We Look Beyond The Leg to Find a Regular Guy Who Embodies All That’s Good About Golf

by Vic Williams
photo by Darin Bunch

We’ll call it The Ironic Cab Ride
Casey Martin’s former roommate and current business partner, Dusty Schmidt — who as a one-time golf professional-turned-poker pro is an amazing story unto himself — tells the tale this way: He, Casey and Dusty’s wife, Nicole, climbed into a cab after the Holiday Bowl in San Diego, bound for dinner at a local restaurant. Their Oregon Ducks had just beat up on Oklahoma State but good, 42-31, and they were feeling it. Maybe Casey’s leg ached a little less right about then. After all, the guy bleeds green and gold these days.

Not recognizing one of his fares was Martin — the former Stanford teammate of Tiger Woods and a pretty good player in his own right — the cabbie happened to riff on another big sporting event that played out in Southern California just last summer: the now-famous U.S. Open at Torrey Pines. “Can you imagine even trying to play golf on one leg,” he said, “much less winning the damn United States Open?”

Uh, yeah, actually. Martin could more than imagine it. He’d done it, man. Well, maybe not the winning the U.S. Open part. But the playing golf on one leg? Been there, done that — and still doing it at a pretty high level, though today he prefers to let his own Ducks, the Oregon men’s golf team, step into the fray and play for glory while he coaches from the sidelines and on the range. He could’ve come back at the cabbie with a stinging remark, but instead the group shared a snicker among themselves and continued the celebration.

Laughter heals. And life is good these days for Casey Martin, on one leg or two. Perhaps not whole in some ways, but good, with a strong shot at getting better even without golf in the equation.

You see, Martin is much more than the Guy in the Cart or the Golfer With the Weird Leg Condition, formally known as Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber Syndrome. He’s a thinker, an entrepreneur, a leader of men and follower of Christ. A realist on one hand but a true believer in the afterlife and the promise of “wholeness” on the other. He inspires others almost despite himself and carries with him a confidence born of raw talent and steep challenges, steeper than most of us will ever face.

He doesn’t complain, he just deals, with courage and humor and that hardest of human traits to develop, an open mind. And an open heart, too — not necessarily worn on the sleeve of his University of Oregon pullover, but on display nonetheless as he spent a morning with FG at the university’s sports administration center, in a meeting room just a few steps from a Hall of Famelike display.

As the Oregon men’s golf coach since 2006, Martin has been out to add some hardware to that wall; the team hasn’t won a Pac-10 title since 1959. It’s a much quieter quest than what he undertook in the late 1990s after he and his buddies at Stanford — including somebody named Notah and, oh yeah, a kid called Tiger — won one and almost two NCAA golf titles. It’s certainly far less stressful than fighting the PGA Tour for the right to use a motorized cart in professional competition, a case Martin took all the way to the Supreme Court in May 2001, winning a 7-2 decision and engendering some divisiveness among his contemporaries, especially old-guarders such as Jack Nicklaus who, as a witness for the Tour, argued that walking is an “intrinsic” part of the game (though he later softened his stance and even used a cart himself on at least one occasion on the Champions Tour). The high court found otherwise. Martin could have his cart. And by codifying his contention that pro golfers needn’t be fully able-bodied to be gainfully employed, he expanded the sport’s participant base, opened some doors and built some hope.

Martin spent one year on the big tour and by 2002 was pretty much out of competitive golf, though the internal fire still burned — hence the return to his native Eugene to give coaching a shot. It was a good move, bringing together the best aspects of his playing past and a concrete plan for the immediate future, which is as far as he cares to look at this point.

“I haven’t thought too much long term about my future,” he said, settling into a chair as best he could for a fidgety, wideranging interview. “I enjoy what I’m doing, and it takes a fair amount of energy and vision to make the University of Oregon golf team the best it can be. I haven’t thought much past the next year or two, recruiting and trying to build the program. Long term, will I still be the golf coach when I’m 50 years old? I don’t know. Hard to say. But maybe I should start thinking about stuff like that. I’m pretty focused. This has become my life, and I’m just grinding on it.”

