Island Packet Verizon Heritage 2008 Coverage | Harbour Town, Sea Pines Resort, Hilton Head Island, SC

By JUSTIN JARRETT
jjarrett@islandpacket.com
843-706-8120

The tales seem more suited for a member of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour than the PGA Tour, and the guy who spawns them is more likely to be mistaken for Larry the Cable Guy than Larry Mize.

Heck, in another life, Boo Weekley might’ve been traveling the country telling jokes for a living. Goodness knows he would find a more receptive audience than he has at home.

“I don’t listen to half the stuff he says,” his wife Karyn Weekley says with a laugh. “But you have to understand we have a 6-year-old who acts just like him, so I hear it continuously, 24 hours a day, whether it’s from Boo or from Parker.”

She might be the only one who tires of hearing Boo’s twangy voice telling tales that seem ripped from a twisted Mark Twain novel.

If there’s anything Boo Weekley can do better than he can strike a golf
ball, it’s telling a story. When Boo gets going, people listen. And they laugh. Boy, do they laugh.

When play was suspended on Sunday at last year’s Verizon Heritage, the practice green might as well have been a campfire on the Florida Panhandle’s Blackwater River, where Boo grew up hunting and fishing. A handful of players and caddies gathered around Boo, who kept them in stitches in between spits of Copenhagen juice.

A funny thing happened the next day. With Ernie Els breathing down his neck, and Harbour Town’s signature swirling winds gusting harder than usual, Boo Weekley’s golf game did a little catching up to his legend.
And about that legend ...

The character of Boo — who is aptly named after a cartoon, Yogi Bear’s sidekick, Boo Boo — appeared on the national scene in 2002, when he first qualified for the PGA Tour. Rising from the midst of so many homogenous personalities, there was Boo, a country boy from the Florida Panhandle who preferred to wear camouflage pants and tennis shoes on the golf course and would rather be holding a fishing rod than a golf club.

And, oh, the stories he told. Boo didn’t hesitate to let reporters in on his off-course exploits, like the time he got punched out by an orangutan at the county fair or his days roping the alligators that got after the cows at his granddaddy’s place on the Blackwater River. The guy wears his heart on his camouflage sleeve and his life story includes a list of Jeff Foxworthy punch lines longer than one of his pal Bubba Watson’s booming drives.

So prolific is Boo’s yarn-spinning that Karyn Weekley is hard-pressed to think of a single anecdote that no one else knows about Boo. “You know how he stands on every issue,” his mother, Patsy, said. “I always say with him and his dad that there’s no filterization between their brain and their tongue. If they think it, they say it.”

Even as Boo’s game failed — he made only five cuts in 24 starts and lost his tour card in 2002 — the legend of Boo grew.

“They started that in ’02,” Boo said. “It was kind of like, in a way, the media kind of got me — I reckon — so blowed up into this cartoon character that I never could really get out of it and let people see who I really was.

“But at the same time, I kind of act like a cartoon character, you know, and that’s who I really am. So it’s a damned if you do and a damned if you don’t.”

•••

Talk about your easy money. All 16-year-old Boo Weekley had to do was whip this orangutan, and he and his teenage buddies could turn their $5 into $50.

He realizes now he should have thought twice when the guy in the truck asked him to sign a waiver.

“I got in the ring. The orangutan didn’t look like much,” Boo told Golf Digest last December. “... My strategy was to fake with my right hand, and when the orangutan tried to block the punch, I’d throw my left.”
The next thing Boo remembers is waking up bleeding in the back of a friend’s truck. So much for easy money.

•••

That doggone orangutan was the only thing that wiped the smile off Boo Weekley’s face in the afterglow of his improbable victory at the Verizon Heritage last April. Boo grinned his big, country grin through all the questions about his rocky ride through the mini-tour circuit, about his brief stint at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, about his heartbreaking three-putt a month earlier on the 72nd hole at the Honda Classic, and most of all about those back-to-back chip-ins that earned him a fancy new tartan jacket.

But that damn ape stopped him dead in his tracks.

“No sir,” Boo said when asked if the story Nick Faldo relayed on The Golf Channel was true. “No sir.”

He came clean later.

“It’s very true,” Boo said with a sheepish grin. “I just don’t want to get in no trouble with them animal rights people.”

That’s the thing about Boo. You could sit around and make up stories till the cows come home, but they’ll pale in comparison to the truth.

Whoever it was that first said, “Truth is stranger than fiction” or, “You can’t make this stuff up” must’ve known Boo Weekley. And if they didn’t, they should have.

“If I even told the public half of the stuff, they wouldn’t believe me anyway,” Patsy Weekley said.

