The Forming of David Duval

The

morning fog has yet to lift in Jacksonville, Fla. It’s very early, and you can’t see a flag from any tee on the Timuquana course. But there’s one pudgy kid out there, playing alone. He is deliberate in his approach, surgically accurate in his shotmaking. You glimpse him through the haze, and wonder what he’s doing. You wonder what he’s thinking.

This tableaux would have been enacted, over and over, in the second half of the 1980s. It is tempting, now, to suppose that young David Duval was dreaming about how, with extra effort like this, he might one day be the best golfer in the world, he might one day shoot 65-67 on the weekend to win the British Open, finishing at 10 under par.

Such notions were floating through the head of a kid even younger, a kid out on the west coast named Woods, known to his friends then, and to the world now, as Tiger. Tiger Woods was keeping charts of Jack Nicklaus’s wins in major tournaments, figuring that one day he might improve upon the Bear’s amazing record. He was plotting a path to the top.

But Duval — no, he wasn’t banking on any big future as he made his way around Timuquana in the fog. He was seeking safe harbor from a painful present. His brother’s death years earlier, when David was only nine, had filled him with guilt, and its aftershocks had ruined his parents’ marriage. His father was drinking too much; his mother was too, and growing progressively more depressed. Only out on the course, often alone, could David find peace. While Tiger Woods was consciously willing himself to become the best golfer in the world, David Duval was stumbling upon a focus, an intensity — a Zen — that would, by millennium’s dawn, make him the American golfer to challenge Tiger, and to beat him and everyone else at Royal Lytham and St. Annes.

Duval, who was born in 1972, and Woods, born four years later, are two very different men, and perhaps because of this golf watchers everywhere have been longing for a rivalry — a rivalry that may now get underway in earnest since Duval has finally crashed the Majors Club. When Woods arrived thrillingly on center stage with his three U.S. Amateur wins, his astonishing 18-under, 12- stroke win at the 1997 Masters and his longterm Nike contract — a deal that would keep his smiling visage front and center for years to come — there was only one thing that concerned the casual fan. Too bad, the Sunday viewer said, that he has no rival. Too bad he’ll be so lonely at the top.

Those who observe the game closely knew better. A hundred and more PGA Tour players enter each weekend’s tournament, and all of them have been champions somewhere, at some time. It’s hard to be top dog; no player wins the majority of golf tournaments, or even a significant minority of them. It is a rare era when the Tour features any player who is head and shoulders above his peers, never mind two of them, paired regularly on Sundays, fighting it out for title after title. Nicklaus and Watson constituted a true rivalry, Palmer and Nicklaus before that, Sneed and Sarazan once upon a time. But even those storied pairings only met, mano-a-mano, on a handful of occasions. It’s against the odds in golf. Navratilova and Evert could be relied upon to challenge one another every other week. Not so likely in golf.

Still. . . . David Duval has, on occasion, played so well — so amazingly well — he has made the fan salivate. Davis Love III is a fine golfer. Phil Mickelson would have been an exciting rival for Woods, but his Sunday yips seem unconquerable. Sergio Garcia? Who knows?

Duval. Here’s a guy who actually bumped or Tiger from the No. 1 spot for a while. Here’s a guy who won the 1999 Tournament Players Championship against one of the years’ toughest fields to punctuate an altogether astonishing 18-month run of golf. Late in 1997 Duval quietly won his first-ever PGA tournament, ruining his reputation as a bridesmaid you could bet on (he had previously enjoyed, sort of, seven second-place finishes in four years on Tour). He won the next week, too, and then the next, becoming the first since Ben Hogan to post his first three wins consecutively. "We knew once David got going, he’d win a bunch," Love told me when we were chatting about Duval back at the time. "But we never expected a roll like this." The roll included, at that point in time, 10 victories in 33 starts; the then all-time Tour single-season money record of $2,591, 031; a second-place finish in the ’98 Masters, when his closing-round 67 was barely trumped by Mark O’Meara’s birdies on three of the final four holes; a 59, carded in the final round of a victory in the ’99 Bob Hope Classic — only the third 59 posted in 83 years of PGA competition — and, finally, that summiting of the world rankings. The TPC win made Duval only the third golfer in the last 30 years to win at least three Tour events in three consecutive years; the two other players go by the names Nicklaus and Watson. And, once David reached the top, he was not through. He won the BellSouth tournament a week after the TPC to eclipse — in the spring! — his year-long money- mark. And the next week he shot the low round on Sunday to finish sixth in the Masters, better than Woods if not as good as Jose Maria Olazabel.

