BIG MAN, LITTLE BALL
The cringing middle in sport is that line between a close call and catastrophe. In racing, whether with cars or with horses, landing on the wrong side of that line can mean death.
In golf, we may never think so desperately, but the game has its own familiar version of the edge, and it sounds like this: FORE! But only maybe will you have enough time to react before a near miss or a painful sting.
When Trey Mullinax was zinged in the back of the head by a golf ball last May, he never saw it coming. One of his pro-am partners had a shanked a ball at close range and it struck Mullinax near his visual cortex. Taken to a nearby hospital, he was evaluated and told he had a mild concussion. OK, easy enough to step past this.
The next day, he opened the Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, with a 67. He had headaches, but felt better on Friday, shot 69, and found himself in the top 10. But in every way that counts for a PGA Tour player, that was effectively the end of his season. Mullinax shot 75-71 on the weekend to settle for a modest paycheck, then proceeded to miss the cut in six tournaments into mid-July, before admitting that something was really wrong.
For one, his depth perception was off. “My eyes and my brain were telling me two different things,” he says. “It was a process getting back.”
Months, actually. Time during which Mullinax rested his brain, then went through a series of treatments before planning to return to competition in 2020. His injury caused him to fall out of the exempt categories for the PGA Tour, but with a minor medical extension, he had two starts in his return to make the FedEx Cup points he needed to regain status. His backup is the Korn Ferry Tour. It’s a picture of how that precarious line can make all the difference in an athlete’s career. What’s sure in one moment can fall to doubt and question in the next. And it can play on the mind—for bad and for good.
Trey Mullinax first learned to love golf because it meant hours and hours of time with his dad. Like other American kids, he played baseball. Like other tall kids, he played basketball. And like other Alabama kids, he played football. But dad won out, in a come-along-with-me way.
“We’d play on weekends together, or he’d meet me after school and we’d play nine holes,” Mullinax recalls. “It was a really great bonding time for me and him. I was like, ‘I’m OK at it, I need to get a lot better at it, but I enjoy playing with my dad, so why don’t I keep doing this?’”
So Chip, the father, and Trey, the son, agreed to dedicate time to Trey’s improvement. Many evenings they’d go to the at-home teaching studio of Archie Burroughs, where Trey would learn the swing, building a foundation for the years ahead.
Then came the day when all that hard work paid off: Trey beat dad. On that day, Chip let Trey play forward a set of tees, with Granddad, who was always a part of the game on Father’s Day. Trey was 13 years old. “We were having fun, and I was taking it serious, because I wanted to beat them,” Trey remembers. “It was just a really, really great day.”
For the young players who regularly play AJGA and other high-caliber junior events, a win over Dad and Granddad may not be a big deal, but Mullinax played most of his competitive rounds close to home and his success as a junior was modest. What he did enjoy were his summer weeks at the University of Alabama golf camp. One summer, when he was 15 or 16, the captain of his team was the father of Crimson Tide Coach Jay Seawell. He watched Trey hit several drives, then called Jay: “I’ve got a guy here who hits it long and straight. You might want to come watch him.” Mullinax calls that the beginning of his recruiting to Alabama. Still, he wasn’t sure if he had the skills.
When the call from Coach Seawell came several years later, the timing was remarkable. Trey was on the phone with Coach Alan Kaufman from the University of Alabama-Birmingham, minutes from committing to play for the Blazers, when Seawell’s name popped up on Mullinax’s phone.
“I told Coach Kaufman, ‘Hang on a second, I need to answer this call.’”
Then Seawell offered Mullinax the only thing the coach had left in his recruiting budget. “I don’t have a lot of money left, but I’ll give you books and you can come play for me,” Seawell told him.
That was enough. Mullinax reconnected with Kaufman, apologized, and said, “I just committed to Alabama.”
Maybe for the first time, Mullinax was discovering the fine line between your plans and what plays out in one’s life. Had Seawell called any later, Mullinax would have been faced with a completely different decision scenario.
Still, Trey had to tell Chip. “I know they’re only offering me books, but I’ve got to go,” he told his dad.
“I agree. You’ve got to.” What else was Dad supposed to say? This is what they had been working toward all along.
The time Mullinax spent at Alabama proved to be a pivoting point, both in his golf and in his personal life. The team is perennially competitive, and they vied for national championships throughout Mullinax’s stay there. Four of his teammates—Scott Strohmeyer, Bobby Wyatt, Cory Whitsett, and major champion Justin Thomas—have gone on to spend time on the PGA and Korn Ferry Tours with Mullinax.
“I soaked in a lot in those four years,” Mullinax says, “because I knew that if I was going to have a chance to beat those guys, I was going to have to learn from them first.”
Meanwhile, Mullinax added Coach Seawell to his list of key men in his golfing life, alongside his dad and Archie Burroughs. “I wouldn’t be here, on the Tour, if it wasn’t for them,” he says.
But the development was slow at times, and even excruciatingly disappointing. In his first national championship, as a freshman playing at Karsten Creek in Oklahoma, Mullinax couldn’t break 84. “I felt like I hurt our team, like I didn’t help our team any,” Mullinax recalls.
