Two magical weeks plus 30 years

Looking back on Billy Andrade's back-to-back PGA Tour victories in 1991

You know you’ve been around a while when a golfer you covered when he was in college is now a veteran on PGA Tour Champions. That’s the case with Billy Andrade, whom I met when he was a student at Wake Forest. Andrade was a member of the Demon Deacons’ 1986 national championship team, which made a big-time comeback on the final day to defeat favored Oklahoma State. Once, during  a North and South Amateur, Billy was interested in seeing where Golf World was published, so I gave him the 10-cent tour of the magazine’s office and printing plant, then located just south of the Lob Steer Inn on a frontage road in Southern Pines.

A handful of years after that, Andrade was on the PGA Tour and establishing himself as a young player on the way up. In early June of 1991, Andrade won the Kemper Open and Buick Classic in consecutive weeks. Back-to-back wins certainly aren’t unheard of in professional golf, but the feat doesn’t happen regularly either. For Andrade, those victories seemed like they could be a springboard to a special PGA Tour career. Later that summer, I saw Billy and his wife, Jody, in his hometown of Bristol, R.I., while reporting a profile about him for Golf Illustrated, where I’d gone to work after leaving Golf World.

I met Billy’s parents, John and Helen, and his older brother, Jack, who is mentally challenged and at the time was a stock clerk in a liquor store. “You talk about inspiration,” Andrade said recently of Jack, now 63. “When I was a little boy, I saw the way some people treated him because he was different. The struggles he’s had to overcome—he has been an unbelievable role model for my whole family. He’s like the mayor of Bristol. Everybody knows Jack.”

A week after I saw the Andrade family, the company that owned Golf Illustrated pulled the plug on its small magazine group. I was at LaGuardia Airport, getting ready to fly to the 1991 PGA Championship in Indiana (yep, the John Daly PGA), when I got the news and hustled back to 34th and Park to clean out my office. While J.D. was gripping it and ripping it at Crooked Stick, I was trying to get a grip on being out of work.

My Andrade feature, including the story of those back-to-back wins, didn’t get written. It was a casualty of the magazine getting shut down. Billy went on to have a long, solid PGA Tour career, playing in more than 600 tournaments and earning more than $12 million, but won just two more tournaments—the 1998 Bell Canadian Open and the 2000 Invensys Classic in Las Vegas. (In Nevada, he was the first to win a PGA Tour event using a ProV1 ball, the solid core, urethane-covered model that soon would become  the talk of the tour.) For three decades I’d wondered about Andrade’s magical fortnight in 1991 and curious about his perspective of the career highlight many years after I had initially planned to write about it.

The seed to Andrade’s two victories was planted in the final round of the Southwestern Bell Colonial in Fort Worth, the tournament prior to the Kemper Open. Andrade was out of contention, paired with a pro who couldn’t wait to be done. “But my attitude was that we had some great tournaments coming up and to try to find something that might help for next week,” said Andrade, now 57 years old. He adjusted his putting stance, opening it slightly for a better view of the line. Three over after No. 6, he birdied five of the last 10 holes to shoot 69 and take some momentum to the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Andrade stayed with his sister, Jane, and her husband, Mark, and their infant daughter, Cecelia, in Fairfax, Va. “It was great,” Andrade said. “My parents came down to see the baby. It felt like a home game. Something clicked with my putting at Colonial and off to the races I went.”

It was a warm week at TPC Avenel in Potomac, Md., and birdies were plentiful. Andrade opened with 68 then recorded consecutive 64s to go into the final round tied for second with Greg Norman at 196, one stroke behind Hal Sutton. Andrade was dejected after failing to birdie No. 15 in the final round and trailing Jeff Sluman by two shots with three to play.

“Walking to the 16th tee, some fan said, ‘Hey, good showing this week,’ ” Andrade said. “I thrive on you telling me I can’t do something. I looked at the guy and said, ‘It ain’t over yet.’ ”

The motivation worked. Andrade birdied the 16th and 17th to tie for the lead. But he found a fairway bunker on his drive at No. 18, then hit his approach into a deep greenside bunker. “I made a helluva’ up and down,” said Andrade, who sank a three-footer after the nice explosion shot for a crucial par to make it into a playoff.

Sluman wasn’t just a colleague and the 1988 PGA champion but one of Andrade’s good friends, with whom he’d roomed on the road as a tour rookie. Andrade hit first on the playoff hole, the 17th, a water-guarded par 3. His 6-iron finished about eight feet from the flagstick. Sluman caught his tee shot thin, and it went in the water, all but assuring the $180,000 first prize was going to Andrade, who casually sank the birdie putt after Sluman was told he couldn’t concede the hole to his pal.

The Andrade family party didn’t last as long as it might have because U.S. Open qualifying was the next day at Woodmont Country Club. Andrade got off to a sluggish start in the 36-hole day. “I was in a fog but all of sudden woke up,” said Andrade, who played the last 24 holes in 11 under to easily earn a berth at Hazeltine National the week following the Buick Classic at Westchester Country Club.

