FURYK CONTEMPLATES FIFTY

Looking back + looking ahead

- John Feinstein

▶ There really isn’t anyone who doesn’t have some kind of story about playing golf for the first time with Jim Furyk. After all, how could you not remember that swing, the one David Feherty once described as looking like “an octopus falling out of a tree.”

▶ “I remember thinking, Boy, they teach the golf swing a lot differently in Pennsylvania than they do down here,” says Justin Leonard, who was 15 the first time he played with Furyk—a few days before an American Junior Golf Association event in Texas in 1988. Leonard laughs. “Then I noticed something else: He got everything up and down and made it look pretty easy.”

▶ Bill Calfee had played on the tour for 10 years in the ’70s and ’80s and had gone to work for the tour in the early ’90s. During the 1993 mandatory orientation session for rookies who had survived PGA Tour Qualifying School, he took two young players— Furyk and Pete Jordan—out to play nine holes at TPC Sawgrass after the day’s seminars were over.

▶ “I’d never met Jim before,” Calfee says. “Very nice guy. Very quiet. But when I watched him swing the golf club, I thought, Poor guy’s got no chance. I said that to Pete when we finished. He agreed. I laugh now when I think about it, because look how it turned out.”

▶ The way it has turned out is this: The guy with no chance, with the swing people didn’t know whether to laugh or cry about, will turn 50 in May and has done the following since making it to the tour at the start of 1994: