David Duval

Quiet, please. He's on the first tee. After an obsequious official in shirt and tie introduces him and his opponent, another official whispers to the first fellow, "You forgot to introduce the marshals." Something to do with TV or the sponsors. The first guy looks puzzled, then nods his head. "I'll do it again," he says. The golfer on the first tee has been getting set to hit his drive. In his Tommy Hilfiger clothes, the shirt buttoned to the collar, and wraparound Oakley sunglasses, he doesn't look quite like most of the other men on the professional golf tour. His posture is comfortable; he seems so relaxed he could be waiting for a bus. He lets the strap on his Titleist hat hang loose from its buckle. Sometimes, too, a shirttail will appear from his waist, over his belt. But anyone mistaking this cool for casualness ought to be with him on the first tee, inside the ropes that keep the crowd from getting too close.

It's silent except for the whispers of the officials. Waving his driver back and forth in short half-swings to dispel tension, he seems ready to take his stance. The only sounds are a traffic hum from beyond the course and birds singing in the fairway trees—and the whispering of the officials, which has been going on while the golfer completes the ritual that precedes his first shot. Suddenly the golfer stops the movements with his driver, and glares at the man who contemplates a repetition of his introduction, with the addition of the marshals.

"No, sir," the golfer says to the official, with a severity that belies his relaxed demeanor and briefly reveals the chasm separating the difficulty of what he does for a living from the ease with which he appears to go about it. "You're done. You did your job."

•

The golfer's name is David Duval. In the opinion of many people, including a large number of his own peers, he is at 27 years old one of the two finest golfers in the world and a kind of standard-bearer in golf for a new generation. Duval is dismissive about rankings and dislikes labels, especially that of celebrity. "I can't understand this fascination with me," he maintains, in a voice that can be a cross between country singer and icy blackjack dealer. "Celebrity is strange. I personally do not have that fascination." During this year's AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, when Tiger Woods was partnered with Kevin Costner and Mark O'Meara was joined by Ken Griffey Jr., Duval chose to play with his hometown friend Scott Regner.

Whatever you call him, Duval is the real thing, often the most talented and certainly the most curious golfer of the game's new age. In late 1997 he won his first tournament on the PGA Tour. He followed that victory with another in his next tournament, and then another for three in a row. He added four more wins in 1998 and four in the first four months of 1999, including one in which Duval became only the third PGA pro ever—and the first in a final round—to shoot a total score of 59. Last season he won more money playing professional golf than anyone else on the PGA Tour. Today, in only his fifth full year on the tour, he is already among golf's career money leaders, having earned $9 million and counting. The money and victories have invoked comparisons between Duval and the greatest players in golf's history, despite his admission that his play in this year's majors was not "much above mediocre." Duval places the blame for that on a putting slump, although by late summer he was feeling "very good about what's going on in my golf game." But with his rapidly growing fame, Duval is coming under new and not always comfortable scrutiny. Ever since a stellar college career at Georgia Tech, Duval has contended with the false perception that he is aloof and unfeeling, an automaton making birdies. In fact, he plays the game with passion, but it is hidden behind the quirks that have gained attention—the ever-present dark glasses, the intimidating stare, the fuck-it shoulder shrug whether a shot doesn't work out right or it comes off dead solid perfect.

Duval's steely-eyed presence can unnerve opponents and interlopers alike. He never raises his voice, doesn't repeat himself and laughs at himself easily (except on the golf course). With a shade of impatience, he listens carefully to questions, each of which he answers directly. On the golf course, Duval prepares for each shot by looking at the next target and asking himself, How am I going to get there? But don't ask him about technique. "Don't take me wrong," he explains, speaking in a slight drawl, "but I don't analyze. I try to get the ball on the green. In the hole. I play what's in front of me."

I play what's in front of me. "The biggest thing is, you cannot be afraid of shooting low scores," he says. "It might sound silly but it's not. I think a lot of players in the game get six, seven under par and instead of picking up two or three more they start thinking about holding on to where they are. You just can't be scared of making more birdies and keeping going lower.

"I know what it is to get lower. The reason I'm not afraid is that I grew up around my dad and I saw it with him. He was never scared of shooting those scores. And so that's how I got."

With a disarmingly uncomplicated perspective on a complicated game, Duval doesn't try to remember a long list of things. "I just try to make sure my feet, knees, hips and shoulders are aiming at the same place," he says, as if that were all there was to it. A fitness nut since he began a weight-loss program in 1996, he believes he has become "more balanced in strength from my right side to my left side, and from my front to my back." This improves his posture, he says, and "just gives me a better feel every day when I get up." There are no secrets to his workouts—regular sessions on the VersaClimber and a mix of arm curls, bench presses and pull-downs. Duval plays Titleist DCI irons, but he's not an equipment geek. "I could make your clubs work for me," he says to an inquisitive stranger. "I could adjust."

