Brandt Jobe doesn’t feel like he should be exempt from household chores anymore. Before he jumps into his next set of honey-dos, however, he is going to be certain of one thing.
“I’m going to make sure I know what my broom is made out of,” he said Wednesday.
In a freakish accident last November, Jobe severed the tip of his index finger and part of the base of his thumb on his left hand sweeping dust out of his garage in Texas. The broom snapped and the metal underneath the plastic cover in essence became a knife. When the mishap occurred, Jobe gathered up his missing pieces and put them into a plastic bag of ice. At 1 a.m. the following morning he had surgery to reattach them.
Unable to play until the beginning of February, Jobe recently spent four days in Florida with his coach, Mike McGetrick, to see if he was ready to get back on the PGA Tour. Working from a major medical exemption, this week’s PODS Championship in the Tampa area is Jobe’s first event of the season.
“I’m 10 tournaments behind the rest of the tour, but I wouldn’t be out here if I didn’t think I could do it,” Jobe said during a telephone interview. “I’ve got the butterflies and everything like it’s my first event, and I’ll probably make some stupid mistakes out there, but hopefully I’ll do some good things as well.”
Jobe, a former Kent Denver star, is hoping his accident was the final piece of a 2006 season that was frustrating on many levels, especially after a stellar 2005 season. That year, Jobe finished 27th on the money list with more than $2 million in earnings and six top-10 finishes. At the beginning of 2006, he had a top-20 finish at the Bob Hope and tied for 10th at the Buick Invitational. He had only one other top-10 finish during the rest of the season.
“It was a crazy year,” said Jobe, who dropped to 106th on the money list. “The big problem was my driver. Usually I hit it long and straight, but I was absolutely horrible. It got to the point where I wasn’t thinking about winning, but just trying to make it through the tournament.”
Things got so bad off the tee Jobe considered making a switch away from Callaway, one of his major sponsors.
“I don’t care who’s paying what, it wasn’t worth what I was going through,” he said.
However, the company has come through with a new model, with which Jobe seems comfortable. All that remains is seeing what he does with it in tournament play.
There will be plenty of opportunities for that. Because of his injury and missed time, Jobe has to play catch-up in terms of gathering points in the chase for the year-end FedExCup playoffs. He also has about 20 events this season and a handful next year to earn enough money to secure his tour card once again. At the end of that time, Jobe must have earned as much as the 125th player on the money list, a total he estimates will be about $680,000.
“I’m gonna have to add a few tournaments, maybe play a little more than I normally would,” Jobe said. “The goal is to be competing for the Cup, at least to get into the first two events. Normally I would think I’d be in the top 144 (the cutoff for the opening playoff tournament). I’ll have to play a lot to get to that now unless something good happens. A couple of top-fives would take care of that pretty quickly.”
Get out – now
Perhaps the only person more eager than Jobe to get started is his caddie, John Killeen, who is in his first season on the bag. If that isn’t enough to make him nervous, there’s the fact that Jobe’s inability to work only added to an already lengthy layoff for the looper. Previously Killeen worked for LPGA star Meg Mallon, who let Killeen go late last season, a year which ended prematurely when Mallon missed a large chunk of time because of assorted injuries.
“Yeah, he’s going nuts, too,” Jobe said. “I think both of us, and our wives, are ready for us to get out of the house.”
Anthony Cotton can be reached at 303-954-1292 or acotton@denverpost.com.
