While the world’s best golfers have the luxury of playing fewer tournaments and gearing their schedules around the four major championships, the reality for an overwhelming majority of tour players is a long, gruelling season on the road.
Australia’s Scott Gardiner is one of many US PGA Tour players made to travel an average of 70,800km per year and spend at least 150 nights away from their homes and families.
While Gardiner, the first ever Aboriginal to earn a PGA Tour card, has loved realising his dream of playing on golf’s biggest stage, he admits the time spent away from his family in Arkansas “is pretty tough”.
“I quite enjoy the travel; the places I’ve been through golf I couldn’t have gone through any other occupation,” he says. “But I’ve got a 6-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl and they miss their dad a lot. I like to be at their events and also to lessen the work load for my wife, who’s doing a two-person job on her own.”
Raised in the western Sydney suburbs of Penrith before moving to Tweed Heads as a teenager, Gardiner is no stranger to travelling for golf – he played on the European Tour from 2001 to 2003, the (formerly named) Nationwide Tour for nine years after that before making his US PGA Tour debut at the 2013 Sony Open in Hawaii.
“You need patience to be a tour player,” he laughs. “And you have to rest a lot; it’s one of the most underrated things in golf.” Social media helps, too. “Facebook, Twitter, and Skype are great for staying in touch with my kids and I use them a lot.” And when wife Kristin, son Kai and daughter Tatum are able to watch their hero in action at a tournament, Gardiner says the experience “almost” makes up for not having them around.
“The tournaments on the PGA Tour try to outdo each other when hosting players’ families,” says Gardner. “At one tournament they opened up Sea World just for the PGA players and their families. At the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill, Florida, we all got to go to Walt Disney World.”
But the 38-year-old wouldn’t trade anything for his most cherished tour memories, including being paired with Phil Mickelson and recording his best PGA Tour finish with his father in the gallery.
“Playing with Phil at the Wells Fargo Championship was the most people I’ve ever seen on the first tee,” says Gardiner. “I had to take a moment to gather myself, but with so much adrenaline I stepped up and hit it 300m off the tee, overshot my wedge in but then chipped in. It was an amazing feeling.
“Having my best finish on tour (a tie for 13th ) at the Pebble Beach National Pro Am was also pretty special. My dad was there and it was cool for him to be at such an iconic course, walking amongst celebrities like Clint Eastwood.”
COURTING FRIENDSHIPS ABROAD
Friendships make time go quicker on the road, says Gardiner, and finding a mate in Australian NBA champion Patty Mills has delivered some good times, and some hangouts in the San Antonio Spurs’ dressing room. The two athletes forged a friendship after each starring in an episode of Away From Country, an NITV network series that profiled five Aboriginal athletes putting their nation, and their people, on the sporting map. While Gardiner has attended a few NBA games and spent some time in the changerooms, a patriotic Mills has also been spotted cheering on Gardiner from the PGA Tour galleries – in such outfits as a Queensland Maroons State of Origin Jersey and an Australian tracksuit. “We’re both of indigenous Australian heritage so there was that connection,” says Gardiner. “I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know him; he’s a great bloke. I’ve been to a few of his games and he watches me at a golf tournament whenever he can.”
