Vegas plays to keep sport alive at home

It will never replace baseball and soccer as the nation's pastimes, but his success could save it from extinction.

"I just want to improve golf in my country, make it grow," he said.

Being the first golfer from Venezuela to win on the PGA Tour and compete in the Masters Tournament is a good start. Even leftist leader Hugo Chavez likes anything that can give him an opportunity to claim superiority.

"He beat all the gringos," the Venezuelan president said in a national address after Vegas prevailed in a playoff at the Bob Hope Classic in January.

Chavez has been waging a calculated campaign against golf for years, seizing nine courses (including the Morichal course in eastern Venezuela where Vegas learned to play as a boy) to build public housing. He rails against the game as "bourgeois" and paints it as a sport for rich, lazy people who ride in carts.

"I respect all sports," Chavez said in an article in The New York Times . "But there are sports and there are sports. Do you mean to tell me this is a people's sport? It is not."

Vegas hopes to change Chavez's mind before any of the 20 courses left are closed.

"He's the president. He does whatever he feels like," Vegas said. "He's always said that golf is for elite people, I guess, and which as we all know here it's not that way. But I guess that he's got that mentality. So I really hope to sit down with him and talk to him and tell him that it's not that way."

His first victory and Masters debut have made Vegas a local hero mentioned along homegrown baseball icons Omar Vizquel and Andres Galarraga.

"I'm happy the president has shown some support in Jhonattan by mentioning him and respecting him by the accomplishment he has made," said his father, Carlos Vegas. "We're very happy for our country to have this first guy to do these things and motivate the sport in the country. They didn't have a clue about golf two weeks ago, and now everybody is going crazy and they want to play golf."

The 6-foot-2, 230-pound Jhonny Vegas wins over fans with his 320-yard drives and 1,000-watt smile. He learned to play the game hitting rocks with broomsticks, breaking windows in his house before building his passion on the nine-hole, oil-camp course where his father served as greenskeeper, caddie and concessionaire and played to a scratch handicap himself.

"I always had that golf in me, and I found a great connection from the beginning," Vegas said. "My parents played golf. We're a family that surrounds everything with golf."

At 17, he came to the U.S. in 2002 for the Junior Worlds in San Diego and decided to stay in the custody of former Venezuelan World Cup golfer Franci Betancourt in Houston.

He knew little English but within a year was able to pass a proficiency exam and the SATs to get into the University of Texas. He graduated in 2008, a four-year letterman, with a degree in kinesiology.

"It took me a year and a half to get decent at it," he said of English. "I surrounded myself with a lot of Americans. They don't know any Spanish, so I had to force myself to speak it. And just kind of over the year listening to them and just trying to find a way to communicate to them, and that's how I progressed and kept getting better."

His game did, too. He nearly made it to the Masters in 2007, reaching the semifinals of the U.S. Amateur at The Olympic Club before losing to eventual champion Colt Knost.

In 2010, he won in Wichita on the Nationwide Tour to help secure his PGA Tour card, then added a six-shot victory in the Argentine Open in December.

"It's incredible what he's done and very significant for South American golf," said 2009 Masters champion Angel Cabrera of Argentina. "To generate this type of enthusiasm and expectations is the best seed that could be sown in Latin America for the development of the sport."

With a remarkable par after driving the ball in the water on the second playoff hole at the Hope, Vegas beat Gary Woodland and booked a trip to the Masters, which he started watching when Tiger Woods won in 1997.

"I think it's going to be a dream come true," he said. "Playing the Masters is, I guess, something that is on everyone's radar. To play the golf tournament will be phenomenal. Like I said, it's one of those magical places in the world that everyone wants to be a part of."

It will be the dream of his father as well, who once asked his son "before I die, just please get me to the Masters."

"I don't want to be cocky," Carlos said with a smile. "A lot of his game, he's polished a lot of the rough parts that he had in it -- the short game and the putting. Being a long striker and a great accuracy guy for the most part, (Augusta National) really fits his eye really well. So don't be surprised if this may be the year that he makes a surprise at Augusta."