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It is not necessary to witness “The Shot in Dark”. Last minute tickets to a Pearl Jam concert at the Blossom Music Center. Ambushing Phil Mickelson with a cheering section as he threw batting practice before a now Akron Rubber Ducks game at Canal Park.
Justin Leonard hasn’t played at Firestone Country Club since 2010. But memories of Akron returned when he returned for his PGA Tour Champions debut at the Bridgestone Senior Players Championship.
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Leonard turned 50 on June 15, but said he had been preparing for his transition to the senior tour for the past year and a half. In addition to his schedule as a golf analyst for NBC Sports and recently moving his family from Aspen, Colorado, to Jupiter, Florida, he had plenty to keep him busy, especially a three-day trip with his 15-year-old son and four dogs to your new home.
Having won the Claret Jug in 1997, Leonard will head to St. Andrews next week to broadcast the 150th Open Championship. But that won’t change his focus on the $3 million Bridgestone event, the fourth of five major majors that opens Thursday on the famed South Course.
“I’m curious to see where my game is,” Leonard said. “There’s a big difference between playing with friends or playing with my kids and putting a scorecard in your pocket and trying to beat some of these guys. So I will say that I am managing my expectations. I hope to learn a lot from this week.
“But as far as results and stuff, I’m not really thinking about those things. I’m just trying to ease my return to competitive golf. I’ll play four or five events between now and the end of the season and get an idea of where these things are.”
The fun times Leonard had in Akron are still fresh, though perhaps not his tie for second place behind Tiger Woods at the World Golf Championship-NEC Invitational in 2000, when eventual eight-time Firestone winner Woods beat Leonard and Philip Price for 11 strokes.
Asked where he was for one of Woods’ most legendary finishes, Leonard said: “I think that was one of those years where I was going to win by 12 or something, so it’s not like I was in the field preparing for a playoff.”
Recalling Woods’ margin of victory, Leonard added: “Yeah, I won flight B, which is good. There is no trophy for that.
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Most of Leonard’s favorite stories come from off the field.
One year, in the days before he was immersed in satellite radio, he was driving to the countryside and heard mention of an upcoming Pearl Jam show. He found Phil Mickelson’s longtime caddy, Jim “Bones’ Mackay, a good friend who is in the music scene.
“I told him, ‘I think Pearl Jam is playing somewhere around here,’” Leonard said of Mackay. “He said, ‘I’m on it.’ An hour later, we had tickets. And that night, Davis Love and Bones and I drove 45 minutes to a great outdoor venue and saw Pearl Jam.”
Another night to remember came in 2003, when Mickelson held batting practice for the Akron Eros, then Double-A, and reportedly offered three $100 bills to any player who could hit a home run. None did.
“I may have, I may not have been eavesdropping, but I heard Phil talking about it with Bones, and he was like, ‘I’ll meet you here in the parking lot at 5:00,'” Leonard said. “So I put it away and told Davis and Fred Couples. I said, ‘Do you want to go look?’ And Fred was like, ‘I wouldn’t miss this for the world.'”
So Leonard told Love and Couples to meet in the parking lot at 4:50 pm so they could see Mickelson’s face when he arrived.
“He stops and we’re all sitting there, and Bones is like, ‘Oh, I don’t know how this is going to end,'” Leonard said. “Phil stops and says, ‘Hey guys, what’s everybody doing?’ He said, ‘We’re going to come cheer you on, big guy.’
“We went down and saw the whole scene. And Phil was very proud that no one hit him a home run. And our kind of argument, ‘Well, at least you have to throw a ball at 50 miles per hour to create enough speed for it to go out of the park.’
“We had a good time with it. Little things like that that happen along the way create these fun memories when I go back to a place like this.”
Considering Davis Love III was part of both of those classic stories, it’s no wonder he began his press conference with Leonard’s Champions Tour debut.
“I walked right onto the property and ran into Justin Leonard and got to play a practice round with him,” Love said, making his first appearance at Firestone since 2016. “He actually put a note on my car on Monday because he changed his phone number and where he lives and his job and now he’s here and excited to see you.
“It really made my day to go out and play with him. They all go up and call him ‘rookie’ and come from other streets to welcome him. He asked me a lot of questions about rules and procedures. I said, ‘You need to ask someone else, I’m not the best at asking.’ But we’ll go to the pro-am draw party when we’re done playing.”
Marla Ridenour can be reached at [email protected] Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MRidenourABJ.