feb ames feature

Stephen Ames is in the locker room. He is standing with a golf club running across his shoulders, his hands drooped lazily over the shaft and his foot up on the bench. He is in his preaching pose, “Life is about conveniences not inconveniences, you must have found that out by now, you’re old enough?”

His eyes are wide, expectant, and he’s flashing those pearly white teeth. Of course, it’s not supposed to be like this. There is something wrong and unnerving here. Pro golfers usually field questions, they don’t throw them back at you. Least of all Stephen Ames whose relationship with the press, his peers and a number of other acquaintances is often a prickly one. Yet here he is, enjoying some between-round banter on all manner of subjects from Canadian citizenship to payment for pros.

“What else do you want to know?” he challenges. “Next question, what’s next on your list?” Ames can be in your face, defiant, stubborn and intentionally provocative. Popularity among his fellow pros has never appeared to be all that high on his agenda. He is a man who has never been short of confidence on the golf course, speaks a good game off it and frequently speaks his mind when others might choose a more diplomatic route.

“Patriotism. You were saying that you don’t like Americans,” I say (this isn’t entirely true, it was more that we were scoffing at their over patriotic nature). The word patriotism had been underlined in my notebook when Ames was explaining that he had never, and will never, want to live in the United States of America.

“Their country has a lot offer,” he muses, “it’s probably the best country to live in when it comes to conveniences, that’s probably why they are so patriotic. There are a handful of them that see the rest of the world for what it is and they then realise that they shouldn’t be bitching about their $3.75 for a gallon of gas.”

There you go, an example of Stephen shooting from the hip, or is it lip? He says things that make you uneasy as to who might be listening in. A journalist’s dream then.

Ames, it transpires, has some issues when it comes to nationality. He was born and grew up in Trinidad & Tobago, but now lives in Canada. He has plied his trade in Europe, for which he gained a British passport (“it makes the travelling easier”), but is now a regular on the PGA Tour in the States.

“My heart is still in Trinidad. But my home is elsewhere? My wife is Canadian and my two boys were born there, that has become home now. I’ve got more support out of Calgary, or out of the nation that adopted me, than I’ve ever had out of my own country where I was born because of this.” He leans forward tapping the back of his hand and whispers, “because I have the wrong coloured skin.” Cue another glance around the locker room before looking back at Ames, who is still looking directly at me.

There is no question that his brain to mouth filter can sometimes fail him, like the time he suggested, after winning a spot at Augusta as the Players champion of 2006, that a week away with the wife and kids was more important than a week in Georgia. In golfing terms, it was sacrilegious and he realised as much, changing his opinion in time to notch up an 11th place finish behind Phil Mickelson.

And then there was his altercation with Tiger Woods over an observation he made on the eve of his first round encounter with the World No.1 at the Accenture Match Play, also in 2006.

“I said that from the places he was hitting it, when his driving wasn’t very straight, it was phenomenal that he kept winning stuff,” he explains.

The media saw it as a dig at Tiger, added the necessary slant and Ames faced a resolute Woods at La Costa. The result was a 9&8 thrashing.

“He made nine birdies in the first 10 holes. I didn’t get clobbered by the fact that he was wayward and then hit it stiff. He hit it down the middle, on the green and made the putt. Anybody playing him that day would’ve lost,” says Ames who still feels sore at what he sees as having been stitched up by the press.

What makes matters worse is that the incident refuses to go away. Ames was in the penultimate group on the last day of the US Open this summer and then in the final group, paired with Woods, at the USPGA.

The question was an obvious one, but Ames made his feelings felt before the reporter had finished. “Stephen, it’s been a while, but a lot was made of your comments at the Match Play about Tiger…I see you rolling your eyes?”

“Are we here at the PGA Championship or are we at the Match Play? Which one are we talking about?” he snapped.

The questioner persevered: “What I’d like to ask you is, you’ve said it was out of context. Can you just, for the record, say what it was that you meant to say in the first place and why it was out of context?”

Ames was having none of it. “I don’t know if I want to go there because you might take it out of context again. So we’ll leave it at that. Next question.”

The odd thing is that one gets the feeling Ames quite enjoys these skirmishes with the pen pushers. He’s self-confident and cocky and for such personality types, an audience can provide a moment of titillation. On another occasion, he was asked what he had in a bunker. The answer expected would have contained a yardage, but Ames responded with “A ball and sand.”

All this hostility does him no favours which is a shame because there is another side to Stephen Ames. Back home, he isn’t just a pro golfer, but he’s Ames the restaurateur, Ames the organiser of golf tournaments for young kids. For all his rancour at being shunned by his homeland, he still runs an event for two junior teams every year, one from Trinidad and Tobago and the other from Canada. It’s 1-1 so far. And in Calgary, he has just opened his second restaurant, ‘The Vintage’.

