PLAYER RECORD
1 PGA TOUR WIN: 2014 Puerto Rico Open
ALL IN (SERIOUS) FUN
LINKS PLAYERS MAGAZINE 2015 ANNUAL EDITION
By Jeff Hopper
Sometimes Chesson Hadley actually tries to make people laugh. That’s the irony of course. Because when you’re six feet, four inches tall and just hoping you tip the scales at 160 pounds, folks are going to say you’re pretty funny just as you are.
By “people,” we mean Jimmy Fallon, the vibrant host of the Tonight Show, who has graced exactly one more cover of Golf Digest than Hadley has. And there, in no time, is another irony, because Fallon says he never keeps score and Hadley was the 2014 PGA Tour Rookie of the Year.
But the two crossed paths, we’ll say, following the PGA Cham- pionship last August when Fallon was reading through another list of his “superlatives,” a sort of lightning round meets celebrity roast, where Fallon and his co-host Steve Higgins apply a barrage of irreverent labels to a group of related people—NFL players, for instance, or Olympians. This time it was PGA Tour players.
About five players in, Hadley’s official tour photo came up, the one where his neck and head rise quite vertically above a plain purple polo. Fallon read the caption: “Most Likely To See One Of Those Giant Wind Sock Guys And Say, ‘Dad?’” When the line drew a great laugh from the studio audience, Fallon added to the thunder by mimicking the bob-and-weave action of those crazy devices.
Two days after the Tonight Show’s fandom had finished laughing, however, it was Hadley who brought the joke full circle. He found his own wind sock guy, a duly
undulating red fella outside a Mattress Firm store.
Hadley stood beside his fantastical “brother” and had his picture snapped. In a minute or two it adorned his Twitter page, accompanied by a one-word caption: “Dad?”
This is the Chesson Hadley friends and family have known since childhood. Playful, even over the top. But unlike the junior high days when his teachers had to sometimes put him in line, this time Hadley’s goofball self-deprecation came with a prize—one Cloud Luxe mattress delivered right to his front door by the friendly (and grateful) folks at Mattress Firm. It wasn’t quite as rewarding as his inaugural win on the PGA Tour earlier in the year, but Hadley celebrated it all the same.
Raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, Hadley liked sports almost immediately, and he landed his first set of golf clubs when he was six years old. “I started going out to the course with my dad, and when you’re that age it’s just about how many balls you can hit and how hard you can swing,” Hadley says. “I wasn’t really focused on anything other than just enjoying it. And I loved it.”
Loved it so much, actually, that by nine years old he walked away from the other sports he played and chose this one. “My parents didn’t even have to ask me to choose,” he remembers. “I knew it was golf.”
By age 12, he had broken par. In the eighth grade, he was already lettering for his high school team. In his senior year at North Raleigh Christian Academy—the same year he was voted class president and named most comedic—he signed on to go to Georgia Tech, a university rich in golf excellence, alma mater to major champions Larry Mize, David Duval and Stewart Cink—oh, and that legend named Bobby Jones, winner of the 1930 Grand Slam and founder of the Masters. The Yellowjackets were still doing quite all right when Hadley showed up.
“I didn’t expect those guys to have a lot more experience than I did,” Hadley says, referring to the other players on his Georgia Tech team, which included current Tour players Cameron Tringale and Roberto Castro. “That fall I think I finished sixth in qualifying three out of the four tournaments (college teams field five players at a tournament). I was really close. School was a huge adjustment. It was kicking my butt. I wasn’t prepared.”
After the Christmas break, though, Hadley started to find his way. He qualified for the team’s trip to Hawaii and played well. “That kind of set the tone for the rest of the spring,” Hadley notes. It wasn’t easy, but he was making it. “You’re finding yourself as a man and your parents aren’t there and you’re managing. It’s a small real-world experience, and at 18 or 19 years old that’s a pretty big adjustment.”
Any conversation with Hadley about the trajectory of his life finds him moving back and forth between the growing up he says he’s done and the immaturity he feels he still possesses. On the one hand, he’s a husband and a father, responsibilities he takes very seriously; on the other hand, he’s still settling his feet on tour, beyond happy to be here.
Hadley’s story cannot be told without reference to Blayne Barber. At the last full PGA Tour Q-School in the fall of 2012, Barber had finished the first stage with a strong showing and was moving on to the next round. Hadley, playing at the same site, had missed again, by a shot. He was leaving disappointed for the third year in a row, “sick and tired of not getting there,” in his words.
