Golf is par for town's course

HARRISON, N.Y. -- The first inclination would be to say there had to be something in the Blackwater River.

It had to have some kind of restorative properties, just like Ponce de Leon's mythical Fountain of Youth. How else to explain it?

How did Bubba Watson, Heath Slocum, and Boo Weekley, three sons of Milton, Fla., make it to the PGA Tour from this small Florida Panhandle town (pop. 8,700), a sportsman's paradise nestled on the banks of Blackwater some 24 miles northeast of Pensacola? How did they go from playing for the Black Panthers on the same Milton High School golf team (Slocum and Weekley on the same squad) in this football-crazed town? How did they defy the odds by winding up on the PGA Tour together?

There had to be something in the water.

"We don't know," said Watson, 28, who was born in Bagdad, Fla., two minutes away from Milton, but attended the Milton School District. "If we did, everybody would start moving there."

"I don't know what it was," said Weekley, 34, an avid outdoorsman who loves to hunt and fish when not on the golf course and was nicknamed after the Yogi Bear cartoon character, Boo Boo Bear. "I don't know how we all got here. It was just destiny, I guess."

Yes, it was destiny. How else to describe the journey each took from their narrow, tree-lined home course at Tanglewood Golf and Country Club to Westchester Country Club in suburban New York, where they will compete this weekend in The Barclays, the first of four events in the PGA's inaugural $10 million playoff. The top 120 players and ties will advance to the second round next weekend at the Deutsche Bank Championship at TPC Boston in Norton.

"Obviously, it's quite remarkable that Milton, Fla., does have three guys on Tour, in the playoffs, this year," said Slocum, 33, who moved to Florida from Baton Rouge, La., and befriended Weekley when they were teenage amateurs playing in the same Future Masters event in Dothan, Ala. "I live in Alpharetta, Ga., now but that whole area from Pensacola to Milton is an area I still call home."

The fact it has produced three Tour players, who rank among the top 100 in the world, seems something of a rarity.

"Very rare," said Weekley's 56-year-old mother, Patsy, from her home in Milton, Fla. "My daughter and I were talking about how rare it is and I think our golf course [Tanglewood] is an older course, a nine-hole course with another nine added, and it's the course they all grew up on. It's a shorter course, but very narrow. I think these guys learned to hit a lot of decent shots there, because of the way our course is laid out, the difficulty of our course being narrow, with a lot of trees, and small greens.

"I would think that, playing under these conditions, helped their golf game because it helped them to learn different shots."

Said Slocum, whose father, Jack, was head pro at Tanglewood, "I was fortunate to be able to play at a lot of golf courses. But when I moved from Louisiana, I moved from a nine-hole golf course to Tanglewood, which had 18 holes. So it was like Augusta to me, because I had 18 holes to play instead of nine. I loved it. It was just a good course for all of us."

Each player has carved his own niche on the Tour.

There's Slocum, the steady grinder and hard worker who ranks 83d in the world and 37th in the money ($1,472,454) and overcame a bout of ulcerative colitis in November 1997 that saw him drop from 150 pounds to 122 and miss a year and a half of golf. "Heath stands out because he's such a hard worker," Watson said. "His heart is bigger than anybody's. He's been through some problems in his life, with some illnesses, and for him to work and do as well as he has, he's had to grind. He hits more balls than me and Boo together, probably."

Said Weekley: "Heath, during high school, he was our No. 1 player. I'd say from 10th, 11th grade on, Heath was our No. 1 man, and I was No. 2 or 3. Bubba was a little younger than us and came after us, but Heath and I played every day. If we weren't hunting or fishing, we'd be playing golf. Me and him got so much in common, it's not even funny. Bubba, he doesn't like to hunt and fish. He came up in an era where you played video games. Not me, I always liked being outside."

No outdoorsman he, Watson readily admitted. "Yeah, I like playing video games. I like [being] indoors, you know? You've got air conditioning, you can sit around, get a glass of ice water when you're thirsty, instead of sweatin' in the sun."