Duval strives to keep things simple off the course, too. He's not superstitious. He has no rules about sex the night before a big match. "Never really thought about that," he says, smiling. He carries his cash—$100 bills—in a money clip. At home, when he plays skins with his father and teacher, Bob Duval, $200 might change hands in a match. He listens to talk shows on the radio, and music—R.E.M. and Pearl Jam—"but not too loud." He enjoyed Saving Private Ryan. He is a voracious reader, with tastes that vary from Richard Rhodes' Making of the Atomic Bomb to Elmore Leonard's Be Cool.

In a game that tests patience and resolve, Duval plays as if he understands something about golf that no one else does. "I'm not going to criticize my peers and say I know more about their game than they do," he murmurs. But it's clear from his recent record that he must. "I know how best to play for me" is all he will admit. "That's the most important thing. That's what I focus on. I don't focus on what other players focus on. I focus on what I think is best for me and the way that's best for me to play."

Figuring it out has not been easy. What Duval knows about golf and life he has paid for with personal pain. A native of Jacksonville, Florida, where he still lives, Duval grew up around golf. His paternal grandfather was a teaching pro in Schenectady, New York and his father was a club pro near Jacksonville. All through his childhood, Duval hung out at the golf course.

In 1980, David's brother Brent, who was three years older, was diagnosed with a rare disease called aplastic anemia. David volunteered to be a bone marrow donor to save his brother's life. The procedure was successful, but his brother died afterward of complications. David was only nine.

The Duval family was devastated. The strain was especially hard on David's mother, Diane. His parents eventually divorced, and that event affected David's relationship with his father, though they reconciled after a difficult period. "David went through a hell of a lot," his father says. Suddenly, at an age when most kids are learning to ride a two-wheeler, David had to deal with questions of human mortality. In response, he focused on golf. Somehow, his father asserts, "David turned what happened into a positive." Forced when he was young to make decisions about what was important in life, he began to develop an ambition and dedication that drive a fierce competitiveness.

Duval rejects the repetitive hitting of hundreds of practice balls as "boring," so he's not the kind of player that you find on the driving range under the (concluded on page 178)David Duval(continued from page 120) tutelage of a highly paid coach. Nor does he have a particular method of practicing. "Different stuff" is a typical answer to a question about what he works on. Would he concentrate on one thing to the exclusion of another? "It depends." Does he ever resort to such practice aids as placing another club on the ground to check alignment? "Now and then."

Duval is equally laconic when it comes to describing the touring life. He has no set sequence of things he does when he gets up. His goal is to arrive at the course with enough time to begin warming up about 40 minutes before he tees off. He may watch TV or read the newspaper or talk on his cell phone, but he doesn't socialize. "I have very few friends who come to tournaments," he confesses.

"David has some more money and a few new toys," his friend Scott Regner observes, "but he's still the same guy he always was." The toys include a Porsche, except Duval prefers to drive his truck. Though he doesn't regularly drink, he's been known to order a cognac after a victory, and he's been trying to quit chewing tobacco. But his tastes are unaffected, and if he has an extra hour on the road somewhere, he's apt to spend it at the local Barnes & Noble. He daydreams about owning a bookstore–café someday. "When I step away from golf it would be something to do," he says, laughing at the image of himself behind a retail counter. "It would be a place to hang out," he continues. "And I could go fishing whenever I wanted to."

In a profession where many of the elite have forgotten they are playing a game, Duval strives to keep his approach basic and enjoyable. When he feels something in his swing going out of sync he simply asks his caddy, Mitch Knox, or his friend, Golf Pride sales rep Hank Friede, to look at what he's doing.

"I don't actually teach him anything," explains Friede, a former club pro. "We talk about alignment or his position at the top. Small adjustments."

"David is unique," his college coach, Puggy Blackmon, adds. "He's focused on what he wants to accomplish. And he's brutally honest. He was difficult to coach. I never questioned his motives or method. But he was different." In part, Blackmon means that Duval didn't need physical instruction. He already knew how to swing a golf club and, more impressively, he knew that he knew. "He had this air about him," recalls Blackmon.