Casey the Coach
Grinder. That’s how Martin played the game as a touring pro, getting through Q School, winning one Nationwide Tour event in 1999 and moving up to the Big Show in 2000. Now it’s Coach Casey Martin in a nutshell. He’s pragmatic and goal-oriented and leaves emotion out of his decision-making process. He’d rather concentrate on raw numbers and empirical results, which is one of several things that make coaching attractive to him.

“I’m looking for scores; what are the kids shooting? If you’ve read Money Ball by Michael Lewis, about how the Oakland A’s became competitive, it’s an awesome read — just breaking down statistically what really matters, and building a team around that. I want the kids who score the best. I don’t care what it looks like, if you’re shooting good scores, I like it. It’s not that simple obviously, but that’s the main thing I look at. You can see pretty much where they’re going. The kids at the top are who everyone wants, and it fades down after that.”

So measurability is important, but after that it comes down to fire in the belly. Martin is constantly testing his players to keep them stoked, challenging them to topple the pro when he feels strong enough to get out there and play with them. “I’ve got a pretty competitive bunch; they’re not intimidated by me. I have to play well to win. I played well the other day and didn’t win. I have to really get into it to beat the whole team. I play nine holes here and there, practice with them a little bit.”

Martin can still belt it 300-plus and, according to www.10thgreen.com, the new golf social networking and game improvement site he and Schmidt have partnered on, he still plays to a +5.8 handicap. Lending his obvious talents as a player and natural leader to the college game keeps him directly connected to his salad days at Stanford, which he ranks among the best of his life. “We worked really hard, but we also had a lot of fun,” he says. “I look back, having putting matches with Tiger and Notah and Conrad Ray, now the coach. We had a great time. That’s what it’s about. The national championship was great, and we almost won two. That was a big part of it — it wouldn’t have been as fun if we were ranked 150th, you know? But it was really the day-to-day experience of being around those guys who were great players and having a lot of fun with them."

“That’s what I’m trying to do here: Make sure that golf doesn’t become work yet. I absolutely preach and scream bloody murder about working hard. It’s the Number One thing I’m trying to instill in this program. But it’s not done just to get your hands bloody. We have a lot of fun. We do a lot of competitive stuff, so guys are hootin’ and hollerin’ and having a good time. It’s not just about beating your head against the wall in practice. When you or I go out with buddies, we try to have that element of competition and fun because that’s what’s special about golf. When the guys have fun, I think they’re gonna play well, and we’ll build a fun program.

“I think it’s a big reason why I am coaching today. I had a great experience at Stanford. I loved it. Had I had a bad experience, I probably wouldn’t want to be around it anymore. But the thought of doing this was exciting to me.”

Once the thought became reality, Martin found Eugene to be as solid a sports town as any he’s come across, certainly more plugged in to collegiate sports on a visceral level across the board than, say, the buttoneddown private-school town of Palo Alto. Not to say he has the golf program attracting notice on the level of Ducks football, which has, over the past decade, turned into a perennial bowl denizen, but he and his team have equal access to Oregon’s impossible-to- describe, state-of-the-art-and-then-some training facility, which benefits from the home-job largess of big-time donors like Nike founder Phil Knight. Martin certainly knows who butters his budget. “The big sports here really get lavished on so they can be successful, and that trickles down to us,” he says. “It’s a model that works. I get it. I’m not claiming to be football, obviously, but we get a lot of support from everybody here. The training facility is very impressive. It’s a great place to be.”

Casey the Teacher
Both on the team practice tee and on 10thgreen.com, Martin’s straight forward, practical approach to golf instruction comes through. You could even call it old school — he’d rather bring out the best in a player’s God-given move than turn out a team of robots á la some of today’s swingmills, where you can only tell kids apart by the logos on their hats, and sometimes not even then.

