By John Hawkins
Photo By Charles Laberge
April 4, 2008
The scrawny teenager who won back-to-back Australian Opens is all grown up now, clearly none the worse for wear, which in his case could mean a pair of plaid slacks and a neon-bright piqué. Thanks to an audacious sense of style and a career colored in sharp contrasts, Aaron Baddeley has never blended into the woodwork. Long before Sergio Garcia broke out the orange pants or Adam Scott took on the hairdo of a Civil War general, Badds had his own website and a couple of national championships in his homeland.
Eight years have passed since the second of those titles, and it is fair to say it has not all been time well spent. Baddeley, 27, floundered for the first two-thirds of that stretch in pro golf's mechanical abyss, failing to earn his PGA Tour card until he had played in the United States for almost three years, then treading water on the back end of the top 125 for three more. If not for his remarkable ability to hole putts, not enough of them for birdies, Badds might have become the Young Gun All Done.
"At age 18 he was the best ball-striker I'd ever seen," says fellow Aussie Geoff Ogilvy, who has known Baddeley since they competed in the Victorian Amateur in the mid-1990s. "I played with him in the first two rounds the first time he won the Australian Open -- he could hit it high or low, draw it or fade it. He was 100 percent a complete golfer, and then, at some point, he lost that."
When Baddeley arrives at Augusta National next week for his fourth Masters, it will be as one of the game's most underrated and overlooked reclamation projects. His commitment to the stack-and-tilt swing method taught by Mike Bennett and Andy Plummer, which began in late 2005, has fully transformed a guy whose low-right miss with the driver had become his signature shot, whose accuracy statistics were so awful at the start of his pro career that it was easy to figure he had peaked before his 20th birthday.
In March 2000, less than four months after winning his first Australian Open crown, Baddeley made his first PGA Tour start at the Honda Classic. He finished T-57, then missed 15 of his next 17 cuts -- eight straight as an amateur in 2000, then seven of nine as a pro in 2001. He spent most of '02 on the Nationwide Tour. It all serves as reference to how unprepared he was for the big leagues, how erratic his game actually was, although reality can be much easier to see in retrospect.
"To be honest, I didn't feel that way," Baddeley says. "I definitely felt like I could compete here. Still, it always seemed like I was on a knife's edge. If I hit it well, I could win. If I didn't, I'd finish in the back of the pack."
If the same could be said about 99 percent of tour pros, the difference between Baddeley's good and bad was much greater than that of his peers. Unlike Garcia, Scott or Charles Howell III, gifted young tee-to-green types whose inability to threaten Tiger Woods' supremacy is often blamed on inconsistent putting, Baddeley has ranked in the top 15 in strokes per GIR every year but one since 2003.
He has led the tour in fewest putts per round twice during that stretch, finishing fourth two other times, which isn't all that surprising because he missed so many greens, but there was a certain pity to Baddeley's plight. If he could putt Garcia's ball, we might have that under-30 rival to Tiger we've been waiting on for a decade.
"The way he played was hard work," says Anthony Knight, Badds' caddie on and off since late 2002. "When he was driving it in the fairway, he was shooting 65 or 66. When he wasn't, it was 72 or 74. He was getting by on natural ability without the technical efficiency."
Enough was enough, at least for the first time, about a year after Baddeley came to the U.S. He checked into the David Leadbetter Academy to see if the renowned swing surgeon could help him find more short grass, a relationship that lasted for more than three years. The two got a lot done during their time together: Badds finished 10th on the Nationwide money list in '02, earning full-time status on the big tour, and in his first start with a card, lost a playoff to Ernie Els at the Sony Open.
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