Sometimes his friends and family just shake their head and take it in stride.

“I do that every day,” said fellow PGA Tour player Heath Slocum, who graduated from Milton High School in the same class as Boo. “Just when I’ll see him and he gives me this goofy wave from across the green or anything, I just shake my head and go, ‘All right.’

“But it’s been like that from day one. He’s the guy that when we were playing high school matches, he’s two or three holes over and he’s yelling at the top of his lungs at me across the golf course. I would just shake my head, and the guys in high school are like, ‘Who’s that guy?’ And I’m like, ‘You’ll see in a minute. You’ll see when he posts a score and in a week’s time, you’ll know exactly who he is.’ ”

But it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly who Boo Weekley is. Most of his closest friends and family members struggle to describe him.

He likes to have fun, they all agree, and he’s a lovable guy. They search for adjectives, but eventually arrive at a conclusion resembling, “He is who he is.”

“There’s probably not one word that you could use to describe him,” Patsy Weekley said.

One thing he’s not, those who know him best insist, is phony.

“I get asked a lot, is this really him?” Slocum said. “As far as I can tell, it really is. Unless he’s hiding something that he’s been hiding for a long time, Boo’s just a lovable guy that has a lot of fun, he’s a big personality, and he is who he is. He doesn’t really change. He is truly a character.”

•••

“Is Boo Weekley really THIS stupid?”

That’s the question posed in a message board thread at activegolf.com a day after Boo confessed he didn’t know any better than to concede an 8-inch putt to Martin Kaymer at the World Golf Championships-Accenture Match Play Championships in February.

By the end of the post, which also recalls Boo’s marking the wrong score on Sergio Garcia’s scorecard twice in a span of a month, the poster posing the question has decided Boo must be “pulling our legs with all of this.”

A silly notion to those who know him best.

“He is what he is,” Patsy Weekley said. “He don’t put on for nobody.”

•••

Patsy Weekley “gets a kick” out of going online to read the things perfect strangers write about her son, even if a good number of them make her grit her teeth in anger.

The one that really ate at her was the woman from New York who said if Boo would rather be hunting and fishing than playing golf, then he ought to give up his spot on the PGA Tour for someone who really wants to be there.

“I keep thinking I’m going to get on there and respond, and then I just think, ‘Why?’ ” Patsy said. “If that’s the way you perceive him, then obviously you don’t really know him, and it doesn’t matter.”

If it’s possible for one man to be a stereotype and an anti-stereotype all at once, Boo fits the bill. From the twang in his voice to the dip of Copenhagen in his lip, Boo Weekley is everything a backwoods redneck is supposed to be and everything a professional golfer isn’t.

Boo didn’t take well to college — he didn’t even last a year at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural. He has a learning disability that makes reading difficult, and his country drawl causes folks to jump to conclusions about his intelligence.

But his buddies say he’s no dummy.

“Boo’s one of the smarter guys you’ll ever meet in your life,” said Brandt Snedeker, who developed a close friendship with Boo when they played together on the Nationwide Tour. “He likes to play that dumb redneck role to a ‘T’ and he’s not. ... I always give him a hard time about it and make sure he knows he can’t fool me like that.”

Whether it’s an act or not, Boo’s apparent ignorance of golf history — “I think Justin Leonard made a putt or something,” is how Boo summed up his knowledge of the Ryder Cup — always draws a laugh, even if that’s not what he’s going for.

“It ain’t that you act dumb,” Boo said. “You just kind of stand out of the way. You don’t answer nothing until you really know the answers.”
For the most part, that means answering the questions about himself with refreshing candor, and leaving the golf questions to the experts. But here’s one he can handle: Does the PGA Tour need more players like Boo?
“I think they do,” Boo said. “I think they need to go out and hire a couple of them.”

•••

Patsy Weekley always screamed when her son would sneak up from behind while she was washing dishes, and you never knew who would find the plastic spider under their covers when Boo was a kid.

Some things never change.

“Boo’s always a practical joker,” longtime friend Toggy Pace said. “He always loves to get you. But he hates to get got.”

After being scared by the rubber snake in Boo’s golf bag one too many times, Toggy decided to get even. On a hunting trip in Alabama last December, Toggy rounded up an old mounted deer head and planted it out in the woods, carefully placing it so it looked legitimate from Boo’s tree stand.

“To make a long story short, he shot the deer decoy. I talked him into it,” Toggy said. “He talked bad to me for about 20 minutes.”

But it was worth it.

“He’s got me so many times,” Toggy said. “He’s kind of hard to get, but it’s rewarding when you do get him.”

•••

Boo Weekley has never taken life too seriously, least of all on the golf course.

