PLAYER RECORD
1 PGA Tour win: 2016 Quicken Loans National

WAITING OUT THE STORMS

LINKS PLAYERS MAGAZINE, 2017 ANNUAL EDITION
By Billy Hurley with Jeff Hopper

Early in my freshman year at the Naval Academy, I caught grief for the golf I played on Saturday mornings. In one way it was an innocent activity, something I was supposed to be doing with the other members of our team. But it also provided me an escape from the rigors of “Saturday morning trainings,” when the upperclassmen would put the freshmen through the grind of a run or an obstacle course or whatever physical exertion they demanded.

I remember returning from practice one Saturday, and my roommates were passed out, just whooped. They had been put through the ringer that morning, so much so that one of them threw up. You feel kind of bad about that, standing there in your golf gear after a much milder workout on the driving range and putting green.

Golf was not the only reason I had chosen the Naval Academy, though. I loved the game, but coming out of high school I wasn’t sure just how good I was and whether I had much of a future in the sport.

My eyes had turned toward the Academy during the summer before my sophomore year of high school. Vice Admiral Charles Minter was the father of the pastor at the church my family attended, and he gave me a tour around the campus. From that day forward, the Naval Academy was the only place I wanted to go to school. In fact, it was the only place I applied.

Once you get there, though, the whole experience can be overwhelming. It’s a big enough adjustment to be a freshman in college away from home, no matter where you are. But at the Naval Academy, you’re required to take no fewer than 15 credits each semester, and often I found myself near 20. In the midst of that is always a military class—leadership, ethics, navigation—meant to prepare you for the five years of service you give to the country in exchange for your education. Then, in my case, I was adding the demands of being a Division I athlete.

I was no different than most athletes: I wanted to play, to start, to contribute. So I worked hard at my game, at least as much as I could without falling too far behind. Every time we played a tournament, we were gone from school, which puts you in a position of having to play catchup when you return. Fortunately, academics always came fairly easily to me, so I was able to meet the requirements as long as I managed my time well.

Eventually, with my keeping everything in order, some of the upperclassmen recognized that I was bringing a measure of pride to the school because I was maybe the best player on our golf team. This gave them a little more respect for what I was doing and they backed off from saying I was just skipping out on those tough Saturday mornings.

YEARS OF PREPARATION
Before his career as a police officer, my dad had been an assistant golf professional, so he knew the game better than most. When I was just a kid, I would follow his foursome around the course and hit chip shots to sprinkler heads while they putted out on each hole. I was never too serious about it, though, since I was more of a baseball player growing up in Virginia.

My freshman year of high school, I told my dad that I wanted to go out for the golf team. He said, “That’s great.” But he also kept signing me up for baseball, because he knew my golf game wasn’t very good. He was right. That first year I didn’t earn my way into any of the matches. In the summer after that year, however, I spent a lot of time playing golf and really got into the game. By my junior year, I quit everything else. Golf was my sport. I knew that I probably wasn’t good enough to play college baseball, but I had a chance at playing college golf.

Like every high school golfer, I had my pipe dreams about playing on the PGA Tour. I liked watching Freddie Couples and Davis Love growing up, and Mark O’Meara caught my attention when he won the Masters and the Open Championship—we still called it the British Open then—about the time my interest in the game was picking up. But how far you can go with your dreams takes a lot of proving. I wasn’t an AJGA champion like Rickie Fowler or Jordan Spieth, and I was going to need my time at the Naval Academy to keep working on my game.

Little by little, my ability moved in the direction I wanted. By my senior year at the Academy, I was figuring out how to win and even compete with the best. I finished second in the medal rounds at the US Amateur in the August ahead of my senior season; then I was the individual champion in six of the 12 events our team played that year. I found my name being mentioned next to Bill Haas, Nick Watney, Ryan Moore, and these other outstanding collegians who were headed to the PGA Tour.

And I was headed to… the United States Navy.

Not everyone knows that US military academy graduates are required to serve for five years upon completion of their schooling. The first-class education is worth the tradeoff and we are paid during our service years, but when you’re 22 years old and your athletic peers are picking up their Tour cards and starting to cash some very nice checks, it can be hard to be patient.

At the beginning of my service time, I was assigned to the Academy. I would be staying in Annapolis and teaching economics on campus. On this professor’s schedule, I still had a lot of time to work on my game. I played the Walker Cup in 2005, and while several of my teammates went off to the Tour right after that, the best I could do was play a couple of PGA Tour events on sponsors’ exemptions.

I applied for the Navy’s World Class Athlete Program—some call it “the David Robinson rule”—but I was denied. Golf isn’t like basketball or football, because you can play golf into your 30s and 40s. So that thinking, along with the fact that we were at a heightened state in the war in Iraq at the time, kept me waiting. I understood this. I wasn’t trying to get out of service; I thought maybe I could serve my country in a different way.

