Phobia forces Langham aside

On an afternoon he might be playing in a professional golf tournament, or at least pounding balls off some defenseless practice tee, Franklin Langham was instead trying to explain why he could no longer bring himself do either of those things.

Short answer: the driver. No longer could he grip it. It was gripping him. Long answer: mortification.

“It was a specific phobia,” Langham said, his voice in near wonder. “You get to a tee box, you get the elevated heart rate, sweaty palms, because it comes from that anxiety of not being able to recall a good shot. The best explanation I could get is, if every time you hit a bad tee shot, somebody stuck you with a branding iron, OK? Well, all of a sudden, it’s Pavlov’s dog. You’re anticipating it even before you hit the shot.

“You’re anticipating the branding iron before you even make contact. You can’t let go of the steering wheel.”

Professional golf will be getting along without Langham this year. One of the finest players the state has produced, he has determined to stay away from the game he loves because he lost a year-long brawl with the biggest club in the bag.

He figures he’ll get back someday, when he feels it mentally and the tendinosis in his left shoulder dies down. Before he walked away from the Nationwide Tour in mid-summer last year, Langham had played 25 competitive rounds in 168 over par. He missed 13 cuts in 13 tournaments. Earnings: $0.

Iron play? Fine. Putting? Even better. But the tee ball? Barely one-quarter of Langham’s drives found the fairway last year in Nationwide Tour play. And of those that missed, many left the property. Hooks mostly, with the intermittent evil slice. It simply dragged down his game and then him with it.

“It was just golf that I’ve never ever seen him play,” said his wife, Ashley, who tried caddying for him, if just to change the vibe. “He’d hit it off the tee box and we were like, ‘What in the world?’ “

So now a couple of months shy of his 41st birthday, Langham is recalculating where he is going. He has taken a job five minutes from his Peachtree City home with a construction and agricultural equipment auction firm, for the first time in his life a nine-to-fiver.

His clubs are at home in the closet. Except for a couple of charity outings four months ago and a couple of shots playing with one of his four sons, he hasn’t touched them since last Aug. 1, when he missed the cut at the Cox Classic in Omaha and came home.

On an afternoon when his internal clock is telling him it’s time to play, Langham is explaining why he can’t. He’d held a PGA Tour card for seven years, banked $4.5 million and, for now at least, cannot go back to that life.

“Golf,” he said, “is what I do. It’s not what I am.”

Progress fleeting

Well before his All-American career at the University of Georgia, Langham had found his aspiration. Making the annual spring trek from Thomson to nearby Augusta National, first as a child with his father and then as a teenage volunteer manning a Masters leaderboard on No. 16, he embraced golf early as more than just a game.

He was a grinder in the word’s best sense, not a long hitter but a clever one. First joining the tour in 1996, five years after graduation —- he had been on the 1991 U.S. Walker Cup team as a collegian —- Langham was in that second tier of players who made their cuts but needed providence to win. His closest call came in the 2000 Doral-Ryder Open, when Jim Furyk’s 66 on Sunday knocked Langham into second place.

“My dad and I, each year we talk and do assessment,” Langham said. “And I was a year or two out of college and he said, ‘Man, even if it ends tomorrow, hasn’t it been a great run?’ And that’s the way I’ve always looked at it.”

Things began to turn in 2001, following elbow surgery to clean out scar tissue. He came back in 2002 and began a six-year odyssey, losing his PGA card, gaining it back on the Nationwide and then losing it again. If it was an ordeal, it was one that he embraced year after year.

In 2007, he sensed a breakthrough, winning the Utah Open after working with swing coaches Mike Bennett and Andy Plummer, who teach a “stack-and-tilt” swing method. But progress was fleeting, and by December, Langham was back at another Tour School qualifier, taking another stab at his card. He wound up withdrawing before the final round, 33 shots off the lead and in career reverse.

“I wrote it off to a mental thing, putting too much pressure on myself. I was pressing,” Langham said. “I figured I’d get away from it. I went into ‘08 thinking, we can get this back together. We’ll cinch up our boot straps like we’ve always done and grind it out.”

Instead, it ground him down, for the harder he tried, the worse his driving became. He managed to hit only 31 of 122 fairways. He played in one PGA Tour event and met unmitigated disaster at the AT&T Classic at Sugarloaf. Opening his first round off the par-5 10th hole on May 15, Langham snapped four consecutive tee shots out of bounds to the left. He would describe it as an out-of-body experience.

When his fifth found the left rough, he was already lying 9. He wound up taking a 13, shot 90 and withdrew. He would play just six more events on the Nationwide and scored more rounds in the 80s (two) than rounds under par (one).

“Outwardly, guys are telling you they can’t believe how well you’re carrying yourself,” Langham said. “I know on the inside, I was churning pretty bad. We all have our pride. I’m sure my wife and kids will tell [you] I was pretty tough to live with. I wouldn’t give myself an ‘A’ on handling it. You get frustrated. You want to go beat the wall.”

‘You crash and burn’

Pro golf is rife with stories of games lost. Bill Rogers. Bob Tway. Scott Verplank. Some made it back. Some never did.

“If I could go back 10 years and do it all over with what I know now, I’d do it totally differently,” said Ian Baker-Finch, the CBS analyst and former British Open champion who between 1995 and ‘96 missed 26 straight cuts and walked away. “I would not play until I was ready to play. I’d go get as fit and as strong as I could get myself and I’d go out there with just the most positive attitude I could.”

Langham wound up at the Emory Psychology Clinic, where Dr. Jack McDowell likened Langham’s trip to the tee box as a claustrophobic stepping into an elevator.

“You crash and burn,” Langham said. “So you’re sitting there thinking —- and this is the hard part —- is this writing on the wall that’s telling you to go do something else? Or —- and this is the way I see it —- it was so bad, it’s almost like it was an anomaly. I can’t really say that, going from almost getting my card back (in ‘07) to not even being able to even make the cut, that’s not how I wanted to go out.

“I need to get away from it for a while. I need to let the wounds heal a little bit.”

So for the first time in his life, he hits the boys’ soccer practice and the pizza dinners on Friday night. Though they have lived in the same house for five years, Ashley estimated they had probably spent just two living in it, after all the travel. In some ways, the Langhams —- including sons Parker (11), Carson (9), George (7) and Oliver (3) —- are a family for the first time.

“It’s been like, ‘Wow. So this is what everybody else does?’ ” Ashley said.

Langham has not watched much golf on television but has kept in touch with friends —- Chris DiMarco, David Toms —- when time allows. There is no timetable for the future. There is not even a timetable for setting a timetable.

“I don’t want this to seem like a poor-pitiful-me,” he said. “I mean, I’m not going through anything other people haven’t been through. We all have our crosses to bear. I feel very fortunate. I got a great wife, great kids, and that’s what matters at the end. All the trophies and all the awards are going to go away.

“I’d love to be able to say one day, ‘I’m going to give it another shot.’ It could even be on the Champions Tour. Golf has been so great to me. …

“Each year is a gift. If I never play another competitive round, it was awesome. Golf gave me more than I could ever imagine.”