Even after he turned pro in 1997 and took his game to the mini tours, golf was not Boo’s top priority. His fishing rods and hunting rifles were always in the truck, just waiting to turn a missed cut into an opportunity for fun.

Perhaps that is why it took him five years to make the PGA Tour ... and why his first venture into the big-time was an unmitigated disaster.
“I literally felt like a minnow in a pond full of bass,” Boo said. “It just didn’t feel right. I’d been on four airplanes in my whole life, and all of a sudden I’m flying all over the world.

“... I wasn’t ready as a person, as a golfer, mentally, everything you could think of, I wasn’t ready.”

He made only five cuts in 24 starts and finished 200th on the money list.
Things didn’t get much better on the Nationwide Tour. He scratched out a modest living for the next three years, finishing in the top 10 four times, but never winning.

Something had to give. Boo Weekley had to get serious about something. So he put up the fishing rods and the guns and started to focus on golf.
In 2006, he made 19 cuts in 24 starts on the Nationwide Tour, finished in the top 10 nine times and ended the year seventh on the money list, good enough to qualify for the PGA Tour ... again.

“The one thing that I think Boo has realized is he has the game,” Karyn Weekley said. “A lot of it was confidence, and he has the confidence now. He knows he can play.”

In his first year back on tour, Boo finished 23rd on the money list and 17th in the FedEx Cup standings, and he soared into the top 50 in the World Golf Rankings.

It appears he’s here to stay.

“I can’t speak for Boo, but from the outside, it looks like when he decided he wanted to do this for a living, he did it,” longtime friend and fellow PGA Tour player Heath Slocum said. “It just took him a little longer to figure out this was what he wanted to do.”

•••

Boo was safe from the layoffs. He had three years under his belt as a hydroblaster at the Monsanto chemical plant, so he could’ve kept right on spraying the inside of those “hell hot” tanks for $7.50 an hour.

But this other guy on the crew, he only had a year at the plant, so he was going to lose his job. This other guy, he had a wife and four kids at home. Boo had a pick-up truck and a bunch of drinking buddies.

So Boo went in and volunteered to take the layoff and let the other guy keep his job, which comes as no surprise to his friends.

“His heart is made of gold, and he would give the shirt off his back for anybody,” said Brandt Snedeker, a fellow 2006 Nationwide Tour graduate. “He’s a great guy.”

•••

Boo admitted last year he “never was too good at math” when asked if he knew where he stood in the FedEx Cup standings, but it doesn’t take a math whiz to figure out it would’ve taken a hell of a long time working at the Monsanto plant to earn the $2.9 million he made playing golf last year.

But neither does it take a genius to realize how difficult it was to get there, and how easily Boo could be back where he started.

“I think I bought me a couple shotguns,” Boo said when asked if he treated himself to anything special after winning the Verizon Heritage and its $972,000 payday. “Money ain’t got nothing to do with who a person is. And I don’t see why a person should change just because you’ve got something now.”

Boo, Karyn and 6-year-old son Parker still live in the same mobile home from the Nationwide Tour days. The trailer sits on a little piece of land out in the country between Milton and Jay, two small towns in the Florida Panhandle.

Any day now the Weekleys should be moving into a new house they’re building “about 15 feet right out the front door,” but that’s about as far as they plan to move. Karyn’s parents are in Jay, and Boo’s parents still live on Tanglewood Golf and Country Club in Milton, where Boo and Heath Slocum used to play football in the sixth fairway every time it rained.

To the rest of the world, Boo is something of a celebrity, one might even say he’s a cult hero of sorts. But in the Florida Panhandle, he’s just Tom and Patsy Weekley’s boy, a kid who carved himself a nice living playing golf.

“They don’t treat me no different, except my banker,” Boo said. “I still walk in the same little, old dive there at the house. Call it the Kwik Burger. I still walk in there and order up the same thing, fried chicken or chicken and dumplings, whatever, and just sit there and talk.”

•••

Boo Weekley didn’t know why his daddy wanted him to stand still, or why Tom Weekley asked his 11-year-old son to hand him the shotgun. But he knew his daddy was serious, so he did what he said with a customary, “Yes sir,” and Tom blew away the rattlesnake that was about to bite his little boy.

“I remember thinking he was gonna shoot me because I’d been a bad kid or something,” Boo said in a Golfworld article last year. “I didn’t know that snake was curled up and ready to go.”

•••

His daddy shooting that snake wasn’t the only time Boo Weekley’s family saved his life, or at least his life as he knows it.

Without the guidance of his parents, Boo figures there’s a good chance he would’ve turned out like too many of his high school classmates. He might be in jail by now, or worse.

