Bulletin E-Edition:
For players' families, tour can be a challenge
‘For every perk ... there’s a trade-off’
By Sheila G. Miller / The Bulletin
Published: August 18. 2007 4:00AM PST| order photo
Sue Bryant, wife of player Brad Bryant, holds the cross on her necklace Friday while watching her husband tee off.
Pete Erickson / The Bulletin
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SUNRIVER — Walking through a mall a few years ago, Sue Bryant was cornered by a woman doing a survey. She couldn’t avoid it, so she started answering the questions. But then the woman asked a stumper: If money was no question, where would you go on vacation?
Bryant’s answer? Home.
She didn’t misunderstand the question. Rather, she was weary from being on the road all the time with her husband, Brad, who has played professional golf on the PGA and Champions tours since 1978.
“We’ve been doing this forever,” Bryant said. “Once we were gone for 13 straight weeks.”
The life of the professional golfer is well-documented: quality meals, solid sleep, a walk-through of the course, maybe a pro-am tournament and lots of rounds of golf. But the pros rarely travel alone — they often bring wives and children with them.
The families enjoy the variety of locations but deal with the challenge of traveling constantly and living life in the background.
As The Jeld-Wen Tradition enters its third day of play at Crosswater Golf Club at Sunriver Resort today, many of the wives of Champions Tour players will be splitting their time between trying to keep their hectic and travel-filled lives organized and being on the course supporting their husbands.
Learning to travel
On Friday, most players and families started their days in the crowded clubhouse dining room, eating breakfast and getting ready for a second day of play. Jenifer Harris had coffee in one hand and dry cleaning in the other. She had just left the dining room and was getting ready to accompany her husband through his second round of golf. Harris hasn’t been living this life very long. Her husband, John Harris, 55, didn’t turn pro until he was 50. Even now that he’s on the Champions Tour, he still runs an insurance company in Minneapolis.
When John turned pro, their youngest child was just finishing college.
“It just all fell into place,” Jenifer said. “It was perfect timing.”
The hardest part for Jenifer was learning to travel.
“You hear about someone’s job involving travel and hotels and all that, and it sounds really glamorous,” she said. “It is really nice, but it’s harder to be away from home than you realize.”
There are 33 tournaments on the Champions Tour and the five major tournaments take place between May and October.
When Harris’ husband first started on the tour, she traveled to all the tournaments with him to keep him company. Now, she’s cut back to part time. When she’s on the road, though, she has plenty to do, particularly on the first day in a new place.
“I like to get us organized,” she said. “I find a place to do laundry, and if John has a pro-am on Monday or Tuesday, then he’ll practice and I’ll get us organized around the room and figure out the lay of the land.”
A sense of normal
Part of the challenge of being a tour wife is keeping life as normal as possible for their golfing husbands.
Margie Kuramoto is particularly challenged when it comes to making life seem normal. Her husband, Massy, joined the Champions Tour in 2006 after playing for years on the Japanese tour. They still have a home in Japan but also have made a temporary home for themselves in Los Angeles.
It’s a hard transition, but Kuramoto is a willing participant.
“He wanted to do it, and I wanted him to be happy,” Kuramoto said.
Kuramoto’s number one request is to have a hotel room with a kitchen, so she can cook traditional Japanese food. The first thing she does after unpacking in a new town is to scout out an Asian market so she can load up on Japanese fare, and then she looks up Japanese and Korean restaurants on the Internet. It’s a way to create normalcy for the couple.
With few Asian markets in Central Oregon, Kuramoto packed a suitcase filled with food and brought it with her from Los Angeles.
Her only complaint — like others — is the amount of travel.
“The hard part is the living,” Kuramoto said. “It’s hard to go cross-country, to be in the same country and still have jet lag.”
Healthy boundaries
Diana McNab knows a thing or two about the life of a sports wife; she was married for 23 years to NHL great Peter McNab and now is married to rodeo cowboy and Oregon native Larry Mahan. She serves as an editor, sports psychologist and director of wellness for Professional Sports Wives Magazine and counsels women who are married to athletes.
“For every perk there is, there’s a trade-off,” McNab said. “You have to stay home and man the house, stay on top of every aspect to keep you as a functional family … and the last thing he wants to go to bed with is a coach or a psychologist, so you have to learn healthy boundaries.”
