Wife, son gave Vaughn Taylor perspective in struggle to return to PGA Tour

Vaughn Taylor discovered the cruel side of golf once his game started to disappear in 2011.

“It can break you down,” said Taylor, who won in 2004 and 2005 and played on the 2006 Ryder Cup team before his struggles began. “It’s a unique game. It can get the best of you.”

Taylor, who lives in Evans, nine miles from Augusta National Golf Club, even shed tears of frustration during tournament rounds before his surprise win at Pebble Beach in February.

“I remember I cried so many times on the golf course when I was struggling and not playing well,” said the 40-year-old, whose Pebble Beach win earned him a spot in this week’s Masters Tournament. “I tried my best to hide it but I cried. It brought me to tears. I would think, ‘Why is this happening to me? This is my life.’”

The missed cuts and poor play on the PGA Tour and then the Web.com Tour would have “probably” driven him out of the game, Taylor said, if not for the support of his wife of nearly five years, Leot, and the birth of their son Locklyn, who is 2 years old.

“I finally realized there’s more to life than what score you shoot.” he said. “It doesn’t define me. We’ve had a little boy and I’ve found life is so much more important than what I shoot. Having a family gives you a different perspective on things.”

Before he had a family, Taylor said, “I was living and dying by the scores I was shooting and how my game was. That was all I really had before then – it was golf and that was really it. I have a couple of hobbies. Growing up playing golf, it’s an individual sport and I wanted to play for a living and you just get so into it and it just means everything. When you’re playing well, you enjoy it and it’s great. When you start playing bad, you can create a fear of losing it all and shooting bad scores. That fear kind of runs your life.”

Which led to his tears on the course. One of those instances, Taylor said, happened in Las Vegas.

“I wasn’t playing very well. I think it was No. 8, a long par-3 – 230 yards or something,” he said. “I finally hit a good shot that day and I airmailed the green and plugged in the back bunker in the worst possible place you could be. I had no shot, I blasted out to like 50 feet. I remember walking around to the putt to read it and frustration boiled over right there. … I was like, what am I going to do here? When am I going to win? What am I going to do to beat this game? What’s going on? I kneel down to read the putt and I started crying. I just put my head down so nobody could see me. I tried to get myself together. I had about 30 seconds. That one kind of stands out. It was probably the worst.”

Leot said the show of emotions illustrated how much he still wanted to perform well.

“I don’t think I ever saw him cry on the golf course, but I’ve seen him cry after rounds or after things didn’t work out or the culmination of events happened,” she said. “He’s a super sweet guy. He’s a great guy. For me, the tears showed that he cared, that his heart’s in it. That’s my husband and I’m proud of him. If he didn’t cry, I wouldn’t think he was in it for the right reasons.”

At Pebble Beach, Taylor, then ranked 447th in the world, closed with 7-under-par 65 and had to wait to see whether he’d be in a sudden-death playoff with Phil Mickelson, a five-time major champion. Mickelson needed to make a 5-foot birdie putt to force the playoff. When he missed, Leot lost it.

“Someone told me you cried a whole lot when he won,” said Loet, who notes that her husband’s win fell on Valentine’s Day. “And I said that’s because I didn’t cry for three years. When he was crying, I had to be positive, I had to tell him we’re going to get through this. There were times I wanted to cry with him. When you want something so bad and it’s not happening and you just wonder. … it wasn’t because he sat on the couch and didn’t work.”

FOR THE FIRST time since 2003, Taylor wasn’t exempt for the PGA or Web.com tours this year. He only got into Pebble Beach as an alternate because he had limited status as a former tour champion – and because Carl Pettersson withdrew.

Taylor might have been a man without a tour, but he continued to work on his game, practicing and playing.

