LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. -- In the writing biz, this is what we would consider a smorgasbord of metaphorical choices.
It's the Golden Corral, Ponderosa and Sizzler of angle options, each of which could be used to compare Lee Janzen's recent car troubles with his playing predicament over the recent past.
A few days back, the two-time U.S. Open champion was having trouble with a dead car battery. Which fits at its core, because not long ago, he'd been searching for an infusion of amps in his game.
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| Lee Janzen won the U.S. Open in 1993 and '98. (Getty Images) |
Finally, he accidentally slammed the hood on his right hand, leaving a few scrapes and a blackened fingernail. Had he not pulled his hand away just as the lid fell, he might have broken a few fingers and not merely bruised a few nails.
"I'm already back hitting balls," he said this week, displaying the damaged digits, "so I'm OK."
He's better than that, really, because this season has been ionic poles apart from the four that preceded it. One again, Janzen has juice.
Turning around his career when it seemingly had stalled for good, Janzen has all but officially secured full status for next year by finishing in the top 125 in earnings for the first time since 2004.
Sure, the Janzen comeback story isn't quite as sexy as the dude who returned from reconstructive knee surgery to win six times (Tiger Woods) or the player who won a major championship in 2009 after returning to Q-school last fall (Y.E. Yang). But along with the guy who returned from the brink of extinction to possibly retain his '10 card, David Duval, Janzen's revival act certainly belongs in the same discussion.
Playing with only minimal status and on sponsor exemptions, Janzen wheedled his way into 22 events this year and made the most of his chances, climbing to No. 94 in earnings and locking up his card for 2010 to reverse a seemingly irreversible fall.
Let's chart the numbers. After finishing 96th in earnings in 2004, he fell to 155th, 146th, 160th and 152nd over the ensuing years. Three of those four years, the eight-time PGA Tour winner was so far down the money list, he wasn't assured a berth in the Q-school finals.
"Lee Janzen, to me, is a perfect example of the depth on the PGA Tour," Disney tournament director Kevin Weickel said.
The game's depth charge sunk Janzen like a leaky lifeboat. The past few seasons have meant playing in Monday pro-ams, schmoozing with sponsors, kissing babies, shaking hands and whatever else a tournament director might ask in exchange for offering a sponsor exemption. A player with 2½ majors -- he won a Players Championship in addition to the two Opens -- was reduced to writing letters and asking for a leg up.
"I could do a school on how to write the letters [to tournament directors]," Janzen laughed. "Keep it simple. Write them yourself. Having a manager write a letter and send them, it doesn't help."
Janzen began to rewrite his story three years ago, when he hired Mike Bender to retool his swing. Bender once explained that players from Janzen's era are often feel players and largely self-taught compared to today's high-tech generation. Thus, when things begin to go wrong, it's sometimes hard for an older player to make the fix.
"When you stand on a tee and really have no idea which side of the fairway you're going to miss on, it's really hard to score," Janzen explained. "Looking back to where my mind was and the state of my game, that I was able to compete at all was a miracle."
Bender, a former tour player who also coaches former Masters champion Zach Johnson and a handful of LPGA players, believes Janzen has learned more about the golf swing in the past three years than he ever knew before. He had to.
"It might have been easier to start over, right from scratch, than to try to forget everything that I thought was the right way to do it, when it really wasn't," Janzen said. "The golf swing, you can't do just one thing wrong. You have to do at least two to cancel the other one out. When you wipe out one bad habit, it exposes the other one sometimes."
Welcome to our world, brother.
Janzen, on the cusp of his mid-40s, had to make a tough call. Overhauling his swing would take months and he had little wiggle room as far as his status on tour.
"It's harder when you don't have the job security to commit to it," he said. "If I could go back and do things over, I would work with Mike Bender from Day 1, instead of waiting until just a few years ago. But I don't know where that would have put me.
"I was much more stubborn then and might not have listened to him."
He had reason to be immovable -- he'd won seven times by age 31, including three times in 1995. But his last victory was at the 1998 Open at Olympic Club, located a few hundred yards from last week's Presidents Club venue in San Francisco, and the sport has only measured regard for a player's laurels.
A look at Janzen's bag says it all. He has no endorsement deal with a club manufacturer this year and is using a generic stand bag, replete with aluminum legs to prop it up rather than the traditional, oversized tour model. He looks like one of his pro-am partners.
"That is my staff bag this year," he laughed. "I didn't have a deal this year so there's no point in carrying a big bag around when I don't need it."
He obviously swallowed his vanity.
"I thought carrying a big staff bag with advertising on it for free was worse," he said. "I'm not giving away advertising. If people see I've got a small bag they might say 'Hey, let's get this guy.'"
Might not be a bad idea, since his game is certainly trending up and the resolve has rarely wavered, even after all the success over the years.
"Panic doesn't do you any good," he said. "You really have to check a lot of things. Your attitude is probably the most important. When you think about what you are getting ready to start on, is it worth the price you have to pay to get back to where you want to be? That's the question you have to ask.
"You might possibly get worse for a while. To me, the prize was worth the effort. The price I had to play was worth the prize I was going for."
