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Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Bob May gets no respect
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Bob May is not a name that pops out of your memory bank just like that — pfffft! In fact, it’s not a name that has popped up anywhere lately. You have to go back to the year 2000 to find him in a headline, and then that was because he lost. And, to whom you ask? Tiger Woods, of course. We’ll get back to that later.
Bob May just passed through town last weekend and I’m not sure anybody even noticed.
He posted three rounds in the 60’s in the AT&T Classic. He may as well have been playing in the Siberian Open, for all the attention he didn’t get. There was a time when he did have to leave for a foreign land to get attention. He played on the European Tour and when he won the British Masters in 1999, they dusted off a place for him and invited him back home, like, “Gee, Bob, where you been all this time?”
He was rolling in 2000 when his name popped up in the PGA Championship at Valhalla. When Tiger checked in with a final score of 270, still the record for the PGA, May tied him and they went into a playoff. Now, we come to the sinister part of the story, on the tee at the 18th hole. Tiger tees off and his ball appears to disappear down an unpaved utility roadway, then mysteriously reappears on the fringe of the fairway. It has been replayed over and over again on television, and the puzzle is how it was re-directed from its line toward the forest to its position by the fairway.
One witness has told me that he saw a boy kick the ball. Stands by his story without flinching. The ball was headed hell-for-leather into deep trouble, but checking replays over and over again, there was never any visible evidence of interference. Surely nothing to implicate Woods in any way, but a mystery that still persists. May has never cried foul. From where he stood on the tee there was no way he could follow the flight of the drive that could have changed the course of his career. Nor would he have been plodding around the course at Whitewater Creek Monday trying to qualify for the U.S. Open, to be played at Torrey Pines in June.
This was a local qualifier, the back door to the Open. Make it there, you move up to the regional. May lives in Las Vegas, but being here for the AT&T, this is where the USGA booked him. He had little leverage. He’s playing on a Minor Medical Extension after two years off the tour.
“I was teeing off in the Byron Nelson in 2003 and something popped in my back,” he said. He had to start all over again in Q-school. “You’d think that playing for the championship of your country you’d get more consideration than that.”
It gets worse. He has to earn $540,000 in four events to be upgraded to Major Medical, and that’s like climbing Mt. Everest barefoot. But, whatever, loading his clubs and giving a wave, it was back to the Nationwide Tour.
