Todd Hamilton - Part 1 (The Early Years)

Intro Music 0:07

Straight down the middle. It went straight down the middle. Let it start.

Mike Gonzalez 0:15

Welcome to another edition of FORE the Good of the Game and Bruce Devlin. I know you very well, and I know what the Open Championship meant to you as a foreign player back in your day. I think it was valued much more by the foreign players than it was back by the Americans for a lot of reasons back in the 60s and 70s. But I'm sure you'd give your eye teeth to have ever been announced and introduced as winner of the gold medal and champion golfer of the year.

Bruce Devlin 0:46

You've got that right. You know me real well. Unfortunately, I came close a couple of times, but uh couldn't ring the bell. But the gentleman that we have today uh has traveled around the world playing golf, made a great impression in Japan for many, many years, and it is indeed a pleasure to have the gold medalist with us today from 2004, Mr. Todd Hamilton. Todd, thanks for joining Mike and I today. We've looked forward to this for quite a while.

Todd Hamilton 1:16

You bet. Thank you for the invite. I can't believe it's been 20 years since that happened.

Mike Gonzalez 1:21

Isn't that amazing? How about it?

Todd Hamilton 1:24

Goes by fast.

Mike Gonzalez 1:25

It sure does. And where are they at this year, 20 years later? Royal Troon.

Todd Hamilton 1:31

Royal Trune, yes.

Mike Gonzalez 1:32

Yeah. Well, we're gonna have a chance to talk a lot about that win back in 2004, but there's a whole lot to cover before we get there, my man. So uh we always start at the very beginning, and Bruce and I enjoy listening to our guests talk about growing up as a kid, who were the early influences, how did they come across the game of golf? Take us through those early years because I know you were born in Galesburg, but you didn't necessarily grow up there, did you?

Todd Hamilton 2:02

No, I grew up in a very small town about probably 40 minutes from Galesburg. Small town called Oquwaka, Illinois. It's an old Indian town. It's set right on the Mississippi River, and Oquwakka is an Indian town that means yellow banks in their language. So right along the river. Matter of fact, if you were on a boat in St. Louis and you went north on that boat and you knew exactly where to look, if you looked to your right, you would look right down the main street of my hometown.

Mike Gonzalez 2:37

And uh river life is unique, isn't it?

Todd Hamilton 2:42

It is. There was a lot of flooding. Uh I lived about two blocks from the river, but I'd only been fishing three times ever in my life. Nothing that interests me, kind of like what golf is to a lot of people. Doesn't interest them. I was the same way with fishing.

Mike Gonzalez 3:00

But oftentimes uh that river life, particularly I know in Illinois where I'm from as well, um, a lot of activity surrounding that river by the townspeople in terms of the type of business, recreational activities, just uh the things you did growing up.

Todd Hamilton 3:17

Yes. Uh my father, when I was a kid, he had a couple boats, so we would go out on it. I I am not a water guy. I don't know how to swim. I think if I was in a pool, I could maybe save myself. But if you threw me out into a pond or an ocean, I would probably struggle to to save my life. But uh he had a couple boats when we were growing up. I have a younger sister, and uh he would take us out on the river with some of his buddies, and uh it was pretty neat doing that. Uh, there was always a life vest on me and one nearby just in case. Because I, like I said, I I hated the water. I really didn't didn't mix with water very well.

Mike Gonzalez 4:00

So tell us a little bit about your folks. I understand they owned a grocery store.

Todd Hamilton 4:05

Yeah, my uh actually it was my grandparents' grocery store. Uh when they passed away, there were four children that it got passed down to, and my father bought the other three people out, so it became his store. Hamilton's supermarket was the name of it. Uh 1,500 people were in our town. We actually had two grocery stores, believe it or not, and about seven taverns. So you can you can understand what kind of clientele that our town had in it. Uh I worked there as a kid, uh stocked shelves, cleaned the windows, swept the floors, dusted. That was probably the least favorite of my chores was the dusting. And uh didn't enjoy it as a kid. I remembered my dad telling me, hey, why don't you come up this next Saturday and start working at the store? And I remember telling him, Well, how am I gonna watch cartoons then? And he said, That's the point. You're not you're done watching cartoons. So uh I'm glad I did it. You know, it made me value uh working for dollars, and uh although the work wasn't that difficult, it seemed real hard at the time, but looking back it was pretty easy.

Bruce Devlin 5:25

So, Todd, when um when did you first um get introduced to the game of golf and by whom?