But something was gnawing on Barber, a moment playing again and again in his mind. He couldn’t get settled on whether or not he had grounded his club in a bunker during the qualifier’s second round. His brother, who had caddied for him, said certainly not. But Barber thought maybe so. Several days into his doubt, Barber called the PGA Tour and disqualified himself. His elimination bumped up everyone who had missed by a shot, including Hadley. These players would move on to the second stage.
This time Hadley went right through, securing a spot in the final stage, where he’d have a chance to earn a PGA Tour card. His scores weren’t good enough for that, but Hadley did gain status on the Web.com Tour and he was ready to move one step up from the mini-tours where he’d been eking out a poor golfer’s wage.
By June of the 2013 season, Hadley had notched second and third-place finishes and was competing well. But the week before he was to head to Raleigh for the Rex Hospital Open, he missed the cut. Not exactly the run-up you’re looking for when all the other signs look good—a course you know, a bed that’s familiar, some home cooking. Fortunately for Hadley, all those familiarities added up to a comfortable week all the same. He opened with 63, closed with 64 that he calls “maybe my most proud round ever,” and walked off a winner on the Web.com Tour. Plus, he was looking very good for landing a spot on the PGA Tour as a top-25 money winner.
When the Web.com Tour Championship came around in late September, Hadley charged in front, firing 65-66 to open the tournament and take the lead. Scott Gardiner passed Hadley on Saturday, but then faltered early Sunday while Hadley was streaking out with three birdies in the first five holes. In the end Hadley made a three-foot putt to seal the victory then celebrated in his usual crazy fashion, giving a laughing growl close by his wife Amanda’s bulging belly—the one that held little Hughes Hadley, two months from being born. Daddy was already getting his son in on the action.
That action has taken Chesson, Amanda, and Hughes far and wide ever since. “We love to travel to the different places we get to go,” he says. “We get to experience different things and eat at different places and stay at these crazy cool hotels.”
While Chesson unabashedly declares his love for the golf and other sights along California’s Monterey Peninsula, way up on the Hadley’s list of cool places is the Trump International Golf Club in Rio Grande, Puerto Rico. Hadley came here for the Puerto Rico Open in March 2014 like a lot of aspiring and recovering players who had not qualified for the World Golf Championships event at Doral. Puerto Rico is an official PGA Tour event, but it’s definitely second-tier.
Unless, that is, you’re a Tour rookie in only your fourth month of action. Then there is no step down. You enter any tournament that will take you.
So here were the three of them—Chesson, Amanda, and 15-week-old Hughes—enjoying the resort life. Hadley counts his parents, his in-laws, his agent, and his swing coach among his “team.” But that week in Puerto Rico, only Josh Svendsen, his caddie, had made the trip. Together they would have to take care of business.
Hadley started with 68. Fine. A couple back of leader Brian Stuard, with two other players sandwiched in-between, including former US Amateur champion Danny Lee. Hadley’s 65 on Friday was sharp, featuring seven birdies and an eagle, but James Driscoll had sizzled to 63 and Hadley was still one back. After 67 on Saturday, though, Hadley assumed the lead, by a shot over Lee. The two were set for a Sunday face-off.
On Sunday afternoon, Hadley and Lee both opened well, but when Lee bogeyed the seventh and eighth holes to fall back to even for the day, Hadley found himself with a four-shot lead. Coasting? Not a Tour rookie. There was a lot of work to be done, and when Lee started making birdies on the back nine to match Hadley’s string of pars, the gap narrowed. Hadley by one through sixteen. But Hadley birdied the par-4 seventeenth and the two matched birdies at the last. What had seemed so distant 17 months earlier when it looked like he had missed at Q-School again now landed right in Hadley’s lap. He was a PGA Tour winner.
“I played some really amazing golf there,” Hadley says in reflection. “From the first round to the final round, it was really, really good stuff.”
Hadley’s agent, knowing his man was in contention, snuck down for the final round to be there for the celebration. And you know that was done well, in Hadley-esque fun. Amanda brought little Hughes out for the presentation of the winner’s large crystal bowl—large enough, that is, to scoop up one giggly baby. Forget all the action shots. The lucky photographers who had drawn the Puerto Rico assignment found themselves snapping the most enjoyable pics on Tour in 2014, with a man, his wife, his trophy, and the little one who filled that victor’s prize. No one thought to say, “Smile.” No one had to.
