Junior Achievers

It’s time to take the junior out of junior golf.

No longer merely a pleasant way to pass the summer, junior golf has evolved into an ultra-competitive game, with players possessing pro-like skills and shooting mind-boggling scores.

The line between professional golf and junior golf has become so muddied that a pair of 17-year-old high school boys--Kevin Na of Diamond Bar and Ty Tryon of Orlando, Fla.--recently announced plans to turn pro.

A sport once thought of as a game for old men already has a younger look in the Tiger Woods era, but Na and Tryon are an indication that the next new face of golf comes with peach fuzz and pimples.

Turning pro just out of high school, once considered taboo in a sport that celebrates maturity and experience, may soon be commonplace.

“They’re coming,” said Earl Woods, who oversaw his son’s junior career and remains involved in junior golf as president of the Tiger Woods Foundation and a member of the board of directors for the First Tee program.

“Tiger left records at every level and kids today are surpassing all of them. I’ve seen 10-and 11-year-old kids come up to Tiger, look him in the eye and say, ‘I’m going to beat you.’ And you know what? I believe them. It’s a different game now.”

There are critics, of course, who say that teens do not have the emotional maturity to handle the rigors of professional golf, but some recent results suggest otherwise.

Tryon has played two PGA Tour events this year and finished in the top 40 in both. Na, the top-ranked junior player in the nation this year, qualified for the Buick Invitational at Torrey Pines in February. He missed the cut by four strokes, but saw enough to know he had the game to compete on tour.

“I really watched how those guys hit it on the range and on the course and I wasn’t all that impressed,” he said. “I was so disappointed in some guys. These guys are some of my favorite players and I’m watching going, ‘Oh, my God.’ ”

Enormous advancements in equipment and instruction, along with the Tigermania-fueled rapid growth of golf, have revolutionized the junior game.

Today, junior golfers have abandoned other sports to focus on golf. They spend hours at driving ranges, honing their skills, and travel the country to play top tournaments on world-class courses. Anyone not doing so is a step behind.

“It’s become a profession,” said Taylor Wood, a senior at Santa Margarita High who is the 24th-ranked junior in the nation, according to Golf Week magazine. “Even at a young age, for you to be successful, it requires a lot. Sometimes I feel like it’s a grind.”

Textbook swings developed with high-tech video equipment and computer analysis make it difficult to tell teens from amateurs on the range. Thin-faced titanium drivers and super long-distance balls enable them to hit as far and as accurately as many of the pros.

Tryon, for example, ranked ninth in the Honda Classic with a 309-yard driving average and was 27th in driving accuracy. He also shot 65 and held the first-round lead last month in the B.C. Open.

Eighteen members of the American Junior Golf Assn., the leading organization for junior golf in the United States, have played professional events in the last two years.

Still, the results of one or two tournaments generally say very little about prospective success in the most fickle of all games. Tryon, for example, shot 80 in the first round of the U.S. Amateur last week, then followed with a 68. He and Na both missed the cut.

History has shown that continued success in golf is built on years of experience. Most players follow the established route from junior golf to college and high-level amateur play before turning pro. More recently, the trend for top players has been to follow in Woods’ footsteps, playing college golf for two years and then turning pro.

The new generation, however, doesn’t buy all that traditional-path stuff.

“Just because people set the standard of high school, college, amateur, pro doesn’t mean there’s a rule you have to follow,” Na said. “If you’re good, you should play the tour. Some people right now make a big fuss about me turning pro. Most people right now say I’m making the wrong choice, but if I was in Europe right now, no one would care. It would be normal.”

Success by teenagers at the professional level is not unprecedented among foreign players. Sergio Garcia of Spain and Aaron Baddeley of Australia won professional events in the last year before turning 20.

Seve Ballesteros of Spain was 17 when he turned pro and Bernhard Langer of Germany was 19. Both have had long, successful careers.

American girls have also been able to make successful transitions from high school to the LPGA Tour. Dorothy Delasin did it last year and already has won twice.

Even the girls, however, are finding success earlier than in the past. Aree Wongluekiet, then 13, finished 10th in the 2000 Nabisco Championship--an LPGA major. Morgan Pressel, a 12-year-old Floridian, qualified for the U.S. Women’s Open in May. Eleven-year-old Michelle Wei advanced to the third round of match play in the U.S. Women’s Public Links.

Because boys do not mature physically as fast as girls, it’s doubtful they would reach success that early, but some say there is no reason elite Americans cannot at least keep pace with their foreign counterparts.

“In America, the stigma has been that you’ve got to go to college,” said Gary Gilchrist, director of golf at the David Leadbetter Junior Golf Academy. “That’s going to change.”

The Leadbetter Academy, in Bradenton, Fla., advocates training kids from a young age and pushing them toward professional careers as early as possible. Tryon and Wongluekiet are among the 140 golfers enrolled there.

“If a kid has a passion to be a doctor, would we have them play golf four times a week? No,” Gilchrist said. “So if their passion is to be a golfer, why make them go to college?”

Earl Woods warns, however, that not every junior player who wants to turn pro will be ready.

“Are they going to be ready to play professionally as teenagers? Yes, there will be some that are ready,” he said. “But very, very few. Most of them are going to fail, and fail miserably.”

The PGA Tour, which is considering adopting an age limit for full-time membership, does not keep age statistics, so the youngest to have played the tour is not known. The youngest in recent memory to try was 17-year-old Floridian Sean O’Hair in 1999.

O’Hair was a junior All-American that year, but did not make it through PGA Tour qualifying school. He failed again in 2000 and is struggling, splitting time between the Hooters and Buy.com tours.

He is 284th on the Buy.com money list with $1,201 in four events and 170th on the Hooters list with $1,496.50 in six events.

“Success as a junior does not equate to success as a professional,” said Stephen Hamblin, executive director of the American Junior Golf Assn. “Golf, unlike any other sport, has a long, long learning curve. There are pinnacles of success to reach at each level.”

Hamblin points out that most successful pro golfers had already established themselves by winning at every step along the way. Woods, for example, won three U.S. Juniors, three U.S. Amateurs and the NCAA individual title before turning pro.

“Tiger reached every pinnacle of success,” Hamblin said. [Na and Tryon] are good junior golfers, but they were never even the AJGA player of the year. What have they won?”

Those familiar with Tryon and Na, including competitors and coaches, say each has the game to become a solid professional, even if it doesn’t happen overnight. They have been evaluated in every way possible--Tryon even has a sports psychologist--and carefully thought through their decisions.

Earl Woods, who knows a thing or two about recognizing when a player is ready, fears that kids who have had some junior-level success will see Na and Tryon and want to follow suit, or that overzealous parents will push their children toward the pros too early.

“The kids have to be evaluated at the professional level to see how far along they are and if they are ready to compete,” Woods said. “Parents are not qualified to make that judgment. You can’t say a kid is ready based on one or two tournaments--even if it’s a PGA Tour event.”

Na has heard it all before. He routinely encounters shaking heads, rolling eyes and legions of naysayers who tell him he is making a mistake.

But professional golf has been Na’s plan since he started high school. He ruled out college during his freshman year and didn’t attend high school last year as a junior, choosing to home school so he could spend more time pursuing a pro career.

Tryon has made it clear he is not dropping out of school and says he will play a limited professional schedule until he finishes in two years. Like Na, he will not go to college.

They probably won’t be the last to take this route.

“If I do make it on tour, it’ll change the way people think about turning pro early,” said Na, who plans to get a high school diploma through an equivalency test. “It’ll show that it could be done and I think more kids are gonna take the step I’m taking.”