At least on the Champions Tour, those healthy boundaries exist inside the ropes on the course, where many of the wives walk with their husbands as they play each round.
The Champions Tour Wives Association organizes fundraisers and community activities, and at each tournament the association usually puts together an event for the wives while their husbands are playing practice rounds or participating in the pro-am.
On Tuesday, a group of wives gathered for a luncheon and tours at the High Desert Museum. Next year, there are plans to go whitewater rafting. Jacobsen said that many of the wives have been traveling with their husbands for years and have longtime friendships. The concierge at the Crosswater clubhouse organizes activities for couples and groups during their off hours, including river floating and horseback riding.
Walking the course
But once the tournament starts, most of the players’ wives spend their days on the course.
Jan Jacobsen looks at her time on the course, walking with her husband Peter and showing positive support, as a kind of job.
“He likes it,” Jacobsen said. “If we can walk, then we do.”
Though she’s been watching her husband play professional golf since they were married during his rookie season in 1976, Jacobsen tries not to interact too much with him on the course.
“He might come over and talk about something that’s good or bad, he might tell me if his back hurts a little,” she said. “But in the middle of golf course, not that I shy away from it, but I try not to (offer criticism or advice) during a round, unless he’s doing something like moving his head while he’s putting. Then I might tap my head … that’s as far as I can go.”
Margie Kuramoto plays golf twice a week with several other tour wives, but she doesn’t bring her expertise to her husband’s game.
“It’s a totally different level (of golf), and the more you play golf the more you understand how difficult the game is and you have more respect for what they do,” Kuramoto said. “Some players don’t want their wives to play because they don’t want them (to give advice or criticism), but I think if you let them play, they’ll understand how hard it is, and be more understanding.”
Coordinating with kids
When the Jacobsens first married, Jan traveled with Peter to every event. Once they had kids, they still traveled as a family until their oldest daughter, Amy, was in kindergarten. Most golfers relocate to areas like Florida, where they can be close to a lot of tournaments, but for the Jacobsens, only Oregon was home. So she divided up her time, taking one child on the road and then coming back for the other, trying to find time to volunteer in classrooms while still being a good wife to Peter.
For Jacobsen, one of the things she’s missed is being able to be a part of her community.
“Traveling so much of the year, it’s very difficult now to get involved in your home community, so sometimes doing something out here on the road that is associated with this community is really nice to do,” she said.
While Jacobsen’s children are grown, Bryant juggles the hectic life on tour with raising the couple’s 14- and 16-year-old sons, Jonathan and Jamieson. On Wednesday, she took the boys up to Mount Bachelor so that they could call their friends and tell them they were throwing snowballs at their mom while their friends in Florida were stuck in 100-degree weather.
When Bryant’s husband, Brad, was 45, he retired from the PGA Tour and spent five years helping raise the kids. At 50, he returned to work on the Champions Tour. This summer, the boys have traveled on tour with their parents quite a bit, but it always involves a lot of coordination. Tomorrow, Sue will take the boys to get haircuts so they’ll be ready for their first day of school, on Monday.
The universal truth
In the end, there’s one universal truth for all tour wives’ happiness.
“When he plays good it’s always good because he’s happy,” Bryant said.
This is one of the biggest challenges for wives of professional athletes, McNab said.
“It’s really an emotional existence whether you want to admit it or not, because he’s in the public eye and so any mistake he makes is a public humiliation,” McNab said. “If he’s benched or not making the cuts, you’re nervous.”
McNab said that her experience has shown that many relationships struggle or end when the athlete’s career begins to go downhill or comes to a close.
“Eighty-five percent of a male’s ego is career-oriented,” McNab said. “You have to be a savvy wife. You have to keep supporting his strengths. At the end of the day, we’re sure not our sports score. But they don’t get that at the time. And any marriage that’s going to work is a full-time job.”
When McNab does seminars with pro sports wives, she starts with a survey, and one of the questions on it is, ‘Are you happy?’ She said that 75 percent of the responses she gets say no.
“What you see is not what you get,” she said.
“It’s a way tougher world than you think.”
Sheila G. Miller can be reached at 633-2162 or at smiller@bendbulletin.com.
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