Hitting balls on the range at TPC Scottsdale in Arizona preparing for qualifiers on the Web.com tour a decade after he finished high up the leaderboard in three of the four majors, Mark Hensby refuses to get down even though his career is at such a low ebb things can only get better.
The Australian had his annus mirabilis in 2005 and arrived at St Andrews in great form, having finished fifth in the Masters and third in the US Open. Playing alongside Graeme McDowell and Justin Leonard, he opened up with a five-under 67 in his first competitive round of links golf at the Open to sit one shot off the overnight leader Tiger Woods, who went on to become one of only five men to lift the Claret Jug twice at the Old Course.
Hensby’s 77 on the Friday undid much of the good work but he made the cut and climbed the leaderboard again over the weekend when first he played with Leonard again and then spent the Sunday in the company of his boyhood hero Greg Norman, Open champions both, and finished in a creditable tie for 14th.
“I loved it at St Andrews,” Hensby recalls. “I got there on the Tuesday and had the one practice round. It was such a different thing to play a course that unusual. It was kind of impressive and the double greens were interesting, the size of them. And on the fairways you wondered what the architect was thinking and why there was a bunker in such a place, then the next day the wind changed and you found out why.”
The experience stood him in good stead and, the same month, Hensby went on to win the Scandinavian Masters in a play-off from Henrik Stenson with a still record low for the tournament of 22-under, his first European Tour title, and was named in the Presidents Cup team by Gary Player. In Virginia the Australian picked up 3.5 points from four in a losing effort against the USA but that got him into the following year’s Open at Hoylake, where he finished tied for 22nd. Even then, however, Hensby was struggling for form and his results have tailed off ever since.
“I had a car crash in January [2006] in Arizona when a car pulled out on us and I ran into a power-line pole at 48mph. My five-year old son was in the front and he got air-lifted to hospital in a helicopter and our car was a write-off,” says Hensby, who as well as serious whiplash suffered injuries to his back and leg and damaged his right arm reaching out to protect his son.
“Two months after that I couldn’t feel my feet after about nine holes of golf but I tried to carry on playing. I’d worked so hard to get in the top 30 in the world and didn’t want to let it slide because of some stupid little accident.”
After an unsuccessful attempt to defend the Scandinavian Open title in July 2006 Hensby realised he needed to get healthy and pulled out of the US PGA at Medinah – “that was hard to do” – and took a rehab break.
On his comeback he began to get problems with his right arm which necessitated another four-month break and, after hitting a shot from the rough at the Memorial which sent shooting pains through the limb, he underwent shoulder surgery. He did contest the 2007 Open at Carnoustie after coming through international qualifying but failed to make the cut and since then has fallen away.
Hensby, now 44, is still in the US and Arizona-based. In his early days in the country in 1994 he slept in his car for three weeks at the Cog Hill driving range in Illinois after losing his lodgings when friends returned to Australia before they found him a place to sleep in the clubhouse as he tried to qualify for events.
Such determination remains. Hensby travelled back to Australia this year to play the Victoria Open and the Victoria PGA in February after missing out on getting through Q school and in the final analysis he added two more missed cuts to his record.
“If you’ve lost form and gone down with injury, Q school is not really the place to be,” he says. “They have made it tougher to get back and I miss it a lot.
“It’s difficult to get sponsors’ invites too, sometimes I think it’s a lot to do with who you know,” he adds. “Mike Weir wrote to the Riviera, where he won twice [the Northern Trust Open in 2003 and 2004] to get one, and was turned down, so I’m not the only one struggling.”
The Canadian left-hander has got a major to his name though, the 2003 Masters, and that opens a few more doors. Hensby’s high watermark in 2005 was a fifth-placed finish at Augusta – “I had seen the course on television and had a fair idea what to expect around the greens” – and a third at Pinehurst in the US Open.
Then he played with Michael Campbell in the third round and kept pace with him until the 17th when the New Zealander holed a bunker shot to get into the penultimate pair for the final round, which he went on to win by two shots from Woods.
“It’s a fine line between winning a major and not winning one,” adds Hensby, who shot a three-under 67 in Monday qualifying for the Wichita event late last month to miss out by a shot and a five-over 77 last week to miss out by several on the John Deere, the event where it effectively started for him.
“I’m really enjoying my golf now but I can’t seem to get anything to happen. For now I’m playing the qualifiers and trying get a little roll going. When you’ve been to the pinnacle it’s very hard to get back there,” he said.
“It’s hard to compete if you are not playing the tour but hopefully I can get back. I will be watching the Open on TV and wish I was playing at St Andrews.
“Kenny Perry and Fred Funk have both won tournaments in their late 40s, and Vijay Singh has too. Age isn’t going to stop us doing what we are doing. That’s an inspiration, that’s the target.”
And with that it was back to the range and another bucket of balls.