When Duval began playing on the tour, that air rankled others. With the sunglasses and apparel and a goatee, it was no pose. The goatee is gone, but the air, the cool attitude, has remained. In fact, it has deepened to the point of being impenetrable. But so, too, has Duval's command of his game. According to Blackmon, "he is secure in the fact that he is a great player."

To watch Duval play golf is to be impressed by the superiority of his driving—almost as long as Tiger's and more consistent in the fairway. Equally striking is the general excellence of every other facet of his game, from accurate long irons to extraordinarily sensitive touch around the green ("soft hands" in the trade). If he has a weak point, it is his bunker play. Duval also makes quick decisions on the course about such matters as club selection. Unlike many golfers, who ponder and second-guess every shot, he never seems indecisive.

But the amazing things about Duval's golf are invisible; what his opponents and fans see are only the results. The strong grip (right hand under the shaft), the fluid swing (with tremendous body action), the power fade (a ball flight that veers left to right)—these are the things we notice, but they are not what make Duval's game. Rather, they are manifestations of something going on inside his head. Duval simply plays a kind of golf unfamiliar to most people.

"Your mind is always a little ahead of your hands," sports psychologist Bob Rotella points out, referring to the phenomenon in any kind of performance of getting ahead of yourself, thinking about where you're going (if I just hit this in close I'll get the birdie I need). Rotella has been working with Duval since Blackmon introduced them when Duval was at Georgia Tech. "David gets his mind out there where he's looking for the target," Rotella notes. Staying in the present moment, he sees the target, undistracted by thoughts about what may happen after he hits the target or, as so often is the case in golf, misses it.

Even the most stoic pro usually displays some kind of emotion. Most, in fact, show a range of reactions. Duval, on the other hand, always acts the same. Before a shot, or before an opponent's shot, he betrays not the slightest sense of predicting what may happen.

"I get on," he says. "That's what I do."

And then, afterward, instead of responding to whatever has happened, "I keep on." No voices tell him if it was a bad shot or good. Duval's so-called attitude is in fact mental discipline; rather than wasting energy criticizing himself for a bad shot or crediting himself with a good one, he directs his strength to the task at hand. He never deviates from this Zen-like behavior. He neither projects (oh no, there's a pond in front of the green) nor judges (I choked on that putt). He doesn't think about how a round is going. "I never put stock in it," Duval says, "because, yeah, so you make a putt on one hole. Well, you have to make one on the next hole, too. Obviously, some days are better than others. I'm not concerned. I'm thinking more about making sure my score's as good as it can be for that day, whether I'm really hot or I'm not. You have to be focused on your score while you're playing and not on how you're performing. You need to do the best you can. You have to be concerned with the present and not with what could happen a few holes ahead or what happened at the last hole."

•

"Golf out here is very difficult," remarks Knox, his caddy. "You've got 144 of the best players in the world coming after you every week." Faced with that onslaught, and the inherent frustrations of the game itself, most golfers sooner or later retreat. Not Duval. "He has a great feel for what's going on," continues Knox, who ought to know. He was by Duval's side when Duval hit a five-iron over water to a pin 226 yards away to set up a thrilling eagle putt on the 18th hole that clinched the 59 on January 24.

Feel. It's the most important word in Duval's game. Going back to the childhood afternoons on the golf course with his dad, Duval has learned to play golf by feel. "We'd hit goofy shots," recalls Bob Duval, who with his son's encouragement now plays on the Senior PGA Tour, where he won a tournament—his first—the same day David captured this year's Players Championship. "Big slices, big hooks, hitting through branches, running the ball through a bunker, skipping it over the lake."

When he was asked what was the most important shot in golf, Ben Hogan said, "The next one." like everyone who plays, Duval gets in trouble—maybe not so often, but he makes mistakes. So many golfers, however—after getting into trouble—fear that next shot so badly that, in the words of David's father, they "are afraid to hit the shot that they see will work."

When David was a kid, his father used to tell him that golf has nothing to do with par. "A golf score is a progression of 18 numbers," he still reminds David. "You add them up at the end of your round." The son learned the lesson so well he could beat his teacher.

"You know," David says, "it's a simple game when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it. It's the most difficult game to perfect, but the game is based on scoring. The game is about nothing else. So you can forget all technical, mechanical, feel—you can eliminate everything. It's about scoring. Period. Low score wins. Not best swing, not best ball striking. So I practice and I prepare, I work on my game. At times I'm mechanical when I'm practicing, at times I'm mechanical when putting. But when I'm playing, I'm out there to score. I might make a six on a hole. That might be the best score I can make. But if I make three or four twos through the course of the round, I sure made up for that six."