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In the solitude of a practice bay near his beloved Wisconsin home, Steve Stricker rebuilt his swing and his focus, foundations for his newly acquired status: second-best player in the world

Cherokee CC is familiar territory to Stricker, who revamped his game with hard work in 2005.

By Dave Shedloski

Photos by Dom Furore

February 22, 2010

A man can find sanctuary in the most curious place, somewhere contrary to convention and maybe even to common sense but wholly compatible with his instincts. He finds it where no one else possibly could, where no one would even think to look, and with it he also finds himself. If he is left alone.

In the months following a dispiriting 2005 season on the PGA Tour, his third in a row that seemed to reinforce the idea that whatever skills he possessed were inadequate for world-class golf, Steve Stricker retreated into the bosom of a typical Wisconsin winter to reassemble his game. He took his faulty swing, his flagging confidence and his heap of broken images to a makeshift indoor practice facility and began the long process of becoming the kind of player he finally realized he wanted to become.

He would smack yellow range balls from the open side of a mobile home into a snow-covered field, hoping the answers that Ben Hogan so desperately sought in the dirt might reveal themselves from an AstroTurf mat. He gauged his resolve not by the number of balls that burrowed into the frozen canvas near flags perched atop small mounds of green-painted snow, but by the hours that unknowingly flitted by. He wrapped himself in a cocoon, mending, evolving and transforming. And then the player who had plummeted to 337th in the World Ranking, who seemed too nice to beat hungrier and longer-hitting foes, who was tormented by his desire to stay home with his family, spread his wings and took flight.

"That's the time I remember best, at the end of '05, when I knew I needed to do something or move on," says Stricker, who turns 43 Feb. 23. "That's when I had more of a purpose than at any time in my career."

Dressed in blue jeans, brown boots and jacket and black Peter Millar cap, Stricker is standing in one of the covered hitting bays at Cherokee CC in Madison, Wis., as he says this. A gas-fueled heater overhead is barely holding its own against the arctic gusts and snow blowing in, but Stricker doesn't seem to notice. A native of nearby Edgerton, Stricker is acclimated to such environs. Plus, he is still basking in the warmth of his two-stroke victory two days earlier at the Northern Trust Open, which elevated him past Phil Mickelson to No. 2 in the World Ranking -- or "No. 1 active" notes his father-in-law and mentor Dennis Tiziani, considering Tiger Woods is on hiatus.

The win is Stricker's eighth since he joined the tour in 1994, but his fifth since he emerged from his own personal wilderness and fourth in his last 14 starts.

Implausible though it is, you have to talk to Stricker and see first-hand the frozen landscape that would feel purgatorial to the rest of the sun-worshipping golfing fraternity to comprehend his rise from mediocrity to this latent meteoric ascent. And even then it still seems inconceivable.

"It's all kind of surreal," says Stricker, who augmented his reputation last fall when he partnered with Woods to produce a 4-0 record in Team USA's victory in the Presidents Cup at Harding Park. "After every tournament [my wife] Nicki and I will sit down and talk about what's happened. We're like, 'Can you believe it, that I won again?' That's our feeling, that it still is unbelievable. I'm shocked by what's happened the last year or so. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it keeps me grounded."

Staying grounded is probably the least challenging aspect of being Steven Charles Stricker, who grew up in a modest middle-class home with two working parents. His father, Bob, ran his own electrical business; his mother, Carolyn, was a secretary. There wasn't a lot of money, but Steve and his older brother, Scott, were given plenty of lessons about comportment and respect for others. Bob was a fine amateur golfer, and he introduced the game to both boys. Steve started at age 7, and he took to it quickly. He played mostly at Towne CC, which at the time was a nine-hole public facility with no driving range. To practice, he'd lug his bag to Edgerton Racetrack Park and hit balls between the baseball fields. He became good enough to draw the attention of the University of Wisconsin golf coach.

That would be Tiziani, who could only offer Stricker a partial scholarship, while Big Ten rival Illinois had a full ride waiting. Stricker would win three conference titles at Illinois and was an All-American in 1988-89. It says a lot about both men that Stricker would enlist the help of Tiziani as an instructor while still at Illinois, and that Tiziani would consent. But, then, Tiziani, who played the tour in the early 1970s before settling in at Cherokee CC, had long ago gotten the sense that Stricker, a pure feel player with rudimentary swing fundamentals, was already a complete person with the potential to become a complete golfer.