Martin Laird’s Card Trick

Lynn Debruin | Illustrations by Dana Barak

What’s the difference between finishing 125th and 126th on the PGA Tour’s official money list? Just ask Coloradans Martin Laird and Shane Bertsch.

As Martin Laird tested the driver he hadn’t touched during a 2-1/2 week trip home to Scotland, the head came flying off on his very first swing. Annoying, yes, but the former Colorado State star simply had to order up a new one. Shane Bertsch’s break wasn’t such an easy fix.

While Laird was packing the sunscreen for his season-opening trip to Hawaii and the Sony Open, Bertsch was still hobbling around his Parker home in a blow-up boot, trying to regain his health, his status and his game.

Considering the two men finished just $11,504 apart on the PGA Tour’s Official Money List, life couldn’t be much different right now.

“I’ve got my first few months planned, then I can pick and choose,” Laird, 26, said of his Tour schedule. “It definitely takes a lot of pressure off.”

By finishing one spot behind Laird, and 126th on the money list, Bertsch 38, finds himself in sort of a no-man’s land—complicated even further by the broken foot he suffered just days after seeing his full-time privileges on Tour slip away in the Florida sun.

“For a couple of months, there wasn’t any uncertainty,” said Bertsch, who thought he had secured status for 2009 only to find out 36 hours before the final event he was still on the bubble because of a misunderstanding. “It gets me bitter the more and more I think about it, but I have no doubt in my mind that I’ll come back.”

Coincidentally, both Bertsch and Laird usually fine-tune their games in January at the TPC Scottsdale.

Yet when they ultimately cross paths, there won’t be any animosity.

“It won’t be awkward,” Bertsch said. “We were just numbers in the system. There’s nothing (bad) between us. He might say sorry about the misunderstanding, but he’s not going to say sorry for knocking (me) out (of the top 125). And I’m not going to say, ‘You jerk’ for knocking me out.”

That they both have Colorado ties only made it ironic that Laird, a former rugby player, leapfrogged Bertsch into the coveted 125th position.

 

The Putt

To do so, Laird came a long way in a short time. In his first 14 events of ’08, he missed eight cuts and had earned just $65,898, plagued by a swing flaw that had him hitting a pull draw.

He had been trying to adjust his swing to play better in the wind and ended up with a stroke that was too flat.

“I wasn’t hitting it good enough to compete, then you start losing your confidence and before you know it, you start to wonder if maybe you’re not good enough to win on Tour,” Laird said.

In early July, at the John Deere Classic, he worked out the kinks and went on to finish T29th. The snowball suddenly began rolling the other way.

“I started to pick up confidence as quickly as I lost it. I went from turning up hoping to make the cut, to hoping to win,” said Laird, who had three top-10 finishes in a four-week span in August—the Legends Reno-Tahoe Open (T4). Wyndham Championship (T4) and The Barclays (T7).

Laird’s finish in The Barclays, the first FedEx Cup event, propelled him into the next two events of the playoffs, the Deutsche Bank and BMW championships. Still, it came down to an 8-foot, right-to-left, slightly downhill putt on the 72nd hole of the final event of the season the Children’s Miracle Network Classic at Walt Disney World. A miss would have cost him at least $16,000 for the event, dropping him outside the top 125 on the money list and costing him his PGA Tour card.

“I was thinking, ‘Don’t get too caught up in the situation. Just try to make the putt and if it goes in, it goes in. Don’t try to think about what’s on the line,’” he said. And his Itsy Bitsy Spider putter came through.

“It was a weird nervous that I never had before,” said Laird, who came to America for the first time as a 17-year-old after accepting CSU’s scholarship. “It’s a lot different when you’re in contention and trying to win or finish as high as you can. But when you’re just trying to survive and not make any mistakes …it’s not a position I want to be in. But it all worked out in the end.”

 

The Bad Break

Not so for Bertsch. But he has seen adversity before. He fist earned his Tour card in 1997, only to lose it the next year then get it back in 2006.

Then vertigo hit, and two MRIs, two CATscans and visits with a half-dozen specialists still couldn’t explain the dizzy spells, which were so bad he could barely stand over a shot.

The temporary solution was to take two different prescriptions to keep it under control, then play 2008 under a medical exemption. The latter gave him 28 events to earn enough money ($774,164) to play the rest of 2008. He surpassed that number and thought—based on chats with PGA Tour officials—that he had reached the 2009 threshold. But he hadn’t—and didn’t find out until two days before the Disney event.

The news left him feeling like he’d been punched in the gut.

He missed the cut at Disney by two shots and ended up with part-time privileges, having also missed the deadline for Q-school finals because of the misunderstanding.

Then, just when he thought it couldn’t get worse, he slipped going down the basement steps in his socks, breaking his foot.

The hard cast came off seven weeks later, on Jan. 2, but the foot didn’t heal as well as doctors had hoped, so Bertsch planned to keep working on chipping and putting until the foot was sturdy enough to put a real shoe on.

He hopes to be ready for The AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am mid-February, or. if not, then the Mayakoba Golf Classic in Mexico two weeks later. The Nationwide Tour also is a likely possibility to keep his game sharp in between regular Tour stops.

“As soon as I get healthy I have to find a way to get in tournaments or play the Nationwide to where I can get a little rhythm,” Bertsch said. “I can’t play once every three weeks.”

Still, he predicts the odds are good that he’ll get back in good standing.

Laird doesn’t doubt it.

“You can let it get you down or use it to motivate. Hopefully he uses it to motivate himself,” Laird said of Bertsch. “He knows he’s good enough. Hopefully he comes out and does just that.”