PGA Tour

Easy Does It

Holding off fellow South African Charl Schwartzel with a bogey-free 66 Sunday, Ernie Els wins the WGC-CA Championship, a triumph for both the three-time major champ's confidence as well as the charity that means so much to him

Back In The Swing: Els, owner of an envied, flowing action, won his first PGA Tour title in two years.

By Ron Sirak

Photos by Stephen Szurlej

March 22, 2010

When Ernie Els won the 1997 U.S. Open barely two months after 21-year-old Tiger Woods staked his claim to greatness with a 12-stroke victory in the Masters, the first major championship he played as a professional, it seemed like game on. Els would play Arnold Palmer to Woods' Jack Nicklaus, picking off half a dozen or so majors while Tiger was on his way to eclipsing Nicklaus' record of 18. This rivalry would carry golf for a decade or more, it was thought. Els was also young (only 27) and that '97 victory at Congressional CC was his second major in three years. His swing? It was so sweet it made even nice guys bitter with envy. But on the road to immortality, life got in the way -- a whole lot of life.

Els failed to challenge in the next 10 majors -- then, in 2000, experienced almost unfathomable professional pain. After finishing second to Vijay Singh in the Masters by three strokes, Els was second again at both the U.S. Open and the British Open -- to Woods -- by a combined 23 strokes. He was shell-shocked, saying at Pebble Beach, "When you have a guy playing like that, you have no chance." And then at St. Andrews there was a note of psychological surrender when Els assessed the situation this way: "He's just an absolute machine at the moment, you know? I don't know what we're going to do. We'll have to go to the drawing board again and maybe make the holes bigger for us and smaller for him or something. I don't know."

Els was the second-best player by a mile, and that was a painful realization. There was, finally, another major title, the 2002 British Open at Muirfield when Woods was blown off the leader board by a Saturday monsoon. But later that year Ben Els was born, and almost immediately golf was placed in a new context. Ernie's second child suffered from epileptic seizures and developmental difficulties. Often, when Els was on the golf course, his heart was at home where Liezl, his wife, was tending to Ben (and his older sister, Samantha, who was born in 1999).

In 2003 Els contended in three majors but came up empty. The next year he was runner-up in the Masters and lost a playoff to unheralded Todd Hamilton in the British Open. Then in 2005 he was hit with a double whammy: He blew out the ACL in his left knee in a sailing accident, and Ben was diagnosed with autism, a developmental disorder marked by impaired social interaction. (According to the Autism Society, 1 to 1.5 million Americans live with an autism spectrum disorder.) "We finally had a name for it," Liezl said. "But it didn't change anything." What did change is that the victories stopped.

Els captured the 2004 WGC-American Express Championship but had won only one PGA Tour tournament since -- the 2008 Honda Classic -- until Sunday, when he took the WGC-CA Championship, the current incarnation of the AmEx event, by four strokes over fellow South African Charl Schwartzel. Now 40 and with that same silky swing, one that should hold up nicely for many more years, Els finds the motivation to work harder on his game all around him.

There is his foundation -- Els For Autism, formed after the family went public about Ben's autism in 2008 -- and then there is the fact the majors return this year to the venues of the 2000 humiliation: Augusta National, Pebble Beach and St. Andrews. Asked if the year sets up well, Els nodded slowly and replied, "I think so." Asked what his victory at TPC Blue Monster at Doral means, he said, "I didn't think it was ever going to happen again. I had to really trust myself today. I had to prove it to myself. I knew yesterday how important today was going to be."