Family legacies are established by the time we take our first breaths, our first steps, our first golf swings. Some are impossible to live up to, others difficult to live down; all ingrained in our fabric.
But let us shower praise on those who are strong, committed and sensible enough to wade through all of that and embrace the notion that what happened before we got here doesn’t define us.
What defines us is what we make with our lot in life.
Eric Cole is crafting his own legacy in a glorious way. On his terms and with a spirit that deserves your admiration. “This is all him,” said his mother, Laura Baugh. “I am so proud of the life he has made. There is no greater joy in life than to watch someone do something they love and do it well.”
“Back then, when I was 10, my dad hit it well past me so I spent more time watching my mother play. We played the course from the same spots, so I’m OK with that.” – Eric Cole
Cole knows of his mother’s golf legacy. He is cognizant of his father’s golf legacy. The Bobby Cole and Laura Baugh legacy as husband and wife – two different marriages that produced seven children – and the more than 650 combined tournaments on the PGA and LPGA tour is there for your perusal should you feel it’s enlightening or pertinent.
But accept this as gospel:
• Eric Cole has maneuvered his way through multiple Minor League Golf Tour seasons with more than 50 wins and a couple of Korn Ferry Tour campaigns to reach the PGA Tour as a 34-year-old rookie. That feat was based on his own merit, not on a pedigree that can’t be quantified.
• Cole is teeing it up in this week’s Honda Classic at PGA National in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, with $335,880 earned in 11 tournaments thus far in his 2022-23 rookie season based on his skill, not a name that piques your curiosity.
Fair enough to suggest he got a lot of his technical know-how of the game from studying his dad. “I think I learned how to play, how to score,” said Eric.
OK, too, if you want to submit that his mom’s game made him value finesse, feel, and the mental side of golf.
“Back then, when I was 10, my dad hit it well past me so I spent more time watching my mother play. We played the course from the same spots, so I’m OK with that,” he said.
But he chose his words carefully here: “I mean, I paid attention to their golf, but I didn’t watch all that closely. I became too focused on the process and definitely chose the route I wanted to go.”
Eric Cole (center) says he has paid attention to his parents’ achievements in golf. But he knows to excel, he will have to forge through the shadow of their legacies.
It’s a route to be applauded, mapped out by a guy who is easy to root for.
“I know what he can do,” said Jon Curran, who squeezed out a few years on the PGA Tour after navigating the worlds of Minor League Golf Tour and Korn Ferry Tour. “Everyone wants the model today – the college star who comes right out of the chute and you can tell where his path is.
“But building a career from scratch and having a humble attitude, that’s something to like. You see Eric and if you have a trained eye you say, ‘This kid’s legitimate. He’s capable to make it happen.’”
• • •
If you expect to make it out of the minor leagues, then you best possess major-league grit. Eric Cole is saturated in it, said Brad Adamonis, who saw it up close early in the 2020 season. That’s gut-check time for the week-in-and-week-out wannabes; one-day MLGT events; 18-hole Monday qualifiers. Go low or go home. At Weston Hills Country Club in Weston, Florida, Cole shot 67 and Adamonis a 68, too high to make it through a U.S. qualifier for the upcoming KFT Country Club de Bogotá Championship. But when you’ve got gumption and no quit in your DNA, you hop flights from Miami to Colombia and try the local qualifier two weeks later. Adamonis remembers shooting 64 and being confident of getting one of the spots.
“But Eric came in with 61 and got in. I didn’t,” Adamonis said. “He then shot 63 for a share of the first-round lead.’’
Eventually, Cole fell back with rounds of 73-70-70 and was T-39, but what Adamonis remembers is the rest of the story, as the late Paul Harvey would say.
Cole flew from Bogotá to Miami Sunday night, got off the plane, Ubered to his car offsite, drove to his apartment in Delray Beach, slept three hours, then drove three hours to the Monday qualifier in Sarasota, Florida, for the next week’s LEMCO Suncoast Classic.
“He shot 63 and got in,” said Adamonis. “Best back-to-back Monday qualifiers I ever saw.”
Cole finished 68-69-66-68 for T-17 at the LEMCO, which occurred a week before the pandemic set in. The Korn Ferry Tour was off line a few months, but Cole had turned those two Monday qualifiers into enough status to ride the circuit through an arduous 31-tournament 2020-21 season which ended with him earning a card for the 2022 KFT season. When that season culminated with a T-3 in the Korn Ferry Tour Championship, Cole cemented his PGA Tour card.
“Man, now look at him – he’s on tour,” said Adamonis. “It’s so great. Nothing but great things to say about him.”
• • •
From St. Augustine, Florida, where she now teaches, Baugh will echo those thoughts. With more passion, of course, befitting her position as the loving mother.
“Eric has done all this on his own,” said Baugh. “I taught all my kids to play golf, but I realized that you either have the love of golf or you don’t. I made it available to all of them, to see if they’d show passion. Eric did.”
