Stephen Ames is part of a small cadre of PGA TOUR players who are citizens of the world, having lived, traveled and plied their trade on both sides of the prime meridian. It sounds like a very exotic life.
Ames began his golf experiences on a small, two-island country in the Caribbean, called Trinidad and Tobago. It is very close to the coast of Venezuela. About the distance from the Ponte Vedra Beach post office to Target. Or Solana Road and AIA to the Palm Valley Bridge. But of course, when he grew up, things were not as they are now.
His father was there working for one of the oil companies, and he was able to learn to play golf at the company-owned course, Pointe-à-Pierre Golf Club. As a teen, he set the course record at Sandy Lane on the nearby island of Barbados, but A.I. doesn’t tell us which course. (Come on, A.I., get smarter! I view current A.I. as a quick encyclopedia, only I always believed the encyclopedia. That was then.)
Let’s agree that Ames was a pretty good golfer as a teen. So much so that he was awarded a golf scholarship to the College of Boca Raton, now Lynn University. From there, it was onward and upward.
His first victory was on the Hogan Tour, which was the original version of the Korn Ferry Tour, at the Pensacola Open. He then turned east and joined the European Tour where he played for five seasons winning twice, at the 1994 Open V33 Grand Lyon in France and the 1996 Benson & Hedges International Open in England. Don’t you agree that sounds exotic?
He thought he found a home on the PGA TOUR, but had two years of visa issues.
Finally, in 1999, he was able to settle into a golf routine in the United States, and his first tournament victory was in 2004 at the Cialis Western Open, now the BMW. But it was his next victory on the TOUR that he would most memorable: The 2006 PLAYERS.
The strangest thing is that in 2002, when Craig Perks won THE PLAYERS, Ames finished second. That meant Ames had figured out the golf course, as much as it’s possible to figure out.
So, in 2006, nobody should have been surprised when he took the lead away from Jim Furyk after round three. But we were because, honestly, no one knew all that much about him except that he had dual citizenship in Trinidad and Tobago and Canada.
Ames wasn’t anyplace to be found on the leaderboard for the first two rounds. But in round three, he kicked Jim Furyk off the top spot and also leapfrogged over Sergio Garcia and Vijay Singh. So, he really golfed his ball.
“It was a good ball striking day,” he said. “I think overall it was a good course management day. The day was not easy.”
It was sunny out, but the winds, as they usually are in March, gusted to about 20. That’s not bad for this time of year. It makes target golf a lot harder. It makes for a really bad-hair day unless you have a buzz cut.
“I think the golf course kind of sets up for me. It's not a bomber’s golf course,” Ames noted. “It’s the kind of golf course that you’ve got to shape your ball off the tee, keep your ball in play. And same for the second shots. You have to shape it into the greens so you have an easier putt at the hole itself.”
Welcome to Pete Dye golf.
Ames said he had been working with Alan Fine, a performance coach who wrote “InsideOut Golf, Mind Over Golf: How to Achieve Peak Performance and You Already Know How to Be Great.” Obviously, it worked. Fine was here with Ames that week.
When asked what his keys were to producing winning golf, he said he was trying to free up his thoughts. He didn’t want to have any.
“I think what’s really good is the fact that I’m standing over the golf ball and I haven’t got a swing thought in my mind, all I’ve got is a shape I want to hit it,” he explained. “I stood up there with no other thought coming in. I think that’s when we play our best.”
In the final round, he continued that process.
“I wasn’t going to make myself have a hard chip or a putt. As you know, coming down to the end there, it was always to the safe side of the flag coming in,” he explained.
His process was to stand up to each shot being committed to it. Being present for it.
“If I didn’t feel like I was where I needed to be, which was present, then I was to back off and start again. That’s where I was all week, was trying to be present on every golf shot,” he added.
It was working because he had a 6-shot lead on the 17th hole in the final round.
While that was his secret to success at THE PLAYERS 20 years ago, Ames also found success on PGA TOUR Champions where he has nine victories.
In non-golf achievements, he was a torchbearer for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver.