Todd Hamilton 5:34

Well my father, he was a he wasn't a real big golfer. He liked to golf. I think he golfed once a week, maybe on his off day of work. Uh he would take me out a little bit with him. Uh I do remember as a kid he had to go do some work for his store. On the way back from what he was doing, we would stop at a driving range in the town where he dropped his uh paperwork off, and uh we'd hit some balls. That's that's no longer there, it's actually a grocery store uh where the range used to be. But uh he would take me golfing with him as a kid, and I like to say that because I grew up playing around more adults than kids, there weren't many kids that played golf uh around our town. I like to say because I was playing with more adults than kids that I was a little more mature for my age, my wife would not agree to that. But uh it was good to it was good to be around older people. I learned how to uh behave and uh react accordingly. And when I turned 16, I was the designated driver.

Mike Gonzalez 6:52

I think our young lives in in rural Illinois had a lot of parallels. I was 10 years ahead of you, but it sounded like you had a lot of the same experience as I did. Nine-hole course, no golf professional, played with with uh adult men much more often than I played with my peers, learned a lot as a result about golf and life, just hanging with those kind of guys, right? Uh yes. You know, no bunkers at our course. Uh, you know, you just kind of just kind of found it out there somewhere, learning on your own.

Todd Hamilton 7:23

That's right. We never had any bunkers either. It was a nine-hole course. I think they added one eventually, but if you hit it in it, it was a pretty bad shot. So it really never never came into play.

Mike Gonzalez 7:35

Pretty self-taught then as a kid?

Todd Hamilton 7:38

Yes. I I was not a kid that liked to go out and hit balls, beat balls all day, but I loved to go play. So I was more interested in scoring rather than how my swing looked. And you know, if I hit a nice draw every shot or a nice fade every shot, I was more worried about scoring, which ultimately is the name of the game.

Bruce Devlin 8:01

Yeah. Yeah, Bruce, it doesn't have to be pretty, does it? No, it does not. And uh around that area, I I believe I don't think you went to high school in that town that you grew up in, did you? I think it was did you go to high school in Biggsville, Illinois? Is that right?

Todd Hamilton 8:19

Biggsville, Illinois. Yeah, it was about 50 minutes away, yes. Uh very small school. I think we had about 300 kids in the whole school for four grades. My grade probably had 65, maybe 70 kids. So very small school. We had no golf team when I was in that school. We had basketball, track, football for boys, we had basketball, track, and volleyball for girls, and that was it. Even though we had a nine-hole course less than two miles from the school, we didn't have a golf team because there weren't many kids that really played golf.

Bruce Devlin 8:58

Yeah.

Mike Gonzalez 8:58

And there were a lot of towns in and around uh your area that just didn't have their own high schools. There were consolidated school districts that had to bring a number of towns in to form the nucleus of a full class.

Todd Hamilton 9:10

That's right. Uh, it might be a 20, 25-minute bus ride for a lot of the kids. I mean, I was probably 15 minutes from my town to the high school. So uh my wife, uh girlfriend at the time, wife now, she lived right across her parents' farm from the high school. So she could probably have walked to school back in the day, but most kids were bust in, you know, 10, 10 to 25 minutes probably from the school.

Mike Gonzalez 9:39

Yeah. You know, when you think about it now, uh, Bruce, you you hear Todd talk about his upbringing, at least to date, and you compare that with some of the other many greats that we've talked to. Um He had it kind of stacked against him, if you will, because you know a lot of these guests they grew up with uh some famous head pro who took them under their wing or a a teacher that that that that uh that they gravitated to at a very early age that helped develop their game. It sounds like those opportunities just weren't quite there yet, uh, and he had to kind of find it himself.

Bruce Devlin 10:14

That's true. And what and uh Todd, w while you were at at the high school, you you were your golf game must have been you must have been getting some golf because I believe while you were there you won the state championship a couple of times, so you must have been working on your game as well.

Todd Hamilton 10:34

Yeah, I won it two times. My last two years of high school. Uh in Illinois we had two classes. We had single A and A. Double A were bigger schools, single A the smallest schools. Uh I didn't play in any tournaments as we didn't have any golf team there, but uh I had to go through what they called the district tournament. If I made it through that, I advanced to the sectional, and if I got through the sectional, I advanced to the state tournament. So uh I even though I didn't play any high school events, I played a lot of uh junior golf in the summertime. And uh I just pr would practice after school. Luckily the course was you know a mile, two miles from the high school, so once school was over with, get in the car, drive over to the course and and play and practice. So although I didn't have any high school team, I still was able to succeed because I wanted to do well for myself.