“They’re teaching them the golf swing, that the only thing that matters in life is getting your club on plane and golf will be perfect,” he says. “That is not true. You can play golf below the plane or above it, as long as you know what’s going on. Sometimes the swing changes from day to day. The problem is, when somebody learns that way, they end up playing ‘golf swing’ the rest of their life. You’ve got to be careful not to fall down that trap. It’s not how I was taught, not how Notah was taught, not how Tiger was taught.”

For that reason, he doesn’t employ too much video in his coaching.

“I never had a hardcore video lesson until I was out of college, and sometimes I regret I ever did anything. You can go way overboard with video as far as making sure every line is perfect — ‘you’re two degrees off from what this player did, and he’s great, so get there.’ I don’t think that’s good for the game. To get too mechanical is a problem. You have to go back and look what the old-schoolers did. They looked at their divots, their ball flight, and related that back to, ‘Well, if your divot’s going this way and your ball’s going that way, you’ve got to be doing this.’ If you don’t have that aspect in your golf game, you’re always going to be dependent on someone filming you, stepping away and looking at video. A lot of these young players are very dependent on people. They can’t do it themselves. I think that’s bad. I enjoy watching swings, slowing them down and seeing what great players do, but too much of it is not a great thing.

“I’m not trying to disparage anyone who uses a video camera in their teaching, but a lot of these assembly line type of products, they’re not great. The kids coming up in America are not as good as the kids coming up in the rest of the world. I don’t know if they’re doing video or not, but they’re doing something better than what’s going on here right now.”

Still, Martin sees college golf as a crucial cog in America’s golf development machinery, and the way to go for the vast majority of kids who love the game and excel at it but might not yet have the right stuff for the Tour even if they’re already on potential sponsors’ speed-dial lists.

“It’s set to be a huge element in the game of golf for a long time, as far as developing talent. No doubt about it. There is the money issue. A lot of foreign kids don’t have quite the desire to go to school, and you’ll see a lot of the really elite talent bypass college. That’s to be expected; when a kid from Australia, Sweden or Korea is so advanced that they can make millions of dollars, why go? Those kids would get full scholarships, but college is expensive, and there aren’t that many scholarships available. So why pay when you can get paid? I don’t have a huge issue with that. But the thing that will always allow college golf to be successful is that most guys don’t hit their prime until your late 20s. So the majority of kids at 18 or 19 are so far away from being ready, they need the competition, the maturity gained in those four to five years. Physically a lot of kids develop late, so there are pretty good juniors who will pop when they’re 22 and become the really good ones. With Tiger, you sort of knew, but even he wasn’t winning tournaments when he was 19 or 20 either; he was missing a lot of cuts. College golf will always have a really big role in the scheme of things.”

Tug of the Tour
So Martin is where he needs to be at this moment, with the next generation of potential U.S. Amateur champs, maybe even a Masters winner in the mix. But press him just a bit, pry into his heart a little, and you’ll find a coal of longing glowing still — for the Tour life he tasted every so briefly, the stage, the lifestyle.

Most of it, anyway.

“I miss the camaraderie with my peers out there, I miss playing the golf, the competition,” he says without a hint of wistfulness. “I loved practicing and getting ready for tournaments, the excitement, the anticipation. I really do miss that. There’s something about the Tour. Even though it’s not as glamorous as people think, it’s not the Hooters Tour either. It’s a pretty good way to live, and you’re treated great. I do not miss playing like crap. I played poorly for a number of years, which wears on you when you’re putting effort into something and not getting any return. So I don’t miss beating my head against a wall. From that standpoint, it’s almost a relief to be doing something else.”

Always a stellar ballstriker, Martin chalks up his “crap” play to a balky putter. He shares that fate with many an excellent player, even though he says he’s waving the wand with greater success these days after going to a 49-inch Two-Ball or Spider. “I regret not doing it sooner. Every time I tried it, I hated it, but about three years ago I said, ‘This sucks, I will be better if I do it.’ I persevered for a week or two, and I love it. I actually have fun putting now.”

