38
September 2010
www.insidegolf.com.auEXCLUSIVE ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Stuart Appleby:
59 good reasons to keep smiling!
AnthonyPowter
HE hadn’t won since 2006. He hadn’t shot lower
than 65 in six years. And he was ranked 159th
in the world. So when Stuart Appleby won the
Greenbrier Classic in West Virginia back in July,
it was a remarkable feat.
For a start he’d fired a 59, the magical number
in golf. He’d also ended a winless four-year period
on tour, which at times had him wondering what
was going on.
The winless drought had stretched over 110
tournaments and put Appleby in danger of failing
to qualify — for the first time — to play in one of
his beloved tournaments, the WGC-Bridgestone
Invitational.
Appleby had not missed the Bridgestone
Invitation (formerly the NEC Invitational) since
the tournament’s inception. He was one of only
four players to achieve that status. Firestone
Country Club is also where he first met his wife,
Ashley, in 2000 — then a 21-year-old senior at
Mount Union.
He’d also missed the cut in 11 tournaments
this season; his non-qualification for The Masters
in April marked the first time that Appleby had
missed a major in more than eight years on tour.
Not even Appleby was aware how he pulled off
that magical feat at Greenbrier. He was six-under
at the turn and then suddenly felt the door was
opening for a number in the 50’s.
“I did the maths at the turn and saw 6-under.
I thought, ‘Well, here I am at 6-under. What will
I do now? Do I need to go another 6?’” Appleby
explains.
“I was only halfway home. I knew there were
opportunities there to do that, but that put me in
the 50s. I thought, ‘Well, that’s pretty cool. Why
don’t we shoot for that too and see if the victory
comes with it?’. That was basically my mentality
for the last three hours of the day.”
His career-low prior to his 59 was a 62 at the
2003 Las Vegas Invitational.
“I was happy with the idea of shooting 59,”
says Appleby.
“I sort of had two motivating forces. One was to
try and chase, and one was to also do something
a bit unique.”
This year, Appleby and Paul Goydos became
just the fourth and fifth players to shoot a 59 on
the PGA Tour, joining Al Geiberger (1977), Chip
Beck (1991) and David Duval (1999).
To say the last few years on tour has been a
bit of a challenge for Appleby is probably an
understatement. Only Appleby has any idea what
was going through his mind, as his world around
him began to change.
In 2009, Appleby missed finishing inside the
top 55 (No.137) on the PGA Tour money list for
the first time since his rookie season in 1996.
“I just had to refocus,” said Appleby, a nine-time PGA tour champion. “I thought, I’m getting
pushed out of the majors, I’m not in all the world
events, and I was becoming a regular in my mind
of those events.”
This season, Appleby experienced a mix bag of
results on tour, and he was feeling that his game
was not at the level that he’d come to expect day-
in-day-out in the US.
“I wanted to get back to that level of golf I
was in; being in the top- 30, being in the Tour
Championships. The possibility of missing those
events wasn’t in my cards the previous years.”
A runner-up finish to Adam Scott at last year’s
Australian Open in December gave Apples some
early hope that his game was on the mend heading
back to the US this season. Top- 10 finishes at
the Verizon Heritage at Hilton Head and at the
Zurich Classic in New Orleans also bolstered
his confidence. But the one thing the Aussie was
desperately seeking was a breakthrough win.
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