But smiles come easy when you’re holding a trophy. And no one gets to do that every week on Tour, where the talent has gotten deeper and the competition wider in recent seasons. It’s not that long a trip from celebration to discouragement. Even for Chesson Hadley.
“I think one of the things all professional golfers struggle with is self-doubt, confidence, attitude, perspective, and outlook on the course,” he admits. “I’ve found that to be more difficult on the PGA Tour than anywhere else. I guess that’s understandable because of the difficulty, the pressures that we’re under while we’re out here.”
Words like that may fall on unsympathetic ears for those who see athletes as big money guys with a lot of privilege and slack thrown their way. But golf is one of those sports where each player earns his keep—no guaranteed contracts. So when you start missing cuts and heading from stop to stop with only expenses in your wake, anxiety can set in. Even for someone like Hadley who says, with a grateful nod to Amanda, that about all he has to do in terms of family responsibility is play golf, a wider view of the world can keep the doubt in check.
“Now that we’re here on the Tour, it’s pretty easy to think about money and what tournaments we’re playing in and where we’re staying and what our courtesy car is and food,” says Hadley, looking back after his first full season on the big circuit. “All these little things are amazing perks on the Tour, and you can get a bad perspective in a hurry if you’re not focused on the right things.”
To counter that poor outlook, Hadley goes to the same place he did when he was a junior at Georgia Tech and he and Amanda had called things off back home in Raleigh during the winter holidays. That breakup led him to sit down with an Atlanta-area pastor after he got back to school and lay his emotions on the table.
“I told him, ‘I’m sick of this.’ I knew that I had been riding the fence of faith for a long time. I had given my life to Jesus and been baptized when I was in the fourth grade, but there was no fruit, no relationship. I really felt like after Amanda and I broke up that I was either going to go one direction or the other. I was either going to be a deadbeat or go be somebody.
“I knew I couldn’t be that somebody by myself. I knew how I should be living, how I should be acting, and until then I wasn’t doing it. I was living for myself and that wasn’t working. That’s why I said I was sick of it. I knew I didn’t want that. I wanted a real faith.”
That night in early January 2009 was a certain turning point. “I woke up the next day,” Hadley says, “and there hasn’t been a day since where I haven’t thought about God or what he wants me to do or anything like that. I have the ability to influence a lot of people and to reach a lot of people with my faith, and I need to take that seriously.”
One place Hadley, who reunited with Amanda in April of that year, openly projects himself to the world is on his Twitter page. There, the first word he uses to describe himself is “Christian.” It can be a loaded word, of course, and open to a variety of interpretations. But when asked, he explains it tidily: “I believe Jesus is the Son of God. He came to earth, and he died on a cross for my sins, for your sins, for everybody’s sins. I choose to accept this gift. We can’t earn it. There’s nothing we can do to make ourselves right before God. We have to accept Jesus. That’s our salvation.”
Words like those have landed many other men the label “preacher.” All right. But sometimes it’s still hard to take Hadley seriously.
When the Tour came his way and asked him to offer a tip on Inside the PGA Tour, Hadley figured he’d seen enough of these videos to know just how not to do them. The Chesson Hadley version was going to start with a strong shot of his self-declared “weirdness.”
He settled himself into a greenside bunker, apparently prepared to lay open his wedge and demonstrate a perfect splash. But then he backed off and started rolling up his sleeves.
“Look, I have no muscle,” he says in laughing at his own actions. “I am bone and vascular tissue, that’s about it. I tell the audience, ‘When you’re at the beach, you’ve got to enjoy it. When the sun’s out, you gotta do guns out.’” Then he proceeded to film the whole lesson with his definitionless golfer’s tan on full display.
“I’m not ashamed,” he says. Obviously. “I’m not bashful, I’m not afraid to do things differently. I’m in there trying to make people laugh. That’s my first instinct.”
It’s an instinct that should suit him well in his fight for perspective. But even when it’s hard to laugh, Hadley knows he’s covered there too. “That’s the beauty of it,” he says. “God is the same when things are going well and things are going bad. He wouldn’t be much of a God if it wasn’t like that.”
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