Enough to entertain thoughts of giving the Tour another go? Once in a while Martin will allow his mind to go there, to dream, and though he quickly realizes it’s probably not going to happen, he knows one fact: He’d appreciate it a lot more than players who, like a links version of AIG executives, live in an alternate universe of stubborn entitlement at a time when they, or the entire Tour, can ill afford to appear more aloof and privileged than they already do.

“I think a lot of the older guys would talk about that, guys like Peter Jacobsen who would say to the younger guys, ‘Hey, you can’t lose connection with the sponsors.’ It’s been taken for granted for a long time. As much as we love the Tour, it’s very selfserving, the most selfish thing in the world — in the sense that you’re not on a team, it’s your money, you’re competing against everyone else, it’s your time, it’s all about you. So you kind of forget that it’s an honor and privilege to be playing, and it can be taken away.

“You can certainly see the writing on the wall, with every sponsor being a bank or a car manufacturer. In a few years it could be an issue. But it could be a good thing, a wake-up call for the Tour and a lot of these guys to not take for granted the kind of money they’ve been making and really start to give back. Not to say they don’t, guys have sponsors and do stuff, but there’s always the sentiment that it’s ‘Oh, I’ve got to do this, or punch the clock to do this.’ Now guys might be eager to do it, to keep the ball rolling.”

Martin pauses for a moment, recognizing that though he’s a political conservative and unapologetic capitalist, he pushes back at the culture of excess that has dominated the Tour over the past couple of decades, especially since Tiger helped push purses and corporate perks to unknown heights.

“Back in 2000 when I was on Tour, it was pretty much taken for granted that there was just a bunch of money, and it was all about you.”

Faith, Pain and the Future
Martin got over that mindset in a hurry, and as a devout Christian never completely surrendered himself to the Tour’s earthly excesses. Still, playing golf for big bucks seemed to be his destiny, and when it all evaporated, he looked heavenward for answers.

“My faith has been a huge part of my life. It was a big reason I got into golf in the first place, in the sense of, ‘Should I try to play golf professionally? I’ve got a bad leg, should I even try this?’ But knowing God will provide and can do great things, I stepped out there and He did,” Martin says. “He took care of me, and in a way I saw mountains moved that allowed me to play golf. So my faith was a big encouragement during my journey on Tour.

“The challenge is that it was also kind of taken away. I grappled with God — why did I have this, get so close and now it’s falling apart? So that was a big challenge to my faith. But as I continued to grow up, I noticed I’m doing something now that’s a lot less focused on me, more about giving back to others. From that perspective it’s a pretty neat journey to see how the stuff I went through, good and bad, has helped me develop as a person and now I can play a role in people’s lives. And even though I’m at a secular university where I don’t preach my faith at all around the kids, I think they have a sense, and in due time my faith can rub off on them, or they can see that in my life and I can be a witness in that way. My life experience and my faith journey have been a huge part of who I am and why I’m doing what I’m doing right now.”

And what if golf was suddenly yanked out from under him altogether?

“That’s a scary thought. I could see myself doing something in the Christian world. Not being a pastor necessarily, but doing something. Beyond that it’s living day to day, a little golf, golf team stuff. It’s funny, when you’re a coach, it becomes more than a job. It consumes my thoughts a lot. It’s not like being a football coach, where it’s 16-hour days. And doesn’t have to be. But I find myself thinking about it a ton, recruiting, staying up writing letters. It’s not really work to me; it’s doing what I like to do. I think I have a good fit here, doing something I’m passionate about and that fits me.”

Martin shifts in his chair for the umpteenth time. The leg, the pain, is always there, you can see it splash across his face like a quick shadow, but he never lets it take over, even when it’s at its worst. Right now it’s not too bad. “I’m not in constant pain, but you’ll notice I fidget because my leg will swell and I’ll readjust. When I’m walking there’s pain in the tibia a fair amount with every step, and when I’m at home sometimes I’ll wake up at night with a pretty good ache. But it’s not like I’m in excruciating pain. I live a very normal life, but I’m always conscious of my leg. I can’t drive for too long or stand for too long. If you had my leg for a day, you’d be worn out and it would drive you crazy. I’ve had it all my life, and I’m used to it. But there definitely is pain 24/7.”