Then Tiger came on in the second half of that ’99 campaign to make Duval’s streak seem middling. He won a made-for-TV head-to-head match-play event over Duval, then his second major at the PGA, holding off Sergio. He challenged Hogan’s consecutive-win streak while racking up — what? — seven million clams in Tour winnings? Yikes. Then things got even more huge: a new $100 million Nike contract, four straight majors (first since Bobby Jones to hold all trophies at the same time), cover of TIME one year, Newsweek the next. Duval, meanwhile, faded into the pack. He got injured; he disappeared. He existed, for months, not only in Tiger's immense shadow but in the lesser ones cast by Mickelson, Love, Garcia and, lately, a guy named Goosen.

But now, he is ferociously back, having thumped the world in a Tigeresque performance in England. And he has the fans salivating again, thinking thet, yes, this will be the rivalry. This is the rivalry we always wanted.

We know much about Tiger. Do we know anything about Duval? This has been the question everyone's been asking in the last 24 hours, and that the golf commentators on ABC suggested has no answer.

Is that true?

Well, yes, Duval is an enigma wrapped in Oakley sports goggles (which he wears not to "intimidate" or "hide," by the way, but to ward off pollen). He is an intelligent, introspective, focused man who has overcome years of late- adolescent brattiness.

His prickliness had roots. Most of what we need to understand about David Duval is traceable to December, 1980, when his older brother, Brent, was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder, aplastic anemia. David’s blood was a near match, and he donated bone marrow in an excruciatingly painful operation. After a very brief recovery, Brent died of graft-vs.-host disease. Nine-year-old David wondered if he had contributed to his brother’s death and became a subdued, serious child; he didn’t wear those sunglasses of his yet, but he started to live life behind shades. David’s father, Bob, now a Senior Tour player, was then the pro at Timuquana, and Bob’s golf course became David’s refuge. The boy would hit balls all day and into the night; he was happy to play alone. His game was aggressive, violent even, yet controlled. David was a star at Georgia Tech — a four-year All America — but was tough to handle. He kept his teammates at a remove. In the early 1990s, he took his shot at the pro ranks, but success was elusive.

Back when Duval made his first run at Number One, his girlfriend, Julie McArthur, said that the pain David was feeling about his family — troubles in his parents’ marriage and in their individual lives — had, earlier, influenced his game. David never wishes to blame missed putts and second-place finishes on such things, but the record tells its own tale. His parents finally divorced in 1996 and Bob remarried; David took his mother’s part, and affairs all around seemed, to him, miserable. By the next year, things were getting better within the family — David reconciled with his father; he was, in fact, the one who coaxed Bob into trying the Senior Tour — and David started winning.

David, though he seems reticent to most observers, says that he is much more at ease than he was during his first years on Tour, and here’s yet another difference — an ironic one — between Duval and Woods. Woods’s big smile lights up those Nike ads, but his anger is quick to flash on course and Team Tiger can prove a formidable phalanx around the grounds. Duval, meanwhile, puts those wraparound sunglasses on, pulls that cap down and looks like some Swarzeneggarian sports villain from a distant galaxy. Yet David has many friends among his colleague pros, some of whom use the word "sweet." "He’s fine to play with," Bob Tway once told me, and Tway is the poor sod who had to play alongside Duval when Duval was shooting 59. "I’m not saying I enjoyed it much — I was heading for 72. But he was very pleasant." Any gutsy kid who approaches Duval for an autograph will get an autograph. "Being a good role model, conducting myself as a professional, acting like a gentleman when playing" are responsibilities Duval welcomes rather than shuns. Want more? "Golf-course design might be something I’d be interested in," he says, "though it would have to be daily, fee-type courses — a quality product accessible to everyone, not something you have to come up with $75,000 to join." Duval reads three dozen books a year while touring, and McArthur, now his fiancé once gave him the Oxford English Dictionary for Christmas. He’s not what he seems.

Another thing he was not, until yesterday, was winner of a major tournament. "It’s a category you want to get yourself into — ‘good enough to win a major, but hasn’t won yet,’ " Love, a major winner himself, told me two years ago. "You want to be good enough to get into that category, then you want to get out of it. I’ll admit it: There are some good golfers out here who haven’t won a major yet and, frankly, the other players would be surprised if they won one. There’s something about them that says it might never happen. That’s not the case with David. We’re expecting it. He’s ready."

Love was prescient, though it took about 24 extra months to prove it. Mickelson, Garcia, Colin Montgomerie — they're still in the category. Duval has broken out. But, really, he broke out a while ago — he got beyond the pain. This other stuff, it's just golf.