How Martin Trainer converted zero status into first PGA TOUR card

So, Martin, just making sure we’ve got your story straight: You were a month shy of your 27th birthday last March, a definite “fledgling pro” who just a few weeks earlier had traveled to Mazatlan, Mexico, for a qualifying tournament to earn back playing privileges on PGA TOUR Latinoamerica, when on your way to that circuit’s opening event, the Guatemala Stella Artois Open, you decide, just for chuckles and a challenge, to try a Sunday qualifier in Leon, Guanajuato, Mexico, for that week’s Web.com Tour El Bosque Mexico Championship by INNOVA. All good, so far?

Big smile. Martin Trainer indicates we can move on. It’s all good.

And then, you not only survive a 3-for-1 playoff for the last spot into the El Bosque, you post rounds of 67-70-68-69 to finish 14-under and win the bloody tournament, just the second time you’ve even made a cut in eight Web.com Tour tournaments. Wild and improbable, all of that, but there’s more, right? Because, don’t you miss the cut in nine of the next 13 tournaments, then strike again? You shoot 62-68-65-68 to win the Price Cutter Charity Championship presented by Dr Pepper, a second Web.com Tour victory that virtually assures you a PGA TOUR card for 2018-19 and . . . well, I mean, you start the year without even Latinoamerica status and you end it with PGA TOUR membership? Crazy, no?

Another smile. Another laugh. Crazy, yes.

What makes it even more wild – and please excuse me for sounding surprised – but it’s not like you blazed a trail through AJGA circles and meandered the country playing the big-league stuff by invitation only. You’re sort of the anti-pedigree kid . . .

Respectfully interrupting, Trainer laughs. “I almost skipped amateur golf, in a way.”

Ah, right. You and no one else. But there’s the matter of your upbringing – which is quite cool and eclectic, don’t get me wrong. Yet, with all due respect, being born in Marseille, France, wouldn’t seem to be a gateway to the PGA TOUR. Paris, Texas, maybe, but not the south of France. It explains why you speak fluent French to your French-born mother, Isabelle, and English to your California-born father, Paul, and why you can make a terrific blanquette de veau – which I would love to savor, should the opportunity present itself – but, listen, let’s be honest, it doesn’t explain how you got to the PGA TOUR, especially without much junior golf stardom, then a collegiate career that was, well, unique. I mean, many kids quit college after their junior year to play golf. You quit golf after your junior year to stay in college.

“I’ve always been sort of unusual in the way I’ve passed through the golf world,” laughed Trainer.

Duly noted. But that begs the question: What do your cousins in France, the folks back home in Palo Alto, California, and your old teammates at the University of Southern California think about you having a PGA TOUR card?

No hesitation, just another big laugh and smile. “I’m sure,” said Trainer, “that they’re as surprised as I am.”

Against a backdrop of cookie-cutter swings and gold-plated junior/amateur/collegiate resumes, there are those who arrive at the PGA TOUR having forged a solitary path as if mentored by the Dalai Lama. They are players who possess “it,” according to Chris Zambri, the University of Southern California golf coach who recruited Trainer for his incoming class of 2009-10.

“In golf, the intangibles are hard to come by,” Zambri said. “But Martin had them.”

Stewart Hagestad, who has since won the U.S. Mid-Amateur Championship, was a heralded member of that class. He knew of two of the other USC recruits that summer, T.J. Vogel and Sam Smith. “But Martin Trainer I had literally never heard of,” he said. “I did wonder, but then again, you had to trust coach’s judgment.”

Zambri’s gut-feel was validated, too, on that first big day of tryouts in the fall of 2009. “We were freshmen, three weeks into the season and in a qualifier,” said Hagestad, “I shot something like 74 or 75 and Martin had a bogey-free 64. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘this kid can play.’”

Turns out, it is Trainer’s MO. “When Martin is good,” said Vogel, “he is very, very good.”

Like the spring of 2011, when Trainer closed out his sophomore year with a victory in the Pac-10 Championship. “The ability to execute when you’re nervous, Martin can do it as well as anyone we’ve ever had,” said Zambri. “He’s a calm customer.”

But so, too, is he as unique a customer as Zambri has ever coached. Things went off script in the fall of 2012 when Trainer, concerned about a sore elbow (he eventually had surgery), decided his senior year would be spent working toward his degree in business administration and gearing his solo practice sessions toward his pro aspirations – no team play for him – and while coach didn’t understand, time has healed all wounds.

“Looking back, Coach was a great guy and he taught me a lot,” said Trainer, who graduated with his degree in business administration.

“Hey, I was a young coach and he was a young player and maybe neither one of us felt college was everything it could have been for us,” said Zambri. “But Martin’s a bright guy and super-talented and I have a lot of respect for what he’s done.”

