When he answers the door to his suburban Dallas home in a T-shirt and gym shorts, it's hard not to notice how much Justin Leonard has evolved physically over the years. What was a scrawny upper body in 1997 now features shoulders carved like baby boulders. Those skinny legs have been redefined by taut muscle. But it's only after entering Leonard's white-brick, Spanish-style sprawl that you discover the most vital signs of his growth: daughters Reese, who will celebrate her second birthday next month, and Avery, who's 4 months old.
Turns out the hard-nosed Texan can be softer than a watered-down fairway.
"It's quite an adjustment," fellow Lone Star State tour pro Scott Verplank says of preserving a spot in the world ranking while starting a family. "Life at home is different, life on the road is different, and your priorities change a little bit. I'd say Justin has handled it about as well as anybody."
Having missed the cut at the Buick Invitational, his first start of 2005, Leonard drove from Torrey Pines to Palm Springs with his wife Amanda, who was six months into what would become a trying pregnancy, and Reese, who got sick shortly before the start of the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic. Of course, Mom caught the same bug, further complicating matters. But in a world where nannies are more useful than gap wedges, some PGA Tour dads actually know how to install a car seat.
"I had to take them to the clinic and get them checked out," Leonard says. "I called [caddie Brent Everson] and said, 'You're off today, go do whatever.' Five years ago, would I have ever done that? It would have been, 'Sorry, honey.' It's the day before the tournament, and I didn't touch a club."
Although nobody wins a tour event on a Wednesday, it took Leonard about a decade to figure that out. A 64-67 weekend at the Hope secured his first win in almost two years, serving up not so much an epiphany as a validation of his fully revised approach to competitive golf. Until last summer, Leonard rarely went more than a couple of days without hitting several large buckets. He was every bit the grinder you see on television, motivated not only by the challenge of keeping up with players who hit it 30 yards past him, but the fear that he might wake up one morning and forget how to draw a 4-iron.
By the middle of 2004, one might suppose he had forgotten. Leonard went five months -- February through June -- without a top-10 finish. He played 41 rounds during that period, shooting in the 60s just seven times. After three consecutive missed cuts at the end of the stretch, he contacted mental coach Gio Valiante.
"Justin has the same mind-set as most guys -- a puritanical work ethic," Valiante says. "But when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Playing bad? Work harder. Not only do you groove bad habits, but it deepens the cycle of frustration."
Leonard isn't the first undersized, overachieving Texan to live and die by the dig-it-out-of-the-dirt philosophy, although Ben Hogan never had two young kids or cashed a first-place check for $846,000. Through Valiante, Leonard finally began embracing the notion that less can produce more.
"I was playing 30-32 events a year and was just consumed by it," he says. "A week off was a missed opportunity -- somebody was out there trying to win a golf tournament, at least trying to get something done. Now, one week off isn't enough."
Nor is one victory. Twelve days after Avery's birth, Leonard finished tied for 13th at this year's Masters, spent a month at home, then capped a three-start run with his 10th career title: a good-news, bad-news win in Memphis. Three flawless rounds gave Leonard an 8-stroke lead heading into Sunday, which only turned his final trip around TPC at Southwind into a climb up Mount Everest. He needed a 7-foot par save at the 17th and a 3-footer for bogey at the last to hold off David Toms by a stroke, allowing Leonard to escape ownership of the largest blown 54-hole lead in tour history.
"The only thing I see is two wins by the end of May," says Valiante, who nonetheless claims responsibility for Leonard's wobbly finish. "I told him, 'Let's play the golf course the best way we can to win the tournament.' We had a game plan -- what looked like tentative golf was actually good golf in a conservative mode."
However rationalized, Memphis reprised an unsavory trend that has haunted Leonard since his playoff loss in the 1999 British Open -- an inability to slam the door on Sunday afternoon. His career has become a mix of pronounced extremes, making the big picture difficult to assess. There are the 10 victories, which include the 1997 British and '98 Players Championship, but two of the last three PGA Championships were Leonard's to win, and he claimed neither.
During the second half of the 1990s, Leonard staked a reputation as one of the game's great late chargers. At both the '97 British and '98 Players, he rallied from 5-stroke deficits in the final round. He had wiped out an identical margin to win the 1997 Kemper Open, so when he jarred the 45-foot putt that punctuated the historic U.S. comeback at the 1999 Ryder Cup, there was no denying Leonard's standing as one of the finest clutch performers of his generation. Nobody holed more bombs or did a better job of maintaining his composure under duress.
In recent years, however, the Sunday afternoon closer has become the opposite of his former self. It's not a subject Leonard is crazy about addressing, but he has never been one to handle reality with a weak grip.
"I am [satisfied] from the standpoint of the process I go through, the changes I've made, the way I look at the game and my preparation for tournaments," he says of his career direction since 2000. "I'm not as happy with the results, especially last year at the PGA. If I'd won that and we were sitting here talking, I'd probably feel a little different."
Leading by a stroke with one hole remaining at Whistling Straits, Leonard piped his drive but still had 217 yards into the monstrous, par-4 18th. Coming off bogeys at the 14th and 16th, it was easy to second-guess Leonard's decision to fire a 5-iron at a front pin on the massive, clover-shaped green.
"One foot from being perfect," says Butch Harmon, Leonard's swing coach since the start of 2001.
His ball parked on a grassy upslope just short of the putting surface, leaving him a relatively easy up and down, but Leonard failed to salvage par and ultimately lost in a three-man playoff to Vijay Singh.
