No Man Is An Island

In David's first ACC tournament, he placed second, and his team tied for fifth. Teammate Tripp Isenhour walked right up to him. "David," he gushed, "you played great, that was awesome."

"Yeah," David replied, voice flat as a desert horizon. "If I'd had teammates worth a s—-, we'd have won the damn tournament."

His teammates' mouths fell open. They couldn't hear the echoes of the boy's scream and footsteps down that hospital corridor. If only they had known the full story then, they would say years later, maybe things would've been different.

What they saw was a new sort of human creature, one whose self-esteem lacked a seemingly critical component: what others felt about him. Their approval meant nothing to him. They were rendered immaterial.

He was so fixed on where he was going, he didn't feel the air thicken when teammates or opponents offered each other the customary "Good luck, guys, hit it good" on the 1st tee, and David just muttered, "Yeah." He didn't notice the looks his teammates traded when he snapped "Hell, no" at a deli worker who had asked if he'd like mayonnaise or at a cheery waitress asking if everything was fine.

Only his old friends from Jacksonville—Pat Lanahan and Kevin Cook and Michael Craven, who knew his past, basked in his loyalty and benefited from his thoughtful advice—could roll their eyes and say, "David, the English muffin is supposed to be burned, the bacon's supposed to be undercooked. This is a $3 breakfast at a greasy spoon, for crying out loud!"

David had no sense of the camaraderie and support he was missing, no idea that if he didn't stop adding to the wall that had protected him through childhood, it could entomb him. Everything from before seemed so distant, as if it had happened to someone else. He couldn't even have told anyone what it was that he was closing off.

In David's second ACC tournament, in 1991, Georgia Tech led entering the final round, with David tied for the individual lead. He bolted to a five-stroke advantage, then rain stopped play and everyone waited in the clubhouse. Finally the announcement came: The final round was washed out, the scores stood as they had at the beginning of the day. Georgia Tech was the champ, David the individual co-champ. His teammates slapped fives and crowed, "We did it! We got a ring!" David's fist slammed into a table. His mouth spat an obscenity. At least one teammate wanted to slug him.

A year earlier, at age 18, he'd stood on the 1st tee at the U.S. Open with his caddie, Puggy, at his side. Intimidated? The boy birdied three of the first five holes and was still on the leader board on the final day. Two years later, in his junior year at Tech, he zipped over from school to play the big boys again in the BellSouth Classic in Atlanta and amazed everyone by taking the third-round lead. He turned to his father on the driving range before that final round and spoke three words: "I belong here." Then he shot a 79 and vanished.

He still wasn't ready for the Tour, because he couldn't dominate it. He needed to endure this halfway house, improve in a way he couldn't quite place his finger on. "College was just another stop on my journey," he would say years later. "I wasn't there for college. Everything I did was preparing for the next level. I was majoring in golf."