Jerry Rice stood awkwardly on the steep, fescue-covered face of a greenside bunker. He hesitantly placed his left foot below the ball and his right foot above it, struggling to maintain his balance as he prepared to hit his next shot. This offered a striking contrast to Rice’s customary sporting pose -- standing gracefully at the line, leaning forward ever so slightly, in complete command of his next move.
Rice caught 1,549 passes and scored 208 touchdowns in his incomparable NFL career, more than any player in league history. Those achievements earned him a landslide induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame this summer, but they mattered not a lick on the sixth hole of his inaugural Nationwide Tour start in April. His approach shot had sailed over the green at TPC Stonebrae in Hayward, Calif., leading him to this uncomfortable stance. He took a big swing, trying to pull off a feathery, Mickelsonian flop shot -- and the ball popped up meekly without moving forward.
Rice scraped it onto the green on his next attempt, made double bogey and trudged away, the magnitude of his new quest suddenly and disconcertingly clear. “That hole right there,” Rice said later, “pretty much brought into reality that, hey, this is a whole different ballgame for me.”
It’s a new game on many levels for pro football players who carry their passion for golf into another realm. Rice’s two-tournament flameout on the Nationwide Tour stirred splashy headlines, mostly because of his NFL-fueled celebrity, but it merely provided the latest example of a football player wandering way, way, way out of his element.
Not one player this side of John Brodie has remotely threatened to make the cut on a major pro tour. Former quarterback Mark Rypien shot 80-91 in the PGA Tour’s Kemper Open in 1992, then 78-87 in the Nationwide Tour’s Tri-Cities Open in 2000. Former placekicker Al Del Greco similarly sputtered in his two Nationwide starts, in 2001 (76-79) and 2003 (75-78).
Or consider this year’s U.S. Open qualifying bids of several active and former NFL players. Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo (69) reached sectionals, but Vikings kicker Ryan Longwell (83), Jaguars kicker Josh Scobee (81) and former quarterback Billy Joe Tolliver (81) all stumbled in local qualifying. (Those were their scores, by the way, not their jersey numbers.)
The overriding lesson: Golf is hard, man. The game seduces these elite athletes with low scores on resplendent, country-club layouts, full of wide fairways, modest rough, tame greens and friendly hole locations. Then comes tournament time and the courses lash back with narrow fairways, menacing rough, slick greens and wicked hole locations.
Rice’s implosion made the point most powerfully. He shot 83-76 to miss the cut at the Fresh Express Classic, the Bay Area tournament he hosted, and then posted 92-82 in another Nationwide event, the BMW Charity Pro-Am in the Carolinas in May. Rice made an inglorious exit from that tournament, when he was disqualified because his caddie used a range finder in the second round.
Even before then, Rice chuckled and half-jokingly called his transition from football to golf a “nightmare.” His famously soft hands occasionally helped him around the greens (he holed one bunker shot), but his impatience, stiff swing and lack of tournament rounds doomed him to early elimination, just like so many other football players with grand golfing dreams.
“I have so much respect for the pros,” Rice, 47, says. “Until you go out there and compete professionally... it’s just unbelievable. This is something they’ve been doing all their lives. They’re way up here” -- he raises his extended palm above his head -- “and you’re just trying to take little tiny steps to get there.”
Tolliver was hardly surprised by Rice’s woes. He totes a plus-3 handicap index, even better than Rice’s plus-1, and he’s twice won the American Century Championship, the annual celebrity tournament at Lake Tahoe. Rice has improved in each of his last five starts in Tahoe, topped by his 10th-place finish last year.
“I have a lot of respect for Jerry and everything he’s done in his career,” Tolliver says. “But I think he’ll come back in the NFL before he makes the PGA Tour or the Champions Tour. He’s got to beat us in Tahoe first!
“If you’re not beating the best players in your club every day,” he adds, “and you’re not shooting 68 or better every single day, don’t waste your time. The average person out there has no idea how good Nationwide Tour players are.”
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