Q School Confidential

Mickey Yokoi was in jail. Golf jail, the kind with bark on the bars. The green was just 60 yards off, but a stand of pines blocked the way. A small, wiry man dressed in Gary Player black, Yokoi choked a sand wedge and took a practice swing, wishing the wedge were a chain saw. Then he hit a shot you and I dream of--it hooked a bit, hopped twice and rolled tight to the flag. His birdie got him within sniffing distance of the leader board at the Shreveport Open.

After dinner that night, Yokoi grinned at a fortune cookie that read, you are the master of every situation. His wife, Carole, laughed at her fortune: You will attract cultured and artistic people to your home. "No, to our van," she said. The homeless Yokois live in a Mazda MPV. Carole recently started lugging her husband's clubs during tournaments, saving $200 a week in caddie fees, and although he was 35th on the money list in March, Mickey had earned only $2386. He can drive the ball 300 yards and hook a hooded sand wedge around a tree, but he'll be lucky to make $20,000 in 1991.

He plays the Ben Hogan Tour, golf's minor league. Hogan Tourists call it "the little tour" to distinguish it from "the big tour" of P.G.A. stars Greg Norman, Curtis Strange and Corey Pavin. And Mickey Yokoi, for those of you who remember Kevin Costner in Bull Durham, is Crash Davis. At 32, he's still shooting for the Show. A second-team all-American ten years ago, he was number-two man on a UCLA squad that included Pavin, Steve Pate and Jay Delsing. Pavin made $468,830 on the big tour last year, Pate $334,505 and Delsing $207,740. Yokoi, playing minitour events in Canada, made just over $10,000. Which doesn't make him a loser, just a guy with a devil of a job. In the rarefied air of pro golf, where .04 strokes per round separated Strange and Bob Estes in 1990, many men spend years looking for the magic that erases that 1/25 of a stroke.

In March, at Shreveport, Yokoi shot 76 in the second round and missed the cut. Packing his van with putters, countless packs of microwave rice and the reel of fishing line he uses to measure yardages, he drove to Gulfport, Mississippi, the little tour's next stop. Beyond Gulfport loomed a nightmare--another trial at Tour Qualifying School, boot camp for golfers.

The P.G.A.'s annual Tour Qualifying School--"Tour School" or "Q School" for short-- (continued on page 152) Q School (continued from page 118) makes December golf's cruelest month. Each year, hundreds of pro golfers apply for their P.G.A. cards, free passes to the golden circuit where the l00th-best player makes almost $200,000. After two brutal regional tourneys, the best and luckiest report to the finals, where six rounds divide survivors and chaff. And each year, on the sweaty, cruel final day of Q School, one putt on the 18th green is the difference between a courtesy car and a van full of rice.

Robert Gamez, 23, won twice in the Show last year. More than the $461,407 he earned, more than the glory of holing out a seven iron to bite the Shark at Bay Hill, Gamez said, winning meant "I don't have to go back to Tour School. I'd hate to do that again."

Hundreds of terrific golfers--local heroes all--practice all year, hitting millions of balls off a thousand driving ranges. Then comes that one excruciating week in December. One veteran calls it a bar exam, med school final and crash diet rolled into one. "You lose lots of weight," he says. Most of the weight loss is flop sweat and tears. After 72 holes at the six-day finals, 80 players are axed; the rest duel for two more days, the most pressurized 48 hours of their lives. Finally, 45 men earn P.G.A. cards. Losers go to the Hogan Tour or to hard-scrabble minitours and wait a year to run the gantlet again.

"Tour School is so hard," says Hogan pro Bobby Schaeffer. "I was really, really close last year. Four under makes your card and I was four under. Then I miss a three-foot putt." Schaeffer's is not the saddest Q School tale. This is:

The top five Hogan Tourists win big-tour cards. In 1990, Rick Pearson was safe until Mike Springer shot 65 on the season's last day, knocking him to sixth on the money list. Pearson returned to school and shot 429 over six days. The golden mean was 428. One putt.

Tour School sucks souls. By the back nine on the last day, every putt is sudden death. Dozens of celestially skilled golfers know that their work on the final hole will dictate their lives for a year. Or forever; many who fail quit the game. Even worse, they often go to the 108th tee not knowing whether they need birdie or par. Play safe? Shoot for the flag? Many players make par at 108 only to ponder suicide as bolder men finish with birdies. In 1989, Gamez sneaked home by a stroke at Q School; out on the big tour, relaxed, he speared the Shark with that famous seven iron and won $162,000 for a week's work. Gamez is the name this year's Schoolers will whisper as they plumb-bob putts.

"My wife knows not to talk to me in November," says Yokoi, who hates December. Like most P.G.A. prospects, he becomes Norman Bates, jumping at shadows, as Q School approaches. At last year's finals, he made 19 birdies in 72 holes. Brilliant, but not good enough. There were also an out-of-bounds ball and half a dozen in the water--"One O.B., six H20." He fell short again.

To feel the weight of that week, spend 25 years in Mickey Yokoi's Etonics:

His parents were first-generation Japanese Americans who ran a Los Angeles flower shop. They wanted a golfer in the family and the mantle fell to second son Victor. He became Mickey when a boyhood scrape left a whisker-shaped scar beside his nose and his sister said he looked like Mickey Mouse. Yokoi grew up playing Rancho Park, the busiest public course in the continental U.S. By 1981, he was a star at top-ranked UCLA. He turned pro in 1983.

