To truly appreciate how high David Duval sits these days on life’s leaderboard, it may be helpful to turn away from his chosen profession and instead focus on one of his passions, snowboarding. More precisely, in the moment when he catches some air and bounds from the earth into the sky.
“It’s just wonderful,” he said. “Because that’s when it just goes completely quiet. There’s no sound. You’re right in the air and it’s quiet.”
Even with his feet planted on terra firma, more often than not, Duval now finds himself reveling in a hush that wells up to the surface one hug, one smile, one tender kiss at a time. The loner golfer who so often appeared to be shutting out the world behind a pair of wraparound sunglasses has embraced family life, living in Cherry Hills Village with his wife, Susie Persichitte, and their four children.
And, in what may or may not be a stroke of delicious happenstance, there is once again a place for the well-struck 6-iron in the life of the game’s former No. 1 player. After plummeting into the 400s in the world ranking, and enduring a 2005 season in which he made just one cut in 20 events, the 34-year-old has shown signs that, like the silence that accompanies floating through the air, the questions about “Whatever happened to David Duval?” may be blissfully stilled as well.
Although he missed the cut at the Masters, his back-nine 32 on Friday was the best of the tournament. Just a little less than a month ago, Duval tied for 16th at the U.S. Open, a finish that might have been dramatically higher were it not literally for a few feet and a couple of bad bounces in the opening round.
Now, days away from the start of the British Open, an event he won five years ago for his last tour victory, Duval says it’s entirely possible that he will be adding a second major championship to his résumé, be it this week at Royal Liverpool or perhaps in August’s PGA Championship just outside of Chicago.
If he does, it will mark one of the greatest comebacks in the game’s history. Even if he doesn’t, Duval has crafted a remarkable rally.
“How do you measure happiness? I don’t know how you do that,” he said. “I’m content. I want to have better success in the tournaments than I’ve had, but I know I’m playing well, so I’m happy with that.
“The best way to explain it is that I’m not yearning anymore, on or off the course. I appreciate what I have. I feel like I’m blessed.”
Dawn patrol
When Duval was the world’s best, he often would choose the earliest tee time possible for the Wednesday pro-ams that are a staple of tour life.
“What else was I going to be doing?” he asked, adding that he eventually opted for a couple more hours sleep by switching to a slightly later time.
Last week, playing in the John Deere Classic on a sponsor’s exemption, Duval didn’t have the luxury of choosing. So it was that minutes after 7 a.m. he took off with a gallery of a few friends and family of his amateur partners and his 15-year-old son, Deano, in tow. Some five hours later, Duval putted out on the 18th green. As he stopped to sign a few autographs, Puggy Blackmon, Duval’s coach at Georgia Tech and a current adviser to the player, says that now it’s “not a question of whether David will win again, it’s when.”
“I’ve never seen anybody who went from one end of the spectrum to the other like he did,” said Blackmon, now the coach at the University of South Carolina. “When he came to Columbia before the Masters two years ago, I looked at him and said, ‘Who are you?’ But it’s like a man who’s had a serious car accident with total memory loss. Slowly but surely, he starts to recover and he has some flashbacks of when he was really good.
“It’s a fine line out here. You get a little bit of indecision, and a little bit of flinching in a Masters or a U.S. Open, and it can be ugly. But all I can tell you is that in college it took him a while to win and on tour it took him a while to win. I think it will take him a little time to win again here. But you look at his track record, look out. I think he’ll be better this time around.”
Duval has had four top-six finishes in the Masters, but after his abbreviated stay this spring, there was much talk about how, with his exemption from the 2001 British expiring, he wasn’t guaranteed a return for next year. Similarly, despite his fine showing in the U.S. Open, he fell one spot short of cementing an automatic berth for next year’s Open at Oakmont.
He doesn’t have to worry about his future as far as the British Open is concerned.
“I have an exemption there until I’m 65, and I’d imagine I’d go play that year,” he said with a laugh. “If I can stand and walk and compete, and not slow people down, I’ll probably go there and do it.
As for the other majors, Duval expects to be playing in them for a long time.
“I’m not worried about the others, not at all,” he said. “If it was 15, 18 months ago, then I might be concerned about it, but I fully expect to be playing, and exempt in all of them again next year.”
To do that, Duval will have to prove he’s indeed capable of winning again. But just expressing such confidence is a good sign to others in the game.
“I can believe in him all I want, but he’s got to believe in himself. That’s the thing,” said fellow player and ABC analyst Paul Azinger. “He has a few hurdles to overcome when you drop that far. There’s obviously the physical issues, but how deep are the mental scars?
“When you can shoot scores like he did at the Masters and the Open, you know you’re going in the right direction. You fall and fall and fall and fall and then all of a sudden you start shooting scores like that, it’s turned around. But now you have to climb and climb and climb and climb. And that’s hard.”