If disappointment comes in a variety of flavors, this was different than the bitter taste that followed the 2002 PGA. Leonard played one of the best rounds of his life in a three-club breeze at Hazeltine National GC that Saturday, shooting a 69 on a day when two-thirds of the field couldn't break 75. It gave him a 3-stroke lead on the first tee Sunday. By the turn he was 2 shots back and fading fast -- a 77 left him in a tie for fourth, 6 behind Rich Beem.
"That round really bothered me for a couple of weeks," Leonard says. "But with a little bit of time, I realized it wasn't my day, which was pretty obvious from the get-go. I ended up not being close at all, which made it a little easier to take. I played so bad that I never had a chance."
With all due respect to the value of analysis, an in-depth examination of any high-level player becomes a matter of perspective. At 33, Leonard has compiled a formidable list of accomplishments, especially as a singles hitter fighting to survive in a perpetual home run derby. Three years into pro golf's monolithic power era, he remains remarkably consistent -- just once since 1996 has he failed to qualify for the season-ending Tour Championship. His average finish on the money list over the last decade is 16th, yet he hasn't made a Ryder Cup squad since 1999, which happens to be the last time the U.S. won. Leonard has as many victories as Jim Furyk, one fewer than Toms, three more than Mike Weir, all of whom rank as the tour's premier finesse technicians. By no means has the game passed them by, but it's not getting any easier, either.
"So many guys out here hit it so far, all they're looking for is one good week," Leonard says. "One week a year where they can find every [drive] and they're putting well. It has certainly taken a lot of skill out of the game. I know I can still work a golf ball. I hear guys saying you can't work the ball anymore. Not the one I'm playing. When I hit it crooked, it goes crooked. Don't tell me today's ball goes too straight, because it doesn't."
Leonard's brand of self-deprecating humor has always been as sharp as his shot-making prowess.
"When I came out here, most guys didn't count on one good week," he said. "You really couldn't, not the way purses were. You needed 10 weeks, and there's no point in aiming for just 10 weeks when you're playing in 28 tournaments. You got up for every week. You never cashed it in. You fought for everything you got. I'm not saying players don't do that now, but I think there are fewer guys who try to play consistent all year long. It's like, 'I'll swing for the fences, and if I find them all, I'll be fine.' There are more players like that now than there were 10 years ago."
At the end of 2000, Leonard terminated his relationship with Randy Smith, the head pro at his longtime home club in Dallas (Royal Oaks CC) and his swing coach since childhood. It had not been a good year for the wily Texan, who finished 14th on the money list but by his own admission, "only had like four good weeks." Harmon began altering what some considered a series of fundamental flaws in Leonard's swing.
"A lot of his weight was on his left foot [at address], which caused him to rock back," Butch said. "His left shoulder was almost lower than the right, and he took the club way past parallel."
Smith has long been considered one of the game's top instructors, but after 20 years with Leonard, it was tough for him to undo tendencies grooved long ago.
"I got him more on his right side and tilted his spine angle back," Harmon said. "What happened was, he was able to get more turn with a shorter backswing."
As for results, at least statistically, it's hard to tell much difference. Leonard's percentage of greens in regulation has barely moved since 1998, falling somewhere between 65.0 and 67.8 every year. He hit a career-best 74.5 percent of his fairways in '98, a number that has dropped to the mid-60s since coming to Harmon, although he has added 11 yards of length over the same period.
When Leonard reflects on leaving Smith, you can hear a certain amount of sadness in his voice.
"Probably the hardest decision I ever made," he says. "Such a good friend, and we'd worked closely for so long. I love the fact that he's more in demand now, that he was the PGA [of America's] Teacher of the Year after I left."
Smith won the honor in 2002. Three years later, he's still plenty smart enough to understand that on the PGA Tour, business comes before companionship.
But that doesn't mean losing Leonard didn't hurt.
"I remember him dragging around a little cloth bag with a Cool Whip tub in the bottom to keep his clubs from falling out," Smith says. "Not many club pros run into a kid with talent and heart like that. That's the thing I always remember. Any tour player wants more -- there's always the desire to raise the bar. I'm sure he felt he could hit it farther and higher [working with someone else], and in any relationship like that, you examine what you did, the mistakes you made and how you might have handled things differently."
To call Leonard "short" nowadays is a bit misleading. At 283.8 yards per measured drive (two per round), he currently ranks 117th, and is 139th in distance on all tee shots (275.3). Basically, that's long enough to compete at two dozen tour events per year and serve as a minnow in a sea full of sharks at two dozen others. Except for the Masters, however, most major setups are conducive to his skills.
"I see four consecutive top-25s [before a T-52 last month at St. Andrews] since we started working together," says Valiante, whose profession requires a pair of rose-colored glasses. "We're in Round 2 of a 10-round fight. Is he better than last year? Absolutely. Is he as good as he's going to be? No way."
That's about all one of America's best golfers can ask for. Justin Leonard has a wife he adores, two beautiful little daughters and a big house to remind him how good he has been over the years. Some guys would be very satisfied with it all, but in the never-ending pursuit to get better, some men must stumble upon the realization that it takes a long time to fill a trophy case, that winning and losing are best digested when surrounded by those who walk past that case every day.
"I'm a totally different competitor now," Leonard says. "The disappointments are easier, the high points more fun, because I've got a family to share them with. There's a big difference between losing the [British Open] playoff in '99 and losing the one last year at the PGA. It's because of where I am outside the game.
"The passion is there. It's just in a better place."
John Hawkins is a senior writer for Golf World magazine.