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Golf on Cape Cod - Personal ProfilesBRAD FAXON: True to His RootsBy Ron Driscoll
GOCC: We wanted to talk a little bit about your
time on the Cape, obviously. BRAD: Jack was my mentor growing up. When I
first got to the Cape, he was a great player at Eastward Ho! I
remember when my dad used to take us down there; I did a little
bit of caddying there and a lot of playing. I think the first
tournament I ever played in was there with Jack...(To Jack) Was
it a member-guest tournament or a member-member? JACK: It was a member-member...I don’t
know how we did. BRAD: Oh, we did pretty good. I had too many
shots, probably. I think we won net and gross (laughing). It was
a quota...and we drummed everybody. I fell in love with Eastward
Ho! Jack and his family had been there for a long time, and he
helped show me the ropes. JACK: I was remembering that ride we had with
(Eastward Ho! professional) Dan Keefe in his convertible, with
you, Brian Shaughnessy and me, going to our first tournament. BRAD: Was that at Harney’s? JACK: It was a pro-junior tournament at Dunfey’s...Remember
the 8-track tapes? We thought, “This guy is cool!”
Remember them? If you left them on the dash, they’d melt.
I think you were wearing sunglasses kinda like those. (Brad laughs
at the dig.) I remember that summer of ‘74 when I came back
from Deerfield and you had grown, and on the first tee you hit
it 20 or 30 yards past me, and I said, “Oh- oh.” It
was all over.
GOCC: Did you play in a Mass. Junior at Cummaquid? JACK: It was a qualifier for the Mass. Junior.
You were 14, I think, and you dusted the Pre-Junior field as I
recall...they wouldn’t let you play in the Juniors. BRAD: Yeah, it was qualifying. The finals were
at Hatherly. I won the Pre-Junior after qualifying at Cummaquid.
It was the only time I ever played Hatherly. A guy named Greg
Orlick won the Junior (in 1976). JACK: You really hit your stride that year. BRAD: The first lesson I ever got in my life
was from Dan Keefe. We played a round of golf, and that weekend
... (trails off at the memory) he killed himself. We played a
lot of golf together...and he gave me this lesson. I’ll
never forget it. I was 13 years old. I was driving it really good,
and Dan had just gone to a Jim Flick school, the square-to-square
swing concept...He was telling me how I wanted to rotate the last
three fingers and keep them tight so I could keep the clubface
square, keep my left wrist flat...And I remember after he told
me that, I used to squeeze so hard that I would wake up in the
morning and my fingers would be stuck. I had to open them up.
And that was the first lesson I ever had. GOCC: When did being a professional enter your
head? BRAD: God, I think when I was 12 or 13 years
old and first started to play in tournaments, thinking, “This
would be cool.” I remember being in high school and knowing
I was going to go somewhere South to play golf, and thinking if
I could be a good enough college player, if I could be an All-American,
then I could play on the tour. I didn’t want to be a 100th-on-the-money-list
guy for 20 years and have nobody ever know who you were. In my
junior year in college, I played well, I was a first-team All-American
and won a bunch of tournaments...from a pretty small school but
against good competition, and that’s when I kind of figured
it out. GOCC: Your grandfather, Ray Faxon, is at Woods
Hole...
GOCC: You never see that anywhere. BRAD: No, you don’t. So don’t tell
anybody (laughs). GOCC: Even as a young player you realized that
it wasn’t always how far you hit the ball, but that placement
was important, placement to set up your second shot. BRAD: Yes, and nowadays I don’t think
Eastward Ho! would be a great course to grow up playing, because
you don’t learn to bomb it. Nowadays, you need it open so
you can hammer it, because, psychologically, you gotta have kids
learning from an early age how to swing for the fences, the way
the game has changed. That being said, if I wanted to go play
Tiger, Phil, Vijay or Ernie, I’d take them to Eastward Ho!
before I would take them to the TPC of Boston. GOCC: What’s your feeling about that?
Is the game getting too long?