Ames’ career has been a slow progression, with the only time out coming in 2005 when his wife Jodi fought off cancer and, understandably, her husband lost his focus.

But Ames stock as a world player has been on the increase, apart from his lively showing in the majors, he closed the season on a high by winning at Disney. He is destined for more press centres next season and a seat closer to the imperious World No.1.

Ames, like many of the ‘minnows’ in Tiger’s pool has something of a love/hate relationship with him. It’s hard to find a subject to talk about where the name Tiger Woods doesn’t come up. Even in his moments of glory when he would walk onto tees and be announced as the ‘Players Champion’.

“It has a nice ring to it, but you don’t want to be playing with Tiger though. He’s won this one, that one and the other one… You’re like, ‘Okay, that’s enough’. I think Phil did that one year. He said to the guy, ‘Okay, that’s enough, let’s play’.”

Ames has just splashed water on his face from the wash basin and is now staring at himself in the mirror.

We talk about contending in majors. “As a player this is what we try to achieve – to win one or two. In the case of Tiger, he’s trying to make 18. So everybody has a different goal.”

And winning tournaments: “Winning, obviously, takes a little pressure off you. But I think that’s because of the depth of the field, it’s harder to win now. I think that’s probably why we have such a lackluster of superstars. Besides Tiger and Phil, there aren’t too many other players you would characterize as superstars.”

I decide to stay with Woods. “Do you get on with Tiger now?”

“You say ‘get on’. Does anybody? I congratulated him on the birth of his daughter because I knew how important it was to him to have children after the influence of his dad. He’ll be a great father. The point is you don’t tell Tiger anything about Tiger, you just don’t pass comment because without doubt it lifts him up. He’s gonna kick your arse.

“When I tee it up with him I know that he’s the better player. He’s proved that. Look at my record and then look at his. I don’t think there is anyone out there right now who really believes they can beat him.

“He is way ahead of us all. He has the perfect power game. I followed Faldo in his prime, he was a great ball striker and did what he needed to do to win majors. He wasn’t a big hitter, but he controlled his ball. It used to be a game of finesse, but now it’s a game of power. Tiger’s so strong that he can miss it and still have the strength to get to the green from the rough.”

I put it to him that the psychological hold Woods has over his fellow competitors seems to drive the oxygen from the air.

“No not at all, I admire the guy. Psychological power? I don’t think he has any,” corrects the Canadian.

But surely Ames can’t really believe that? Besides, there was a contradiction on the Saturday of the USPGA when he was asked how he might get on playing alongside the favourite.

“I haven’t got a clue,” he responded, “I’ve never been in a major with him in the last group. He has that influence on players. It’s probably going to happen to me. I don’t know.”

Well, we do know now and it did. Ames hooked his tee shot into the trees and went on to shoot 76. The occasion got to him that day and the new swing, the one he had been working on since November 2006, suddenly looked fragile.

He had changed it because of back pain, standing a little taller over the ball and with quieter hands in the first move. He has always been a finesse player rather than a power one, which is why he talks so fondly of Faldo. Here’s a player who is into shot-making and versatility. A strong wind just adds to the challenge as he tried to explain to an American journalist when talking about golf at the Open, “…you can hit 5-irons 150 yards. I mean when was the last time you did that?”

“All the time,” came the reply.

I ask him how accurate he thinks the public’s perception is of a tour player.

“Not at all,” he says. “They think it’s all glory. There are times when we are playing golf and we don’t want to play, we just want to run off the course and go home. Also, I don’t think we look like we are enjoying ourselves as much as we should. It’s all too business like.”

“But you get well paid.”

“We’re underpaid compared to other sports. We work six, seven hours a day. That’s well over 35 hours a week and we are the elite, the top one per cent of the population of the whole world that play this game. Yup, we’re underpaid, big time. When you consider the fact that in America you get guys that can throw a ball and get $100m over 10 years. Who are you kidding? And they only have to work three days a week for 10 weeks a year.

“Also, those guys get everything paid for, while we have to pay ourselves. People don’t know that either. All the sports teams in the United States, everything is paid for, they don’t take a cent out of their pockets. We pay for everything, psychologists, trainers, coaches, caddies and hotels.

“That’s in the range of $300,000 to $500,000 a year. Then if you have a private plane like Tiger does, the figure is in the millions.” There’s that mention of Tiger again, all too often a common denominator in his train of thought.

As Ames turns and leaves the locker room, it’s tough to be too sympathetic. He made over $2millon last season, enough for his own jet if he ever decided he needed one.

This feature originally appeared in the January issue of Golf World magazine. Subscribe here.