The son of a Masters champion, Kyle Coody dreamed of winning a green jacket like his father, Charles Coody, a three-time PGA Tour victor, including in 1971 at Augusta National. Unfortunately for Kyle, his professional golf career took him to many places – Asia, Canada, South Africa – but never the Tour – outside of a pair of starts. He tried his hand at Qualifying School seven times and failed to advance to final stage on each occasion.
His last attempt at earning his card, in 1996, was most heartbreaking. In the mix to finally break through, Kyle, with Charles on the bag, played the wrong ball with his approach shot on the 13th hole of his final round – or maybe it was the 14th hole, he second guesses, having worked hard to rid his memory of the gory details.
“It was the only time in my life I’d ever done that,” said Kyle, who would miss the cut by two shots. Shortly after that, he hung it up. “I just ran into a roadblock at tour school every year, and when you get to be 30 years old with no desire to travel overseas and you want to start a family, it was time to do something else.”
Twenty-six years later, Kyle is now the father of twin boys, Pierceson and Parker, who are in the infant stages of their professional golf careers and fresh off leading the University of Texas to the NCAA Championship.
And he’s back at Q-School.
While Pierceson kept full Korn Ferry Tour status thanks to a win last summer on the developmental circuit, Parker had to navigate second stage last month. With Kyle carrying the bag, Parker tied for fourth in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to make it through by five shots.
“You bet your butt I checked every single thing possible – counting clubs, checking golf balls, everything,” Kyle quipped. “I don’t think I’ve ever been that nervous caddying for Parker. I had never made it to final stage as a player, and I didn’t want to be a jinx for my son, re-living all my nightmares. I did the best I could to keep my mouth shut, and Parker played great.”
And now, Kyle gets a break, having been relegated to spectating duties for this week’s final stage, which begins Friday at The Landings Club in Savannah, Georgia, where Parker is among 149 players vying for fully exempt status (to the winner) or some form of guaranteed starts in what marks the final Q-School before PGA Tour cards (well, a handful of them) are again up for grabs starting next fall.
“I love my dad, but it’s about time for him to get off the bag,” said Parker, who is employing Pierceson’s caddie, Daniel Gregory, this week.
Meanwhile, Pierceson is back home in Dallas nursing another broken bone. Both twins, competitive as all hell, had previously suffered nearly identical radial-head fractures in their right arms after running into a wall during a relay race inside the Longhorns’ indoor weight room last December. They rebounded from the freak accident, of course, with a national championship. This time, Pierceson broke the hamate bone in his left hand, an injury that forced him to withdraw from the KFT Finals finale in Newburgh, Indiana, in early September.
The week prior, in Columbus, Ohio, Pierceson started experiencing numbness in his fingers. He missed the cut, took a few days off and then headed to Victoria National, where the hand worsened.
“The pain built really fast,” said Pierceson, who gutted out a first-round 72 before withdrawing, ending his last-chance bid for a PGA Tour card. “I knew something was not right.”
PIERCESON WAS INITIALLY DIAGNOSED with a pinched nerve, but after 10 days of rest didn’t improve the injury, he saw a hand specialist, who discovered the fracture, the result of overuse.
“He started pounding balls in the middle of January when he came back from that broken arm and didn’t take any time off after that,” Kyle said. “He was just go-go-go.”
Pierceson, and his brother for that matter, have always lived life full bore. When they were rehabbing their arms, they’d work out in the morning, eat lunch, then work out some more before eating dinner, going to bed and doing it all over again the next day. They also played a ton of ping-pong – with their non-dominant hands.
But this injury was different. Kyle tells the story of Pierceson asking the doctor post-surgery what all he needed to do to ensure his hand healed properly and quickly.
“Open your fingers, and close them,” the doctor answered. To which Pierceson replied, shocked, “That’s it?”
Last Tuesday marked exactly a month since surgery to remove the compromised bone. Pierceson said he’s currently having no issues with non-weight-bearing tasks; he was holding his phone with the hand during the interview for this story, but he’s still about a week away from putting real pressure on it. He expects to be full-strength by mid-December and ready for his first full KFT season, which begins Jan. 15-18 in Great Exuma, Bahamas.
In just 11 starts last season, Pierceson managed to finish No. 32 in KFT points. He fired three rounds of 63 or better, including a second-round 62 in Maine that spurred his first professional victory. He notched two other top-10s, but otherwise was inconsistent, missing five cuts. He also had a tee ball kick off a tree and out of bounds during his final round in Utah that had it stayed in, and he made par instead of double bogey, he would’ve earned enough points that week to secure his Tour card.
“A lot of ups and downs, and so many different thoughts that went through my head,” Pierceson said, “but I’m still very happy with where I put myself this year, and I believe that I can do what I need to do to get my Tour card.”
It’s easy for others to think about how circumstances could have been different for Pierceson. Last May, he turned down what he described to Golf.com as “crazy money” – and a lighter schedule – from the Saudi-backed LIV Golf league. Meanwhile, Oklahoma State’s Eugenio Chacarra, who beat Coody in the quarterfinals at Grayhawk, couldn’t resist what was reportedly an eight-figure payday; he then won the event in Bangkok last month and collected a jarring $4.75 million.