Bruce Devlin 11:37

Yeah.

Todd Hamilton 11:37

I wish I would have had a team, it'd been great to celebrate a state championship or tournament wins with other teammates, but there just weren't any kids that really enjoyed it, at least enough to to warrant having a golf team.

Mike Gonzalez 11:51

You probably would have won on the orange course at Savoy. Is that where they had it back then?

Todd Hamilton 11:58

Uh no, we played Arrowhead Country Club in Chillicothe, Illinois. Okay. All right. I know that was one of them. I know I played the rail as a freshman in Springfield. Yeah. I did not make it to the state tournament as a sophomore. Uh, and I I know one of the titles that I won was at uh Arrowhead in Chillicothe, and the other one might have been as well. I don't I don't remember if if both were there or not.

Mike Gonzalez 12:28

Yeah. Uh Jay Haas was my era, so I kind of ran into a buzzsaw with Jay Haas on the Orange Course. I think he one round he shot a little 65 like it was nothing.

Todd Hamilton 12:40

He could play back then, even.

Mike Gonzalez 12:42

Yeah, he's pretty good. So pretty amazing, Todd. I don't know. Were there any guys that you're aware of that went down your path, no golf team, individual, competing on your own, and won the state title in Illinois?

Todd Hamilton 12:57

Boy, I don't know. I I'm sure there's some. I've always heard stories about the Byron brothers. They had to drive 30, 45 minutes just to play on grass greens.

Mike Gonzalez 13:08

Well, yeah. Yeah.

Todd Hamilton 13:09

I I would think after a couple times doing that, that would get really old.

Mike Gonzalez 13:13

Yeah. Uh speaking of uh other types of greens, did you have any sand greens around you? We had a few around us in central Illinois.

Todd Hamilton 13:20

Not that I know of, no. They were they were mostly nine-hole courses. There were a couple, eighteen-hole courses that uh were pretty nice courses. Uh tree line, Mammoth, Illinois had a real nice coursaire. And I think their their school won five or six straight Class A state championships. So uh my father was good friends with their coach, and I knew the coach as well. Knew a lot of the kids there. So I would play a lot with those kids in the summertime at the Corsair in Mama. So we we had a lot of good players around the area, uh, but none in my area where I lived.

Mike Gonzalez 14:02

Yeah, so what were your other sources of learning? I mean, uh you mentioned the guys you played with, and I'm sure just through observation you pick some things up from people, but you know, we're talking now uh as you approach sort of middle of high school, you're around 1980. Uh a lot of the greats of the game are still playing, aren't they? Nicholas and Watson and Trevino and so forth, Bruce Deblin. And uh uh and but there wasn't much video yet. Uh it was television, it was magazines. Uh where else did you go for knowledge?

Todd Hamilton 14:33

I read a lot of golf magazines, golf digest, golf magazine. Uh I don't know how many times I learned how to fix my slice. It seemed like every every three or four months, hey, here's how you can fix your slice. And I never I never could figure out how to add that extra 15 yards of distance either. But there were articles on that. So uh I I was more I was more just go out there, find something that works for you, improve that to the best of your ability, and fortunately I was a very good chipper and putter. So when things didn't go well from T to green, I usually, and I say usually, usually could salvage a halfway decent round. Not always, but usually. If I if I drove the ball well, I usually played really well. I never really drove the ball consistently, and anytime I got on some tree line courses, it seemed like I that's where I struggled the most.

Bruce Devlin 15:40

And what I was gonna say is what when you were in uh high school, were you, as you said, two time state champion. Were you recruited by a lot of the colleges to go play golf, or how did you get to go to college?

Todd Hamilton 15:54

Not too many. I got recruited by the University of Oklahoma, which is ultimately where I ended up. Uh, I took a recruiting trip to the University of Texas, a recruiting trip to Texas AM. I believe at the time the coach at Texas AM, he was originally from Illinois. And then I lived down the alley about three doors down from a lady whose relation was the golf coach at Northern Illinois. And he happened to be in town visiting during the winter months, visiting his uh relation there just down the door, just down the alley from us, and somehow got in touch with me and asked if he could come and meet with me. I said, sure. But my first trip that I took was to the University of Oklahoma. That would have been in October of my senior year of high school. And once I went there, I knew that I wanted to go there. I really liked the kids that were on the team, loved the coach. The facilities weren't the greatest, but we had access to different courses to play around town and uh other towns nearby. So basically, all those other trips that I took were just to get out of high school, to be honest with you.