That recollection, though, is coupled with another. And this time the outcome showed just what can happen in the long, steady development of a player. As a senior, it was Mullinax who sank the deciding putt on the seventeenth hole at Prairie Dunes Country Club in Kansas. “When we won that championship and Coach Seawell ran and jumped into my arms, that was such a special feeling because it was such the opposite from Karsten Creek,” Mullinax says. “What a crazy stretch four years can be, right?”
Of course, Seawell was an unexchangeable part of Mullinax’s golf trajectory. But it was the coach’s introduction of his players to College Golf Fellowship’s Stephen Bunn that had the deeper impact on Mullinax’s life.
Trey had grown up in a church-going family, and he had gained a lot of support through his high school years from his pastor, Jamin Grubbs. Mullinax was appreciative of that upbringing. He wasn’t one of the kids looking to escape religious ties the minute he set foot on campus. But it was still good to get some guidance as to where he could find the support he was looking for. Bunn is himself a graduate of Alabama, so accepting an invitation to bring his biblical insight to the team each week was a natural. Every Thursday he’d gather with Coach Seawell and any of the teammates who wanted to connect. Most came.
“Those were the days I looked forward to most in college,” Mullinax says. “Bunn would come down and we would have such a great practice, then Bible study, and then we’d go eat, and we’d go to a basketball game. Thursday nights felt like a Saturday night.”
What Bunn brought, at least as far as Mullinax was concerned, was critical for life. “He poured into me the man I wanted to be when I left school, the man I wanted to be as a husband to my future wife. Coach Seawell was like my dad away from my dad, and Stephen Bunn was like my fun uncle, who poured the word of God into me all the time. I feel like those men are part of my family.”
As it is, Stephen Bunn’s influence in Mullinax’s life did not end with college. That both lived in Alabama gave them opportunity to meet up when Mullinax was at home, and Bunn is part of the chaplaincy for the PGA Tour’s weekly fellowship. In the months after his injury, Mullinax leaned on Bunn for assurances.
If the line between staying power and another course in life really is that fine at the top levels of professional sports, an injury can lead an athlete to ask all kinds of questions, some even of God. At times like these, a player who is well-surrounded may have the advantage of encouragement and counsel that can carry him through lean or challenging times.
Mullinax’s full team includes his caddie, his swing instructor, and his agent, but he lists his family at the top: his wife Abi and his parents. Add to these Seawell and Bunn, and you have what Mullinax calls his “tight corner.”
“Those would be the people I would call if I’m ever in a funk. I know that with any decision I have to make, they’ll tell me where it will be good or bad, and what will be in my best interest,” he says.
But Mullinax knows certainly that his best interest is not always the same as what he wants for himself. Among Mullinax’s favorite passages of Scripture is Jeremiah 29:11. A lot of athletes cling to it, actually, for it appears to promise a smooth road in life: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, to give you a future and a hope.”
Then that golf ball struck Mullinax right near his visual cortex, and that future and hope were not so clear anymore.
“I was having a really good year, really consistent, and then I get hit in the head with a golf ball, and now my plans are different than the plans God has for me. I’m not playing golf, not having the success I want, because I can’t play. What’s the plan here, Lord? I feel like I’m doing everything right. What’s going on?” Mullinax’s questions were as big as any he’d ever asked. The answers were no smaller.
“God kind of just hit me with the realization that the reason I wasn’t where I wanted to be was because I wasn’t really following the plans he’d laid out for me. I was tuning him out and focusing on me, me, me. I wanted him to go my way and right now. Instead I needed to hear what he was telling me: ‘Hey man, I’ve got a plan for you right here. Why don’t you just follow me and I’ll show you that the plan I have for you is so much greater than what you’re doing right now?’ Honestly, it took getting hit in the head with a golf ball to realize that.”
No one asks for suffering. It just comes with life. Whether you are an athlete at the highest levels or a weekend warrior trying to beat your friends for bragging rights, you can get stopped in your tracks. Partly this may steel you, redoubling your resolve at the game you love.
Trey Mullinax was already resolved. His buddies’ winning success on Tour, particularly by friends like J.T. Poston and Keith Mitchell, fueled his hunger. “If I can’t win,” Mullinax says, “I’d rather have somebody that I love or have a really great friendship with, I’d rather have them win. But it also motivates you, because you know you’ve beat them before, so if they win, then I’m not far off from being able to win.”
Now his injury has added to Mullinax’s motivation. He knows how close he was when he got hit. He’s fighting to get back there.
But when injury or interruption you cannot control comes at you strongly, as it did Mullinax, it can also soften you, allowing you to see some things that need to be reordered in your life. During his months away, Mullinax’s little daughter Sawyer Ann learned to recognize his face as that of someone who was more than passing through. “She knows me as Daddy now when I come home.” More than this, the Mullinax family has had time to consider one big question about their faith: “God, what are you trying to teach us here?”
That answer won’t always come clearly or quickly, but it’s the question for all suffering—the question that leads to firm footing, no matter what side of the line you find yourself standing on today.