Mastering a dream: Streb set for Augusta National debut

AUGUSTA, Ga. — It’s right there on Robert Streb’s profile on the PGA Tour website.

After wading through Streb’s likes (Italian food, Jason Aldean and “Happy Gilmore,” among others) and his dream foursome — his father (David), brother (Garrett) and Arnold Palmer — you get to his two bucket list items.

The first is to attend a Texas-Oklahoma football game. The other is to play at Augusta National.

Both seem natural for someone born and bred in Oklahoma and practically raised on the golf course. And of the two, the one that seemed rather easily attainable was taking in the Red River Rivalry.

Go figure, the Masters dream came true first.

“I’m the bad dad because he’s never gotten to the OU-Texas game,” David Streb joked. “My buddies tease me all the time about that. But when he was growing up, we were always at a golf or hockey tournament. It just never worked out.”

It will work out eventually, and Streb will fulfill that dream as well.

As far as getting to the Masters, well, that was one Streb never could have been completely sure would have ever worked out. Yet it has and when he tees it up at 10:25 a.m. Thursday alongside Ben Martin and Cameron Tringale, Streb will cross a pretty big one off the list.

“As a kid you just always want to go,” Streb said. “You’re not sure how you’re going to get there, but you want to go.”

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Indeed, it is a journey to get to Augusta National. Some golfers spend their entire lives striving to set foot on the course’s hallowed grounds and never quite get there. For others, it falls into place rather easily.

Streb’s journey falls somewhere in between. He’s met with his share of setbacks and heartbreaks, the kind that can sometime be devastating.

Yet every dose of adversity has been met with an emphatic response from Streb. He’s been undeterred in his pursuit to be a successful professional golfer.

“When he gets somewhere, and he gets comfortable or feels like he belongs, he does well,” David Streb said of his son. “Whether that’s college, high school or as a professional. At every step, he’s done it, and it’s been fun to watch.”

The gut punches have come at every step of the way. From being passed over for scholarship offers by in-state favorites Oklahoma State and Oklahoma to finishing 126th on the PGA Tour’s FedEx Points Standings and thus losing his full-blown tour card for a year, Streb has run the gamut of emotions.

But through it all, he’s kept his same determined, quiet and calm demeanor, refusing to let the setbacks become permanent.

Though he admits, “The 126 hurt for a while. That wasn’t very fun. I thought about it for a long time, but I also looked at what I needed to work on and got after it at the start of the year.”

The ability to take a punch and come back perhaps was honed during his days spent participating in his other childhood sporting passion, hockey. Though he didn’t take to the sport as quickly as he did golf and realized even quicker he didn’t have a future on the ice — “I would have like to played, but when you’re 5-foot tall in ninth grade, you’re not going very far,” he said — Streb played throughout high school.

In hockey, you’re going to take a hit or two, maybe even a punch. When it happens, you merely pick yourself up and skate on.

“You get beat up a little bit playing hockey, and you can get beat up a little bit on the golf course,” Streb said. “You just have to get over things pretty quick. You have to be tough about it. You can’t roll over and die.”

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David Streb couldn’t help but introduce his sons to golf. A solid golfer in his own right, he made every effort to keep his game sharp for the state amateurs and U.S. Open qualifiers he routinely played in.

With his wife, Lauren, traveling for her job, Streb had but one choice if he wanted to head to the range — take the boys with him.

While Garrett stayed in the stroller as an infant, a 2-year-old Robert set up right next to his father and began taking his own swings.

“He’d get a pile of balls and a sawed-off club, and I’d get 30 minutes to work on my game while he had fun,” David recalled. “He’d stay hooked up. It wasn’t anything serious. When he was 7 or 8, we joined Oak Tree and he got to playing some and it just grew from there.”

So did Streb’s ability. By the time he finished his prep career at Edmond (Okla.) North High School, he was an accomplished golfer at a school that was producing a load of Division I players, eventually earning a spot in the Edmond Junior Golf Hall of Fame.

The only offers he received from local college heavyweights Oklahoma State and Oklahoma, however, were walk-on, and that didn’t interest Streb. So he chose Kansas State.

“I wanted to go somewhere I can play and play a lot,” said Streb, who became an All-American for the Wildcats, posting 12 career top-five finishes. “It helps to play. You get to travel around and see different places and different courses. That’s what I wanted to do. Coach (Tim Norris) played on tour for a long time, and it was nice to see what he thought about things and what I needed to do.”

Norris, who played on the PGA Tour from 1981-89, was a four-time winner and played in the 1983 Masters, obviously saw plenty of potential when he first started recruiting Streb. Perhaps the thing that stuck out the most, however, was Streb’s demeanor.

“He’s always been pretty even-headed,” said Norris, who coached at Kansas State from 1997-2013. “He would get upset after a bad shot, like all golfers do, but he didn’t let it bother him long. He didn’t ever let one hole carry over to the next.”

That was evident in Streb’s only career PGA Tour victory — the 2014 McGladrey Classic. Streb opened that tournament with a double bogey on his first hole, but came back to beat Will MacKenzie and Brendon de Jonge in a playoff for his first tour win.

“That tells you everything you need to know about him,” Norris said.

David Streb has seen that trait all along as well.

“Watching him, he’s very calm and pretty soft-spoken, and that’s served him well,” he said. “That consistency and that calmness have been big. What you see is what you get with him.”

The influences to reinforce that behavior have been many. From his father to Bob Tway, a fellow member of Oak Tree Country Club and father to Streb’s former high school teammate Kevin Tway, to Norris and former K-State pro Jim Colbert, who frequently visited the program and was grandfather to Streb’s college teammate and roommate Kyle Yonke — all have had impacts.

“Bob was a real help to Robert,” David Streb said. “He was a calming, positive influence in a very quiet way. He was just the nicest guy in the world, a perfect gentleman.”

Streb shows those traits constantly. It’s not rare for him to take time from his practice to chat with members of the gallery or to stop and sign autographs for lengthy periods of time for young fans.

“Any time you watch your child succeed, it’s something special, but what means more is when we hear stories of being kind to the children or when he’s playing in a pro-am and you hear comments about how nice he is,” David Streb said. “As a parent that means as much as winning a tournament. It’s neat because we know how hard he’s worked and how few people get there. There are way more that don’t than do, and I’m glad he’s getting the fruits of his labor.”

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At times, it has been labor. When Streb first tried qualifying for his tour card in Q-School, he made it to the second stage before falling short. The following year, he made the Q-School finals, earning a spot on the Web.com Tour.

Streb flourished immediately on the tour in 2012, winning the Mylan Classic and finishing seventh on the money list to earn his PGA Tour card for 2013. Though he posted five top-25 finishes in his first year on tour — including a best of T11th at the Puerto Rico Open — Streb came up one place and one stroke shy of retaining his card for 2014.

“A lot of guys struggle the first year, and I was no different,” Streb said. “You’re trying to figure things out and you can press a bit because you don’t get all the starts you want. You don’t get to pick your schedule so you play when you can. Sometimes you get on these five, six-week runs and it wears you out. You’re always learning about each place and when you go back the second time, you just have a better understanding of everything.”

Despite having limited availability for the tour in 2014, Streb made the most of his starts, making the cut in 17 of the 21 2014 PGA Tour events in which he played. That included a runner-up finish at the Zurich Classic of New Orleans, which helped him into the FedEx Cup Playoffs, and he advanced to the second round.

Despite tying for ninth at the Deutsche Bank, he again came up one shot and one place short of moving on, finishing 71st in the points standings. He hardly looked at the near-miss as a setback and instead used it for a springboard for a breakthrough year this season.

Before winning the McGladrey Classic, Streb posted a top 10 at the Shriners Hospitals for Children Open. He followed the win with an eighth at the Sanderson Farms Championship and then a tie for eighth at the Hyundai Tournament of Champions.

Two more top 20s followed and Streb found himself atop the FedEx Cup Points standings for the bulk of the early part of the season.

“The biggest thing was just the knowledge that you can do it,” Streb said. “You get a little job security, which is nice, and that lets you just relax and go play.”

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Streb has no time to relax these days, and he’s more than fine with that.

Immediately after finishing tied for 10th at the Waste Management Phoenix Open, Streb rushed home to Kansas City to be with his wife, Maggie, who was expecting the couple’s first child. Catherine Joye was born on Feb. 4 — an event Streb called “way more important than my win.”

In the two-plus months since, Streb’s biggest focus has been finding a balance between his professional and personal lives.

“It’s different,” he said. “You’re used to kind of going where you want to and doing what you please. I missed them for a few weeks after she was born. You go home, you don’t get to put your feet up and watch TV. You’ve got stuff to do. It’s an adjustment, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

It’s taken some time. Streb missed the cut in his first tournament back — his first missed cut since last August — and has missed two more cuts leading into the Masters. His best finish in the last two months is a tie for 56th at the World Golf Championships at Doral and he has slipped to eighth in the FedEx Cup points standings.

True to form, Streb is unwavered by the rough stretch.

“It would be nice to get that balance right, but the dad thing is more important right now,” he said. “I feel like I’ve got a lot more comfortable finding the right balance because I was searching there for a few weeks. I feel like I’ve got it going the right way again.”

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Nothing would get Streb going again like a strong showing in his first Masters appearance.

He got his first look at the course in mid-March and admitted it wasn’t anything like he expected.

“It’s funny without the people,” he said. “Whenever you watch it on TV, there are people everywhere. But when you get here, it looks totally different. On 9 and 18, the greens are kind of just out there. It’s weird. But it’s really cool here, and they treat you so well.”

Streb’s game seemingly fits the course layout, playing a strong right to left game off the tee.

“I’m really excited to see how he’s going to do,” Norris said. “Hopefully it will be a great week for him, and I hope it’s not just a once-in-a-lifetime deal for him. And I don’t think it will be. What you see with him is constant improvement each year. That’s what you like to see and it will serve him well as he goes forward.”

This debut is one that Streb has dreamt about for some time.

“When I turned pro after college, I was like, ‘I want to go play there,’” he said. “I felt I could do well here. You never know until you play it. But I thought it would be a neat place to play, as it would be for anybody.

“I feel like if you’re playing well, you’re going to have a chance. I’m going to soak it all in while I can.”