Open Target

Casey Martin turned 26 last Tuesday and called his parents from the house where he was staying for that week’s Nike Tour event in Dayton, Ohio. The woman who owns the home had a short message for his mother when they had a brief chat.

“She said, ‘Boy, that Casey sure does get a lot of phone calls,’ ” Melinda Martin said.

That’s sort of the way it goes for the Martin family, which finds itself in its usual swirl of attention, much of it long-distance, spread from the woodsy Pacific Northwest to wherever Casey happens to be playing golf that week.

Today, it’ll be Cincinnati, where the most famous disabled golfer in the world will prop himself up on his ailing right leg, take dead aim at his latest target and try to qualify for the U.S. Open.

Check the numbers and they seem sort of daunting. There are 69 golfers playing 36 holes in one day to try to get one of the five spots for the Open, to be held June 18-21 at the Olympic Club in San Francisco. Martin won’t be hard to recognize. He’ll be the only one riding a cart.

Cameron Martin said his younger brother may have a difficult time.

“It’s gonna be tough,” said Cameron, 28. “There’s only five spots available. He’s just got to let it fly. It’s gonna take some deep numbers. But 69 golfers and five spots . . . those are not real good percentages.”

Maybe, but if there is one thing the entire Martin family knows about, it’s how to beat the odds where Casey is concerned. It was Casey who played on an NCAA championship team at Stanford. It was Casey who won the first Nike Tour event he played. And it was Casey who beat the PGA Tour in court for the right to ride a cart in tournaments because of his physical condition.

And back in his hometown, it’s Casey’s family members who are pulling together as they always do, hoping he can pull off another one.

This one would be really big, though. No other player ever has played in the U.S. Open and ridden a cart because of a disability, probably because nobody else was good enough to get this far.

Martin was born with Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber syndrome, a circulatory disorder that causes blood to pool in the lower part of his right leg. He doesn’t have the veins to properly carry blood to the bones below his knee, which has made his tibia brittle and in danger of snapping. In many cases, the leg must be amputated above the knee.

The condition is not only rare, but extremely painful. When they were kids, the head of Cameron’s bed was next to the wall to Casey’s room. Cameron knew when Casey was hurting because he could hear Casey moaning through the wall at night.

Maybe that’s as good a reason as any for the Martin brothers to bond. Not all brothers are close, so it’s not a given. But Melinda Martin said Cameron and Casey always seemed to get along a lot better than even she expected.

“Cameron is the big brother every kid would dream of having,” she said.

And so today, when the 36-hole scores from the Open sectional qualifying come in, Cameron will monitor them on the Internet from his office, just as he does when Casey is playing a Nike Tour event.

“It’s going to be a normal workday,” Cameron said. “But you can be sure I’ll be logged on.”

Cameron works down the hall from his father at Salomon Smith Barney in the tallest office building in town, 10 stories. Cameron and his dad, King, are Casey’s support group in starched shirts and wing tips. King was a 10-handicap golfer at Eugene Country Club, where both his sons found the game they could share after Casey’s knee became too weak to play basketball after the seventh grade.

Through it all, beginning with the landmark lawsuit against the PGA Tour that brought down the wrath of some of golf’s most revered establishment figures like Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer as well as near suffocation from the media, King Martin said his intentions were really quite simple.

“How we thought about being perceived, what we wanted to do was to just project the qualities we think of as a family--to step up and provide support to your child when he needs it,” he said. “We’re still doing that.”

If the negative feedback from much of the golf world during the legal battle was surprising to the Martins, it didn’t come close to matching the Martins’ reaction to the media. The level of scrutiny caught the Martins so much off-guard, they struggled for balance.

“We were simply not prepared for it,” King Martin said. “You’re just thrust into making history. It wasn’t like it was planned that way. It wasn’t like Tiger. Fame was basically part of his program from the beginning. He was schooled for it. We were not.”

The elder Martin said the suit might have been decided by a higher court than the one that ruled in Casey’s favor in a downtown courtroom in February.

“It was meant to be,” he said. “God hadn’t brought Casey to this point for no reason.”

When her son’s next point in his life as a golfer is decided in Cincinnati, Melinda Martin will be going about her business, preparing for her next visit to the nearby Pearl Buck Center, where she works as a volunteer to help children with mentally delayed parents or children with special needs, whose parents are alcoholics or drug addicts.

Her afternoons are nearly always the same at Pearl Buck, tucked into the woods at the bottom of a hill. At nap time, nursery lullabies play softly, the blue curtains are drawn and Melinda reads softly to Chayla or rocks Logan to sleep while he holds his blanket tightly.

The experience may be emotionally draining, but so is seeing your newborn son with a darkly purple leg and knowing something is very wrong. Melinda is trying gently to get Casey to visit Dr. William Shaughnessy, a Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber specialist at the Mayo Clinic this month. But her son is unconvinced, she says, because he has been let down before and doesn’t want it to happen again.

“These doctor things come up, everybody tries to talk Casey into them, but he’s just so reluctant,” she said. “We understand.”

King Martin wishes the PGA Tour would demonstrate some understanding on a different level. He just can’t understand why the Tour doesn’t admit it made a mistake and welcome his son with open arms. After all, time is running out. Casey’s leg is deteriorating and his window to play professional golf is closing fast.

“There are times when I find myself . . . well, my blood pressure goes way up. I really can’t say I feel anger. If I did, I can say I would then be just as blind as some people are right now. It was a major PR nightmare for the PGA Tour. It still is.”

Meanwhile, Martin is a hero to many. The National Amputee Golf Assn. has 4,500 members and Dan Cox, its executive director, credits Martin for bringing an awareness to disabled that they are not shut off from golf.

George McGrory of the Children’s Golf Foundation said his organization started 10 years ago with nine disabled kids and now teaches as many as 470 a week.

Greg Jones, president of the Association of Disabled American Golfers, followed Martin in a one-person cart at the Nike Greater Austin Open, which was Martin’s first tournament after his victory in court.

And in southwest Oregon, the Martin family seems ready for Casey’s next step, whatever it might be, when he hits Clovernook Country Club in Cincinnati on Monday morning. The support system is in place, just like it always is. They will go about their business, try to act as if nothing is happening, follow the results as best they can, then wait for the phone call. In this family, there are lots of phone calls.

As for Martin’s chances to qualify, well, he’s No. 11 on the Nike Tour money list, but he hasn’t had a top-10 finish since he won at the Nike Lakeland Classic in January.

“He’s hanging in there,” Cameron Martin said. “He’s tired.”

But many experts agree Martin has the right game to be a success on tour because his strengths are driving and putting--the two biggest assets a player can have. Rick Smith analyzed Martin’s swing in a recent Golf Digest article and found it nearly flawless. David Leadbetter praised Martin’s ability in a story published in this week’s Oregonian.

On the course, there is still work to be done. Casey Martin’s wish is to make it to qualify for the U.S. Open, play the PGA Tour, leave the cart controversy behind.

Back home, his father has a different wish.

“My desire for him is that someday he will not feel pain,” King Martin said. “If that means they must take his leg, I’m all for it. Now, obviously, we’re going to go as far as we can.”

For this particular group, it seems a perfectly logical next step. After all, just look how far they’ve come already.