PLAYER RECORD
2 PGA Tour Wins: 1996 BellSouth Classic, 1997 United Airlines Hawaiian Open
A REVISED LIFE
LINKS PLAYERS MAGAZINE 2018 ANNUAL EDITION
By Jeff Hopper
Paul Stankowski dismissed himself from the table. The tingling pain in his arm had returned, more serious this time, and he wasn’t sure what to say to his buddies.
They had come to Dallas National for a charity event that day. No one knew that three days earlier Stankowski had experienced a similar episode while on the job as an on-air analyst for SiriusXM’s Sunday coverage of the PGA Tour. That day, the pain had subsided and he even got in his usual cardio routine later that afternoon.
But now he pressed his palms against the counter in the restroom and stared at himself in the mirror. “Am I really not going to tell anybody about this?” he asked himself. He knew he couldn’t wait. He walked out and found friend Mark Parry, who was hosting the event for Kids Across America. “Mark,” Stankowski told him, “I don’t know, but I think I may be having a heart attack.”
Like any professional athlete, Stankowski is an achiever of dreams. With definite ideas about what they want to accomplish, these dreamers go to work. Lots and lots of work. When the big paycheck comes on a good weekend, fans look on and say, “Wow, a million bucks for a weekend of playing golf?” They form dreams of their own. But between the fledgling hopes of the kid on the practice green telling himself he’s putting to win the Masters and the reality of playing on the biggest stage are hours and months and years of focused, committed work. Without pay. Sometimes with little evidence of progress. The dream seems only a flicker.
Stankowski had known this kind of toil. He came through college in relative anonymity at University of Texas-El Paso. When he landed on Tour in 1994, his results were either excellent or dismal: 19 missed cuts in 29 events, but three top-10s, including a closing tie for fifth at the Las Vegas Invitational. The next year was weaker, and he was forced to return to the Qualifying Tournament. He tied for 15th and went back to work in 1996, when the flicker became a legitimate flame. A week after winning on the Nationwide Tour, he captured the PGA Tour’s BellSouth Classic in Atlanta.
“I thought I was in control of this thing, that I could control what was going to happen. ‘It’s time to step it up and take it to the next level’—and my career cratered.”The possibility that Stanko, as many of his friends call him, had found his way looked certain. He won again early in 1997, capturing the United Airlines Hawaiian Open, then snatching two more top-fives ahead of the Masters. At Augusta, Stankowski came home with the best major result of his career, a tie for fifth. No one noticed. It was at that Masters that Tiger Woods emerged. Stankowski finished 15 shots behind the winner.
By season’s end, Stankowski’s winnings totaled just under $1 million. He played the Tour Championship to close a healthy final month. But a reporter’s memorable question came at Stankowski at the Tournament of Champions to start the 1998 season: “After the success of ’96 and ’97, what does ’98 look like for you?” He probably gave the very answer the reporter wanted: “You know what, after seeing Tiger last night winning the Player of the Year Award, I think it’s time to step it up and take my game to the next level.”
The next level. There it is. Pure athletic ambition. Not posturing. Not fantasy. Just what you might expect from someone close to the top but not quite there.
“Right?” Stankowski asks now, 20 years later. “That was the quote, which sounds really cool. I mean, you’re a sports fan and you hear your quarterback say that, you yell back, ‘Yeah! That’s macho. That’s what you’re supposed to say.’”
But where Stankowski goes next with this story is to 2009. He’s sitting in a small Bible study with some friends from his home church in Dallas, where he has lived since his career began. They’re watching a video and the teacher, Matt Chandler, starts talking about two women. Even if you don’t know your Bible well, you’ve likely heard of them, for they are Mary and Elizabeth, the central women of the Christmas story. Chandler is only reciting the text of the Gospel of Luke, but here’s what leaps out for Stankowski: When Elizabeth recognized the blessedness of Mary in carrying Jesus in her womb, Mary’s response was, “My soul magnifies the Lord.” The humility of her words instantly captivated Stankowski.