Mike Gonzalez 17:19

Typical kid. Here you come out of small town Illinois and and and now you're on campus. Do you remember what you felt like those first few days entering that new world?

Todd Hamilton 17:33

Uh I felt a little bit of apprehension because I'd never really been away on my own before, other than you know, maybe a week at a time for a golf tournament. Uh but I also felt a great opportunity to do something that I love to do, and that was play golf at a high level. Uh I was very fortunate that the kids on the team were super kids, and you know, they they helped me settle in real well. We had or my roommate was I think he was a senior at the time. He was from New Zealand, Philip Aiken. Bruce, you may know that name.

Mike Gonzalez 18:14

Yes, sir.

Todd Hamilton 18:14

You know that name, Philip Aiken? Yes, sir. Yeah, he was my roommate my uh freshman year of school. So I don't know if that was by design, putting an older player with a younger player to to kind of guide him along, but uh if it wasn't by design, I'm glad it worked out that way. Yeah. And uh Grant Waite was a freshman uh for us at Oklahoma the same year I I entered school. So we always could uh hang around with each other if we had problems. We'd ask another guy, you know, how to fix it, uh best classes to take, good places to go do your laundry, things like that. So the guys were great, coach was super, and I'm I'm glad that I picked the school that I picked.

Mike Gonzalez 19:03

Yeah, we we haven't heard much about coursework studies, going to class.

Todd Hamilton 19:08

Uh I did do that. I wasn't the best student, but uh I did enough to get by, let's put it that way.

Mike Gonzalez 19:16

Yeah, so uh take us take us through how your game sort of progressed through those four years in college. Did you make a step change in certain facets of your game based on what you learned there, or was it just a steady progression?

Todd Hamilton 19:30

Uh I think it was a steady progression. I struggled early on as a freshman. Uh, I remember changing my grip a little bit, my my right hand grip. Uh I I thought, coach thought it was too far underneath the club. Uh, I could hit it a long ways, but as I mentioned earlier, I never really hit it a long way straight uh more than I needed to. So so we tried to get that right hand more on top of the club and not so much with the palm facing up. Uh that took a little while. I I think a grip change, probably one of the hardest things you can do. So that took me a little while. Yeah, that took me a while to get used to. I didn't I didn't feel like I had any power with that hand in the proper position compared to what I was used to. Uh but as the years went on, I think I I won an event, my sophomore year. Uh kind of struggled here and there, my junior year, and I think my college career I won four events, which looking back maybe could have done better, but uh at least I succeeded a little bit and uh you know kept my interest in the game to to go to the next level. As a team, we uh my four years there, we finished third in the NCAA three times, and one time we finished tenth. We didn't play very good my sophomore year. Uh I played well as an individual my sophomore year. I think I finished sixth. Uh, but team-wise, we had chances uh my freshman, junior, and senior year. As a matter of fact, I think my junior year, we may have had the lead with nine holes to go and ended up finishing third. So we were always seemed like we were always close. We just could never get over the hump. Oklahoma State was always they always had our number. They had uh just seemed like every player that they had was just a little bit better than the corresponding player on our team. And you know, we we just could never get past them in a in a real meaningful tournament anyway.

Mike Gonzalez 21:49

Yeah. Well, three-time All-American at at Oklahoma, so you must have played quite well. Who were some of the the big names you were running into that you then found yourself uh Paling with later on the tour.

Todd Hamilton 22:04

Brent Job is one guy. We actually ended up playing a lot of golf overseas together in Japan and on the Asian tour. He played golf at UCLA. Brian Watts lost in a playoff to Mark O'Mara in the 98 Open Championship. We were really good friends. Rivals in college. He was at Oklahoma State. I was at Oklahoma. Big rivals, but good friends nonetheless. We played on the Asian tour. Played on the Japanese tour. I remember Duffy Waldorf. He was at UCLA as well. I think he was a couple years ahead of me. Andrew McGee was a senior at Oklahoma when I was a freshman. Guys, there were there were a lot of players that ended up making big names for themselves that you never would have guessed would have happened, seeing some of them in college.

Mike Gonzalez 23:05

Yeah, we all sort of mature and grow up differently, don't we? That's right. Sometimes it takes a while, Bruce.

