He’s walked Augusta National before, even nabbed a commemorative jacket to remember his experience, but this?
This was where the Cardinals play — where his Cardinals play — and Zach Johnson gazed at the expansive green and took it all in from the home dugout.
A closer look at Bellerive Country Club, where the world’s best golfers will play for the 100th PGA Championship
Johnson, the great golfer, is friends with pitcher Adam Wainwright. They live in the same Georgia town, but Johnson is from Iowa, raised on corn and crackling KMOX. So when Johnson came to St. Louis a Sunday ago, to practice at Bellerive, Wainwright gave him a private tour of Busch Stadium.
As the two past champions left the dugout, Johnson said to Wainwright: “Man, you don’t know how cool that was for me, growing up as a Cards fan, seeing Ozzie and Willie.”
Waino thus said to him: “You want to meet Willie?”
“Willie’s here?” Johnson asked.
Of course, Willie McGee joined the Cardinals coaching staff this year. Here’s the thing, though — McGee loves golf. So when the 2007 Masters champ walked in, “You kind of froze for a minute!” McGee recalled with a smile. “I always admired his style and how he went about his business, you know? Classy and professional. And then to see him, all of a sudden? That made my day.”
Needless to say, it also made Johnson’s day, the owner of a green jacket meeting the owner of a red one. Johnson will be back in St. Louis this week, hoping to make history in the same town where McGee won an MVP and Wainwright threw the final strike of a World Series. Johnson also has won the British Open, but never the PGA Championship. His highest finish was third. Johnson, 42, entered the weekend as the No. 51-ranked golfer in the world, just behind, sure enough, No. 50 Tiger Woods. But Bellerive lends itself to a golfer with Johnson’s accurate abilities, compared to some of the monstrous mashers of the new generation.
“Zach is a good overall driver of the golf ball, and you have to play the fairway here,” said Mike Tucker, the PGA pro at Bellerive. “The rough got tougher this (past) week with the rain.”
Wainwright and Johnson live in the area of St. Simons Island, Ga., “and we go to the same church and the kids are the same age,” Waino said. “And he’s a member of the course that I’m a member of. Or I should say – I’m a member of the course that he’s a member of. Sea Island Golf Club.”
That’s the famed course where Davis Love III fell in love with links – and in 1997, Love III won his lone major, the PGA Championship. Wainwright is also close friends with Love III, and Waino once even umpired Little League games featuring Davis’ son, Dru, who’s now a professional golfer, too.
“We probably have 10, 12 big-time golfers who live in the area,” said Wainwright, himself a 3.0 handicap.
But Wainwright is probably closest with Johnson, who stayed at Waino’s home while in St. Louis to practice at Bellerive. Johnson even sat in the stands at Busch with his fellow Cardinals fans and Wainwright’s wife, Jenny, who grew up going to the Masters with her family. Adam, meanwhile, grew up 2½ hours from Augusta but never got to go — and even when Adam and Jenny began dating, he never got a chance to use the cherished family tickets. He works weekends in April.
But in 2011, Wainwright was out for the year after surgery. Perhaps the only good thing about missing the year after finishing second in Cy Young voting — and missing a year your team won the World Series — is getting to attend the Masters.
“So I had my arm in a sling,” he said, “and I was walking around, following Tiger Woods, following Bubba Watson, following Zach, all the big-timers, because I wanted to see their shots. You can’t have your phone out there, but when I got back to the house, I had all these texts from my teammates who were watching the Masters, because (the TV) showed Tiger teeing off – and I was standing right behind there with my arm in a sling.”
Wainwright jokingly took the blame for Johnson missing the Masters cut in 2011, since Waino showed up halfway through the round — and that’s when the trouble began for the old champ.
“Also, in 2016 we had an off-day in Atlanta on a Thursday,” Wainwright said, “so me and Michael Wacha and Trevor Rosenthal and my brother went to Augusta. Zach got us tickets so we walked around and followed him for a round. It was pretty neat.”
Standing in the Busch Stadium hallway outside the Cards’ clubhouse, Wainwright was asked for a little intel on Zach Johnson.
“A quick story about that,” Wainwright said. “He is one of the most competitive people I’ve ever met. We went over to his house for Halloween a few years back. And he’s the first guy — and you probably know someone like this — once he starts competing in something, he’s shirt off, hat backwards and suddenly it’s the Masters. He thought he could beat me in ping-pong, which wasn’t the case. So then he challenged me to any other sport I wanted to do. And I said, ‘What are you talking about? Listen, golfers are great athletes at what you do.’ I was just trying to rub him a little bit. And he goes, ‘Well, I can beat you in basketball.’ And I’m like, ‘Are you serious? Pick another sport. You won’t even get a shot off me, just trust me.’ He goes, ‘All right, 40-yard dash, right now!’
“And I’m wearing jeans and a Halloween costume or whatever. He goes, ‘You want to stretch?’ ‘No, I’m good.’ One of our other friends, Brent Schwarzrock, and he goes out and holds his hands up and we race. I beat him by like 10 feet. (Johnson) looks at me like, ‘Wow! You’re fast.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m really not that fast! You don’t understand. I run fine, but on a team of 25 players, there are probably 20 faster than me.’ And he’s like, ‘Really?’And I said, ‘I told you — baseball players are athletes.’ And he was just so mad.
“But I love the fact that he’s so competitive.”
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