But Pierceson, who cashed $194,709 in his abbreviated KFT campaign, has zero regrets. He can’t help but point to his friend and mentor, world No. 2 Scottie Scheffler, who had expressed to Pierceson how beneficial he felt his time, though brief, in the Tour’s minor leagues was to his development. Scheffler earned guaranteed starts by a shot at Q-School in 2018 before going on to win twice on the KFT and this year add four victories on Tour, including the Masters, en route to nabbing PGA Tour Player of the Year honors and reaching No. 1 in the world.
“He had to get up and down on his final two holes just to earn starts,” Pierceson said. “That’s the cool stuff. That’s what pro golf is. It never has been a handout. It’s the way my grandad did it. It’s the way my dad tried to do it, and I have always planned on doing it that way and never pictured myself going any other path. However things fall now or in 10 years, I can accept it because I love playing golf, and trying to get to the PGA Tour, that’s what I’ve always dreamed about. … I didn’t want the handout.”
Besides, as Pierceson explains, he couldn’t fathom playing for just money or titles and accolades of little meaning. “I couldn’t even tell you what the names of [LIV’s] tournaments are,” he added.
“I’m proud of him,” Kyle said. “That was one of the hardest discussions I’ve ever had with a 22-year-old, who was offered quite a bit of money, to turn that down.”
PIERCESON’S REJECTING OF LIV also had implications for Parker. The upstart tour wanted to lure the No. 1 player in last season’s PGA Tour University class away from the Tour pipeline so badly that they were willing to offer Parker a deal as well.
“Pierceson and I were on the same page,” Parker said. “We’ve always wanted to play the PGA Tour.”
Even if, in Parker’s case, it means bouncing around Canada for a few months. Kyle has always told his boys that when it comes to professional golf, “you’re going to get a lot of junk thrown at you.” Parker found that out the hard way this past summer.
“Canada opened my eyes to pro golf, that’s for sure,” Parker said.
During his first three-week stretch on PGA Tour Canada, he had his second event, in Elk Ridge, Saskatchewan, canceled after getting just three holes and spending the rest of the time watching it downpour from an expensive host resort.
“He calls me and goes, ‘The last thing I need right now, Dad, is a $2,500 vacation I can’t afford,’” Kyle said.
Further dampening Parker’s mood was a 14-hour travel day to the next tournament on Prince Edward Island. He was one of over two dozen players who had flights and bags delayed while connecting through Toronto. The mishap forced some players on Parker’s late Sunday night flight, which finally arrived at 2 a.m. the next morning, to Monday qualify with rental clubs (and even borrowed, beer-logoed attire). Parker was luckier; his clubs arrived at his hotel two nights later, followed the next evening by his bag of clothes.
The $150 taxi rides from the airport to the hotel and back weren’t fun that week. Neither were the three straight missed cuts in his second batch of events in late July.
“I went home after that, talked to my family, talked to my coaches, Troy Denton and Josh Gregory, and they all said, ‘Look, you have to have a good attitude,’ and they were right; I was ragging on it way too much,” Parker said. “I got in a better mindset, went up there to Winnipeg, and obviously things went well from there.”
Parker won the Manitoba Open in late August, firing a 62 of his own in the second round to win by eight shots at a whopping 27 under. He closed the season with three more made cuts, including a T-11, to finish No. 12 in points, which didn’t mean much considering he was already exempt into second stage of KFT Q-School via his top-15 showing in PGA Tour U. But it did boost his confidence before a year-deciding four days in New Mexico, where he closed in a smooth 67 after starting the final round near the cut line.
“Whatever it took, I told myself, you have to get out of second stage, because I did not want to go back to Canada,” Parker said. “This is a step in the right direction as far as just grinding it out, step by step, checking the boxes. But Q-School isn’t over. I still need to play well this week.”
TECHNICALLY, PARKER ALREADY HAS his KFT card, but he knows conditional status won’t always be enough to break into fields. He’d rather just win and be able to plan out his schedule along with Pierceson.
Kyle guesses the twins playing two different tours for the first time in their lives caused a little separation anxiety for the pair. Luckily, Parker developed a closer bond with Baylor grad Cooper Dossey, who jumped on Parker’s bag for the weekend in Winnipeg. And some of the KFT veterans took Pierceson under their wings.
Still, there’s nothing the Coodys would love more than for a reunion next season.
“Parker doing his part this week would go a long way to both of us feeling really comfortable out there and getting in a nice routine of playing, practice rounds, dinners, sharing hotels,” Pierceson said. “And I think he’ll take care of business. He had the success that he had up in Canada, had that runaway victory, so I think he believes that his good golf can go a long way.”
Ideally, all the way to the PGA Tour. Both Coodys.
“Our life has been the PGA Tour,” Kyle said. “It’s been great for our family, great for the career my dad had out there both on the PGA Tour and the senior tour, and you’re going to be loyal to that, whether the boys make it or not. Obviously, it can be devastating if you don’t get a career out of it, but it’s super rewarding when you beat the odds and earn it.”
As Pierceson says, “That’s all I want is to find a way to get there.”