may 2019 | golfdigest.com 99When Kuchar was asked about the story
at Riviera, he brushed it off, saying that as
far as he was concerned, “this is over.”
It was far from over. To most people,
Kuchar was acting like the typical spoiled,
insensitive, rich 1-percenter.
“When I heard that my grandmother was
being forwarded stories about what a bad
guy I had been,” Kuchar says, “I knew I had
to rethink.”
Kuchar talked to a number of friends he
trusts—some in golf, some not. “I’ve always
admired people who are willing to take the
blame,” he says. “I realized I’d shied away
from it, and that didn’t feel right.
“What happened was, I won a golf tour-
nament and made a lot of money. In a situ-
ation like that, you want both sides to win.
David hadn’t won financially. I decided the
thing to do was take the blame and make
sure David won financially. As soon as I
made that decision, I felt better. I knew it
was the right thing to do.”
He put out a lengthy statement apolo-
gizing for the entire incident. “I was disap-
pointed in myself,” Kuchar told me after
returning home from the WGC event in Mex-
ico City, confirming an additional payment
of $45,000 to Ortiz. “This was the first time
I acted in a way that wasn’t the way I wanted
to be looked at or thought of by people. It
was time to stand up and say, ‘I messed up.’ ”
Kuchar and Ortiz spent time together
before the third round of the tournament
in Mexico City, and Kuchar says the fan
response he got during the tournament was
overwhelmingly positive. Kuchar knows,
though, that there will be some who don’t
want to let it go. “I can’t say it’s over, it’s
behind me,” he says. “I got all sorts of media
requests to talk about it in Mexico, and I’m
talking to you about it now. But at least now
I feel like I did the right thing, even if it took
me a while to get there.”
Who, then, is Matthew Gregory Kuchar?
Zach Johnson, one of Kuchar’s clos-
est friends and a Sea Island neighbor, says
“There is no one on the PGA Tour whose
image is more different than who he really is
than Matt Kuchar.”
That isn’t a reference to the Ortiz inci-
dent. And no, Kuchar isn’t like David Simms,
the character in “Tin Cup,” whose pristine
image hid the fact that he didn’t like chil-
dren or old people.
But there’s very much a little bit of the
devil in him.
“I think it comes from my father’s side
of the family,” he says. “Whenever my dad
and his family get together, there’s usually
a lot of joking and pranking going on.”
“Put it this way,” says Jim Furyk, who
selected Kuchar as a vice captain for last
year’s Ryder Cup team. “To be in a room
with a lot of people and know there’s one
guy Phil Mickelson will not take on when it
comes to giving people a hard time—and
know it’s Kooch—should tell you all you
need to know. Phil thinks he’s the king,
except for Kooch. He owns Mickelson to the
point where Phil just gave up.”It isn’t just one-liners. Kuchar works
at his humor. In 2013, on the night before
the Presidents Cup began, the other 11
American players and captain Fred Couples
walked into the team room and found large
“fathead” images of each of them on the
walls of the room. Each photo had a T-shirt
that went with it, but they were jumbled so
that the players had to guess which shirt
went with each image.
“The funniest one was Tiger’s,” says
Davis Love III, an assistant captain on thatteam. “It had the word ‘TEAM’ across the
front, and in the middle of it was a red ‘I.’
Underneath, it said, ‘There is an ‘I’ in team.’
Everyone, including Tiger, broke up.”
Despite four Ryder Cup appearances and
nine PGA Tour victories, Kuchar’s journey is
a good deal different from that of the typical
multimillionaire PGA Tour player.
Yes, he was a star growing up in Florida,
highly recruited as a golfer, choosing Geor-
gia Tech, in part because the golf team
had access to a number of top courses, but
also because he thought it would be a good
place to prepare for the business world if he
didn’t become a professional golfer.
His path changed when he won the U.S.
Amateur in the summer of 1997 after his
freshman year. The thought of winning the
Amateur the first time he played in it had
never really occurred to him.
“When I got to the semis, the other three
guys were Randy Leen, Joel Kribel and Brad
Elder,” Kuchar says. “All three of them had
just played on the Walker Cup team a week
earlier. I knew I wasn’t in their class.”
Kuchar remembers being so jumpy the
morning of his semifinal against Leen that
he couldn’t eat a bite. “Never been more
nervous in my life,” he says. “I knew the im-
plications of the day. If I won, I’d be in the
Masters. I was terrified.”
He was so terrified that “somehow”—
his word—he birdied four of the first five
holes and won, 6 and 5. The next day, in the
36-hole final, he built a big lead on Kribel
and hung on to win, 2 and 1.
That meant two months before turning
20, he would tee it up on the first day of the
1998 Masters with the defending champion:
Eldrick (Tiger) Woods.
“OK, I might have been just as nervous
that morning,” Kuchar says. “I still remem-
ber walking through this wall of peoplefrom the putting green to the first tee. Tiger
went first, and of course, the place went
nuts for him. I figured I’d sneak on the tee
behind him and get two claps. But I got a
huge cheer. I was very happy when I was
able to get my tee in the ground without
falling over.”
Kuchar shot 72 that day (Woods shot 71)
and finished T-21 with his dad on the bag.
Then he finished T-14 at the U.S. Open. By
then, corporate America was lining up to
make him rich as soon as he turned pro,‘at least now i feel like i did
the right thing, even if it took me
a while to get there.’