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Turn It Upside Down
Howell III seeks to do just that in his hometown
By Michael Bamberger
 A child comes into the world not whole. Maybe the child has no windpipe. Or has
lungs that won't inflate. Or has half a stomach. Charlie Howell is called in.
Charles Gordon Howell Jr., chief of pediatric surgery at the Medical College of
Georgia, in the heart of Augusta's worn downtown, tries to make the infant
whole. Howell's motor skills are off the charts: He has the hands of a gifted
athlete, a concert pianist, a Las Vegas magician. No, the surgeon -- this
surgeon, any surgeon -- is not God. Except during those long minutes when he
is standing over an anesthetized body, at work, saving a life, making a
life. Then he's God. Ask the
parents.
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Howell works as hard as Woods, but those aren't tiger
stripes on his and Heather's bed at home. Jeffrey Lowe |
The doctor's father, the first Charles Gordon Howell, was a respected south
Georgia farmer. Also a drinker and a smoker. He died at 46. The doctor's first
child, Charles Gordon Howell III -- Thurston to PGA Tour needlers versed in
Gilligan's Island -- is the most extraordinary twentysomething golfer
not named Tiger Woods. CH3 doesn't drink, never has. Of course he doesn't smoke.
He is, like Woods, marathon-fit, immensely focused, smart. (They are both, it
happens, college dropouts. Woods left Stanford after two years. Howell left
Oklahoma State after three, but not before meeting Heather Myers, his first
girlfriend, now his 21-year-old wife.) Like every child, like Woods himself, he
didn't come into this world whole. Tiger had Earl. Charles had Dr. Howell. Great
golfers are not simply hatched, no. They are
made.
Charles Howell III was born into a family of devout Christians not quite 23
years ago in the city where his father roams the shiny halls of the new
Children's Medical Center, the city where his maternal grandfather was a cotton
broker, the city where Bobby Jones wintered, the city that figures in a million
golf dreams. Larry Mize, Augusta-born and bred, won the 1987 Masters. Fuzzy
Zoeller won the first Masters he played in, in 1979. This year CH3 will look to
equal both men: win in his native city and in his first
Masters.
This isn't just the Mountain Dew talking. (That's the kid's libation.) A few
weeks ago somebody asked Arnold Palmer, "Won't the course changes at
Augusta National play into Tiger's hands?" Palmer said, "They'll play
into Charles Howell's
hands."
Howell positively bombs the ball, with almost no curve to his tee shots. When he
rotates his 30-inch waist on the downswing, it's a blur. Last year, at a clinic
at the Memorial, Jack Nicklaus asked Howell to give a driving demonstration. As
Nicklaus watched the soaring shots, he shook his head. Nicklaus was the greatest
driver of the wood-club era. He has never hit a tee shot the way Charles Howell
does
routinely.
Augusta National is a driver's course, now more than ever, and it suits Howell
to his bones. He has played the course about 15 times and knows its humps,
hollows, passing lanes, death traps. The first time he played it, he broke 80.
He was 10. The first Masters he attended was the one Mize won, when Charles was
seven and new to golf, and he's been to the toonamint, as the locals say
it, most years since then. His mother's father, Ralph Hall, has had tickets
since the
'50s.
Only the Charles Howells, Jr. and III, seem worried that the son has played 39
Tour events since turning pro in June 2000 without winning. Everybody else who
knows anything -- Palmer, Johnny Miller, the Tour caddies -- expects Charles
to win at least once before the year is out and many, many times before his
career is out. If his first win is at home, this month, the rest of the golf
year will be one long CH3 watch. The boy is a 5'11", 155-pound, crewcut
curiosity wearing Jesper Parnevik hand-me-downs. (The two pros wear clothes from
the same designer, with the same 1974 sensibility.) When Butch Harmon bumped
into CH3's spunky mother, Debbie, at a tournament recently, he said
good-naturedly, "Mrs. Howell, I sure hope Charles makes a good showing at
Augusta this year, because the old boys there are going to have a field day with
those clothes he's wearing." Debbie laughed. What young Charles likes about
his clothes is that they are unusual, as is he. There's nobody like him on the
Tour.
From his mouth: "My father joined Augusta Country Club so I could play
there, but it's closed Mondays, so I'd go over to Forest Hills -- it's public,
open every day -- and I'd play all the time with these two older gentlemen,
Boomer Gant and Charles Bussey, and they worked at the National, I think in the
dining room or something, and they'd tell me all the old stories, and on
Employees' Day they had me as their guest, and I'd come right through the front
door, all legal and everything, and we had the best time." His sentences,
once he gets going, are like his tee shots: in the air
forever.
Howell has an exotic face, sharply angled, with narrow eyes. There's no hint of
the modern Tour's affluence in him. He looks like a gangly Appalachian schoolkid
in a Depression-era photograph, but he's no hillbilly. He has superb manners,
he's engaging and open, and he has a mind that can go deep on anything important
to him. (Don't get him started on cell phones, for they are surely, he'll tell
you, the invention of Satan himself, as man was not meant to be available 24/7.)
He's wealthy, but earthly possessions don't interest him. When you look
carefully at his face, what you see more than anything else is
desperation.
Lunch is a sandwich eaten while he stands on a practice putting green. (When he
starts making 10-footers, he'll be all-world. He's now ranked 40th.) On weeks
when he's not playing, reports his wife, he climbs the walls of their new house
in Orlando. His father won't say if Charles is obsessive-compulsive. That's a
term of psychology, and Charlie is a surgeon. He will, however, borrow from the
cardiologists: "I'm type A, and I'm sure Charles is
too."
