An American original on tour - Native American golfer Notah Begay

Golf Digest, July, 1999 by John Strege

Native American Notah Begay is pumped up to make his mark at the game's highest level

Hoops dangle from both his ears, perhaps the first pair pierced on the PGA Tour, a pop-cultural vacuum where typically only a ball gets tattooed. If this alone makes Notah Begay III unique, what then is he when you also factor in that he is a Stanford-educated Native American who quotes Greek philosophers, consumes more than 20 vitamins a day and shoots 59 while putting right- and left-handed? "He's very unique," says Casey Martin, his close friend and former college teammate, who might have unwittingly concluded that, with Begay, degrees of uniqueness are required. "He's just the antithesis of the traditional, conservative, upper-middle-class white golfer. He's just different."

What he is is an American original, from any perspective-notably a branch in the family tree. Begay, 26, is a full-blooded Native American: His father is Navajo, his mother equal parts Isleta and San Felipe. And he spent seven years of his youth living on the Isleta Indian Reservation south of Albuquerque.

Attempting to tailor a stereotype to fit Begay is a fruitless endeavor, even as he describes himself as a warrior who once arrived on the first tee of a college tournament with red clay beneath his eyes. Indeed, it's his mission to dispel stereotypes-of professional golfers and Native Americans.

"We're real people," he says in defense of the latter. "We're not the romanticized stereotyped characters you see in cartoons and movies."

Only the plight is similar. Par on the reservation is poverty and hopelessness, neither a springboard to a Stanford education nor a career in golf, yet Begay has both. He has a degree in economics and last year finished 10th on the Nike Tour money list to graduate to the PGA Tour.

Begay has combined his disciplines to develop a forte: an economy of strokes. He shot 59 in the Nike Dominion Open last year and once shot a record 62 in the NCAA Championship. His ability to shoot low scores, he says, reflects his reliance on cultural stroke savers passed down by his mother, lessons on respecting his surroundings and "what Mother Earth provides for us day in and day out."

Becoming 'one with the game'

When the birdies start, they don't necessarily stop, "because I have that respect," he says. "I'm able to elevate myself to a higher level of spirituality. I become one with the game, with the course I'm playing, with the event I'm in. I don't perceive myself as separate from those things, because I respect the game, I respect the opportunity. I just go with it with all my heart. I let it take me where it wants to take me."

Begay's game evolved over time at Ladera Municipal in Albuquerque, where at the age of 9 he began working in exchange for a waiver of the green fee or for a bucket of balls. Feeding a golf habit was beyond the means of divorced parents, who determined that whatever sacrifices they made would be better di-rected toward education. "You set goals according to what you see," Begay says. "You see that your cousins and your friends are not going on to a four-year college or even community college. That's as high as the bar has been raised. Luckily for me, my parents struggled, but they worked their butts off to send me to a private prep school."

He eventually enrolled at Stanford to prove to doubting classmates at the Albuquerque Academy that he could gain admission, one instance of his reluctance to shy from a challenge. Another came at the U.S. Amateur in 1995, when he was a victory away from a match with Tiger Woods, his Stanford teammate. "I want to play him," Begay said at the time, "because I know how to beat him."

Pining for Woods in the U.S. Amateur perhaps was not an endorsement of the intelligence that a Stanford degree implies. Occasionally, Begay's mind seems to short-circuit. To wit: As a college sophomore and already regarded among the best collegiate putters in the country, he and Martin decided they would putt better if they became switch-putters, based on the popular premise that a right- to-left putt is easier for a right-hander and a left-to-right putt is easier for left-handers.

The concept was sound in theory, Martin says, but not in practice: "When I got over the ball [putting left-handed] I felt like I was on Mars." Begay, too, was a galaxy away from feeling comfortable, but he chose to persevere (see story below). "I felt there was a definite edge," he says. "But it wasn't going to be realized in the short term." Begay claims he is now a better putter as a result. "I honestly don't think so," Martin says. "I think he just likes being different. But he was brave enough to stick with it. Stanford breeds a definite openness to ideas."

In 1995, Begay decided he needed to reconstruct the eyesore of a swing that he had cobbled together as a youth. He chose Moe Norman's Natural Golf, but after a year failed to advance beyond unnatural. So he reconciled with his old swing, concluding that whatever mess it created ("if they paid us on esthetics, I'd be looking for a job"), he possessed a short game that could clean up after it. The combination of the two worked effectively enough to have produced a scoring average of 70.09, fifth on the Nike Tour last year.