Escaping the dad from hell

Sean O’Hair’s victory in the John Deere Classic represented an amazing escape from the dark side of professional sport.

For the young American golfer, who turned 23 on July 11, the win represented a base camp in his long climb from purgatory.

He was literally living a life of hell on earth and the devil was his own father.

His story deserves re-telling because it is so inspiring and also for it to stand as a timely warning of how easily the quest for financially lucrative sporting excellence, a modern phenomenon, can lose all perspective.

O’Hair’s odyssey was excellently chronicled by Steve Elling in the American GolfWorld magazine as, in January, he set out on his first full year on PGA Tour.

O’Hair was one of America’s top junior players; a star in the making of the American Junior Golf Association. He turned pro at the age of 17 while still at high school, one of the youngest players yet to do so, but in Elling’s GolfWorld article an alarming motivation for his decision to play for pay was revealed.

The teenaged golfer had seemingly been coerced to go this route by his father, Marc, and had, in fact, signed a management contract with him.

O’Hair snr subjected his son to a psychological and physical regimen you would only find at boot camp and had no qualms about it – believing he was entitled to a return on his investment of what he claimed to be $2-million and telling Elling: “I’m an iron-asshole bastard who made all of his money the hard way, through my own sweat. I invested everything I had in his (Sean’s) golf game. I told him, ‘I can’t blow this kind of money without a return. When you make it there has to be a payback.’”

Sean signed his first contract with his dad when he was 17, requiring him to pay his father 10 percent of his professional earnings for life, and, according to Marc, signed another when he was 20.

Marc O’Hair sold up the family business to bankroll his son’s career and seems to have given no thought to the kind of pressure he was subjecting the boy to; in effect putting his family’s livelihood in how well his son played.

He bought a car and drove Sean from event to event; acting as driver, cook and caddie and, stretching back to his junior days, subjecting his son to “punishments,” such as being forced to run a couple of miles, if did badly.

In 2002 Sean, after meeting the girl who would become his wife, Jackie, and finding respite in her supportive family, broke away from his father and just how dysfunctional their relationship was is shown by Marc’s reaction. “What am I supposed to do, say, ‘Oh Seany boy, you don’t have to get up early today,’” he told Elling sarcastically. “The military, they know how to build a champion. Somebody who slacks off, that’s a loser. The typical high school kid is hanging out at the mall – that’ a loser. You have to have a goal or you are just wasting time. I busted my (butt) on this thing. I thought I was doing him a favour. You would not believe what I did for him.”

Such parental behaviour defies belief but somehow Sean recovered from the twin psychological hammering he was subjected to by his father and the fact that his initial strides in professional golf, on the Nationwide tour, were pretty faltering.

With the help of Jackie and her father, Steve Lucas, who started to caddie for him, he started to earn some money on the mini tours and in 2004, on his sixth visit to the Qualifying School, won through all three stages to earn his PGA Tour card.

Now he has entered the winner’s circle and is 16th on the money list with earnings of $1,733,830, one spot behind Retief Goosen and four ahead of Ernie Els. In just his 12th start of his rookie campaign he finished solo second at the Byron Nelson championship and it seems he has a lock on Rookie of the Year honours.

But it is a happy state of affairs that could yet be spoiled… by his father suing him for repayment of the money spent on fostering his career because, as Marc O’Hair told GolfWorld, Sean’s success at the age of 22 proves his approach was right!