In his two years on the Tour, Watson has also come to be known as one of the longest hitters, ranking first in average driving distance (316.2 yards). Ranked 36th on the money list ($1,493,635) and 87th in the world, Watson's best finish this season was a tie for second in the Shell Houston Open April 1. He also had a tie for fifth in the US Open June 17 in Oakmont, Pa.

"Hitting it long gets me a lot of fanfare, but I want to be known as a good player, a great player," Watson said. "So far, my two years [on Tour], learning it myself, I've shown I can play. I've got five top-10s this year, three last year, so I've gotten better. Hopefully, people will start saying, 'Hey, he's a great player and he can hit it long.' "

Then there's Boo. "He's one of a kind," Slocum said. "He's very free-spirited, loves to have fun, loves to joke, loves to play golf and he's very good at it. He's very, very good for our Tour."

Sergio Garcia might beg to differ. A self-described "country boy," Weekley admitted at the PGA Championship "I was never good at math" after he scored Garcia, his third-round playing partner, with a 4 on the 17th hole instead of a 5, which resulted in the Spaniard being disqualified for signing an incorrect scorecard. Despite that mini-controversy, Weekley remains one of the more refreshing characters to burst upon the Tour this season, what with his syrupy drawl to go along with a Southern-fried sense of humor.

"First time I met him was at the Future Masters," Slocum recalled. "I knew he was from [Milton] and I knew we were moving there from Louisiana. He was a guy who had a big smile on his face. He was a guy who wore his Footjoy Classics with no socks, and [shoes] untied. That's the way he played golf all through high school."

A 2001 Q-school graduate who made it onto the PGA Tour last year after graduating from the Nationwide Tour, where he finished seventh on the money list, Weekley ranks 21st in the money ($2,196,592) and 40th in the world and this year enjoyed a breakthrough with his first PGA Tour victory by shooting a 14-under 270 at the Verizon Heritage April 15. He added a top 10 (T9) at the PGA Championship in Tulsa, Okla.

"I actually didn't think I could play pro," Weekley said. "Heath took it serious, because he's good and he's still good and that's why he's been out here as long as he's been. He's always been the golfer around our area. Bubba, the same way.

"But me, I went off to college [Abraham Baldwin Agricultural] and played one year of college golf and didn't think I'd go anywhere," he said. "I quit, worked at a chemical plant, Monsanto, and was a hydroblaster and grounds crew worker. They were laying people off and one of the guys in my crew, he had been there one year and I had been there three years, was about to be let go. He had a family, a wife, three boys, and a little girl.

"I got to thinking and I went in and said, 'If there's any chance, lay me off, and let him stay on.' He had a family to feed. I was laying around, sleeping in my truck, and partying with my friends. I was living life as a 26-year-old without a care in the world."

Until, that is, Weekley got married, had a son, Thomas Parker, now 6, and turned to golf. When he struggled to make ends meet scuffing around the mini-tours, he considered giving up golf for a more stable job. But his wife, Karyn, encouraged him to give golf one more try.

"She was like, 'Are you going to be happy? Are you going to be happy clocking in to work every day?' " he recalled. "When you don't feel good, in a normal job, you've got to still go to work. You got to make yourself happy in what you're doing."

And so he did by playing golf on the PGA Tour with two of his buddies from back home in Milton, Fla., where a river named Blackwater runs through it.

"All three of us had dreams of playing on the PGA Tour and now to see us here, and now in the FedEx Cup, all together, it's neat," Watson said. "We can lean on each other every once in awhile. If we have questions, or if something is going wrong, or if we feel out of it or something, we always have someone to talk to because we grew up in the same area and we know what we've been through growing up. So it's a great thing to do and to see our hometown is behind us all the way. So, yeah, it's been fun."

"I have to say, the good Lord has blessed me," Weekley said. "To do the things I do for a living, I'm grateful for the opportunity. It's such an honor to be out here. And to have that opportunity to do it with Bubba and Heath? That ain't nothing but the icing on the cake right there."