GOCC: So you think outside factors are as least
as much an issue as the game itself... BRAD: I’m not too worried about it. We
had a panel discussion yesterday with Sports Illustrated (http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2005/magazine/06/06/gp.table0614/index.html):
David Fay of the USGA, (author and course designer) Geoff Shackelford,
Larry Dorman from Callaway and myself. I represented the Tour
players. There was a moderator from SI, and it was state of the
game stuff. Shackelford was saying that the ball was ruining the
game, and Fay, to his credit, said, “You know what? There’s
nothing wrong with the game right now.” And one of the points
he made was this: Is a course like Merion not going to host another
U.S. Open because it’s too short, or because there’s
not enough room for corporate tents anymore? It’s as much
that being a factor – the bottom line, rather than the golf
course. If you go play Merion, it’s every bit as good a
U.S. Open course as it ever has been. But there’s not a
driving range there that’s suitable...there’s not
an 18th hole there that you can line with $250,000 skyboxes. GOCC: We remember Jack Nicklaus playing in the
U.S. Open in the early 70s hitting a lot of 2-irons off the tee. BRAD: Absolutely. GOCC: Would you qualify this year as a slow
start? (Note: Brad missed five of six cuts to start the season;
he later sandwiched a tie for 3rd at Westchester and a tie for
9th at Milwaukee around a tie for 23rd at the British Open.) BRAD: Definitely. I’ve had a very odd
year, and it really kind of started last year. After I hurt my
knee in the fall of ‘03, I did some stuff that I’m
not sure now was right or wrong. I probably should have had surgery
right away on my ACL, and then I started messing around with my
golf swing with a bunch of different teachers and not sticking
to anything. I went back and forth with a lot of stuff. If you
watch me play, there’s nothing really wrong... It’s
pretty frustrating, because I haven’t hit it terrible, I
haven’t putted terrible, I just haven’t put anything
together. I’ve had no momentum, I’ve had nothing go
well and, when I go out and play with my friends, I’m playing
fine. It’s just a matter of turning things around in tournaments.
I’ve had nine holes here and there that looked great, but
it’s been a challenge. It’s been a frustrating year,
because after having a great year in ‘03, I started thinking,
“Hey, this is easy,” and now this. GOCC: Have you had lower periods in your career?
GOCC: So it wasn’t the injury that led
to the tinkering? BRAD: Well, it maybe stopped me from doing what
I had been doing. I had been working with a guy that I’ve
worked with for a while named Kevin Sprecher – he’s
a Jim McLean guy. And then I started questioning everything, and
I went back to different teachers and different thoughts... Out
here, it’s nice to have good information, but it’s
nice to have the same information, you know? Information you can
play with. I’m an inquisitive guy. I like to ask questions...
I’m an a la carte guy, I take bits and pieces from everybody’s
menu. Sometimes that’s a good thing, but I’m very
confident that it’s not too far away. I would just like
to have it happen tomorrow, not next week. GOCC: You’ve been on Tour for many years...
how much of the game now is mental for you rather than physical? BRAD: It’s more mental for me. Physically
I’m fine, other than my knee, and my knee doesn’t
bother me to hit a shot, it doesn’t bother me to walk the
course... The guys who play well for a long time, they’re
ready to play when they play. They still want to play golf, which
I still do. That mental challenge is the thing you’ve got
to be prepared for, because I can tell you that physically there’s
nothing that’s broken or that’s not working. GOCC: We were watching the Heritage Classic
on TV recently and saw a threesome of Sindelar, Calcavecchia,
and Price, all guys in their mid-to-late 40s. Is there a generation
gap now, with the younger guys coming in? BRAD: Well, yeah, there are some guys out here
now, let me say this right, that are younger than the amount of
years I’ve been out here. I’ve been on Tour for 22
years now, and there are guys like Kevin Na, who turned pro out
of high school and who were prepared totally differently than
we were. These guys were playing in national junior tournaments
at 14 or 15 years old. Honest to God, a big tournament for us
was the state junior, and that’s how you measured yourself.
Now, they have ranking points and national schedules. It’s
unbelievable. GOCC: These kids have personal trainers now... BRAD: I’ve told everybody for a long time:
The hardest thing when you first get out on Tour is to not compare
yourself to everyone else and not try to do what everybody else
does. It’s very intimidating when you see Vijay Singh get
to the range early and leave late and then go to the gym, and
think that you don’t have to do all that to beat him. I
remember measuring myself; I remember looking at Payne Stewart
and thinking, “I better have that swing or I can’t
play.” I remember looking at (Ben) Crenshaw and thinking,
“I better putt like him or I can’t putt....”
