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Farmington • Daniel Summerhays knows all the words to the song about Augusta National Golf Club and is immersed in the traditions of the Masters, including the awarding of a green jacket to the tournament winner Sunday evening amid the Georgia pines. He also understands adding a prized article of clothing is better than subtracting any of them, one after another.
Summerhays once agreed to a putting competition with his brother Boyd, who's four years older. The stakes: If one contestant made his 10-foot putt and the other missed, the loser would remove one item of clothing.
So on a November afternoon at Oakridge Country Club, Summerhays eventually faced a dilemma of discarding his glasses or his underwear, knowing he couldn't possibly putt without his glasses. That's where the story ends, happily. The club manager kindly advised the boys to halt the contest.
Summerhays, 33, will become the first homegrown Utahn to play in the Masters since Clay Ogden, his Davis High School and BYU teammate, who competed in 2006 after winning the U.S. Amateur Public Links Championship. He's the first Utah native to make his Masters debut as a PGA Tour member since Jay Don Blake in 1991.
He made it to Augusta National by finishing third in the 2016 PGA Championship. The more thorough, yet simple, explanation of how he got there is having grown up as a Summerhays — notably, being influenced by Boyd, who is now his coach.
It's true that Boyd got his little brother into "some good trouble from time to time," as he acknowledged. Episodes such as Daniel's driving a golf cart into a pond on No. 6 while racing across the course and the brothers' hitting low-flying shots toward one another on the driving range and fracturing Daniel's foot all were part of growing up among seven children in the family's culture of the game.
Rick Mears, Oakridge's longtime pro, is "a saint for putting up with the Summerhays boys for so long," Daniel said.
Those stories aside, they behaved well on and off the course. The brothers have memorized Dave Loggins' "Augusta" lyrics that begin, "Well, it's springtime in the valley on Magnolia Lane" and end with "the wooden-shafted legend of Bobby Jones."
Displayed in Ann and Lynn Summerhays' home in Farmington is a framed excerpt of Alistair Cooke's "America." Cooke labeled Jones "a gentleman, a combination of goodness and grace, an unwavering courtesy, self-deprecation and consideration for other people."
The Summerhayses try to model Jones, the Augusta National developer and Masters co-founder, and they revere his tournament. When Ogden played in the Masters, his BYU teammates attended the Sunday round, having come to Georgia for a tournament the next day. As they watched from behind the No. 12 tee, BYU coach Bruce Brockbank asked Summerhays about leaving for a church meeting.
"Coach," he responded, "I'm feeling it right here."
Summerhays played Augusta National three weeks ago with his father. "I've never met anybody who loves golf so much," he said. "Part of being a Summerhays is just being passionate about the game."
His brother Bruce usually was busy — the former club pro would become a star on the Champions Tour in the 1990s after turning 50 — so Lynn jokes about having taken two wives and about a dozen children to the Junior World tournament near San Diego for 18 straight summers. The 11 Summerhays cousins in the field were profiled in the Los Angeles Times when Daniel was 5, with Lynn explaining, "We don't really care if any one of them has any higher aspirations than this."
Several of them did, of course. Carrie Summerhays Roberts, now the BYU women's golf coach, qualified for the LPGA Tour. Her cousins Boyd and Daniel each made the PGA Tour, and other boys from each branch of the family played college golf. As a teaching pro, Joe Summerhays (Carrie's older brother) played in the PGA Championship in New Jersey, where Daniel earned his Masters berth.
Pursuing high-level golf was their choice, although there may have been some push to make Daniel put away his Legos and get out of the house occasionally as a 4-year-old.
"It was never, 'You had to [play].' It was never a burden," Roberts said. "We'd have fun playing golf. People are so surprised when they hear that."
Daniel won the 2000 Utah State Amateur at Oakridge when he was 16, then beat his brother the next summer at Wasatch Mountain State Park on his way to another title. For their father, that quarterfinal match was tougher to endure than his own loss to his brother in the 1966 semifinals. "Joy and pain, at the exact same time," he said.
In annual school photos, Summerhays wore Oklahoma State shirts two years in a row, supporting Boyd's college. But he picked BYU. Brockbank, now in his 25th year, reflected, "I haven't had [another] kid like Daniel Summerhays."
Summerhays' level of commitment sometimes led to frustration with himself and his teammates as he pursued a finance degree and interrupted his golf career with a church mission to Chile. "People are just not wired the way he is," Brockbank said.
But his game came together in his junior year of 2006-07, when he shot a 60 in a fall tournament at Williamsburg, Va., and became a first-team All-American. That distinction earned him an invitation to a premier event in Columbus, Ohio, on what's now called the Web.com Tour. He won the tournament as an amateur, missing the $126,000 first prize but subsequently turning pro and using the tour exemption that came with it. That meant skipping his senior year at BYU, where he later completed his remaining credits.
Summerhays undoubtedly is the only pro among Masters contestants who never has cashed a first-place check (Boyd, by comparison, has more than 20 professional wins, in events such as the Utah Open). Yet Daniel has earned more than $8 million while traveling the PGA Tour with his wife, Emily, and their growing family. They spent seven months away from Farmington with their two boys in 2011, driving a motor home around the country.
Now with three sons and a daughter ranging in age from 2 to 9, they've built a house in nearby Fruit Heights. The family accompanies Summerhays to tour events as often as possible, part of an existence Emily describes as "almost like we have two lives."
The children will caddy for their father in Wednesday's Par 3 Contest, wearing white jumpsuits sewn by their grandmother, Sharon Brinton, and aunt, Katie Beard.
Their parents ask themselves every year, "Is this still the best thing for our family?" The accompanying question as of April 2017 is whether Daniel can earn full access to the PGA Tour for an eighth season. He's 155th in the FedÂEx Cup standings; in August, the top 125 players will keep their tour cards. The good news is that with access to all four major tournaments, he can make up a lot of ground.
The Summerhayses have rented three houses in Augusta, where Daniel's wife, children, parents, in-laws, six siblings (some with their spouses) and friends will join him. Contestants get 12 tickets, so the finance major did the logical thing: He created a spreadsheet, mapping out who will use them and when. The week's plan fulfills what he once told his oldest brother, David: "I want you to know, this Masters thing is a family affair."
That's what golf always has been, to these people.
Twitter: @tribkurt —
Utahns in the Masters
Daniel Summerhays will become the sixth Utahn to play in the Masters. The others:
Player Years Hometown Best round Best finish
George Schneiter Sr. 1946, '47, '49, '56 Ogden 70 T13
George Von Elm 1951 Salt Lake City 76 T50
Billy Johnston 1957, '64 Ogden 70 T28
Jay Don Blake 1991, '92, '93 St. George 68 T27
Clay Ogden 2006 West Point 76 MC
Note: Ogden played as an amateur; the other four are in the Utah Golf Hall of Fame.