Steve Flesch remembers 2007 Barracuda Championship win

Editor’s note: Prior to making it on the PGA TOUR, Ohio-born, Kentucky-raised Steve Flesch played golf throughout Asia, competed on various mini-tours and finally made it to the Korn Ferry Tour. Entering the 1997 season-ending TOUR Championship in Alabama, Flesch was 24th on the money list. He won that week, catapulting him to No. 4 on the final earnings list, giving him PGA TOUR membership for the first time. Flesch never looked back. In his career, he played in 464 PGA TOUR tournaments, winning four times. Since turning 50 in 2017, Flesch has been a mainstay on PGA TOUR Champions, where he has also picked up four titles. In this article, Flesch reminisces about his 2007 Reno-Tahoe Open (now Barracuda Championship) win, when the tournament was still a stroke-play event and not using the current Modified Stableford format, and what that triumph meant in his career.

One thing I’ve learned during my career is when you’re not playing well, you’re never as far off as you think you are, and things can change pretty quickly. That was me in 2007.

I was in the middle of my 10th year on the PGA TOUR, my 17th overall as a professional, and things weren’t going particularly well. I missed the cut in my season-opener at the Sony Open in Hawaii, and by May I didn’t have a top 10 – my best finish being a tie for 11th at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. After that, I had two missed cuts and withdrew from one tournament, and my top performance was a tie for 49th in Houston. After taking three weeks off, I resumed the season in New Orleans, where I promptly missed the cut.

That began a stretch of eight consecutive weeks of tournament golf I would play, and I would have made it nine had I been eligible for the U.S. Open, which I was not. I returned to action at the Travelers Championship in Connecticut and played six more tournaments in succession. My thinking was I needed to make money. The thoughts of not keeping my card started creeping in.

My stretch was 14 tournaments in 15 weeks, which is not exactly a recipe for success. After a tie for 50th at the RBC Canadian Open, I was fried. When you’re on your fourth or fifth week in a row, you’re mentally wiped. I was well past that. Yes, I probably should have taken a break, but I was desperate for a good week.

That’s where the Reno-Tahoe Open came in.

Montreux Golf and Country Club is a course I love. For some reason, I always played Jack Nicklaus-designed golf courses well. Montreux, the Reno-Tahoe Open’s home, is a Nicklaus course that forces you to shape the ball a little. I liked the way the greens set up for my shot shape because Nicklaus always angled his greens one way or another, so good iron play would be rewarded.

I had a decent record there to prove my point. After a tie for 50th in my debut in Reno, in 1999, I tied for seventh (2000), tied for 10th (2001) and tied for sixth (2002). In 2003 and 2004, I qualified for the WGC-NEC Invitational played the same week as Reno, and the next two years I didn’t play anywhere.

As the 2007 season dragged on, it might have made sense after playing so much golf to skip the cross-continent flight from Toronto to Reno and take a break. But good vibes are good vibes. Despite how things were going, I was actually looking forward to getting to Montreux.

Because I was so comfortable at the course, I don’t think I even played nine holes during my Tuesday practice round. I then played in the pro-am, and by Thursday morning, I was ready to go.

Much of that week is hazy to me, but I know this: I struck the ball exceptionally well all four rounds, and I putted ... average. I was using a belly putter at the time, when those were still legal, but nothing I did on the greens was special.

I’d been fighting my putting for several years, with wiggles in my hands. For my entire TOUR career, I was monkeying around with different putters and different grips and shafts of different lengths. And I would keep mixing it up. It just so happened that at that point of the ’07 season, I was using a belly putter.

That turned out to be a good thing.

In the opening round, after a first-hole par, I made birdies on Nos. 2 and 3 and then eagled the par-5 fourth. I picked up two more birdies to make the turn at 6-under. I made my second eagle of the day at No. 11, and then I birdied the 18th hole for a 9-under 63. I led José Coceres by a shot.

I stayed at the Atlantis in downtown Reno that week, and although I’m not a gambler, I loved walking around and watching people play craps or blackjack or whatever. On a typical week on TOUR, if I wasn’t with my wife, I would have dinner with Harrison Frazar or Franklin Langham, good buddies of mine. Harrison was in the field in Reno, so we would eat and then people-watch. I’d grab a Coke and just meander around the casino. I always enjoyed doing that.

Reno was a fun tournament. It was an opposite event, with the World Golf Championships event taking place in Akron, Ohio, so things in Nevada were a little laid back. But, again, I liked going to Montreux because I knew I was going to play well there. Maybe it was the fairways I liked, the bentgrass with a little poa annua mixed in. That’s the kind of grass I grew up on. All I knew was that something seemed to always click when I got to Reno, and my opening 63 backed that up.

On the second day, I wasn’t as sharp, shooting a 69. A double bogey on No. 2, my 11th hole of the day, didn’t help. But at the halfway mark I led Charles Warren by two shots. By the time I teed off in the last group of the day Saturday, the wind was blowing pretty hard, as it can in Reno. It was steady, between 15 and 20 mph, with gusts that had to get into the 30s. That made conditions tough, however, five birdies – including my third of the week at the closing 18th hole – against two bogeys led to another 69. With 18 holes to play, I was comfortably five shots ahead of the trio of Stephen Allan, Todd Fischer and John Merrick.

With a lead of that size, and with the wind blowing almost identically to how it blew Saturday, I played pretty conservatively to start my final round. I made a couple of early bogeys and was 1-over on the front nine. With the wind causing all sorts of trouble, nobody was putting any pressure on me. It was a tough day to score. I made another bogey at 10 then was 2-under the rest of the way, to finish even for the day and 15-under overall. Thankfully, nobody got anything going, and I cruised, winning by five over shots over Kevin Stadler.

I’m really proud of that week because you don’t get a lot of five-stroke wins on the PGA TOUR. I can’t say I did much celebrating. When you win, you’re always the last guy to leave the golf course after you do all the media stuff, meet with the sponsors, sign autographs and all the other things associated with a victory. By the time I pulled out of Montreux, I needed something to eat, so I went to P.F. Chang’s and ate by myself. Not exactly glamorous.

An interesting byproduct of the victory is it meant I would be playing for an eighth consecutive week since my win got me into the PGA Championship field at Southern Hills in Tulsa. I was wiped out, but you can’t skip the PGA, right?

I ended up having a decent week in Oklahoma even after everything in Reno. I tied for 23rd, finishing 5-over on an extremely difficult course.

Finally, I took a break, skipping the Wyndham Championship in Greensboro before starting another streak and finishing the season playing – yes, I did – seven consecutive tournaments. However, in week five of that stretch, I won the Turning Stone Championship in New York. That gave me two titles in a season for the only time in my career.

Golf is a funny game. I went from worrying in May about keeping my card to winning twice in a six-week stretch.

And it all started in Reno, where the good vibes are real.