Captain America

By Jimmy Roberts
Photo Illustration By Aaron Goodman April 2009

Editor's note: Like most players, NBC Sports reporter Jimmy Roberts has endured sudden incompetence on the golf course. In his new book, some of the most successful people to play the game--Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Greg Norman, Johnny Miller and Phil Mickelson, among others--tell Roberts how they survived panic and frustration to find success again. In this chapter, Paul Azinger overcomes a cancer diagnosis, a long slump and the death of his close friend Payne Stewart before winning again and captaining the victorious 2008 U.S. Ryder Cup team.

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It's a sunny late-September morning in Bradenton, Fla., and I'm standing in line at Starbucks with Captain America. I go for a decaf, but Paul Azinger prefers something stronger. As if he needs it. He's buzzing anyway.

"Way to go!" an older woman yells at Azinger a few minutes later from the window of a weathered SUV. "Congratulations!"

Much to Azinger's delight and surprise, the scene is repeated a handful more times as we sit sipping our coffee at an outdoor table. "There's a lot going on that's not good," he says. "I think it's kind of a scary time, and this was uplifting for a lot of people."

Eight days earlier, using a blueprint for team-building that might wow the people at Harvard Business School, Azinger engineered a win for the United States at the Ryder Cup in Louisville. It had been nearly a decade since the last United States win, and America's fortunes in the competition had become something of an obsession in the insular world of golf. Azinger could be doing "The Tonight Show" with Jay Leno or taping a guest spot with Ellen DeGeneres or Jimmy Kimmel, but he has turned it all down to come back home and just let it sink in.

"I feel like I spent the last two years slowly pulling back the string of a bow," he says, "and I finally let it go."

The night before, we walked out his back door and onto the dock, which leads 382 feet into Tampa Bay. The sky was clear and the night was silent, except for small waves lapping hypnotically against the pylons. Azinger looked west toward the Gulf of Mexico and sighed. "People always ask me why in the world I would want to live in Bradenton; there's nothing here. 'You're right,' I tell them. 'You don't want to come here.' "

He laughs, and we head back to the house. Many in American golf would have you believe that the Louisville matches were a matter of life and death. Azinger is a vicious competitor, and he desperately wanted to win the Ryder Cup, but it was hardly a life-and-death affair. Who in golf could possibly know any better?

There was a time not too long before when Azinger's celebrity wasn't about helping others do their best, or commenting about it on TV, but rather doing it himself.

In 1987, he was the player of the year. It was the start of a seven-year stretch during which Azinger won 11 tournaments on the PGA Tour and finished every year except one among the top 10 on the money list. (The year he didn't, he finished 11th.) "If I wasn't the best player in the world, I was certainly the hottest," he says.

He might have also been the biggest surprise.

"I couldn't break 80 two days in a row my senior year in high school," he says. "I suppose I probably could, but if I did, I'd run home and tell someone."

The son of an Air Force navigator who flew C-141s in Korea and Vietnam, Azinger learned to play golf mostly on military bases. His earliest memory of the game is riding atop the pullcart his dad, Ralph, dragged around the course at Homestead Air Force Base in South Florida when Paul was 3 years old.

"My dad was a single-digit handicap," he says, "but my mom was better than him. She got down to like a 4- or 5-handicap."

Aside from winning several state and regional tournaments, Jean Azinger's claim to fame was playing--with great distinction--in an exhibition with Hall of Famer Patty Berg in 1959. Jean chipped in three times during the round, a round she played while seven months pregnant--with Paul.

Initially, though, Paul was mostly an indifferent high school player. "None of my friends played golf," he says. "I just wasn't into it." Upon graduating from Sarasota High School in the spring of 1978, he didn't get a single scholarship offer and ended up at Brevard Community College. "I knew I wasn't any good," he says. "Sometimes you think you're good, and you're not. I knew I wasn't that good."