After teaching at the Academy for two years, it was time for this surface warfare officer to get stationed on board ship, where he belonged. The Navy sent me to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, where I would spend two years as essentially a recreational golfer. I played maybe once a month on average. The hard part was that the average fell greatly in the last five months of service, when I played just one time. I got out of the Navy having played no golf and I was supposed to go and be a professional golfer.

In the long run, the Navy is the big winner with regards to what has happened in my career. They held me to my full active duty service commitment and I’ve become the first Naval Academy graduate to play and win on the PGA Tour. But in those first days back in Annapolis, I wondered if all this was possible, if maybe the interruption had been too much. Except for one thing. For the first time in my life, at 27 years old, golf was the only thing I was doing; it was the sole focus of my professional aspirations.

I was thinking it would take me six months to get my game back in order. It was more like nine months, and those last three months were especially excruciating because I kept telling myself the game should be back by now and it wasn’t yet there. The slowest thing was just playing 18 holes of competitive golf. It was like, How do you respond to a double bogey? How do you respond to three birdies in a row? How do you respond to hitting one in the trees? I could hit all the shots, but I had to learn again how to manage the game and react to both adversity and elation.

I spent a year and a half on mini-tours, but in 2010 I earned status on the Web.com Tour coming out of the Tour Qualifying School. From the Web.com Tour (the Nationwide back then), you have to finish top-25 in season earnings to move to the PGA Tour. In 2011, I finished 25th, right on the number. But during my rookie year on the big Tour, I landed on the other side of the bubble, finishing 151st, one spot from keeping my status. For want of $163, I was headed back to the Web.com.

I’ll admit that I was generally lost in my rookie year on the PGA Tour. The whole circus increased about tenfold and I just didn’t play very well. In the summer, I finally had a couple of good finishes, but I missed a ton of cuts. Not a whole lot of rookies keep their Tour card and it’s easy to understand why. Like a lot of my friends, I needed another year of preparation on the Web.com Tour before I was able to come back up and make it stick. Now I’ve been on the PGA Tour since 2014.

A lot of people go to the golf course to get fresh air and recreation. I went to the golf course and was confronted head-on with the memories.

DAYS OF GRIEF
None of us can tell our story completely without bringing our family into it. I have my own now, having been married to Heather for 11 years and raising our three kids with her. But before that, of course, I grew up as a child myself.

My parents were good people, active in the Leesburg, Virginia, community where they raised me and my three siblings. And as I’ve mentioned already, my dad was also active in the game, teaching me to play golf when I was just a little guy. He also spent more than 20 years on the local police force and helped out at the Reston Bible Church, where one of the pastors, Wallace Mitchell, was one of his best friends. My dad was as solid and faithful a man as you would ever meet.

But in July 2015, as I was preparing for the Quicken Loans National at Congressional Country Club in Washington, DC, I received a phone call from Pastor Mitchell. My dad, he said, was not home. He had not been home for a week. No one knew where he was.

My mother was shaken. She filed a missing persons report that day. Meanwhile, I realized that as a PGA Tour player, I had an advantage that a lot of people don’t have: access to the media. Before the press at the tournament, I asked for help. Had anyone seen my dad?

Media requests can place a lot of demands on athletes, but this time the media provided us with an invaluable service. They helped us get the word out. And as much as anything, we hoped my dad would hear our pleas to come home.

A couple of days passed. Nothing.

But on Friday after my round, I was told that my dad had been found. Someone had spotted him at a library in Texas. He was safe, he wanted us to know, just traveling. A reporter asked me if I had a message for my dad. It was simple: “I love you. We love you. Please come home.” What he had done was so uncharacteristic, we still weren’t convinced he was OK.

In a way, Dad did come home. He got back into his car and drove from Texas all the way back to Virginia, all the way to Loudoun County. But on Wednesday he stopped along the Potomac River, took out the service-issued handgun he had purchased when he retired from the police force, and shot himself to death. My dad was 61.

It’s not easy to say that someone you love committed suicide, but that’s what it was. It doesn’t really help when people try to brush up against it without really calling a spade a spade. They’ll say something like, “So, after your dad passed…” I don’t like that. I don’t know why my dad did what he did—some of these questions will have to wait for heaven, if they even matter then—but I know what he did. What he did hurt. For a long time it sucked a lot of the joy out of our family. But it doesn’t help to sneak past it like it didn’t really happen.

In 2005, when Heather and I were first married, we attended a small group Bible study. I wasn’t sure at that point how much my parents’ faith was really my own, but I met a man who has become a great friend through the years, Pete Hiskey. Pete’s dad was one of the original members of the Christian fellowship on Tour, but we ran across each other because we happened to be going to the same church in Annapolis at the time.

Pete has shown me much through the years, but what I remember from that study is that we were reviewing the book of Colossians and a particular verse jumped out at me. I still write that reference, Colossians 3:15, alongside my autograph: “Let the peace of Christ rule in your heart.” It would be a full year after my dad’s death before that passage came to life for me on the golf course, but in those days when we were grieving over his loss, I can say now that Christ’s peace held us together.