What he’s done is pretty much secure a PGA TOUR card in a most improbable manner – 42 tournaments on PGA TOUR Latinoamerica and just 28 on the Web.com Tour – that Trainer thinks confirms the glory of pro golf. There is no blueprint, no one way to proceed. “There are different paths, different journeys,” he said. “When I went to play college golf, I just assumed I’d try pro golf. This is a dream.”

That the dream kicked off October 4-7 at the Safeway Open in Napa, California, a mere 90 minutes from Palo Alto, where Trainer moved with his family when he was 5, provided more flavor to his story. Paul and Isabelle were there to watch, as were a couple of aunts and plenty of friends, and for sure, it was never like that when he played PGA TOUR Latinoamerica or Web.com Tour events. Trainer did resist, however, the temptation to seek out Phil Mickelson and Fred Couples for autographs.

“I thought about that,” he said. “(But) I’ve been on TOUR a few days, so maybe I shouldn’t charge in to meeting everyone quite yet.”

He did, though, charge into a mode that explains much about who he is. Having opened with 75 and sitting 2-over with five holes to play in Round 2, Trainer hit it to 12 feet at the 14th, 3 feet at 15, 6 feet at 16, 3 feet at 17, and 3 feet at 18 – five straight birdies to shoot 66 and make the cut on the number. “That,” laughed Hagestad, “is such a Martin thing to do. It’s classic Martin.”

Like the scintillating 64 he had shot in that USC qualifier and how he turned a qualifying spot into an El Bosque win and PGA TOUR card? “Exactly,” said Hagestad. “It’s a Martin thing.”

Like getting into position to win and doing it? “Martin is wired that way,” said Zambri.

An engineer, even a retired one who now makes his own electric bikes, could possibly explain, but the best Paul Trainer can do is offer this: “He’s streaky. He’s been like that all his career, so it didn’t surprise us that he won twice (to get his PGA TOUR card). He just needs to put it all together.”

If Paul and Isabelle have fully supported their son’s pro golf aspirations – “almost irrationally,” laughs Martin – likely it is rooted in their own commitment to a life that was not the norm. A 6-foot-7-inch basketball standout at the University of California, San Diego (he still holds records for career points and rebounds and was enshrined into the Hall of Fame four years ago), Paul Trainer in the mid-1970s figured he’d play a few seasons of pro basketball in France.

Only 22 years later he was still there, married with two sons. He worked as an engineer in the satellite TV world, but his passion was the outdoors, bikes, drones, and using his creative mind – sometimes to try and assist his son’s career.

“He built a 3D putting template that I use,” said Martin. Paul Trainer has also used drones to offer video lessons to his son. But mostly, the father is is enjoying his son’s eclectic pursuit of a nomadic lifestyle that has already seen him play professionally in more than 15 different countries.

“His story is a little different,” said Paul, who will travel with Isabelle in their RV to watch Martin play a handful of tournaments on the West Coast. “He didn’t play as a young boy in France, and he got a late start into the game, but when he became totally into golf, he put a lot of time into it.”

Martin Trainer had moderate exposure to national tournaments – he qualified for the 2007 and 2008 USGA Junior Amateur, making it to the second round of match play the second visit – but some of the youngsters against whom he competed (Jordan Spieth, Emiliano Grillo, Brooks Koepka, Cody Gribble, Patrick Rodgers and Vogel the most notable) had far more experience on the big stage. What convinced Trainer that he might be able to make a career out of golf, however, was his victory in 2008 in the San Francisco City Golf Championship, and Zambri concedes that made an impression on him.

“It’s a very good tournament with a lot of veteran players (Trainer beat 48-year-old Randy Haag, a former champ, in the final) and he showed great composure,” said Zambri. “Martin was very green, but I think that’s when he decided he wanted to be a golfer and he dove in, head over heels.”

It has been an intriguing ride, with Trainer fully embracing his reality (“I’ve never been the best, but I’ve kept improving”) and his approach to the game (“If I drive it straight, I’ll do well; if I don’t, I’ll miss cuts”). When he teed it up at the Safeway Open, he was wide-eyed about everything – from the courtesy car, to sharing a putting green with Mickelson, to being asked to come into the interview room for a pre-tournament interview. Talk about a whirlwind; just eight months earlier he had booked a schedule built around tournaments in Guatemala, Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, Chile and Nicaragua, only to somehow make it through at Sunday qualifier for the El Bosque, then author a miracle of miracles.

“I cried. I couldn’t believe it,” said Trainer. “The night before (the fourth round), I couldn’t sleep. I was two off the lead and I was as nervous as I’ve ever been.

“But now, I’ve certainly surprised myself and I’ve had to pinch myself. It’s crazy, but at the same time, you just can’t just sign up (to play the PGA TOUR). I’ve earned it.”