And looking down at a guy like Greg Norman and saying, “He’s
the best driver. I gotta hit it like that.” I was trying
to do all these things, I was trying to eat right, I was trying
to exercise right, trying to do all this stuff that didn’t
have anything to do with how you play golf.... GOCC: When did you reach your comfort level,
how long did it take? BRAD: I still haven’t gotten there yet
(laughs). GOCC: You’ve always been recognized as
one of the best putters. Is that something you were born with? BRAD: No, I’ve been a good putter since
I was younger, but I don’t believe that you’re born
a good putter. You have to practice, you have to learn how to
putt. I’ve told a lot of people that my statistics got better
the longer I was on Tour. When I first got out there I was never
a top 10-ranked putter, and then for a stretch of, what, three
out of five years, I led the stats. It’s a hard thing to
do to lead that stat by hundredths of a point... But I got better
– my mechanics got better, my discipline got better, my
mind got better. I’ve told all the people that always ask...
that you can get better as a putter. It’s not like you’re
either born with it or you’re not, and you can’t get
it if you don’t have it. There have been a lot of guys,
like Dana Quigley who’s a better putter than he used to
be. It’s not like you get age-inflicted with bad putting...
They say young players tend to be great putters because they have
no fear. Well, you can’t be a great putter with fear. You’ve
got to be able to throw away that fear. GOCC: What is the key to good putting? Ball
position, staying still, rhythm, what? You have to putt the ball
solidly so you can get it to the hole, right? BRAD: You’d think so – and yet,
I’ve hit a lot of bad putts that aren’t solid that
have gone in the hole. I don’t think there’s an absolute
thing that you have to do fundamentally perfectly to be a great
putter. I would say you have to be able to putt without fear.
There’s no great putter that’s putted well for a period
of time that hasn’t done that. There are too many different
styles, there’s too many models of putters, there’s
too many different postures and theories that have worked, to
say that this is an absolute. But there’s no great putter
that’s ever gonna tell you that, when he was putting great,
he was worried about missing it. How do you throw away the fear?
That’s my answer – You’ve got to throw away
that fear. It’s like, “Why do you putt better in a
scramble? Why do you putt better after you’ve missed your
first one and you make your second one? Why do you hit it better
on the driving range than you do on the course?” Because
it doesn’t matter if you miss. That may seem overly simplistic
to a lot of people, but the truth is not arguable. You may say
head still is important, and I can tell you that Scotty Cameron’s
research shows that the head of every single player he’s
ever tested moved at least an inch and a half and sometimes eight
inches. Ben Crenshaw, arguably the best putter ever, told me he
wants to make sure that his head and knees move when he putts.
The stroke gets longer, not shorter. Jack Nicklaus stood over
the ball forever and putted better. Some players take less time
and putt great. It’s an answer people don’t want to
hear... because they always want a band-aid; they want to have
a fix-it, some physical change that will make them better. GOCC: So do we. BRAD: The other thing is, changing the putter
or your grip can be a temporary band-aid that can really work!
Because you say, “OK, I’ve got this claw grip now,
who cares if I miss... it’s the claw, it’s not supposed
to work.” Finally, you’ve given in and you say, “OK,
I’m just going to go with this...” so you try it. GOCC: It’s another way of taking the pressure
off... BRAD: I would say go out someday for fun and
putt with your sand wedge bladed, or putt with your 3-wood or
putt with a 5-iron, and I’ll guarantee you, you’re
gonna come pretty close to putting as well as you do with your
putter... until you start thinking like you do with your putter.
Go out there with different clubs, and I did this today in the
video with the Golf Channel. I just showed them, “Look:
what’s great about putting with different clubs is, there’s
not a correct way you’re supposed to do this. You don’t
think about anything else except, “OK, I’m just trying
to putt. I’m just trying to knock it in the hole.”
