GOLF: Going home a true champion

Greg Puga, playing in his first Masters, shot 76 on Thursday and 80 on Friday on the Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia. Greg missed the cut by eleven shots and is heading back home to Los Angeles, California. However, he is going home a true champion despite his play in this week’s Masters.

Puga, a Mexican-American, resides in Boyle Heights, which is over twenty four hundred miles from Augusta. The distance from the sun to the moon might be a better estimation. You will find no golf courses, no driving ranges, no dogwoods or any azaleas in Boyle Heights. You will find sixty gangs with 10,000 members. Many say that Boyle Heights is the epicenter of gang activity is Los Angeles. How would a product of this brutal environment make it to such an exclusive, wonderful place like the Masters?

Greg got his start in athletics as a star quarterback for his Pop Warner team and later played quarterback for Roosevelt High School. Puga’s athletic ability and easy demeanor allowed him to stay on the outside of the gang culture without feeling pressure to be involved. His parents also helped by being very strict and teaching discipline in their household.

Puga was introduced to golf at age 15 by his former brother-in-law. Being good at other sports made Greg very competitive and he got hooked on the game as he tried to improve. A rival football coach noticed Puga’s golf skills and introduced him to Steve Pate’s wife’s father, Bob Huning. Huning took Puga to Jim Petralia, a teaching pro at Oak Creek Golf Club in Irvine, and asked Petralia to give Greg $100 of instruction. The instruction obviously worked as Puga played college golf at Rio Hondo Community College in Whittier, California.

After college, Greg turned to caddying to make money and gain passage to a golf facility. His first gig was at Annandale Country Club in Pasadena. Puga then moved to Oakmont Country Club in Glendale. In 1995, Greg took a job at Bel-Air Country Club. Bel-Air gave Puga the opportunity to make good money, play on a nice golf course, improve his already great golf game and play in tournaments. Greg won the Inland Empire Amateur in Riverside, California, in 2000 and the 1999 and 2000 Southern California Public Links Championships.

Puga earned his biggest victory and an automatic invitation to the most exclusive tournament in the world by winning the 2000 U.S. Mid-Amateur Championship at the Homestead’s Cascades Course to become the youngest champion (29 years old) in the 20-year history of the tournament. John Strege, in the March 23, 2001 issue of Golf World, wrote that Greg’s participation in this year’s Masters "represented another hurdle cleared because an underprivileged minority who ordinarily would have been required to enter through the back door, the employees’ entrance, had the invitation to walk through the front door of a club that historically has been an awkward step behind most of the country in embracing diversity".

Greg will now decide whether he wants to defend his U.S. Mid-Amateur Championship or try the PGA Tour qualifying tournament. Regardless of his decision, Puga will always have the wonderful memories of playing in the Masters in the same year that Tiger Woods won his fourth consecutive major. Greg’s accomplishments seem so great considering his surrounding environment and what might have been. His story should serve as an inspiration to those who think that life is too tough to accomplish their goals. Nothing has stopped Greg Puga!