“He got up every day, he got dressed and went to work,” Leot said. “To put it in perspective for the average person, imagine getting ready, getting dressed to go to work and not having a job to drive to. My husband went to an office every day, he went to practice, but he didn’t get to compete or he wasn’t in the tournament and wasn’t playing full time. But I
never pushed him. He’s done this long enough.”
The lack of status on any tour “really scared me,” Taylor said. “What was I going to do if I didn’t play well in the tournaments I could get into? Is this the end? What am I going to do? Go back to Web.com Q-school? I had a lot of bad thoughts. I didn’t have a whole lot to fall back on.”

He even thought of what he could do if he had to quit pro golf.

“I was thinking, worst-case scenario, I could teach. I met (NFL receiver) Wes Welker and he was asked if he was going to play another year. He said, ‘I think so, I’m not good at anything else.’ I’m not good at anything else (but golf) either. So worst-case scenario was I could teach. I didn’t want to sit in an office.”

His wife, playing the role of cheerleader, would step in and offer encouragement.

“He’s had a great career,” Leot said. “My husband is in the smallest percentage in the world doing what he does. Even in his worst years, there’s people who only dream to get a chance to play like he plays. Before Pebble Beach happened, over the last couple of years, I would ask him, ‘If at 12 years old when you really started getting into golf and somebody told you you’re going to be on a Ryder Cup team, you’re going to win twice, you’re going to be a member of the tour with past champion status, you’ll travel to all the places you’ve traveled, what would you have said?’ And he said, ‘I would have considered it a success.’

“I said, ‘Well, you’ve been a success already. So always look at that. Once you’ve been somewhere, it’s easy to get back. And you can get back there because you know what it takes.’ I always knew he’d get back there. I just kept reminding him of that. I’ve always known he had the talent.”

SO DID TAYLOR. It was just that off-the-course obstacles – and bad luck – continued to get in his way, like what happened in the four-event Web.com Tour Finals last year.

“Even though I was playing well, I missed the first tournament with a random foot injury,” Taylor said.

Then he cut his thumb on a fishing hook, but he still played well enough to be in the running for full status on the tour coming into the final event in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.

“I made the cut and went to the last hole knowing I needed to make a birdie to have full status. I missed a 12-foot birdie putt and I kind of knew I’d miss it by a shot. I couldn’t even look at the sheet. There was a lot of low points, but that was pretty tough.”

Still, he continued to believe.

“I knew I had some game left,” Taylor said. “I feel like my swing and my putting can have longevity. I don’t have a short, fast swing or fast-paced putting stroke. I feel like I can play for a long time with my tempo and rhythm. That’s a big part of golf. I always believed I could get it back at some point.”

He also didn’t appreciate talk that his best days might be over because he was approaching 40.

“It’s tough to hear,” he said. “That can play in your subconscious and head. You can get voices in your head. You’ve got to block it out. It’s a tough battle all the way.”

Leot saw her husband’s game coming around last year when he split time on the Web.com Tour and whenever he could get into PGA Tour events.

“I thought last year was a great year. He made 12 of 13 cuts on (the PGA) tour, finished 151st on the money list, less than a full stroke away from getting conditional status,” she said.

During some of Taylor’s lowest points came one of the highest: the birth of Locklyn.

“We have a very strong marriage and family,” Leot said. “The best thing that has happened to us in the past two years is Locklyn. Despite golf not going so well, our family went really well.”

If his poor play had any silver lining, it was that he spent more time home and was able to see his son start to grow, she said.

“He got to be home when he was born,” Leot said. “He didn’t miss the first time he crawled or walked. He got to be home for everything. He got to celebrate a lot of big milestones that unfortunately a lot of golfers have to make that decision about. Because he wasn’t playing full time it just worked out that he didn’t have to make that decision. In that sense, I feel like we were really blessed. Our worst years or struggles were things people dream of. We always kept that in perspective.”
Now that Taylor has a two-year exemption
on the tour for winning at Pebble Beach, his family can travel with him more because he can set his schedule.

“He doesn’t have to go to a (PGA Tour) Mon­day qualifier,” Leot said. “If he didn’t get in, he’d have to run to a Web event. There were lot of questions before.”