And that’s what works. When people ask me if I practice
a lot... I count a round of golf as practice, because I’m
trying to make the putt. When I go out to a putting green, I’m
trying to knock the ball in the hole. When you go out to shoot
baskets with your buddies, or shoot pool with your buddies, you
wouldn’t go out there and worry about your right elbow when
you’re shooting – at least I wouldn’t. The more
you can make that happen in putting, the more you can make it
automatic and routine, the better you’ll be with every part
of your game. GOCC: Do you think the driver gets into the
same mental thing? BRAD: I think for some guys it does; you watch
what happened with... you mentioned Duval, Beck, Seve. Whether
their problem was that they got too swing-oriented, too much mechanics,
or just a plain loss of confidence... I think it comes from hitting
shots way offline and not being able to shrug them off. And then
trying to get fixed all the time, always trying to get fixed...
that’s what’s happens to guys. It’s magnified
more with the driver. GOCC: You mentioned being the a la carte type
of guy. You listen to interviews with Duval and some of those
guys, and they talk about how they listened to too many people
and just didn’t focus on any one thing, and found themselves
trying too many different things, not pinning themselves down
to one particular thought. Do you think that’s more mental
than physical, where they say,” I was trying too many different
things.” BRAD: That’s a good point; yeah, I think
so. It’s just such a fine line, too. Everybody wants to
get better at something; they want to make their swing look better...
they want to hit more quality-looking shots... and that can get
you a little perfectionist. You’re hitting it great on the
range, and then you get out on the course. When I’ve been
working on my swing a lot and hitting it great on the range and
then get out on the course... if it’s just not there, then
I kinda start questioning what I was doing and trying something
else GOCC: You didn’t move to Florida, like
a lot of Tour guys, to improve your game. How come? BRAD: Actually, I did. I lived in Florida for
10 years. Jack and I lived together at Grenelefe, in Haines City
in 1983. I stayed down there until 1992, until my kids got old
enough. I would never change the quality of their life to live
in Florida... it’s so much better up here. GOCC: In what way?
GOCC: Obviously, the Senior Tour is out there.
It’s a little ways to go yet (Brad turned 44 on Aug. 1),
but I’m sure you pay a little attention to what’s
going on there... BRAD, smiling: To tell you the truth, I haven’t
wished that I were 50 yet. GOCC: When you’re 60, you will.
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Brad
Faxon of Barrington, R.I., has been a model of consistency on
the PGA Tour for 22 seasons, after an amateur career that included
college Player of the Year honors and a Walker Cup selection.
Brad retains his roots, living in Rhode Island and hosting a popular
charity event there with fellow Ocean Stater and Tour pro Billy
Andrade, but he also has long ties to Cape Cod, where he got his
first lesson, played his first tournament, and where members of
his family still live.
BRAD: I think it was 1975. I won the state juniors in ‘75 in Rhode
Island. That was a big summer. When I went from 14 to 15, I grew
a little, got a little pop, got a little length and that helped.
That was a big part of it...and having guys like Jack to play
with was great. We would play 36 holes a day, and we wanted to
play more. I still say growing up at a golf course is the best
thing that can happen to a kid.
BRAD: The oldest living member at Woods Hole. He’ll be 98 this
year. He’s a golf nut, and a stock market nut. I learned
to play cribbage from him...I still love the game. I played very
little golf at Woods Hole. I probably played there as a kid two
times, I don’t have enough memories of the place. It’s
a very hilly course, but I don’t think it’s quite
up there with Eastward Ho! Eastward Ho! is one of the best courses
I’ve ever played. 
BRAD: I don’t think so yet. The USGA is making it so it’s
not going to accelerate like it has in the past, so that the next
advances are going to come from conditioning and instruction,
not from the ball and technology. I would say there was a problem
if we didn’t have great rivalries in the game, if we didn’t
have people that loved to watch. You know, people are always saying
there are less golfers playing than there used to be, but I don’t
know if that’s true. I think the core group of golfers is
still playing, yet maybe there are less new people that are picking
it up. But we’ve had a lot of things change since 9/11;
the world’s changed, the economy hasn’t been as strong.
I think that’s as much to blame for it. It wasn’t
that long ago that everyone was going crazy, seeing how many courses
they could build as fast as they could, and charging as much as
they wanted...
BRAD: Oh yeah! In 1985, my second year on Tour, I missed like eight
cuts in a row, was 124th on the money list, and I didn’t
feel like I could hit it within 100 yards of where I was aiming.
I don’t feel like that at all now. I feel like I can still
play. It would be nice to shoot a couple of good scores and get
a couple of solid tournaments in, and not mess around with my
swing as much as I have been.
BRAD:
Schooling, the people you meet up here, the climate, my family
is from here, and it’s more beautiful up here... I mean,
I like the weather in Florida too; I’m not an idiot. But
I like living up here.