That causes the elephant in the room to clear its throat: When will it finally be time to leave the leg behind and embrace prosthetic technology? “I was in that position a year and a half ago, that this was not worth it — I would be so much better not having the pain,” Martin says matter-of-factly. Some of those thoughts have faded away, but there is a very big part of me that absolutely believes that if I would just do it, if I could do it clean and nice and there weren’t any complications, my quality of life would go through the roof. It’s just hard to do it.”

“I see guys [with prosthetic limbs] running marathons, and I go, ‘Wow, I could do that.’ I like to be active, and I’m really not, except for golf. I could see [playing golf with a prosthesis]. I would like to find out how well I could play without the pain. I do have pain in my golf swing; when I try to work on certain things and tried to get better when I was struggling with my game, I ran into some roadblocks. ‘Man, this hurts!’ But what I could do if I wasn’t in pain, with all the stack-and-tilt and left-sided golf teaching that’s going on, I’ve definitely thought very hard, ‘I wonder if I could somehow do this.’ But I’m not there yet.”

Someday the leg will force him there. And he will then become even more of the poster boy for accessible golf, though during his legal battle nearly a decade ago, that’s not what he had in mind. He just wanted equal opportunity to make a living. The larger question of whether the courts should mandate accessibility to public golf facilities — a movement undertaken on several fronts for years, including requiring courses to buy special carts for disabled golfers — draws a swift, definitive and some would say surprising answer from Martin, even now.

“It’s great to open the game up, obviously. It’s been a huge benefit to me. But I think you have to be careful before you just mandate that every golf course has to have all these things for people. We’re in a challenging time. If you start mandating that they’ve got to pay thousands of dollars for everyone to have accommodation, that might be difficult. If courses did it willingly, they might draw part of the population they didn’t know was there — but I think it’s a little early to say they’ve got to have [carts]. First, the disabled community has to realize that golf is even an option, that it’s playable, what a great game it is and how their lives can be enriched by it. It is tailor-made for recovery — to be in a parkland setting, to get to compete or play a challenging skill. There are a lot of guys coming back from Iraq who have issues, for whom I think it would be a blessing to get out on the golf course. But to mandate it, I don’t know if that’s fair.”

Someday, fair will have nothing to do with it, Martin believes. After all, in his vision of heaven, everyone will be on equal footing at last, with pain and human frailty reduced to less than memories.

“I can’t wait for the day when I don’t have any physical problems,” he says, his brown eyes glimmering, looking beyond. “That will be great. But from a spiritual perspective, heaven’s a lot more than just not being in physical pain. The Bible has a pretty cool picture of what eternity will be like, relationally and how you live, and sin won’t be a part of it. There’s a lot to look forward to. But being free of physical pain and discomfort is probably going to be a bigger thing than I realize now because this is all I know.”

Published in FG Magazine, April 2009

AMERICA'S MOST HONORED MAGAZINE AT ING AWARDS
It’s getting to be a habit, and we can’t seem to help ourselves. For the fourth straight year, FG racked up an impressive load of hardware at the International Network of Golf Media Awards announced at January’s PGA Merchandise Show. We scored six awards in all, besting writers and photographers from such national publications as GolfWeek and Sports Illustrated. First-place honors went to Vic Williams in Competition Writing for his piece on Tiger’s historic U.S. Open victory (July-August 2008), Joann Dost for her epic shot of Tiger’s 72nd hole putt on Open Sunday; and Calder Chism for his “Weekend Wisdom” drawing of Vic in the May-June 2008 issue. Outstanding Achievement awards went to Williams and Darin Bunch for Travel Writing. Other FG contributors who took home awards included Tony Dear and Bob Seligman. Next year, look for the clean sweep.