A cautionary tale
While not No. 1, at the start of the 2006 season Chris DiMarco was as entrenched in the game as someone not named Tiger Woods or Phil Mickelson could be. The runner-up to Woods at the 2005 Masters in the spring and one of the heroes of the 2005 U.S. Presidents Cup team in the fall, DiMarco began the new year by winning the European Tour’s Abu Dhabi Championship and then returning to the States and finishing in the top 15 in three of his first four events.
However, taking a two-week break before the Players Championship, the start of the run-up to this year’s Masters, DiMarco injured his back while skiing in Colorado.
Forced to withdraw from the Players, DiMarco returned the week before Augusta but missed the cut at the BellSouth Classic. He also failed to stay the weekend at the Masters. In fact, of the 12 events DiMarco has played since getting hurt, he has missed seven cuts, including the John Deere, lending a chilling literal meaning to the term “slippery slope.”
Duval said he has not chatted with DiMarco, but there’s no question he can relate better than most to his problems. A back injury that began in 2000, combined with wrist problems and a bout with bursitis, sent Duval “down some paths I wouldn’t recommend to anyone or would do again.”
Over a period of time, he said, “I slowly continued to compensate for the physical problems I was having and ended up completely destroying my swing, my set-up, my posture. Everything was gone.”
Duval’s always seemed to have some ambivalence toward the game, even when he was at the top of the charts. When he won the British Open at Royal Lytham & St. Annes five years ago, he openly wondered if there shouldn’t be more to it. Similarly, before finding religion at the 1999 Ryder Cup, Duval questioned what the fuss was all about in the biennial competition between the United States and Europe.
As a result of those views, Duval gained the reputation of being aloof; however, some of those close to him saw it another way.
“You gotta look at it from the human being side of it – the kid was lonely,” Blackmon said. “He had everything in the world that you could possibly want, but he had no wife, no family, no one to share it with.
“He’s just a totally different person. It’s fun to watch and it’s fun to be around him. He’s just enjoying it now.”
Surprisingly, perhaps fortuitously, Duval’s conversion came as he was falling into depths that Jacques Cousteau could only dream about. He met Persichitte at a restaurant in Denver during the 2003 International – which Duval says probably would never have happened had he still been one of the world’s best players.
“My head still would have been buried in the sand,” he said. “I seriously doubt I would have gone to dinner somewhere other than the clubhouse. I would say it’s a mere certainty we would not have met.”
Their whirlwind romance – they were married within seven months of their first date – not only gave Duval some much-needed balance, it provided a reason to keep playing.
Going for the gold
Duval says the great thing about his swing is its repetitiveness, but he was unable to regain the form that brought him 13 wins between 1997 and 2001. When things reached their lowest point, Duval admits he considered walking away from the tour. However, in his new role as parental role model, he decided that wouldn’t be the best course of action.
“It’s hard, especially when you’re talking about a few years of struggles, not months,” he said. “Having a family at that time was kind of a double-edged sword. It might have been easier to walk away and just be with them, but it also gives a lot of incentive to keep working.
“I’ve had tremendous success in the game. If I was alone I could have walked away, but wanting my family to see what I’ve been doing for so long, and what I’m capable of doing, is certainly some great incentive.”
Asked if he’s ever sat his brood down to show them his career highlights, Duval chuckles and dismissively said, “There hasn’t been ‘David Night’ yet.” Besides why pop in a DVD when there’s still so much to offer in person?
Ask him what his goals are and Duval initially says it’s simply to play golf the way he wants to.
Soon enough, Duval will be back on his snowboard. Every year, during his initial trip to the slopes, Duval tells himself to take it easy, “and then, about 100 yards down, I’m looking for something to jump off of.”
Now, having stared down his golfing demons, Duval is ready to go all Shaun White on us.
“I still have aims of that Ryder Cup,” he said of September’s match in Ireland between the United States and Europe, a competition for which players have been amassing points for the past two years and would seem to be completely beyond Duval’s reach.
“I have four tournaments left – the John Deere, the British, the International and the PGA. You win the John Deere and you win a major and you give (U.S. captain) Tom Lehman an excuse to pick me.
“If I can win the British or the PGA, then you’re talking about an experienced Ryder Cup player with two majors. I should get a look then at least. I don’t think I would qualify on points, but at least I’d make him think about it.
“It’s a crazy goal, but you never know.”
Staff writer Anthony Cottoncan be reached at 303-820-1292 or acotton@denverpost.com.
British Open
What: 135th British Open championship
Schedule: Thursday-July 23
Site: Royal Liverpool
Length: 7,258 yards
Par: 35-37-72
Purse: TBA ($7.3 million in 2005)
Winner’s share: TBA ($1.26 million in 2005)
Defending champion: Tiger Woods
Last year: Woods went wire-to-wire at St. Andrews, the second time he has captured the claret jug at the home of golf. Jack Nicklaus played his 164th and final major championship, missing the cut.
Television: Thursday-Friday, 5 a.m. to 5 p.m., TNT Sports. Saturday, 5-7 a.m., TNT Sports; 7 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., KMGH-7. July 23, 4-8 a.m., TNT Sports; 8 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., KMGH-7.
