Back when he was the golf coach at the University of Maryland in the 1980s, it wasn't enough for Fred Funk simply to go to the practice range with his driver late in the day. Instead, he would often jump in a cart, armed with several buckets of balls, and head out to the golf course, looking for an empty tee box pointed toward the tightest fairway he could find.
From there, Funk would hit shot after shot, first down the left side, then toward the right and eventually down the middle. Rarely did his drives ever find the rough on either side. The only problem he ever had came at the 15th hole one evening, when a young boy dashed out of the woods down the left side, picked up a ball and ran back into the trees.
"Then the kid did it again," recalled Don Slebodnik, who played for Funk at Maryland. "So the third time, Fred hit it down the right side so the kid would have to run farther to get the ball. As soon as Fred hit it, he started running down the fairway and tried to catch the kid. Fred kept running and he finally caught him, but they were both so out of breath neither one of them could even talk. Knowing Fred, he probably gave the kid the balls anyway."
Anyone who knew Funk back then also had an inkling that one day all that practice would eventually pay off. So what if he never hit the ball a very long way? He didn't have to, then or now, because all those twilight evenings of aiming at tight College Park fairways would eventually make him the most accurate driver of the ball on the PGA Tour.
Funk, who will turn 49 next week and is in his 17th season on the PGA Tour, leads current tour statistics by hitting fairways 76 percent of the time. His average driving distance -- 268.2 yards -- ranks him 181st in length off the tee, 51 yards behind the tour's driving distance leader, Scott Hend. But Funk, No. 26 in the world rankings, can still laugh about that yawning power disparity all the way to the bank. He's sixth on the PGA Tour money list, with $2.27 million, the fourth straight season he'll exceed $2 million in earnings, and is on his way to his best financial season ever.
He's also making all that money despite being ranked 155th on tour in putting, usually one of his great strengths. Despite his deficiencies, he's a gritty player -- Jack Nicklaus calls him a "bulldog" -- who combines accuracy off the tee and solid iron play with simply knowing how to get the ball in the hole, skills he began honing more than 20 years ago when he coached the Maryland golf team from 1982 to '88.
"It was a great time for me at Maryland," Funk said recently. "The only thing I didn't like was the recruiting. I couldn't ever land a blue-chip guy. We were too far north, the weather wasn't always good and we did not have a real good practice area. We just didn't have the appeal to a kid that Wake Forest or Duke could offer to them, but we did have a good time, I can tell you that."
Funk always seems to have a good time on the golf course these days. When his game is on and putts are falling, his megawatt smile and celebratory gyrations have also made him one of the tour's more colorful and endearingly popular players. Fans seem to relate to a 5-foot-8 bantamweight trying to slug it out with all those heavy hitters.
"I'm really so proud of him," said Woody Fitzhugh, a teaching pro who owns a Northern Virginia driving range and also was a dominant player in the Middle Atlantic PGA section when Funk was still playing locally and coaching in College Park.
"I call Fred my 'earthly hero.' What this guy has done is just amazing. Most of the guys he's playing against now are half his age and hit it 50 yards by him every time. But he knows his strengths and his weaknesses, and he knows his limitations. He makes up for his shortcomings by doing everything else better than anyone else. Back then, he was always friendly, a great guy, and he's never changed -- not one bit -- and I love that about him."
From Cut to Coach
There is much to love about Funk's story, the PGA Tour version of the recent up-from-nowhere Seabiscuit and "Gentleman Jim" Corbett genre. Funk grew up in College Park, was a fine amateur boxer in his teenage years and once was cut from his college golf team at Maryland, where he also flunked out before buckling down in community college and getting back to eventually play for and then coach the Terrapins, and also get a degree in law enforcement.
He began in golf as a caddie for his stepfather, and as a college student, he also helped pay his way through school as a weekend circulation distributor for the Washington Star, waking up at 1 a.m. Sunday morning when many of his classmates were just leaving their campus fraternity parties, to drive a delivery truck loaded with papers. He was done by 10 a.m., still leaving plenty of time for a round of golf and a little nap.
