Par Report: Where There's A Will...

Where There's A Will...
Shark.com Staff
January 8, 2007

Every year the PGA Tour seems to produce a new personality who does and says more wacky things than Robin Williams on a caffeine high. This season that person is undoubtedly Will MacKenzie.

Few golf fans had heard of MacKenzie until last week's Mercedes-Benz Championship because he had spent several years playing the mini-tour circuit. He finally earned his PGA Tour card in 2004 and last year won the Reno-Tahoe Open that's played opposite a World Golf Championship event.

MacKenzie, 32, stole the spotlight for most of the Mercedes with his unusual past, his offbeat personality and devil-may-care attitude. It didn't matter that the man who calls himself a professional kayaker eventually finished tied for fourth, six shots behind winner Vijay Singh. MacKenzie still provided much of the tournament buzz.

MacKenzie was a top junior golfer in high school in North Carolina, but he gave up the game his sophomore season and eventually decided to leave for Montana as a 19-year-old country boy trying to find himself. MacKenzie didn't play golf for almost a decade, and he's convinced without that time away, he wouldn't be playing the game for a living now.

"I just wanted to do something different," Mackenzie said of his sabbatical from the game. "I was a little bummed out (as a 14-year-old) because all my summers were taken up by golf. I'm going into ninth grade and that's all I did was play golf. That's what you were supposed to do, I guess, if you wanted to be a great player.

"I burned out sooner than later and I guess that was a blessing for me. If I had gone to college and done that, who knows. I might be right where I am now, but I might have burned out in college and not be here."

So MacKenzie started an odyssey that took him to New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Alaska and Costa Rica and other doing whatever he had to to get by in life. That meant working at a Taco Bell, then as a security guard and a cook at a lodge in Big Sky, Montana where he snowboarded most of the day, worked at night and slept in his van in the parking lot when he felt like it.

He eventually headed to Alaska to do some heli-boarding and skiing. MacKenzie was asked if he ever came close to dying in such a risky sport.

"Probably for the layman, yes, I've edged off cliffs and been like, 'Oh no, about died there," he said. "I've been upside down in my kayak thousands of times and I've hit my head pretty hard. Fortunately, I've never been knocked unconscious."

It took, of all things, Payne Stewart's victory at the 1999 U.S. Open in MacKenzie's home state of North Carolina to finally knock some sense into him. Inspired by Stewart's win, MacKenzie took up golf again.

He played all over the mini-tour map, in Canada, in Florida, winning a tournament here and there to slowly regain his touch. His big breakthrough came in 2004 when he was named Player of the Year on the Hooters Tour after finishing third on the money list and winning three times.

He finished ninth at Q-School that fall, earning his first PGA Tour card. But he had to go back to Q-School after finishing 179th. A ninth-place finish at the 2005 Q-School got him back onto the PGA Tour, where he finished 100th on the money list last year, thanks to his victory at Reno.

His fourth-place finish at Kapaula gives MacKenzie quite a jump-start on keeping his card this year. But he showed last week he still has plenty of work to do to fit in with the millionaires on the PGA Tour. That was clear when MacKenzie arrived at the resort somewhat wide-eyed.

"I'm checking into the Ritz-Carlton and they're saying, 'Good day, Mr. MacKenzie...' -- how do they know my name?" MacKenzie famously said.

He also made a major gaffe by telling Golf Channel viewers not only the hotel where he was staying, but his room number. When he got back to the room, he had more than 25 messages and eventually had to turn his phone off so he could sleep.

"The rookie mistake of the century," he said, smiling.

But MacKenzie made few other mistakes in his first trip to the elite, winners-only event. He will be worth watching this season as he continues to find himself in life.

The Par Report is posted every Monday on Shark.com. It does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Greg Norman.