Andrade felt comfortable at Westchester, not only because he enjoyed the challenge of uneven lies and blind shots that some other pros disliked. In 1989, his second season, he had proven to himself there that his game was good enough when in the final round, grouped with Paul Azinger and Fred Couples, he held his own with an even-par 71, matching Couples and bettering Azinger, to tie for fifth, his best finish on tour. “That was my defining moment to that point,” Andrade said. “I walked out of Westchester in ’89 believing that I belonged.”

After a first-round 68 Andrade was tired and feeling that the magic of a week prior might be missing. Then he had a conversation with Jay Haas, older brother of Jerry Haas, Billy’s college roommate. “I was always a good listener,” Andrade said. “I was a sponge when it came to listening to guys who played before me. Jay was another of my ‘big brothers’ on the tour. I told Jay after the first round that I was exhausted, and he said the best time to win your second tournament is right after you’ve won your first. All of a sudden, something clicked, and I felt like I had my adrenaline back. I told myself that I could do it again. I felt in control, and I was making putts.”

Because it preceded the U.S. Open and offered a strong test, the Westchester stop always got a strong field during that era. And 1991 was no exception. Defending U.S. Open champion Hale Irwin led after 54 holes. With 68, 68 and 69 Andrade was tied for third, two back, and Seve Ballesteros and Raymond Floyd were among those another shot behind.

Andrade’s defining moment came at the par-4 15th hole, a dogleg right around a large oak tree. “Guys now would hit it over the tree and have a flip wedge in there,” Andrade said. “I had a blind approach to a pin cut on the upper tier. I hit a cut 3-iron to about 15 feet and made the putt to take the lead.”

Andrade closed with a 68 to defeat Brad Bryant by two, with Irwin and Nolan Henke sharing third another stroke back. Ballesteros was T-5, Floyd T-8 and Couples and Norman T-10. The Rhode Islander had another $180,000 coming into his bank account.

“I remember Tom Kite saying to me earlier that season that I was a lucky bastard to come out on tour at the right time,” Andrade said, “that when he was starting out first place might have been $35,000, $40,000. We were playing for about million-dollar purses. To win $360,000  in two weeks—I thought I had all the money in the world. But it wasn’t really about the money. I’d proven to myself that I could win at the highest stage, so it was really cool.”

Andrade’s hot play continued into the first round of the U.S. Open, where he birdied six of the first 10 holes and was in the lead. “I had a 70-foot downhill putt on the sixth and hit it was too hard,” Andrade remembered, “but it hit the back of the cup and dropped in. Davis Love was in my group, and you can kind of hear him laughing on the highlight video when I made that one.”

But Andrade carded an 8 on No. 11 shortly before play was halted because of an electrical storm. Five spectators were injured, and one fan was killed by a lightning strike near the 11th tee. When play resumed after the tragedy, Andrade continued to struggle, making another 8 on the 16th hole while shooting a back-nine 43 for a 76. He followed it up with a 75 to miss the cut. Payne Stewart went on to win the title in a Monday playoff over Scott Simpson.

One factor that disrupted Andrade’s winning momentum was an equipment switch the likes of which has befuddled a number of players. “My management company at the time wanted me to sign a new deal with a golf company that promised a ton of money and said they could duplicate the irons I’d been playing. It was a five-year deal which turned into a six-month deal. I just couldn’t play with them and went back to what I’d been using.”

It would be seven years until Andrade won again. “You think, ‘I’m the man; this is easy,’ ” Andrade said. “But then you try something different and can get yourself in a bad way quickly. All of a sudden, the game isn’t easy, it’s hard. One year, two years, three years go by. There are a lot of good players out there. You’re less on your time and more on other people’s time when you get in the spotlight, and I didn’t handle it as well as I might have. You think after you win two in a row like I did, you’re going to win a bunch more, then some scar tissue builds up when you don’t. You come close and don’t get it done think, ‘When am I going to win again?’ ”

Andrade is a social person. Late in his PGA Tour career, a sports psychologist he was working with visited him in Rhode Island and noted how Andrade seemed to know everybody, that he lacked the hard edge many great golfers have possessed. “He said maybe you would have won more tournaments if you’d had more ‘jerk’ in you, but that’s not who you are,” said Andrade, who with Jody has two adult children, Cameron and Grace. “Many of the greats have had a mean streak. That’s not who I am. You can’t change your stripes. If I had to do it over, I wouldn’t change a thing. I mean, it was an absolute blast.”

That could be said of an informal round of golf at Westchester Country Club in 2010, which recently popped up as a Facebook memory. Andrade was working in television prior to joining the Champions Tour (where he has won three times). Driving from Atlanta, where he lives most of the year, to Rhode Island, where he spends the summer, Billy stopped in New York to play golf with Cameron, then 16 years old, an avid golfer but yet to defeat his dad. “The kid holed a 40-footer on the last hole to shoot 69 and beat me for the first time,” Andrade said. Cam is 27 now, same age as his father when, for a couple of weeks, he was better than everybody.