“A lot of people I grew up with,” Boo said, “unfortunately they found a lot more trouble than I did in life.”

Now it’s Karyn’s turn to keep Boo in line. The couple met when Karyn was working at Stonebrook Golf Club in nearby Pace, Fla., and immediately hit it off.

“I thought he was crazy,” Karyn Weekley said of the first time she met Boo. “And if I had known half the stuff about him then that I do now, I probably would have really ran the other way.”

It’s a good thing for Boo that she didn’t. A few years ago, he was about to give up on golf, go get a day job and a regular paycheck. But Karyn wouldn’t have it. She didn’t think Boo would be happy in a 9-to-5, so she talked him into giving it one more shot.

“I’m sure it’s something that crosses a lot of pro golfers’ mind, or really any professional athlete,” Karyn said. “They just think, ‘Is it worth it?’ But he didn’t quit, thank goodness.”

It’s easy to say thank goodness now. When Boo was struggling to make a living playing golf, he had to play as many tournaments as possible, leaving Karyn at home with Parker. Since his win at Harbour Town, Boo has more freedom to skip a tournament or two and help Karyn with Parker, something he’ll probably have to do more of in the near future. The couple’s second son is due July 4.

“Since last year, he’s been coming home a lot more,” Karyn said. “I think he would like being home all the time.

“I don’t know if I would, though,” she added with a laugh.

•••

It was the last day of a mini-tour event in Alabama, and Boo had a share of the lead. The other guy hooked one toward the water, and Boo started hollering for the ball to get down and stay dry.

Well, the other fella didn’t take that too kindly, and in a flash they were on the ground “rolling around, throwing punches.”

“Two things happened within the next 30 minutes,” Boo told Golf Digest.

“I got back on my feet before he did, and I won the tournament.”

•••

By all accounts, Boo Weekley’s a pretty easy fella to get along with.

Karyn Weekley says “he pretty much doesn’t meet a stranger.” But he doesn’t have any patience for folks who cross him, a hard lesson he learned between stints on the PGA Tour, when he lost a lot of friends as quickly as he gained them.

“I ain’t saying that there’s a lot of bad people, but people want to use you,” Boo said. “Once you get your recognition, they want to tag along and get in with the rest of what’s going on. But all they’re going to do is they’ll step on you sooner or later. That’s what I learned the first time around. I let some people in that I thought were good friends, and one thing led to another and I got stepped on and burnt.”

So Boo’s pretty careful about who he calls his friends these days, and he’s loyal to those he lets in. He has surrounded himself with people he knows well: Joe Pyland, an old high school teammate and Iraq war veteran, is on his bag; Jimmy Johnston, a friend from his mini-tour days, is his agent.

Patsy Weekley and longtime friend Toggy Pace take care of the rest, serving in whatever capacity they’re needed from financial advisers to confidants and everything in between.

“I used to take care of all his business,” said Toggy, who was Boo’s de facto agent when he was on the Nationwide Tour. “So I was a damn psychiatrist, a pimp, just a jack-of-all-trades. ... Mostly what I do now is I’m the hunting coordinator. I schedule all the hunting trips around the country for me and Boo to go on.”

When Boo won at Harbour Town, none of his family members were present. Everyone had taken time off from work and planned to go to New Orleans the following week for the Zurich Classic. So Boo celebrated with his friends. Brandt Snedeker was hanging around the media center waiting for Boo to finish his post-tournament press conference, and when the last question was answered, they were off.

“We were supposed to go play a pro-am for Joe Durant up in Pensacola, but it got rained out,” Snedeker recalled. “So we went and got a case of beer and hopped on a plane and went to ... I can’t remember where he ended up dropping us off. But we had a good time.”

•••

“I don’t know if y’all might’ve heard about an accident I had with some bullets in my bag at the airport,” Boo said with a straight face at Verizon Heritage media day in February.

The bullets, which went to his .308-caliber Browning rifle, were sitting on the truck seat, left over from a last-minute hunting trip before Boo and his family headed off to Hawaii for the season-opening Mercedes-Benz Championship. His carry-on bag was sitting on the floorboard.

“Somehow, them bullets rolled off in that bag,” Boo said. “And I show up down there at Pensacola airport.”

Next thing he knows, security guards are everywhere, dogs are sniffing all around him, and they’re asking him to take his pants down.

“It was kind of embarrassing,” Boo said. “It goes to show you got to be careful around them people.”

•••

It wouldn’t hurt Boo’s feelings if he never had to get on an airplane again, and it has nothing to do with the “red flag” status he has to deal with since “them bullets rolled off in that bag.” Flying makes him tense. He needs a couple days to unwind before he can swing a golf club worth a darn.

