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No need to witness “The Shot in Dark.” Last-minute tickets to a Pearl Jam concert at Blossom Music Center. Ambushing Phil Mickelson with a cheering section as he threw batting practice before a now-Akron RubberDucks game at Canal Park.
Justin Leonard hasn’t played at Firestone Country Club since 2010. But memories of Akron came flooding back as he returned for his PGA Tour Champions debut in the Bridgestone Senior Players Championship.
Leonard turned 50 on June 15, but said he’d been preparing for his transition to the senior tour for the last year and a half. Coupled with his schedule as a golf analyst for NBC Sports and recently moving his family from Aspen, Colorado, to Jupiter, Florida, he had plenty to keep him busy, especially a three-day drive with his 15-year-old son and their four dogs to their new home.
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Winning the Claret Jug in 1997, Leonard will head to St. Andrews next week to broadcast the 150th Open Championship. But that won’t change his focus in the $3 million Bridgestone event, the fourth of five senior majors that opened Thursday on the famed South Course.
“I’m curious to see where my game is,” Leonard said. “There’s a big difference between playing with friends or playing with my kids and put a scorecard in the pocket and trying to beat some of these guys. So I’ll say I’m managing my expectations. I expect to learn a lot from this week.
“But as far as results and those things, not really thinking about those things. I’m just trying to ease my way back into competitive golf. I’ll play four or five events between now and the end of the season and get a sense of where these things are.”
The fun times Leonard had in Akron remain fresh, although perhaps not his tie for second behind Tiger Woods in the World Golf Championships-NEC Invitational in 2000, when eventual eight-time Firestone winner Woods beat Leonard and Philip Price by 11 shots.
Asked where he was for one of Woods’ most legendary finishes, Leonard said, “I think that was one of those years where he was going to win by 12 or something like that, so it’s not like I was on the range getting ready for a playoff.”
Reminded of Woods’ victory margin, Leonard added, “Yeah, so I won the B flight, which is nice. No trophy for that.”
Most of Leonard’s favorite stories come from off the course.
One year, in the days before he was immersed in satellite radio, he was driving to the course and heard an upcoming Pearl Jam show mentioned. He found Phil Mickelson’s longtime caddie, Jim “Bones’ Mackay, a good friend who is into the music scene.
“I told him, ‘I think Pearl Jam is playing somewhere here nearby,’’’ Leonard said of Mackay. “He said, ‘I’m on it.’ An hour later, we had tickets. And that night Davis Love and Bones and I drove 45 minutes to a great outdoor venue and saw Pearl Jam.”
Another night to remember came in 2003, when Mickelson threw batting practice to the then-Double-A Akron Aeros, reportedly offering three $100 bills to any player who could hit a home run off him. None did.
“I might have, I might not have been eavesdropping, but I heard Phil talking about it with Bones, and he said, ‘I’ll meet you here at the parking lot at 5,”’ Leonard said. “So I stored that away and told Davis and Fred Couples about it. I said, ‘Do you guys want to go watch?’ And Fred said, ‘I wouldn’t miss this for the world.'”
So Leonard told Love and Couples to meet in the parking lot at 4:50 p.m. so they could see the look on Mickelson’s face when he arrived.
“He pulls in and we’re all sitting there, and Bones is kind of like, ‘Oh, I don’t know how this is going to go over,’” Leonard said. “Phil pulls in and goes, ‘Hey, guys, what are you all doing?’ I said, ‘We’re coming to cheer you on, big guy.’
“We went down and watched that whole scene. And Phil was all proud that nobody hit a home run off of him. And our kind of argument, ‘Well, you have to at least throw a ball 50 miles an hour to create enough velocity so it can get out of the park.’
“We had a good time with it. Little things like that that happen along the way that kind of create these fun memories when I get to come back to a place like this.”
Considering Davis Love III was a part of both of those classic stories, it’s no wonder he led off his press conference with Leonard’s Champions Tour debut.
“I walked right onto the property and right into Justin Leonard and got to play a practice round with him,” said Love, making his first appearance at Firestone since 2016. “In fact, he stuck a note on my car on Monday because he changed his phone number and where he lives and his job and now he’s out here and just excited to see him.
“It really made my day to get out and play with him. Everybody’s riding up and calling him ‘rookie’ and they’re coming from other fairways to welcome him. He asked me a whole bunch of questions about rules and procedures. I said, ‘You need to ask somebody else, I’m not the best one to ask.’ But we’re going to the pro-am draw party when we get done playing.”
