow breathed a sigh of relief when the weather horns went off again. “I was feeling great about my game, but it was pretty humid up there that week, so it was a nice break,” Barron said.
He retreated to the players’ lounge, where for nearly two hours he sat with Couples, Jay Haas, Woody Austin, and Billy Andrade. And he watched TV, with his eye to one thing: the replay of Couples’ round, where Barron saw just how Freddie had navigated the closing holes. He called his wife. “I said, ‘Honey, I’m going to figure out how to finish.’” Then he went back out to the course, birdied the fifteenth and added another at the par-3 seventeenth. It may have seemed like only a blink after the late restart, but it had taken Doug Barron 12 days to become the first-ever player on the PGA or PGA Tour Champions to pre-qualify, Monday qualify, and lead wire-to-wire on the way to victory.
“This is no disrespect to any Hall of Famers or any other great players out there, but a lot of those guys aren’t the same players they were when they were 30 years old,” Barron reflected at the end of the season. “Not saying they aren’t great players! But I felt like I was pretty hungry, and I had been working pretty hard. I had won three little tournaments against 20-year-olds, so that gave me a lot of confidence that I could go do this with these guys. This isn’t going to happen every week, but I was on my game that week.”
In all of this, you need to know that Doug Barron hasn’t always been on his game. In 2010, he was on his face, alone in a room upstairs in his house, just praying that his family still loved him enough to let him go to Target with them. His family relationships were that broken.
Early in his years on Tour, Barron had been invited to attend a Bible study among the players by his friend Stan Utley. The influence of Dean Bouzeos, Larry Moody, Dave Krueger, and others who traveled with the Korn Ferry and PGA Tours, brought Barron to a place of belief if not surrender.
“I would say I didn’t become a Christ follower until about nine years ago,” Barron says. “I didn’t surrender everything until about nine years ago.”
Everything?
“I was holding back a lot of pride issues and maybe a lot of guilt and shame. I had a point in my life where I had to look in the mirror, and I didn’t like the guy I saw in the mirror. It was either keep being that same guy or get divorced, lose your family—I’m not prideful about it, but I’m thankful.”
Barron moved upstairs for six months. Self-exile, call it. “I remember calling up my pastor, and I told him I didn’t cheat on my wife or anything; I just was not a very good husband. I was mentally abusive at times and I finally, six or seven months later, after God had peeled back all the layers of the onion, I called my pastor and I’ll never forget as long as I live what he said, which was if she leaves me tomorrow I’m still going to be a good dad, and I’ll be a good ex-husband, but I could live with it then. So, I knew God had done a work in my life and it was kind of cool and hard to explain.”
Leslie Barron saw the change. “My wife fell in love with me again,” Doug says. “It was the greatest blessing in my life.”
It’s not magic, and Barron is open about needing to remain vigilant in his faith. “It’s easy to go back to old habits at times, but you catch yourself, and I have to fight every day. I think it’s like being an addict—you have to wake up every day and start over with God sometimes. My tendencies are tough. I don’t have my anger, and I don’t have some of the old qualities that used to come out, but you still have to fight Satan on a daily basis, I believe. At least I do.”
The Barrons, now married for 24 years, have two sons, Buzz, who is a freshman at Mississippi State, and Wiley, a middle schooler. The boys enjoy University of Memphis basketball games with Dad. They shoot buckets together and sometimes play golf. “I kept them out of competitive golf on purpose,” Barron explains, “unless they wanted to play. I wanted them to want to play golf. I didn’t want them to play because of me.”
Doug also enjoys sharing his love of the movies with his family. When he started on Tour, his friends Omar Uresti and Dave Stockton, Jr., like Barron, “weren’t big partiers. So we were at the movies all the time.” And forget favorites. He loves most anything, though classics like Shawshank Redemption or The Godfather stand out.
All these family times are only the happy extras, of course. Meanwhile, Barron has had to walk alongside his own father, whose failing health demanded special care. For a long time, Barron couldn’t have a meaningful conversation with his dad; the medications he was taking wouldn’t allow it. A change in care and an elimination of some unnecessary meds woke Dad up again. “I’ve had some great conversations with him,” Doug says, “and it has given me a lot of peace.”
Indeed, peace and pleasure are evident throughout a conversation with Barron. At the core, he continues to watch most closely what God is doing in his life. “I couldn’t do what I have done, especially what I did this year, without God being in control,” he says. “I am a control freak, and it has been very difficult for me to give up control, but God has done work in my life to be able to do that.”
Barron’s win at the Dick’s Sporting Goods Open gave him an exemption on the Tour Champions through 2021. Likely he’ll continue to get texts from chaplain Larry Moody like those he received during Dick’s: Stay positive. Know whatever happens, you can rest assured in Christ.
“When I played on the PGA Tour,” Barron says, “I may have been a little hard on myself. That’s just a fact. I think positivity has made a huge difference in my life and in my golf game, because I haven’t beat myself up so bad.”
Now a few others on Tour may be hoping he doesn’t beat them up either.