“I’m telling you,” Stankowski says, “it was an out of body experience. I saw a flashback of my career, like dominoes falling, and it went all the way back to that interview with that reporter and I said, ‘It’s time I step it up and take my game to the next level.’
“From there, I saw a graph chart of my career post those words. And if you look at my career, you know, it started in ’91 and made a little headway and then it jumped up. I got my Tour card, and then it went up again when I won. And it kept on going up and up. But from that moment, the first event of 1998, it never went up again and it started coming down to the point where it is now.”
That now was late 2009, after Stankowski had endured what he calls the two worst seasons of his career. The record bears him out. He made just eight of 22 cuts on the PGA Tour during those two years. He played 16 Web.com events in those years, too, bringing home a mere $20,000 in five cuts made. This is how a family goes hungry. And Stankowski has a family, in his wife Regina, his son Josh, and his daughter Katelyn.
What’s surprising about those lean years is that Stankowski seems to have been set up to fail. By God.
The early to mid-2000s were a litany of injuries for Stanko. Wrist troubles kept him from the Tour for months in 2003 and 2004, while a finger injury wiped out all of 2005. Looking back, he calls that absence a blessing, a chance to be home when his children were little and establish who daddy was for them. But he was itching to play. He returned in 2006, though taking “Celebrex, Vicodin, whatever I could,” to manage the pain because now his shoulder was giving him fits.
After shoulder surgery in 2007, Stankowski told God, “I would love to have one year of pain-free golf again to see what I can do.” Remarkably, he was given that and more: “Absolutely zero pain” for 2008 and 2009. Yet as far as golf was concerned, he failed.
But then came that November revelation with his small group. “I started laughing,” he recalls. “I thought I was in control of this thing, that I could control what was going to happen. ‘It’s time to step it up and take it to the next level’—and my career cratered. I realized right then and there that God allows the good and the bad for my good and his glory.”
You can no more relax as a professional late in your career than you can early on. “If I didn’t work my butt off, I wouldn’t have gotten to where I had any of the success that I had,” Stankowski says, “because you can’t get better doing nothing. But that being said, it was God and God alone who allowed it all to happen. Period. He allowed the injuries and my body to break down and all that stuff that happened afterwards. He was out in front of those things. It took 11, almost 12 years, but when I realized all this in 2009, it was such a freeing moment.
“It’s about the heart, right? And where is my heart? Do I put my trust in myself, or do I put my trust in God?”
Funny he should mention the heart.
Stankowski certainly has one. In 2010, he reset his course to focus on process. Not goals. Not dreams. Just doing the work. From there, he parlayed his limited status as a past champion into a couple of decent seasons, pushing toward $1 million in winnings in 2010-2011.
But there was more than golf going on in Stankowski’s hard-working world. He founded a company with a friend. In a mashup of their middle names, they became Francis Edward, a purveyor of custom-made fine leather belts, which they market through tournaments and pro shops.
And he’s found a niche with SiriusXM, a gig interrupted nearly before it began by that heart attack in the spring of 2016. Stankowski calls the episode a wake-up call.
“When I stopped playing, I stopped exercising and didn’t change the way I ate. I was busy from my business, and there was some extra stress from that. I could feel my heart beating all the time, and I actually told myself, ‘You’re going to have a heart attack if you don’t do something.’”
Stankowski was fortunate. The blockage he’d been feeling as tingling and pain that week was resolved with a stent and he was home in a couple of days.
But his physical heart isn’t the only reason for Stanko to get back to regular workouts. There is also his heart for the game, from which he hopes he has only “put the career on pause.” He’ll turn 50 in late 2019, a few years after some of the friends and competitors he tangled with in the ’90s and ’00s.
“It’s going to be hard,” he says. “It’s going to take time to get my body back in shape, gain the 10-15 percent of flexibility I lost. I’ve got my hands full with the work ahead of me, but Lord willing, I’ll have the opportunity.”
Even a grown man can dream.
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