Boo would much rather get around in his truck — a four-wheel drive Ford F-150 — and for that matter, he would rather not have to play golf for a living. One of these days, when he has enough money in the bank, Boo will be able to hunt and fish whenever he wants. He won’t get on anymore planes, and golf will become a game again, rather than a job.

“I know exactly what it’s going to cost me to live,” Boo said. “And then I can say, ‘I’m done.’ ... I want to watch my children grow up.”

Golf never was his first love, anyway. He didn’t start playing until he was 13, and only then, he says, because he had torn up about every part of his body playing one contact sport or another.

“I kind of ran out of other sports, playing basketball, football, baseball, I got to where I had hurt myself playing all those other sports, so I had to find a sport where you can’t hurt yourself,” Weekley said. “I figured golf was the last option.”

Patsy Weekley recalls Boo’s soccer coaches calling him “Thunderfoot” for his booming kicks, and he still wonders aloud from time to time whether he could’ve made it to the big leagues. A left-handed pitcher and switch-hitting outfielder, Patsy still has some of the orange T-balls Boo knocked out of the park when he was a young ’un.

“Boo always loved baseball,” Toggy Pace said. “He used to pitch us batting practice, but I’d hit his (stuff) up out of the park, so he didn’t like pitching me batting practice no more.”

Boo tried playing baseball and golf at Milton High School, but the seasons were simultaneous, so he eventually had to pick one or the other.

His buddies thought he had lost it when he picked the gentleman’s game over America’s pastime.

Maybe they don’t think he’s so crazy now.

“Back then we all thought golf was a bunch of sissies,” Toggy said. “I still call him a sissy. But he’s a sissy who’s got more than I got.”

•••

In his 17 years at Harbour Town Golf Links, John Farrell had never seen a scene like this. The final round of the Verizon Heritage was wrapping up, already a day late, but the players who had finished their rounds weren’t rushing off to catch flights like they usually do. They were gathered around the television in the locker room, pulling for Boo Weekley.

Farrell, Harbour Town’s head professional, pulled aside PGA Tour tournament director Slugger White and asked what was going on.
“This is Boo,” Farrell recalls White saying. “This is one we all love.

This is one of the good guys.”

•••

Such scenes might not be so rare on the PGA Tour if guys like Boo Weekley weren’t so scarce, says Woody Austin, a kindred spirit who is equally endearing to fans because of his candor. Austin figures the golf world could use a few more fellas like him and Boo, guys who “don’t have the golf pedigree.”

“It’s important to remember that because you play golf does not make you a better person than other people; you just play golf better,” Austin said. “Guys like Boo and me, we realize that golf is great, but there’s other things that are involved in life.”

So, yeah, calling Boo Weekley a breath of fresh air for the PGA Tour is like saying it was a bit breezy at last year’s Heritage, when 45-mph gusts blew billows of sand out of bunkers, snapped tree limbs and forced tournament officials to evacuate the sponsors skyboxes for safety concerns.

When the wind died down enough to play golf again, it was a country boy named Boo Weekley who emerged from the pack in fittingly unconventional fashion. He flew the green at the par-3 17th, then flubbed a chip from the edge of the marsh, leaving him in a precarious position to make par.
He flopped it up and in.

But Boo nearly blew it again at the par-4 18th. His approach shot missed the green, and his ensuing chip skidded across the green and narrowly avoided a disastrous end in the marsh along the Calibogue Sound.

His next chip didn’t look too good, either. Boo says it was a good foot outside the cup in the last foot when that wind kicked up and started pushing it toward the hole.

“It looked like it was just driving itself in there,” Boo said, his hands on an imaginary steering wheel for demonstration purposes.

When it dropped in, the reaction at Harbour Town’s signature 18th hole was more mild than usual, a result of a meager crowd on a blustery Monday afternoon. But the joy in the locker room and back home in Milton — Boo’s family wasn’t present because everyone had planned to go watch him play in New Orleans the following week — made up for it.

“I was ecstatic to see Boo win there, and he couldn’t have done it in anymore of Boo fashion,” Slocum said. “I’ve never been more nervous in my life.”

And with that, Boo Weekley had a fancy new jacket, an invitation to the Masters, and his buddies had a new favorite Boo story.

“Truthfully, the best story was when he chipped in both times and won the golf tournament, how he reacted — that’s him, and that was awesome to see,” Bubba Watson said. “Just to see it all come together at Hilton Head was unbelievable. It was good to see that with everything he’s been through in his life, everything he grew up wanting to do came true.

“That’s probably my best Boo story.”