Back on Course : Esperanza’s Hergert Isn’t Allergic to Golf

With his recently bleached-blond hair and scraggly month-old beard, Esperanza’s Peter Hergert hopes people see him as someone other than a typical golfer.

“I don’t like being the average golfer,” Hergert said. “I want to be known as the Dennis Rodman of golf, not like totally wild, but I want opponents to look at me and think, ‘Look at this guy, I can beat him.’ ”

The truth is Hergert is far from average, even if you overlook his looks. Serious allergies knocked him out of the general student population for four years, but after two years of home schooling and two of independent study, Hergert returned to school last fall, a junior in a strange land.

“It was really scary,” Hergert said, “because I hadn’t been to school since sixth grade, and a lot of things had changed since then.

“Seeing all those different kinds of people--there are some weird people at school, all the different hair colors. It was all weird to me. I was staying home with Mom and then going to school, it was a sudden change.”

If he wasn’t prepared for the culture shock of high school, Hergert was more than ready for high school golf. A top junior player in the Southern California PGA ranks for several years, he had a 73.5 stroke average during the regular season, the same as Aztec senior Ryan Donovan, a Times first-team all-county pick last year.

Hergert helped Esperanza to a share of the Sunset League team championship, finished tied with Donovan for second in the league individual tournament and Monday shot 77 at the Southern Section boys’ individual championship at Sandpiper Golf Course in Goleta.

Mostly self-taught--he has never had a regular teaching professional, another thing that sets him apart from most top high school players--Hergert is an extremely long hitter, regularly knocking the ball more than 300 yards off the tee with his fluid swing.

“His natural talent is better than any I’ve ever seen,” said Jamie McCance, an assistant pro at Fullerton Golf Course, where Hergert often played during summers. “The problem is he goes for the flag on every shot. He’s got to learn to play to the center of the green.”

Monday’s tournament is one of the main reasons Hergert wanted to be a mainstream student again, and he passed up a chance to graduate this spring when he enrolled at Esperanza.

Born with asthma and a predisposition to allergies, Hergert spent a lot of his early life sitting in hospital emergency rooms with his parents because of high fevers caused by respiratory problems.

Even so, he was always athletic and tried most of the typical youth sports--baseball, soccer and even running. But he couldn’t handle strenuous activities, said his mother, Susan. “He would go into a full-blown asthmatic attack and blow up like a balloon,” she recalled. “It was just pathetic what happened to him.

“We would try to encourage him and sign him up for other sports, but he could never survive them because of his asthma. When you have a kid who has something like that you never want to treat them differently or make them feel like there is nothing they can do. We told him, ‘There’s something for you, honey, don’t worry about it.’ You just keep him going, and he finally found a sport.”

Hergert discovered golf at age 8, when his family was living in Canyon Lake, a golf community near Lake Elsinore. A professional at the course offered a weeklong clinic and after the week was up, Hergert told his parents he wanted to be a professional golfer.

Even then it was clear he was a natural. Club professionals often approached his parents to tell them they needed to give him every opportunity to pursue the game, so when the family moved to Chino Hills, it purchased a membership at nearby Western Hills Golf and Country Club.

But living and playing golf in dusty Carbon Canyon aggravated Hergert’s allergies terribly and three months later, he stopped playing because he was so sick. Western Hills refunded the family’s money and the general manager issued an open invitation for Hergert to return when he felt up to it.

Eventually, the allergies also forced Hergert to leave school. When Hergert was home sick for one of his first three weeks of junior high, his parents decided it would be better if he did his learning at home. “We realized he was heading for disaster,” Susan Hergert said.

But inside his home, made as mold-, pollen- and dust-free as possible by an air-filtration system, Hergert started feeling better, and a few months later, he returned to Western Hills. He would study with his mother for three or four hours in the morning and play golf the rest of the day.

In the summer of ’92 he played in his first SCPGA junior tournament and finished third. He had rediscovered his calling and this time he wasn’t about to quit, even though doctors told him a golf course is one of the worst places for him to be.

Hergert understood their thinking but disagreed. “When I was on the golf course, it never seemed to hurt,” he said. “I’d be expecting to feel worse because of the grass, but I’d totally lose sight of being sick and just think about golf and how much I liked it.”

Hergert’s health was helped further when the family moved out of Carbon Canyon to Yorba Linda two years ago.