My Shot: Thomas (Boo) Weekley

My dad was awfully big on manners and discipline. Still is. If you walked into my old man's house wearing a hat, he'd give you a minute or two to take it off. Then he'd say, "Is it raining in here? I didn't think so. Take your hat off." I've heard him say that to some pretty important people. He insisted on our saying grace before dinner, and I was taught to address every adult by "Sir" -- you notice I still do that. All that discipline probably kept me out of jail when I got older. Half the guys I ran with wound up fine with good jobs, but the others wound up behind bars, and I have to think the difference was all that discipline.

There are some good teachers out there, but the only one who is a genius at diagnosing my swing is my mom. She took up golf late, when she was 39, but in her younger days she was an amazing athlete. She never read an instruction book or took lessons, but she has a remarkable eye for motion. If I can find a way to keep Mom sharp, I'll make us both a lot of money.

I can't say I've read many books. I have SLD, which stands for Slow Learning Disability, and some ADD, too. I can learn as quickly as anybody when I hear something or see it on TV, but reading is extremely difficult because it takes forever for me to process the information. So school was discouraging.

I gave college a try; couldn't handle it. From 1994 to '97, just before I turned pro, I was a hydroblaster in a chemical plant. There were these huge tanks, and the walls inside them would get caked with an ammonia residue that had hardened. To get it off, we'd spray it with a hose that fired water so fast you wouldn't believe it. A nozzle in a car wash shoots water at about 80 psi [pounds per square inch]; this thing cranked a jet of water anywhere between 10,000 and 25,000 psi. You could cut a big board in half with that water as easy as if you had a chain saw, and of course it could easily cut off a man's leg or arm. We wore big boots, Kevlar vests and helmets to protect ourselves. It was hell hot down there, about 130 degrees. Two guys would go down in the tank at a time, and we wore harnesses attached to a rope. The guys up top yanked on the rope every minute or so, to make sure a guy hadn't passed out from the ammonia. You'd work one hour on and two hours off. I made good money hydroblasting; when I turned pro I had $5,000 in the bank.

I wrote down the wrong hole score for Sergio Garcia at the PGA, and he signed for it and was disqualified. He was madder that he played bad than he was at me. Then I did it to Sergio twice more at the Deutsche Bank, only those times it was caught. It happens a lot more often than you'd think, probably 15 times every week. I don't understand why they have us scoring for each other anyway. For one thing, they have scorers walking with us. For another, expecting a player to keep track of how many times another player has hit the ball when there's so much at stake and you're trying to concentrate on your own game, is a little unreasonable. If they changed the way we did that, it wouldn't break too many hearts.

When I've got a big shot to play, I always tell myself the same thing: This shot is not life-threatening. I learned to do that by being around my caddie, Joe Pyland, who did two tours with the Army in Iraq. I look over at Joe, who knows what real pressure is, and realize that the worst thing that can happen to me is to get stung by a bee or bitten by an ant. No matter what happens with the shot, I'm not going to get hurt. Somehow that really calms me down.

The local guys I went up against around Milton [Fla.] when I was a teenager knew how to bet, how to talk and how to play. Most of them were 10 years older than me, and it wasn't easy holding my own against them. I learned the hard way. I ended up owing one guy $600. I gave him my paycheck for three straight weeks to pay him off. In that environment I had to improve to survive, and I did get better. It was like paying tuition.

When we got tired of playing the same old nassau, we played "lefty-righty." After everybody tees off, you see which two balls are the farthest to the left, and those two guys play against the pair who are the farthest to the right. You start all over on the next hole -- every hole's a new match. You play for a fixed amount on every hole and keep a running total of how each guy stands. It's real interesting, a team and individual game rolled into one.

City people are terrified of alligators. I don't think they're a big deal; I've helped catch them on dry land and even caught a couple of small ones with my rod and reel. They're amazing, though. I watched an alligator chase down a 150-pound calf over 40 yards once. The calf was caught alone and was too young to know better. The big mama cow, they usually know better. When they take their calves down to the river to drink, they'll leave the calves back a ways and go out in the river first. They stomp circles out in the water to scare off any alligators that are out there. When you grow up around nature, you learn that all animals are smart. You have to respect them. Orangutans especially.

My Shot: The Very Best Interviews from Golf Digest Magazine, a compilation of more than 30 My Shot articles by Guy Yocom (208 pages, $29.95, Stewart, Tabori & Chang), is available in bookstores and online.