In 1984, his Bruins teammate Pavin set a rookie record on the big tour, winning $260,536. Yokoi lost money playing the Golden State minitour. His short game was flawless, but he was shorter off the tee than most of the rangy pipettes on the tour, and when he tried to belt the ball, his driver betrayed him. Brief stints on the Asian and Australian circuits proved even tougher and cost more. American P.G.A. qualifiers--the dreaded "four spots" in which 100 or more men compete on Monday for four places in a big-tour field--led to 12 P.G.A. events in which he never cracked the leader board, and every December, he flunked Q School. There was always one bad round, one heartache that lasted a year. One bent shot or, worse, a bad decision.

At La Manga in Cartagena, Spain, for the finals of the European Tour School, which is less deadly than the U.S. school but malo enough--Yokoi was safe. He was sure that a par on the final hole was his ticket to the rich Faldo-Langer-Ballesteros circuit. "Stupidest thing I ever thought," he says. He made his par; a flurry of late birdies left him out in the cold by one stroke.

He might have been smarter to take an assistant's job at a muni or a backwater golf club. There were offers--steady pay in exchange for a life of selling Izod shirts and teaching beginners not to shut their eyes on the downswing, but that was surrender. As a teaching pro, he would have spent the rest of his life wondering, Did I give up too soon?

He refuses to hang up his spikes. "There's this dream guys like me have," he says. He sees himself "playing the big tour every week, how much fun that would be. Those guys must be happy just waking up in the morning."

A psychology major at UCLA, Yokoi knows that dreams can be delusive. He has seen scores of talented players beaten by the game's incessant demand for a rare mix of skill, luck and ego, and now believes in mind over matter. While praising Pavin's skill, he credits his former teammate's success on the big tour to something nearly mystic: "Corey goes out there and knows he can win. Most of us hope we can win." Yokoi knows a lot of guys who hit the ball pretty much the way Pavin does; he's one of them. He also knows that only a few will ever rub elbows with Pavin, Strange and the Shark in the Show, and almost all of them are younger than he.

"I can't do this forever. Carole and I want to have a home. We want to have a baby, but right now, we can't afford it, we can't afford anything. So we're thinking, if this year doesn't work out, I'll quit," he says. "Of course, I say that every year."

As a Q School finalist, Yokoi plays the Triple-A tour. Created in 1990 as a proving ground for the P.G.A.'s best prospects, the Hogan Tour features groomed courses and gleaming leader boards, plus marshals and scorekeepers armed with walkie-talkies, just like the big tour. Players get free equipment and don't pay greens fees for practice rounds, as minitour players often do. "You feel you have a kind of validity," says Yokoi. Showing off his P.G.A. of America card, number 0003612684, he grins. He carries a more important talisman, as well--the thing players mean when they refer to their "cards," the charm that gets them into clubhouses on the Hogan Tour. It is a gold money clip, emblazoned with the tour emblem. Yokoi loves the feel of his money clip, its tangible validity. He only wishes there were more Grants and fewer Washingtons between its tongs. Hogan golf "is no picnic," he says. Expenses run about $700 a week and that's if your wife caddies for you; miss a few cuts and the money clip that proves you're a pro golfer holds too few bills to buy dinner.

Yokoi hits hundreds of balls a day on driving ranges from Bakersfield to Yuma to Macon to New Haven and he seldom makes expenses. Endlessly fiddling with his swing, he watches himself and tour eponym Ben Hogan on video tape. (Yokoi's video camera and VCR are his only pricey possessions.) One win, he thinks as he compares Hogan's swing with his own, always falling short. He opens his hips an instant too soon, the ball hooks directly to jail. Fix that for one week, he thinks (though by doing so, he may delay his hip turn and push the ball to the right). Fix that for a week and make a few putts; one win in 1991 and I can afford to give my wife a week off from caddying. And one win could lead to two. Two wins make me a probable top-five finisher on the Hogan Tour, and the top five go directly to the big tour, bypassing Q School.

On a windy Saturday in March, at Shreveport's Southern Trace Country Club, Yokoi never once hit his driver less than 280 yards. When one of his Shreveport thumpers rolled to a stop 310 yards from the tee, a local fan drawled, "Was that his drahhve?"

Carole, toting Yokoi's golf bag, stayed a discreet and very Asian ten yards behind her man as he strode through a dispiriting round. His gallery numbered two--Alan and Ilene Murakami had driven over from Texas to support their old friends. "A few years ago, Mickey and Carole had a chance to settle down. Mickey could have been an assistant pro," said Alan, a comfy suburbanite who is an account manager with a computer firm, "but they wanted to keep the dream alive." Watching one of Yokoi's three-foot putts lip out and return to sender, Alan Murakami shook his head. "Mickey always misses out, just by a hair." Then Alan, who carries a 16 handicap as a weekend golfer, said, "I still envy him. He gets to live the fantasy all of us golfers have."

At the 18th hole, a 527-yard par five, Yokoi hit a jumbo drive and a six iron that landed ten feet from the flag. Too bad it hit hot; the ball skipped into a trap behind the green. His bunker shot and Pyrrhic birdie putt drew applause but still meant 73-76. Yokoi didn't need to check the scoreboard to know he had missed the cùt. He went straight to the sun deck at Southern Trace, where he and Carole and the Murakamis ordered gumbo, sandwiches and lemonade. Sitting in the sun with his wife/caddie and his friends/gallery, enjoying his view of the 18th green, he made a fist and hit himself on the head. "I hate it," Yokoi said. "I hate missing cuts at a place like this. It's so nice being out here, then you have to leave so soon."

His eighth Q School was eight months away.