Lifestyles
Totally Tee’d
Most American sports stars pick up a bat or a ball, or lace up their skates at an early age, and can think of doing nothing else. A few, like professional golfer Boo Weekley, take a less direct approach.
“I started swinging a golf club in the summer right after eighth grade. And that’s only because by the time I was in the ninth I’d run out of sports to play,” says the 35-year-old Florida native. “I trashed my shoulder and knees playing football, hurt my arms playing basketball, and ruined my feet playing soccer. So golf was really all that was left.”
The eleven-year PGA vet, whose real name is Thomas Brent Weekley, won bragging rights to the tour’s prestigious Verizon Heritage event in 2007 and successfully defended the title a year later, besting players with better known names like Ernie Els and Jim Furyk for the victory. And as for his nickname, Weekley earned it when he was just 3 years old, thanks to the old Yogi Bear cartoon.
“It was my favorite show. Apparently, every time Yogi’s sidekick Boo Boo Bear came on, I’d start giggling and laughing out of control. I got so cracked up over it my family started calling me Boo.”
The son of a nurse and a pharmacist who owned his own neighborhood drugstore, Weekley was born in July of 1973 in East Milton, Florida, a blue collar town with some 8,000 residents located in the state’s panhandle. Raised on the banks of the Blackwater River three hundred yards up a dirt road from the house where his grandparents lived, he enjoyed plenty of hunting and fishing with his family while growing up—two pursuits that remain as much a part of him today as his golf game. In high school, banged up and bruised from the rough and tumble of playing other sports, he joined the school’s golf team—a team that also included Heath Slocum and Bubba Watson, two of Weekley’s closest colleagues and competitors in today’s PGA.
“We had a solid team, and there were some good players on it,” he recalls. “But I didn’t take golf seriously at that time. I just enjoyed playing it.”
After graduation, Weekley struggled through a year at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Georgia, and was forced to drop out due to failing grades. He headed home to Florida and, with few other options, took a dangerous job scrubbing out ammonia tanks at a chemical plant in Pensacola. But in 1997, thanks in part to his school buddy Heath Slocum, whose dad Jack co-founded the Developmental Players Tour, Weekley got the chance of a lifetime.
“Heath’s dad told me he could help me break into the sport professionally. Jack was a hell of a player, too, and he even caddied for me on the first mini-tour.”
That’s not to say, however, that Weekley had it easy.
“In the beginning, every time I went to drive to a tour I got lost. And I stayed lost on the road, but I’ve since solved that by investing in a GPS for my car,” he laughs. “And you could say I butted heads with one or more of my fellow golfers early on.
Hogan’s the Hero
ŠPGA Tour
Boo Weekley considers the late, great golf legend Ben Hogan (1912–1997) his role model and hero.
“The man played golf the way it’s supposed to be played,” he says, noting that Hogan is credited for not only having one of the fiercest swings in the history of the game, but also that he employed a work ethic unlike any other golfer before or after.
“The Hawk” Hogan is historically credited with inventing the concept of rigorous practice sessions, because golfers were generally swinging at dirt and could master their swing through practice and repetition. Hogan also golfed bare-handed without using gloves and developed a secret swing move called ‘cupping under’ that baffled opponents both on and off the golf course for decades.
“The man was a genius,” says Weekley. “And I just like playing with the brand of golf clubs he created.”
The first was this guy who had a reputation among the other players for being a talented cheater. He hooked a shot into some trees, and before I walked over to my ball in the fairway I saw his ball in some small roots. As he walked around sizing up his shot, he knocked the glove out of his back pocket, and it landed close to his ball. When he hit the shot, a big cloud of dirt flew up—which was impossible because his ball had been sitting in all this wood. When his ball hit the green, I said, ‘Hold on. We’re going back to that spot to have a little look at your divot.’ Just like I knew, the divot was well behind the roots. ‘You’re out of here, buddy,’ I told him, and the next thing I knew, he shoved me. I warned him that if he touched me again, I’d knock his lights out and called the officials over. They escorted him off the course right then and there.”
On the final day of a mini-tour held in Alabama, Weekley got into another scrum with a player who didn’t quite appreciate his sense of humor.
“Me and another guy were tied for the lead when he hooked it left, toward the water. I happened to joke, ‘Sit, land soft! Get down, don’t go in the water, don’t go in the water.’ Of course, his ball went into the water. He turned to look at me and said that I wasn’t to say another word to his ball, to which I jokingly said, ‘Dude, I’m just trying to be nice and helpful, the way I was raised.’ My turn came up, I teed off. When he got up to hit his next shot, he sent his ball almost to the same spot as before. I started to laugh and said, ‘Go in the water, go in the water…’
“Next thing I knew, we were on the ground, wrestling around and throwing punches, right there on the tee box. I got back on my feet before he did, went about my business, and beat him to win both the fight and the tournament.”
Weekley played on the mini-tour circuit until 2002, when he finally qualified for the PGA tour—only to run into an even more volatile opponent at the Hartford Open in Connecticut.
“A buddy of mine and I were on the tour together. It was pouring out. I missed a put, got a little aggravated, decided to eat my lunch while I waited for him to finish up. I had this pair of bulky rain pants on, and my keys were hooked onto these britches. The PGA had set up these porta-johns for the players, pretty much a hundred miles away from everything. I needed to use one, so I went in. When I started to pull my pants down, my keys came unhooked and dropped clear into the toilet. Now, we only had three hours until we flew out of Connecticut. My buddy came walking off the green, so I asked him to get me a coat hanger from car so I could fish my keys out of there. But there was a problem…or several: the car was on the other side of the world from where we were, nobody was out in the rain, so we couldn’t find transportation back to the car, and we couldn’t get into the car to pull a coat hanger from our clothes anyway because we needed those keys to unlock it. There was no way to escape it, so I finally rubbed a bit of Copenhagen under my nose and under my lip and dug my arm around down there until I found my keys and pulled them out.”
When not touring with the PGA, Weekley returns to his roots to enjoy his other two passions, hunting and fishing. His family owns a hunting camp in Alabama, and though Weekley’s golf and traveling responsibilities have made it difficult to meet there as often as he’d like, he and his dad still take every opportunity to hunt together.
“Our place has running water, power. It’s like a trailer that’s been added onto and has most modern conveniences. And it’s my favorite place to be,” says Weekley. “Mostly, we go there to hunt whitetail deer. But it doesn’t matter what I hunt. It’s all about being in the woods.”
With the Gulf of Florida only half an hour from his front door, Weekley also tries to squeeze in the occasional deep sea haul of trigger fish, snapper, cobia, speckled trout and redfish. “I’ll fish for just about anything, but my favorite is bass. Being on the lake fishing for bass or hunting for whitetails benefits my golf game. Doing those pursuits reminds me to take my time, to slow down and be patient. Sometimes, you get out here on the golf course and work yourself into a hurry because when you’re playing good, you want to keep your momentum going and so you have a tendency to rush it. Hunting and fishing help to keep me on an even keel and from getting too excited or anxious when I’m on the course. Golf, to me, is a great deal of fun, but at times it can also be very aggravating because I know how good a player I am and what I want to accomplish with it, and there are some days when you just can’t reach that level.”