Golfweek

Note: This story appeared in the March 31, 2007 issue of Golfweek.

Geoff Ogilvy blithely folded his hands and fixed an inviting smile onto his expressive face. Although he’d just lost his final match to a hard-hitting Swede in wraparounds, his post-round comments on a cool February evening at the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship were honest and insightful. Signature Ogilvy.

Watching the wiry Australian, consumed in a calm blanket of reason and ease, it was nearly impossible to imagine a time when a loss like the one he suffered in the Arizona desert would have prompted the kind of vocal outburst we’ve come to expect from guests on daytime talk shows.

Had the loss occurred, say, three years earlier, the scene would have been much different. Mangled golf clubs might have marked an angry trail from The Gallery’s 17th hole, where Ogilvy succumbed to Henrik Stenson in his bid to win back-to-back Match Play titles, and his postround interview would have been short and largely unprintable.

It likely would surprise many to learn that the game’s most engaging and endearing newcomer once was a bona fide hothead. Before Ogilvy became a U.S. Open champion, he was better known as a player who ran slightly hotter than mercurial chef Gordon Ramsay on Fox’s “Hell’s Kitchen.”

“It’s interesting now that people talk about Geoff and how calm he is,” says Dale Lynch, Ogilvy’s swing coach since his junior days at the Victorian Institute of Sport in Melbourne, Australia. “Well, three years before that he was a hothead. He was one of the hottest players out there.”

To fully understand the maddening mountain Ogilvy has scaled, it’s important to envision a player who once lifted his golf bag over his head and slammed it to the ground after a particularly offensive round.

At the 2001 Honda Classic, Ogilvy failed to get up-and-down for par at the 72nd hole and lost to Jesper Parnevik by a shot. Fuming over his final-hole gaffe as he exited the scoring trailer, he launched his golf bag into the air with a single violent kick.

“I used to play events with him and he would be screaming at himself walking down the fairway,” says Cameron Percy, a fellow VIS graduate who traveled extensively with Ogilvy during the duo’s amateur days. “As an amateur I’d find a way to beat him. Just fairways and greens and you knew he’d find a way to muck up. Now, he doesn’t muck up.”

Like most metamorphoses, Ogilvy’s transformation from volcano to the picture of peacefulness was slow.

“It’s like you do something stupid, you get hit in the head 100 times, and you say to yourself, ‘Don’t do that again.’ You do it again. Every week you’d sit down and go, ‘You’re an idiot,’ ” Ogilvy says. “It took me longer to work it out than some guys, but some guys never work it out.”

Success is the ultimate form of anger management, and his victory at the 2005 Chrysler Classic of Tucson likely helped temper his heated edges. Marriage and fatherhood – Ogilvy and his wife, Juli, had their first child, Phoebe, last October – also put golf mishaps into perspective.

Mostly, however, Ogilvy learned that tee sheets at PGA Tour events are filled with players looking to rough him up, so perhaps it was best if he didn’t join them. “It was getting too tiring to play a golf tournament,” Ogilvy says. “I wasn’t enjoying it anymore. I just tried to get 1 percent better every day. But I’m still only a 5 out of 10 mentally. Maybe a 6 (of 10). I’m getting better.”

Fittingly, the ultimate test of Ogilvy’s patience turned out to be the defining moment of his professional career.

At last year’s U.S. Open, the meanest of streets where only the coolest heads prevail, Ogilvy avoided corporate tents, trash bins and obscurity to become the first Aussie in 13 years (Steve Elkington, 1995 PGA) to win a major.

Often lost amid Phil Mickelson’s 72nd-hole meltdown at Winged Foot is the simple reality that four players (Mickelson, Ogilvy, Colin Montgomerie and Jim Furyk) needed a par at the final hole for a shot at victory. Mickelson, Montgomerie and Furyk played the twisting 18th in a combined 5 over. Comparitively, Ogilvy’s 4 was almost textbook.

“Not only did he do it, but he’s the only one who didn’t mis-hit a shot,” Lynch says. “He hit a flush drive that ended up in a sandy divot, terrible lie. His approach comes out soft and just feeds off (the green). Hits an unbelievable pitch and tough putt. He hit four perfect shots at 18. People forget that.”

In many ways, Ogilvy’s nondescript career leading to Winged Foot was a byproduct of poor timing. Sandwiched between the high-profile debuts of countrymen Aaron Baddeley and Adam Scott, Ogilvy was something of an Australian afterthought.

Yet his ascension to the top of a talented Aussie class was predictable, at least for those closest to him. His Tucson breakthrough came after numerous near misses (16 top-10 finishes in 107 Tour starts prior to his 2005 victory), and the groundwork for Winged Foot had been laid a few months earlier at the Match Play when he dispatched, in order, reigning U.S. Open champion Michael Campbell, Nick O’Hern, Mike Weir, David Howell, Tom Lehman and Davis Love III on his way to victory.

“If you really looked at his career, it’s been a steady progression,” Lynch says. “He’s the only person I’ve worked with that has actually gotten better, and gone up a level every single year. You’ve got to be smart to do that because it means you’re learning lessons along the way.”

The next logical rung in Ogilvy’s ladder is Augusta National, an Australian Achilles heel that has never yielded a champion from Down Under.

Last year, in his maiden Masters, Ogilvy had a chance to move into the Sunday hunt when he roped his second shot at the par-5 13th to 15 feet. Three slippery putts later, his hopes were gone.

The old, angry Ogilvy might have deposited the offending implement into Rae’s Creek. The new, improved edition, however, embraces the long view.

“The moral of the story was don’t hit it above the 13th hole on Sunday,” Ogilvy says with a smile.

Spoken like a reformed hothead.

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