Wild ride to success on Champions Tour

Aching knees haven't stopped golfer's ride from journeyman to star

By Lynn DeBruin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published July 23, 2008 at 11:05 p.m.

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Photo by Kevin C. Cox © Getty

Eaks tees off during his most recent victory, at the 3M Championship at the TPC Twin Cities in Blaine, Minn.

Photo by Rob Schumacher © Special to the Rocky

Champions Tour golfer R. W. Eaks spent a week this month touring the Durango-Silverton area on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle with his wife.

Click to enlarge

They had driven all the way to Nacogdoches, Texas, for a two-man golf tournament.

Problem was, neither had any money to pay the entry fee.

So R.W. Eaks and his buddy, Eric Hoos, did the only thing they could think of, and Hoos floated a check.

"We knew we were in trouble," recalled Hoos, now the University of Denver's golf coach.

Luckily, they would win the tourney and square up.

How times have changed.

When Eaks returns to play in the U.S. Senior Open next week in his hometown of Colorado Springs, he'll arrive with more than $3.8 million in career earnings, including $262,500 for last week's record-setting victory in Minnesota.

In the rearview mirror are some good old days, when minitours and state opens went hand in hand with Taco Bells and Olive Gardens, and when 77 events on the PGA Tour netted nothing higher than a seventh-place finish.

"It's great to see one of us make it," quipped Hoos, a frequent travel buddy of Eaks on those low- and midlevel pro tours.

"He was so talented, I always knew he'd make it eventually. . . . The only thing holding him back was his body."

That's still the case 20 years later. While the golfing world awaits updates on Tiger Woods' surgically repaired left knee, Eaks continues playing on knees so bad he has been told he needs both of them replaced in the near future.

Though the knees keep him up most of the night, and leave him unable to walk many courses, the man Hoos affectionately dubbed "Gramps" years ago insists he isn't about to miss the Senior Open.

"They're going to have to pry me away not to play there," said Eaks, who hopes new FDA-approved electrical-stimulation braces will ease the pain and buy him more time on the Champions Tour.

Gofer to golfer

At least Eaks will have the local knowledge next week. After all, he knows The Broadmoor's famed East Course like the back of his Harley.

He caddied four years there when he was a teenager, even looping a couple of times for the late Forrest Tucker, an F Troop star, when he came through town.

Then there were his Bill Murray days on the grounds crew.

"My job there was to change the holes and kill the gophers. But I never did kill a gopher," he said.

Instead, Eaks was allowed to set new hole locations midafternoons, then play the course, which he did probably a hundred times.

One year, he even served as a gofer for Dow Finsterwald, a PGA Tour star in the '50s and '60s and The Broadmoor's director of golf from the mid-'60s until his retirement in 1993.

One particular errand - washing Finsterwald's car every Monday - would prove more fun than work.

"That particular year, he had a red Buick Wildcat convertible, and, man, I was stylin' in that baby," Eaks recalled. "Sometimes (the car wash) lasted all morning. That was a good time."

For Eaks, a personable character on a tour filled with as many rags-to-riches survivors as Hall of Famers, there are more tales than he has time to recall.

But he laughs thinking back on one in particular, even though he was quite devastated at the time.

He had just three-putted the final hole in San Diego to miss his PGA Tour card - again - by a single stroke. And he couldn't stand it anymore.

So he grabbed that wretched Bulls-Eye putter and tied it to the back of a buddy's old Mercury. By the time they got back to Colorado Springs, there wasn't much left of it.

"Sparked for a while," Eaks said.

It was hot, like that check Hoos wrote.

"It's amazing how good you can play when your back's totally against the wall," Hoos said. "Bobby, whenever finances got really tough for him, he managed to play well, make some money and get it back home and take care of (his family)."

What about Bob

Robert Wayne Eaks is his real name, but depending on which tale he tells, he started going by R.W. or simply "Dubs" because there were so many Bobs on his college basketball team.

No matter the name, Eaks was a star. At Mitchell High School in Colorado Springs, he helped his team win the 1971 state championship over a Wheat Ridge squad led by Dave Logan. After that the high-scoring guard took his game to the University of Northern Colorado, where from 1971 to 1975 he became a member of the 1,000-point club.

When a knee injury as a senior effectively ended his hoops career, he turned to golf and moved to Arizona to work as an assistant pro at Papago Golf Course in Phoenix.

The man who had built a swing and a game on his own was finally cashing in on sports - a whopping $197 every two weeks.

But it was a blast, he said, hanging out at a course where tour players from Billy Mayfair to Howard Twitty have honed their games in the winter.

That's where Eaks got the only golf lesson of his life, saving up $50 to have the late Joe Nichols give him a few tips in 1978.

"I hit balls and thought I hit them pretty good. Then we went inside and looked at the video," Eaks recalled.

"Son," Nichols told him. "There's one thing I can tell you that's really going to help your game."

Eaks was all ears until he heard the advice.

"Quit, go get a job," Nichols told him.

Fat chance, Eaks thought.

"I just walked over to the counter, handed the guy my 50 bucks and left and vowed I'd never take another lesson," he said.

"I left there and went right back to the golf course and I practiced every night until it got dark and until I thought I was good enough to go play."

He got his Tour card in 1980, only to lose it in 1981, and find his way back in 1998 and 1999 by finishing 13th on the Nationwide Tour money list.

Though he won three times on the Nationwide and pocketed $608,704 in 258 events - that averaged out to about $2,359 per start.

In 77 PGA tour starts, he made the cut just 23 times and won $291,734.

Comeback kid

Even when he turned 50, success didn't come immediately for the Scottsdale, Ariz., transplant.

He was winless in five-plus seasons on the Champions Tour before capturing the inaugural Dick's Sporting Goods Open at En-Joie Golf Club in Endicott, N.Y., last summer.

The win included an eagle and hole-in-one en route to a second-round 62 and was worth $240,000.

He won again two months later, earned Comeback Player of the Year and finished sixth on the money list to push his career earnings past the $4 million mark.

Now, instead of bumming rides with friends, he can afford to splurge on a souped-up Harley that he spent a week on this month cruising the mountains in the Durango-Silverton area, his wife, Karen wrapped around his waist.

"It's really nice to see someone keep the belief that they can do it, through all the rough times that he's had and the financial struggles, and the trouble with his body, and with his game," Hoos said. "He stuck through it all and was able to reap some of the benefits for all his hard work."

Now, if only those bone-on-bone knees would hold up for four days next week.

"If I catch a little lightning in a bottle, who knows?" Eaks said.

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