Quiet Please!
The Masters champ takes to the ice, the Shark goes cave diving, and Tiger remains coy about his schedule. Tim Rosaforte covers it all in his weekly notes column
Immelman plans to play three-in-a-row as prep for his title defense at Augusta.
Trevor Immelman had never held a hockey puck, let alone thrown one down on center ice before an NHL game.
"It's cold," said the South African, taking hold of the hard rubber disc in the locker room of the Tampa Bay Storm Arena Football League team in the bowels of St. Petersburg Times Arena in Tampa.
"They're kept in a freezer," said Bill Wickett, VP of Communications and Public Relations for the Tampa Bay Lightning. "We call it the puck freezer."
Instead of the green jacket, Immelman was wearing a Lightning sweater, his name stitched across the back. This was Tuesday night, just minutes before the opening face off in a game against the Pittsburgh Penguins.
And you could tell he was genuinely excited and a little nervous: A good kind of nervous. When Immelman made a hole-in-one on the 16th hole at Augusta in 2005, he leaped into the sky like a Cirque du Soleil cast member, showing nimble athleticism. In his Cole Haan loafers, Immelman was afraid he might slip.
"How do you drop a puck?" he asked, and Wickett proceeded to show him how it worked.
The Masters champion was making a corporate appearance through an affiliation he has with Transitions, the Tampa Bay-based eyewear company that is one of the few American companies who find it politically correct and financially wise to be investing in golf, PGA Tour golf. Thus, the Transitions Championship in two weeks, the first of three straight weeks for Immelman in his run-up to Augusta. Transitions also has space on the boards at The Forum and is a partner of the Lightning.
We were given this access as part of a final media sweep being conducted by Immelman so he can try to regain the acute focus he had last year at Augusta, when he outlasted Tiger Woods by three strokes for his first major title. To this point, it has been hard putting all the pieces of mind and technique together with the deadly putting stroke that Immelman had on those icy Augusta greens.
We started the day in the back of a stretch limousine at Lake Nona, where I had 90 minutes with Immelman, his wife Carminita, and his wingman, Jon Wagner of IMG. At the Forum, we entered the backstage door where the hockey teams and rock stars make their entrance, took an elevator up to a floor where we exited through a kitchen, and found ourselves on the club level more than two hours before the game.
Immelman was a thorough professional, giving every interview all he had. Like Padraig Harrington, Geoff Ogilvy, Jim Furyk and Stewart Cink, Immelman has evolved into one of the most thoughtful interviews. He never tired through the process, starting with the Lightning radio and TV network, and continuing on to a conference room, where he knocked out three more interviews, one for a magazine that kept him on the line for the equivalent of a six-hour round. Before going on the ice, he met with the golf writers of the Tampa Tribune and St. Petersburg Times.
My old Tampa Bay roommate, Mick Elliott of the Tribune, opened by saying, "I didn't recognize you without your green jacket." It drew a laugh from Immelman, who at that point was wearing a suede Gucci blazer, and it made me realize that in the concourses upstairs, the hockey crowd wouldn't recognize him either.
In the Transitions box, Immelman hung with the company's executives, representatives from Innisbrook and tournament director Gerald Goodman, returning for two periods after the puck toss. In the 10 hours I was with him, I never saw Immelman check the time on his Rolex. I did see him smiling and enjoying himself, fascinated with the speed at which the sport of hockey is played.
Gettting back into the limo, Wagner had one more interview for him. Immelman grabbed the agent's cell phone and went through it all one more time, a Q&A that covered everything from Augusta to his relationship with Transitions, with the player quoting everything from UV rays to the size of his jacket (42 regular).
"Do you need anything more?" he asked, just as we were driving past the Tampa Bay Fairgrounds on I-4, so I popped open the laptop and we talked all the way back to Orlando. We arrived at 11:30 p.m. At 8 the following morning, he had PGA Tour Productions coming over to film him in his music room. At 11, he would conduct a media teleconference with Augusta National.
The details of this half-day in the life of a defending Masters champion will be in an upcoming issue of Golf World. We started with a photo shoot behind a set of Pearl drums once used by Bon Jovi Hall of Famer Tico Torres, and during the course of the interview process, went back to his childhood in South Africa; the painful operation to remove a tumor he endured just four months before his Maters win; and took it all the way forward to final steps he's making to defend, including a trip he made recently to Augusta National with brother Mark, the golf coach at Columbus (Ga.) State.
Cave Diving With The Shark: Greg Norman's preparation for the Masters has also stepped up, but with The Shark, there's always some sort of adventure along the way. On the Sunday morning of the Mayakoba Classic, at the host course he designed in Cancun, Norman and business manager Bart Collins accompanied cave diver and National Geographic explorer Sam Meacham to the Cenotes Taj Mahal for a little cave diving.
