In golf, everything is multiplied. Winning or losing never stops at one number. There is a cascading effect. After round three of the OHL Classic in November, Seamus Power was deflected into the mixed zone, one of the stories of the day. Only two players had gone lower than his 64. Three shots back, the rookie was in the hunt. “I have an inner belief that I can play,” he told PGA Tour radio. “I feel very comfortable.”
Behind the smiley faces of his 68 and his 66 and his 64, though, Power was fighting his driver. Off the tee the only shot he had was a fade. On Sunday there was a fierce wind that blew left to right on the first. Power launched his tee shot like a paper airplane, surrendered to the elements. In mid-air it was abducted by a gust of wind; cut spin and one big bounce took it out of bounds. On a par four he signed for a seven. With one stroke three days had been mutilated.
Just like in a game of snakes and ladders he landed on the head of a snake. Power finished with 76, tied for 28th. The cash and FedEx points that he had burned didn’t bear counting. “There were a lot of guys making birdies,” he says now, with deadpan resignation. “I dropped back pretty quickly. That knocked me back. A couple of bad breaks and didn’t play my best. You just get overtaken… It was new. Everything was different.”
How do you know you’re ready? In May of last year Power won for the first time on the Web.com tour. He posted a good number in the final round of the United Leasing and Finance and nobody reached it. Tied in second was Cody Gribble. A few months later they both secured their playing rights on the PGA Tour and plunged into the Fall Series that starts the wraparound season. The Sanderson Farms event was their second start.
Power played so well on the first two days that he was in the final pairing on Saturday. His third-round score was dull but not destructive. Still in the chasing pack. Cody Gribble started the final round one shot ahead of Power and produced 65 to win. In golf’s giant slot machine all the lemons aligned for him: prize money, security, playing privileges, you name it. Power? He shot 77. He hadn’t carded a double-bogey all week until the back nine on Sunday, when he made two.
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Does Gribble have more game than Power? Nobody would say so.
“He got himself into a position where he wasn’t comfortable,” says Power’s coach Todd Anderson, “and he didn’t play well. Part of growing as a person and as a player is putting yourself in positions where you’re uncomfortable.”
Anderson’s roster of PGA Tour players includes Brandt Snedeker, Billy Horschel, Davis Love and others. He knew Power when he was on a golf scholarship at East Tennessee State University and when Power first turned professional in 2011 Anderson was his coach. After a couple of years they parted but Anderson never lost sight of him.
“For a couple of years he was just all over the place,” says Anderson. “He’d play great one week, he’d play good in a couple of spurts but it wasn’t sustained over a long enough period of time to enjoy the fruits of his labour.”
In professional golf there are leagues. The mega-bucks PGA Tour is the Premiership, the Web.com tour is the Championship and beneath that are scores of mini-tours scattered around the United States. It’s like pool-shark golf: you put your money down and back yourself. There are no privileges or exemptions: in the mini-tour that Power joined in North Carolina the entry fees for tournaments varied from $700 to nearly $900. The winner would be guaranteed a minimum of $5,000 but nobody got rich; most were out of pocket. That’s where he started.
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“Your number one goal when you start the week,” says Power, “is get back what you paid. When you’re struggling you can burn through money in a hurry. You just have to put it out of your mind where the next cheque is coming from. It’s expensive. You’ve got to balance up whether it’s worth the money that you’re going to pay. It can be very stressful at times but you’ve got to suck it up.”
In four seasons, Power made just two appearances on the Web.com tour. Q-School turned into an annual persecution of near-misses and fluffed chances. One year he thought he needed to birdie the last to progress to the next stage when in fact he didn’t; Power played his approach chip like it was the last shot that counted and missed an eight footer for par.
He leaned on an Irish Sports Council grant for years and every so often West Waterford Golf Club would run a fundraiser to top him up but the greatest challenge was in his mind. That was the battle Power couldn’t afford to lose. “There are disheartening moments but I never thought I wasn’t going to make it,” he says. “If I did I probably would have quit.”
At the beginning of last year he started working with Anderson again. In 2015 Power had a couple of top 10s on the Web.com tour but he wasn’t close to getting his PGA Tour card. “In his golf swing he’d really gotten away from a lot of the things we’d done previously,” says Anderson. “What I saw in him last year after we worked was a re-instilled confidence.
“When I saw him in university I thought he had the game to make it out here. You just don’t see young people as organised as he was and as committed to the vision of where they’re trying to go. It’s been a long journey for him. I admire his persistence and his grit.”
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Was nature the source or was it nurture? Either. Both. His mother Philomena died when he was only eight; his twin brothers were just two years older. When his father Ned realised he couldn’t support his family from a small farm outside Dungarvan he took a second job as a factory welder. “I wanted my sons to follow their dreams,” he told PGATour.com. They wanted for nothing.
“Looking back, I don’t know how he did it,” says Power. “No idea how he did it. He did everything.”
Ned followed his son to Rio for the Olympics in August. A couple of his aunts went too, a brother and some family friends. For a mad hour on Sunday afternoon he had an outside chance of bronze. In any case it felt like his entry onto the big stage. From the Olympics to the PGA Tour wasn’t a quantum leap.
“You think these guys on the PGA Tour do things amazingly well,” says Power, “and there are no weaknesses but they’re really just slightly sharper on certain aspects of the game: they’re good mentally and they have good short games. The rest of it is not unbelievably impressive.”
To retain his card Power will need to finish in the top 125 on the FedEx Cup standings; in terms of prize money that roughly equates to about $800,000. Before this week’s event he had earned just less than $100,000. Because of his exemption status his schedule will keep changing according to his performances. Either way he reckons he will get more than 20 starts. It is in his hands.
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“He’s got all the tools,” says Anderson. “He’s got the kind of tools to do things on the big stage. He’s got the kind of game to play well in majors.”
It’s a blank canvas. Go paint.