A SUNDAY TO REMEMBER
I’m very good at making goals and pretty good at reaching them, too. What I have never been the best at is moving my goals up a level to challenge me to greater success. This all had to change last summer when I found myself back at Congressional competing in the Quicken Loans National, which is in many ways my hometown tournament.

I was sitting with Pete in the locker room after Friday’s round and I was being as frank as I could with him. I was tied for the lead with the weekend to go and I was a little too satisfied. “Man, I would have signed up for 22nd place this week,” I told Pete. “I haven’t had a good year. I haven’t done anything.”
But I had learned something in the two previous years on Tour: chances to win don’t come around that often. You can’t squander them. So this time I raised the bar. “I’ve got to flip that thinking,” I said. “I’ve got to go try and win now, or I’m going to finish 22nd. Let’s go win.”

I shot four-under on Saturday and took a two-shot lead into Sunday. Maybe no lead is as big as you’d want it to be, and that’s especially true in a final round when you’re trying to get your first PGA Tour win. You can’t count on even par getting the job done. You’ve got to go out and play good again.

Ernie Els, my playing partner, rolled in a 35-footer for birdie on the first hole. But when I made a 12-foot birdie on top of his, we were off and running. There was no more time to get caught up in thinking about laying it all out there and trying to get it done. Now I had to hit the shots.

By the tenth hole, Ernie was struggling, but two guys ahead of us, Jon Rahm and Vijay Singh, were making strong runs. In fact, Vijay was playing so well, it was a good thing he ran out of holes.

At fifteen, I missed the green short and left myself a pitch over an awkward rise to a right hole location. Here was the obstacle that could keep me from winning, the kind of challenge I had practiced for on those Saturday mornings at the Academy when I might have been faced with obstacles of a harsher kind. I sent the ball up onto the green, watched as it darted straight for the hole, and had no idea what to do with myself when it fell into the cup. Suddenly, I had my two-shot lead back.

I held on to that advantage with another birdie at sixteen—I still don’t know how that putt went in—then I made two pars to seal the win. A few holes before, I had fallen into wondering if this thing that was “supposed to happen today” was really going to finish my way. But when the pitch at fifteen went in, then the putt at sixteen, it all flipped back in my mind: This is going to happen!

A SEASON TO CELEBRATE
During the week of my win at Congressional, the news cycle that had died out a couple of weeks after my dad’s disappearance and death returned. People wanted to know if this golfer who had been through so much less than a year before could carry the weight of emotion and still win. I was playing close to home and in a tournament that works very hard to honor the military. There were so many themes that pointed my direction.

The hardest part of that whole year between my dad’s death and the victory was that many of the memories I have about my father revolve around golf. When I went to the golf course, I was flooded with the memories and the emotion that goes with them in the aftermath of his suicide. A lot of people go to the golf course to get fresh air and recreation. I went to the golf course and was confronted head-on with the memories—of his life and of his death.

That Sunday at Congressional I did not think about my dad. This may sound callous now, but on the other hand I don’t know how I could have held it together if I had my normal thoughts about him. It wasn’t that I was trying not to think about him. In fact, there were a few minutes when I looked over and saw that I had police officers following me as they always do on Tour to provide the leaders some extra security. My dad had done this same duty at a couple of Presidents Cups, so seeing these men reminded me of him. But those thoughts came and went quickly, and I can only think that this peace was a gift from God.

Beyond the peace, though, there was something bigger. I haven’t talked to my family about it exactly like this, but I would have to say that the win gave us all permission to celebrate again.

When you lose someone you love dearly, and especially when that loss is painfully unexpected, it’s hard to know when to stop grieving. You don’t want to say the wrong thing or come off as if you’re taking it all too lightly. Maybe we were being extra careful in that way. But with the win, it just seemed as if it was OK to have joy again. We could celebrate my dad for who he was and not just get stuck on how he died.

For more than 10 years now, I have kept Colossians 3:15 right in front of me. Our brains are pretty powerful and when you think on something over and over, it seeps in there, right? Maybe this is why I have been given so much peace in the times it should be hardest to attain. Maybe, too, it’s the legacy I’d most like to pass on to my own kids.

Heather does not play golf. That’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned, because you could very easily label me a workaholic and everything I do could be golf, golf, golf. But if I’m not playing this weekend, where I really want to be now is with my wife and family, walking the neighborhoods of Annapolis while the kids ride their bikes. We might stop for coffee or an ice cream. We’ll keep it simple. And in the midst of all that simplicity, we’ll be reminded that the God who loves us and governs our lives wants us to live like that, clearing the decks of all that can consume us and making room for time with him.

COPYRIGHT 2017 LINKS PLAYERS INTERNATIONAL