Puyallup Native Ryan Moore Poised For Stardom
Swinging a golf club with a broken left hand is like kicking a football with a broken toe or pitching a baseball with a cut on your finger.
It hurts. And eventually, your mechanics will change to compensate for the discomfort — even if you don’t realize it.
Just ask Ryan Moore. He knows a little about playing through pain — and then having to go back and erase those little hitches that inevitably leak into your swing when you’re ailing.
The Puyallup native, on the verge of becoming the greatest golfer to come out of the Seattle area since Fred Couples, was sidetracked in the middle of 2006 — his first full year on the PGA Tour — when he finally had surgery to repair a broken bone in his left hand, an injury he had played with for nearly a year. He bounced back solidly after a six-week layoff, a nice string of finishes in the fall padding his money total enough to easily earn his 2007 PGA Tour Card.
But throughout last fall, he was still sore from the surgery and had to invent a highly unorthodox address to avoid the pain in his hand. Holding the club level with the ground at address rather than grounding it, he started his shoulder turn from there and brought the club back down the normal swing plane. It raised more than a few eyebrows and provoked a few chuckles.
But Moore has always played a bit outside the box. Even before his injury, his swing was, well, unconventional … very upright, with a takeaway outside the plane and an easy tempo reminiscent of Couples, one of his idol’s growing up. He’s been known not to use a yardage book and only recently hired a professional caddie. He has never had a formal swing coach, teaching himself to play with a bit of help from his father, Mike, a real estate developer who now co-owns and operates the Classic Golf Club in Spanaway.
But now Moore is pain free and regaining his form, succeeding on the PGA Tour, a place where so many recent U.S. Amateur winners have failed (remember, Nick Flanagan, Ricky Barnes or Bubba Dickerson?)
So far, 2007 has been an up-and-down year for Moore, with flashes of brilliance interspersed with periods where it seems he’s still fighting his hand — and ridding himself of the mental baggage leftover from the injury. As of May 13, Moore had made seven cuts in 13 events and was 81st on the money list with $469,805, well on his way to earning his card again for 2008.
It remains to be seen whether Moore can live up to the lofty expectations the golf media heaped upon him following “the greatest amateur season in golf’s modern era,” according to Golf Magazine.
Since a certain Mr. Woods came along, there’s not a whole lot of room in the record books left for anyone else. But Moore wrote a few pages in 2004. The four-time All-American at UNLV won the U.S. Amateur, the U.S. Amateur Public Links, the NCAA Championship, the Western Amateur and the Sahalee Players Championship, all in the space of a few months. No one had ever won more than three in one calendar year and he was just the fifth person to win two USGA amateur championships in one year.
Then in 2005, after an impressive 13th place finish at the Masters, Moore earned his 2006 PGA Tour Card by winning $686,250 in 10 starts via sponsor exemptions, the first to do so since Tiger in 1996. The only other players to do that since 1980 were Gary Hallberg, Phil Mickelson and Justin Leonard.
Q School? The Nationwide Tour? Moore’s never been there. Where he has been is dancing all around — but not in — the winner’s circle. Five top-10s, including a pair of runner-up finishes, in less than two years on Tour has him poised to break through for his first victory very soon.
Moore talked with Cascade Golfer about putting his amateur success behind him and what it takes to succeed as a pro: