With about a month left in the deer-hunting season in south Georgia, Harris English and Hudson Swafford are anxious to get back to their hunting base in tiny Pavo, Ga. But first they have business to tend to at the PGA Tour Q-school at PGA West, where they are both trying to earn their 2012 PGA Tour cards.
As childhood friends and roommates at the University of Georgia, where they starred on one of the nation's best collegiate golf programs, the pair have been looking forward to this opportunity their entire lives."This tournament is kind of interrupting our hunting," Swafford said playfully.
In the first two rounds they are even paired together. English, a 22-year-old Thomasville, Ga., native, got the best of his friend on Wednesday, shooting a 4-under 68 on the Stadium course. Swafford, 24, who grew up about an hour south of English in Tallahassee, Fla., had a 2-over 74.
English had another good day on Thursday, shooting a bogey-free 5-under 67 to tie for second, a shot behind 36-hole leader Will Claxton. Swafford played better in his second round with a 1-under 71 to move up into a tie for 101st place.
Swafford reached the finals by making it through both the first and second stage qualifiers. English got here through the second stage. "We both bogeyed the first hole and we said 'Well, there are 107 holes left,'" English said after the round.
"Harris stuck me today," Swafford interjected. "But we have 90 more holes." There are probably not two players in the field this week with more in common than English and Swafford. They are both roughly 6-foot-3 with the same brown hair and thick Southern drawl. It's difficult to tell them apart and it's not unusual for them to finish each other's sentences. They both hit high fades with their irons and play similar games from tee to green.
"The Clemson coach [Larry Penley] still doesn't know us apart," English said. Since turning pro this summer, they continue to live together in a condo on St. Simons Island that they share with Gator Todd, a former Alabama golfer, who shot a 1-under 71 on the Stadium course Wednesday. English and Swafford are even dating best friends. Recently, Swafford tweeted that English was engaged to be married. It was a prank that English didn't take lightly.
"I'm still working on something to get him back," English said. Asked who was ahead in head-to-head money matches, they both agreed that Swafford leads that race by a mile. "I think it's that older brother syndrome," Swafford said. "I don't even have to get into his head."
"I just don't want to beat him up too bad," English said. No one has watched their relationship as golfers and friends more closely than their Georgia coach, Chris Haack. "Everybody thought they were brothers," Haack said. "Both are good ol' slow-talking, easy-going Southern boys who hit the ball a long way."
Haack, who has built Georgia into a national powerhouse in his 16 years at the Athens school, wasn't too thrilled to see them paired together at Q-school. "Sometimes being too comfortable on the golf course can be a detriment," Haack said. "It might impact the other one. But at the same time, if they are both playing well, they can feed off of each other."
Despite their long friendship, English and Swafford had never been paired together in a tournament. So they were happy for the chance. "It's a tournament, so we are not goofing off too much," Swafford said.
In July, English won the Nationwide Tour's Children's Hospital Invitational in Ohio when he was still an amateur. Two months earlier, his Georgia teammate, Russell Henley, who didn't make it to the Q-school finals, had won the Stadion Classic on the Nationwide Tour at the University of Georgia Golf Course.
With his win, English is fully exempt on the Nationwide Tour for next year. "I know that I have a place to play next year," English said. "So I'm just going go out and try to play my game and have fun and learn as much as I can."
Since making his professional debut in September at the Soboba Golf Classic on the Nationwide Tour, English has had second- and third-place finishes and had he been able to cash the $144,000 check in Ohio, he would have easily been one of the 25 players off the Nationwide Tour to earn berths onto the PGA Tour.
Swafford, who took a redshirt year in his fourth year of school after a shoulder injury, has had a much humbler path to La Quinta. He got his first professional win on the eGolf Professional Tour's HGM Hotels Classic in August in North Carolina. For the win he made $30,000, which allowed him to easily cover the $4,500 for Q-school.
"It was nice to not have to worry about how I was going to pay for Q-school," Swafford said. At the eGolf event, Swafford beat former Bulldogs teammate Brian Harman, who shot a 3-under 69 on the Stadium Course in his first round on Wednesday.
The 24-year-old Harman, who grew up in Savannah, Ga., and lives in the same house with English, Swafford and Todd in St. Simons Island, met his former teammates outside the scorer's trailer after their first round. They are planning to DVR Saturday's SEC championship game between Georgia and LSU.
"We're going to run to the car after the fourth round with our ears covered so no one can blurt out the score before we make it home," Harman said.
English and Swafford are hoping they can have a celebratory hunting trip before the start of the first full-field event of the new year at the Sony Open in Hawaii. It would be a fitting tribute to their long bond as good ol' Southern boys with a great passion for hunting and golf.