The father took up golf only to further the deep interest of his prodigy son,
who stumbled on the game when he saw a neighbor playing backyard Wiffle-ball
golf. Charlie has no use for the old-world Augusta social scene. He joined the
city's foremost country club for Charles, who was then 10. "I knew he would
have to know how to putt bentgrass greens if he was going to advance in the
game, and Augusta Country Club was one of the few courses around home with
bentgrass greens," Charlie
says.
He's asked, "After four years around the game, you had enough golfing
sophistication to understand the importance of learning to putt on bentgrass
greens?"
"Are you kidding me?" he responds. "I've made a study of
this game. There isn't much I don't
know."
Ten years ago, when Charles was 12, the Howell family started making monthly car
trips to Orlando for him to take lessons from David Leadbetter, the holistic
golf teacher. (He monitors his pupils' swings, mental states, workouts, fiber
intakes.) The drive took about seven hours, with Charlie and Debbie in the front
of their Chevy Suburban and Charles and his brother, Ben, four years younger, in
the back. In Orlando, Charlie and Charles would spend the days on the lesson
tee. Debbie, a registered nurse not now working, and Ben, now a college freshman
and not a golfer, would be on water slides and roller coasters. The two Charles
Howells would watch as Leadbetter worked with Nick Faldo, Greg Norman, Nick
Price, Ty Tryon. The Charles Howells were human VCRs. "David became like a
second father to Charles," says Charlie. It takes a confident father to
make room for a second
one.
During a practice round at Bay Hill last month, Leadbetter caught up with
Charles on the 13th hole, a short par-4. Two days earlier Leadbetter had
persuaded Howell to try a new body-massage machine imported from France and
known by its code name, S-Six. This is how they greeted each
other.
CH: "That machine is
unbelievable."
DL: "You look
loose."
CH: "I'm telling
you."
DL: "What'd you hit off the tee
here?"
CH: "That new
two-iron."
DL: "Like
it?"
CH: "Love it. You know how good that club's going to be at
Augusta?"
The Howell family's loyalty to Leadbetter played a role in Charles's firing of
his former manager, Rocky Hambric. Last year Hambric negotiated a deal with Golf
Magazine for Howell to become a playing editor. (Golf and SI are both owned by
AOL Time Warner.) When Leadbetter learned of the agreement, he was disappointed.
He's on the staff of Golf Digest, a competing monthly. He told the
Howells it was awkward for him to be at one magazine and have one of his star
pupils at another. The Howells had been with Leadbetter for a decade and with
Hambric for less than three years. They wanted to appease Leadbetter, which put
them at odds with Hambric, and the manager was out. Hambric responded with a
suit against Charles, charging him with wrongful termination and breach of
contract. Charles countersued. The suits are still pending. Howell is now with
IMG, which also represents
Woods.
One reason the Tour caddies are so impressed by Howell is his work ethic. It's
not just how much he practices but also how intelligently he practices. The
master of this, of course, is Woods. Last year at the Western Open, Howell was
at the back of the range at Cog Hill, chipping and pitching and hitting bunker
shots, when another golfer arrived. Howell looked up. There was Woods.
"I see you're working hard," Woods
said.
"I've got to work hard to be out here," Howell replied. Woods is where
Howell wants to be. Howell's goal is to be the best player in the
world.
"Yeah," said Woods. "It takes hard
work."
"It reaffirmed everything I believe," Howell says. "Tiger was
saying, 'It's right there in the dirt. Go find
it.'"
When Charles is practicing, Charlie is frequently nearby. The father gets to as
many of the son's tournaments as his work allows. After the first round at Bay
Hill last month, the two Charleses went straight to the practice green, where
they were met by Leadbetter and an associate of his unfamiliar to Charlie. The
man's PGA Tour neck tag identified him as DR. ROBERT WINTERS. He had a weather forecaster's
hairdo, and his color coordination was too perfect, and by body language you
could see that Charlie was skeptical of him. Any number of people had tried to
get Charles to make more 10-footers, none of them
successfully.
After about 20 minutes, Charlie went over to Debbie. "Well, he says Charles
is right-eye dominant and he's not using his right eye enough when he's standing
over his putts, so that's a good thing," he said. "But I'd sure like
to know what he's a doctor of. I asked him, and I still don't know."
Charlie Howell knows that putting illnesses aren't cured in 20-minute
consultations.
Charlie and Debbie aren't easy to please. When they follow Charles on the golf
course, they walk separately, but they say much the same thing. The son leaves
an easy uphill chip short, and the mother says, "That was poor." The
father watches an approach shot drift into a bunker and shakes his head. There
are parents today who wear out the phrase "good job." The Howells are
not among them. At Bay Hill, Charles played the first two rounds with veteran
Dan Forsman. During the second round Forsman's caddie, Greg Martin, walked up to
Charlie and said, "You've done a real fine job raising your boy. He's a
gentleman."
"Thank you," the father said politely, without breaking stride or
making any effort to extend the conversation. He wasn't going to milk the
caddie's kind
words.
Every so often Debbie will tell Charles, "Just don't ever forget where you
came from or how you got to where you
are."
"Yes, Mama," he says. His father
nods.
For the Charles Howells, Jr. and III, golf isn't just fun and games or a way to
make money. "My job is to help him be the best golfer he can be, because
that's what he wants," Charlie says. He knows that every child needs
something to make his life whole. The father gave golf to his first-born child,
as surely as God Almighty Himself gave him two working lungs with which to
breathe.
Issue date: April 8, 2002
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