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DEL.ICIO.USMasters invite tops all for recent winner Wagner
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Augusta — Say your name is Johnson Wagner. (Sounds like a construction firm, huh?) If you weren’t in Augusta, you’d be on Kiawah Island jollying about with an old classmate from Virginia Tech, you and the family. But the dangedest thing happened in Texas.
You won the tournament, the Shell Something-or-other, and the first thing you said after you sank the clinching putt was, “I’m going to the Masters!”
Nothing about the million dollars he’d just won, nothing about two years on the PGA Tour, no more Q-School, no more Nationwide Tour, no thought of the Kapalua tournament for tournament winners only. A sort of a career security blanket.
No, instead “I can’t believe I’m going to Augusta next week!”
If that doesn’t convince chairman Billy Payne he made a right move, then “good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are,” to purloin an old line Jimmy Durante used to close his show. Once upon a time, every winner of a PGA Tour tournament automatically won an invitation to the Masters. Hootie Johnson thought the field might be getting overcrowded and deleted the practice about seven or so years ago. Among the Payne innovations was the restoration of the rule, and so it came about that the last-chance tournament this year was the Shell, and while more attention centered on Davis Love III and the prospect of keeping his Masters streak active, the unlikely Montford Johnson Wagner had the lucky number.
Last time this happened was in 1996, when Paul Stankowski won the BellSouth tournament in Atlanta the week before the Masters. First thing he said was, “How do you get to Augusta?” Somebody suggested a road map might help. That was before those in-car navigational gadgets.
Well, Davis Love didn’t make it, but Johnson Wagner did. The name does draw attention. It’s not often you come across a golfing personality with two last names. About the only one I can remember is Chandler Harper. He won the PGA Championship when I was still covering civic-club luncheons.
Johnson Wagner comes with golfing blood in his veins. I saw his grandpa play several years ago, a gentleman of some age then, and I still remember that swing. In young Johnson, the bloodline prevails.
He’s a stout fellow, larger than he appears on television, about 6-foot-3 and 190 pounds, a trim physical specimen. After the morning fog cleared, and Arnold Palmer had struck his ceremonial opening shot (“I hit it out of sight,” he said, and he had. The ball disappeared in the fog.), Wagner stood pondering a 3-foot putt on the first green. And missed it. He birdied the second hole, bogeyed the third from about 40 feet, and sort of disappeared into the kind of swirling melange that the opening round turns into.
He bogeyed two more holes before the turn. On the back nine, though, he blotted out all those doubts that flutter through the mind of a neophyte at the Masters, and leveled his score on the 16th green. He put it on cruise control on the way in, and thus his day came to nothing more, or nothing less, than one might have expected of the story, “Johnson Wagner Meets the Masters.”
He said it best: “A million dollars is nice, a two-year exemption, Kapalua is nice, everything that goes with winning on the PGA Tour, but being able to come to a place like this, it’s beyond belief.”
Have a nice week, Johnson.
Comments
By allen981
April 11, 2008 9:40 AM | Link to this
Mr. Bisher, once again you’ve told an inspiring story in a beautiful way.
I’ve been reading your work my entire life, and I’m the better for it.
Thank you.
By Bill
April 11, 2008 10:04 AM | Link to this
Furman I dread the day when I will no longer read your articles. You are the best! Take care.
By mike dunn
April 11, 2008 11:19 AM | Link to this
Doing a Google search I typed “Johnson Wagner” to follow his progress into the Masters. This young gentlemen inspired me. Following his Shell victory, I looked up his stats on the tour, woah, not good, then to pull the upset of the year winning the Shell to clinch the Masters, using a NCAA tournament cliche’, he was the glass slipper & hopefully it doesn’t shoot a “90” as Wagner jokingly stated, but I’m cheering for him. Ok, why I’m writing, I found your article very heart warming & you seem the only journalist following this young pup. Thank you for the article, I have know added you to my RSS.
By HOKIE Harry
April 11, 2008 12:17 PM | Link to this
GO HOKIES!!!!!!!