Bruce Devlin 23:12

So when when did you think Turning Pro might be the the ticket for you?

Todd Hamilton 23:21

Well, I was always a pretty good junior golfer and I could shoot a lot of low scores uh as a kid, but it was just in central Illinois. You know, there's not that's not really a hotbed for golf, in my opinion. But I did play a lot of the big junior tournaments, the U.S. uh junior championship, did fairly well in that once or twice. I tried to qualify for the U.S. amateur, made it pretty deep in that. I think I I missed out one match from going to the Masters one year. I think top four at that time got you to the Masters, and I lost my last match to get into that final four, so that was kind of disappointing. Uh I remember losing to the eventual champion, uh, which was I forget the year, it's been such a long time ago. Uh I think I made it to the final 16 that year, made it maybe to the final eight another year. So I always felt that I could play well. I never won a big tournament, amateur tournament, uh, but I showed glimpses of uh good play, which kept my interest sparked and made me feel like if I could just correct a few things or refine a few things that I could maybe have a future playing golf. I never really had a set point that I wanted to be a pro-golfer. I just always loved to play golf, whether it was with people or on my own. I I had no problem getting in a cart if I was old enough to drive and go playing 18 holes by myself, or if I wasn't old enough to get in a cart, put my bag on my shoulder and and walk 18 holes.

Mike Gonzalez 25:20

So when did you make that decision? Do you remember the moment it kind of clicked and said, Okay, I'm gonna go for this?

Todd Hamilton 25:29

Boy, I I don't remember. I remember when I got out of college, I I turned professional. Uh but I always always wanted to play golf. Once I got the bug as a kid, uh had a little bit of success in college, in junior golf. I always wanted to play golf. There was an intrigue about the game. Uh you you never could you never could there was never a perfect round in my opinion, and there still isn't. You it seemed like you could always do one or two shots better. Even if you shot 63. There was always that. Why, you know, I missed this drive behind a tree and I had to chip out. I made a par, but it was an ugly par, and if I hit a good drive, maybe I make a birdie, stuff like that. So there's never a perfect run. I don't think there ever will be. Uh, you're always thinking I could have hit this shot better. I only had a wedge in. Why did I hit it to 30 feet? I'm usually better than that. I could have hit it closer, made that putt, and shot 60 instead of 61, even though 61 is a hell of a score.

Bruce Devlin 26:41

So when you turn pro in uh 87, uh, did you go to the PGA tour qualifying school?

Todd Hamilton 26:50

Or I did, yeah. I went that fall, and I think I shot 76 the last round to miss by I want to say about three shots, maybe. But that was all smoke and mirrored. That was all that good chipping and good putting I mentioned earlier. Because I had no business. No business being that close. I I do remember that. But uh it gave me a good taste of what could be if some of those things improved a little bit.

Mike Gonzalez 27:25

Uh just stepping back a moment before even Q school, ask you a little bit about what typically happens. Uh some buddies or some family kind of pass around the hat to try to figure out how they might provide you a little financial support out there to get you going. Uh, what happened with your situation?

Todd Hamilton 27:45

I had the exact same situation. My father had a uh bunch of friends that pitched in some money. I think they could buy a what they called a block. I don't know how much each block was worth, but uh they pitched in some money, kept it going for a number of years. I struggled playing for about five years right out of college, did the tour school, missed five times, ended up playing the Asian tour five times, and uh the last time I played the Asian tour, they were pretty much done with putting money in.

Mike Gonzalez 28:24

Right.

Todd Hamilton 28:25

And that was that was kind of you know put up or shut up time. And fortunately for me, I don't remember doing anything that I anything differently than I was doing before, but I had a really good tour on the Asian tour in 1992. I won their order of merit. Uh I think I won one official tournament, and then we had one tournament that was it was during the Asian tour, but it wasn't official for that tour. I won that tournament. I think I made over a hundred thousand in about three months and was able to wire a bunch of money back to pay bills and and kind of get going on my own without any financial backing. And by winning the Asian Order Merit in 92, that got me uh uh one-year exemption onto the Japanese tour, which is kind of when everything kind of took off.

Mike Gonzalez 29:27

Thank you for listening to another episode of For the Good of the Game. And please, wherever you listen to your podcast on Apple and Spotify, if you like what you hear, please subscribe, spread the word, and tell your friends until we tee it up again for the good of the game. So long, everybody.

Intro Music 29:51

It went smack down the fairway. And it's time to slice just spit off line.