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Message: Venezuelan Rises on Tour After His Homeland Rejects Golf
Seen this kid play at the bob hope and last weekend (on TV) was rooting for him just so it make Chavez look bad, there is a slight resemblance to Chavez
Venezuelan Rises on Tour After His Homeland Rejects Golf
By LARRY DORMAN
Published: February 1, 2011
SAN DIEGO — Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela, is no friend of golf. He has called it a “bourgeois sport” played primarily by lazy, rich people in carts. He has closed six of the country’s courses and said the government should appropriate private urban land for public housing. “Do you mean to tell me this is a people’s sport?” he said in 2009. “It is not.”
Donald Miralle/Getty Images
Jhonattan Vegas during the final round of the Farmers Insurance Open in La Jolla, Calif. on Sunday.
That was before Jhonattan Vegas came along. Two Sundays ago, Vegas, 26, a rookie on the PGA Tour whose golfing family suffered as a result of Chavez’s course closures, won the Bob Hope Classic in La Quinta, Calif., in a stirring playoff, becoming the first player from Venezuela to win a Tour event.
He was almost instantly acclaimed a national hero, then solidified that position a week later by finishing tied for third in the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines in San Diego. Vegas had a share of the lead midway through Sunday’s final round, and after a gutsy but unsuccessful go-for-broke final hole he finished three strokes behind the winner, Bubba Watson.
Although Vegas may not have made a convert of Chávez, he certainly had him bobbing and weaving. After Vegas won the Hope Classic, Chávez, who has not, it is believed, put buildings on any of the courses, proclaimed that he was not “an enemy of golf, or any other sport.” He said he would call to congratulate Vegas. “He beat all of the gringos,” he said.
Vegas declined to discuss in detail Chávez and his attitude toward golf as he prepared last week at Torrey Pines. Neither would he talk about how Chávez’s actions had affected him or even of the apparent softening of the mercurial president’s position.
“You know what, he’s the president,” Vegas said, laughing. “He does whatever he feels like. I just got to focus on being a golfer and doing my thing.”
Several years ago, Chávez closed three courses in the Vegas family’s home state, Monagas. All were essentially clubs for workers in the nation’s wealthy oil industry. Vegas’s father, Carlos, who at one time worked as a caddie and later became a food concessionaire to two of the clubs, decided his son would have to leave Venezuela if he were to pursue golf seriously.
Vegas was 17 and spoke no English when he was separated from his parents and three brothers. He was eventually placed in the care of Franci Betancourt, a Venezuelan golf pro, and his wife, Alba, who had settled in Houston. Under the tutelage of the Betancourts and Kevin Kirk, a prominent golf instructor in Texas who had been taught by Franci, Vegas learned the language and American culture, and he worked on his game. He went on to graduate from the University of Texas with a degree in kinesiology, to make the second-tier Nationwide Tour and ultimately to reach the PGA Tour.
“All of a sudden, his father didn’t have a job; the kids didn’t have anywhere to play golf,” Jonathan Coles, an eight-time Venezuelan national champion golfer who is from Cambridge, Mass., said of Vegas’s departure. “Everything in their family that had been built around golf was just taken away from one day to the next.
“The old man told me that when he told Jhonattan, the kid thought it was totally impossible,” continued Coles, the retired chairman of the Venezuelan food company Mavesa who also served as minister of agriculture from 1990 to 1993 under President Carlos Andrés Pérez. “He didn’t speak a word of English and thought he was going to have a terrible time going to school.”
Vegas acknowledged that his transition was not an easy one. There were days, he said, when school, golf and English studies took him well into the night.
The long climb to the verge of stardom has seemingly fashioned Vegas into a golfer who is mentally tough and outwardly cheerful, a single-minded, focused individual who appreciates his good fortune and makes time for just about everyone he meets.
“He is a very special kid,” said Betancourt, who had been the head pro at two of the courses closed by Chávez. “He is unique.”
Vegas has ramrod-straight posture, which makes him look taller than his 6 feet 2 inches. His shoulders are wide and thickly muscled, and when he throws them back as he walks, he creates an imposing presence even heftier than his 230 pounds.
Embracing the made-for-Hollywood sobriquet Johnny Vegas, he exhibits the kind of joy that the young, unburdened Tiger Woods, his third-round playing partner Saturday at Torrey Pines, used to bring to the course.
The similarities between Woods and Vegas are striking. They share a love of competition, of playing under intense pressure and of shotmaking. The differences are obvious, too. Vegas smiles his way around the course, makes more eye contact and sometimes even laughs after the occasional mis-hit. Last weekend he waved to his fans in the gallery from South America and Venezuela.
“It’s because he’s enjoying the game, even when he hits it bad,” Betancourt said. “That’s not common. I would say that’s one attribute that is something that is really personal. You can see it in the way he walks between the ropes. He has that look that says: ‘Well, sir, here I am. I guess I belong here.’ ”
Vegas had no trouble making a case for his belonging on the Tour during the pressure of the final round Sunday when, stalking Watson, he tried to read a long, difficult putt at the sloping green at the par-3 11th. Needing to bleed his first putt to the very edge of a slope, Vegas did not hit the ball hard enough and left it sitting on the ridge an embarrassing eight feet from the hole. He smiled playfully and shrugged, then went on to miss the par putt, a crucial three-putt at that juncture. And yet the smile said much about his appreciation for the breaks of the game, good and bad.
“I’ve been playing great golf,” he said. “I’m enjoying the moment, and enjoying everything about the PGA Tour so far. It’s been a dream come true.”
As he said this, the ripples had barely cleared from the pond in front of the 18th green, where his ball lay in the depths. Trailing Watson by a stroke, he had tried a high-risk shot from the rough with a 5-iron from 217 yards. The shot very likely cost him second place and maybe $300,000.
“Even when I hit the ball in the water on 18, I went, Oh well, let’s see if we can make it now,” Vegas said.
This ability to refocus calmly impressed Kevin Sutherland, who played alongside Woods and Vegas on Saturday. After praising every aspect of Vegas’s game, Sutherland stopped, turned and said, “What I liked best about him was his demeanor.”
The demeanor did not change even when Vegas talked about having spoken with Chávez, and what he hopes will come about as a result of the chat: perhaps a friendlier attitude toward the sport in the presidential palace so that some Venezuelan youngster playing baseball might think of switching to golf, as Vegas did when he was 12 and a power-hitting third baseman.
“The president congratulating me; that means a lot,” Vegas said, adding, “Just to have the support of your country, it’s huge.”
That support was in evidence at Torrey Pines. An all-sports television network came here from Caracas to video the star who Mike Perez, the executive producer, said was “right there with Omar Vizquel and Andres Galarraga,” the baseball players. Another television personality, Jeanette Vargas Lovelle of Hoyo 19, who did a three-part series on Vegas before the season, said in an e-mail, “In effect, Jhonattan is becoming a kind of a national hero.”
That is a long way from a scared 17-year-old who immigrated to Houston nine years ago. If the country he left is leaning that way about a golfer, can the president be far behind?
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