Kragthorpe: Johnson's Masters win makes impact Nationwide
By Kurt Kragthorpe
Tribune Columnist
Salt Lake Tribune
By the time Zach Johnson slipped into his green jacket Sunday evening at Augusta National Golf Club, 10-year-old Jacob Byers was already suggesting marketing themes for the next staging of another golf tournament that Johnson once won.
Utahns will take any relationships to major champions they can get. And if having a golfer win the Masters four years after spending a successful week at Willow Creek Country Club is not quite the same as having a genuine Draper resident claim the title, it still hits home.
So it was that 3 1/2 years after Johnson made a lot of friends in Sandy, he joined Mike Weir, Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods on the list of recent Masters champions. His two-stroke victory over Woods and two other players was validating for Evan Byers, the director of the Nationwide Tour event now called the Utah Championship, which explains why Byers' son was busy coming up with promotional slogans after watching the telecast in Sandy.
"It's just a huge win for all of us," Byers said.
That obviously includes Johnson himself, who was struck by his long road from the mini tours to a major victory. "I got better and better every year," he said, "and looking back on it, it's amazing where I came from."
Sandy is one of those places. Yet the real story here is not so much that it's possible to go from winning in Utah to winning a major, as John Daly did in an 11-month stretch in 1990-91, but that performing at the Nationwide Tour level requires great talent.
It's not so much that Johnson went from earning $81,000 at Willow Creek to collecting $1.3 million at Augusta National, but that making nearly half a million dollars on the Nationwide Tour in that 2003 season is more than Johnson ever imagined when he was playing the Prairie Tour in the Midwest or the NGA Hooters Tour in the South and being financially supported by a bunch of guys from his hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Other former winners of the Sandy tour stop kept surfacing on the leaderboard of this Masters, including Brett Wetterich and Arron Oberholser. Johnson emerged above everybody, after having lost the lead with three consecutive bogeys to conclude Friday's round, staying close amid Saturday's trying conditions and moving ahead of Woods on the back nine Sunday.
It was the same story at Willow Creek in '03. except winning that tournament required shooting 21 under par, not 1 over par. Johnson went 65-65 that weekend, in a performance that led runner-up Bobby Gage to describe him as "tough as nails." That trait came into play at Augusta National, where "perseverance and patience," according to Johnson, was needed.
Johnson took advantage of the par-5s, playing those four holes in 11 under par over four days. He did the same thing at Willow Creek, only he was able to reach those holes in two shots. In the Masters, he relied strictly on the Weir method of laying up and using his wedge to set up birdies.
So the self-described "normal guy" went from fighting off Gage by one stroke to beating Tiger by two. Yeah, that's a leap. "As they say, the giant's got to fall at some point," Johnson said.
Johnson was the Nationwide Tour's king when he and his future wife, Kim, came to Utah and celebrated the victory that wrapped up Player of the Year honors. Sunday, fans who met them back then were naturally thrilled. It's worth retelling how Zach and Kim drove out of the Willow Creek parking lot for the sake of a TV production that night, then Johnson turned around, came back to the clubhouse and signed autographs for everybody.
"I actually root for Tiger all the time, but not today, when I saw that Zach was winning and Tiger was the only real threat," said Bill Crowe, a tournament volunteer.
Somehow, the Utah event has developed a history of selecting someday-famous champions. "When those guys win here, it really gives the people in the community an opportunity to remember a hero," Evan Byers said. "They get to meet him, they get to know him, they get to touch him."
Johnson already was on the cover of last year's Utah Championship program, thanks to making America's Ryder Cup team. Look for a repeat appearance in September. Jacob Byers' best marketing suggestion, so far: "Utah, where green jackets are made."
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E-mail: kkragthorpe@sltrib.com