What she couldn’t make available was access to the elite junior golf programs. Her second marriage to Cole ended in 1998 when Eric was 10 and with seven kids (ages 1 to 16), “and it wasn’t because he wasn’t good enough, it just wasn’t feasible to get him into those junior tours,” she said.
It’s not in Eric Cole’s nature to complain. And, besides, those summers when he got to travel with his mother to LPGA tournaments are fondly remembered, especially when the on-site daycare was dominated by his younger siblings.
“I was the lucky one,” laughed Eric, then a young teenager. “I got to walk and watch golf.”
The spark in Eric’s eyes was spotted by Baugh, so she managed what she could and Eric soon played his golf for a junior rate at West Orange Country Club in Winter Garden. “He’d play there every day, all day, when he was 11 and by 12 and 13 and 14 he was great.”
“She came into pro golf with so much success, a U.S. Amateur championship, and she took opportunities. She focused on off-course business a lot, but when she started having children, that is where her focus was. She shifted her priorities. She wasn’t goal-oriented, she was family-oriented.” – Eric Cole, speaking of his mother, Laura Baugh
Re-married to a lawyer who had a membership at Bay Hill, Baugh caddied for the first time for Eric at that club championship. “He won by something like 12 shots. It was the first real tournament he played.”
The Bay Hill experience went beyond the pure golf experience; that is where Cole developed a friend for life, a kid named Sam Saunders, also known as Arnold Palmer’s grandson.
“We went to different high schools (Saunders, a star in the privates at Trinity Prep; Cole, a star in the publics, at Olympia) but I played a lot of golf with him and when he got out on the (Korn Ferry Tour and PGA Tour) I caddied for him a bunch,” said Cole.
They also played with PGA Tour veterans such as Lee Janzen, Mark Calcavecchia and Russ Cochran. Advice was asked, lessons were learned, and this insatiable desire to make golf his life burned within Cole. He was well aware of how his parents had done it and Cole respected their professional routes. But Eric Cole listened when father and mother spoke of trappings that were out there. He appreciates all the tutelage and guidance they’ve provided.
• • •
Bobby Cole had an eventful launch into pro golf, for sure. After winning the South African Junior Championship, he became an 18-year-old winner of the British Amateur at Carnoustie (1966) and was still that age the following spring when he finished low amateur at the Masters.
There were significant wins on the Sunshine Tour – at the South African Open and South African PGA – then some dances with Open Championship glory. At 26, Cole was beaten in the 1974 Open at Royal Lytham and St. Annes by only Gary Player, Peter Oosterhuis, Jack Nicklaus and Hubert Green. A year later, Cole birdied the diabolical 18th at Carnoustie to take the 54-hole lead, only to stumble with a closing 76 and finish one shot out of the playoff that gave birth to Tom Watson’s brilliance.
Bobby Cole and Laura Baugh enjoyed success at different stages of their careers.
Watson beat Jack Newton in a playoff for the first of his five Claret Jugs, while Bobby Cole would wait two more years for his only PGA Tour win – the 1977 Buick Open.
Cole was 32 when he married 25-year-old Laura Baugh in 1980, by which time she had already been described by every golf writer in America as “a blue-eyed blonde beauty from Long Beach, California.” Her entry onto the national scene had come in 1971 when she lost the U.S. Girls’ Junior to Brandi Burton, then bounced back to become, at 16, the youngest winner of the U.S. Women’s Amateur at the time.
Before she turned 18, Baugh turned pro in 1973 and was off to play in Japan until she met the age requirement for LPGA membership. In her pro debut on American soil, Baugh was in line to win the Lady Tara in Atlanta but got derailed by a double-bogey at the 15th. She settled for a share of second place and a check for $2,480.
Understand the pittance of the prize money back then. Kathy Whitworth in ’73 won seven times and piled up $82,864.
So is there anyone who would have turned down the endorsement offers that came Baugh’s way? She signed with IMG, which housed a marketing gargantuan in Arnold Palmer, “and I had an opportunity to do what a lot of women weren’t able to do so I took advantage of it,” said Baugh.
Did it impact her game? You can make that case, given that Baugh never won on the LPGA Tour. But she finished top 10 on 71 occasions, including 10 seconds, and the rewarding highlights were plentiful.
Just don’t forget that best of all, she earned the enduring respect of her oldest son, the golf-mad Eric.
“She came into pro golf with so much success, a U.S. Amateur championship, and she took opportunities,” he said. “She focused on off-course business a lot, but when she started having children, that is where her focus was. She shifted her priorities. She wasn’t goal-oriented, she was family-oriented.”
The family side took a major hit last May, however, when Michael John, her fifth child and youngest of three sons, died suddenly at the age of 28.
“While I’ll never be the same, I also know I’ve been blessed in so many ways,” she said.
Watching Eric earn his PGA Tour card and be rewarded for years of perseverance and patience? “He was that bright light in a dark year for our family.”
Eric Cole appreciates his mother’s way of mourning, but grief comes in all styles. And being true to his humble and shy nature, “I just don’t have much to say about it,” he said. “Other than I loved him so much and miss him every day.”
• • •
Bumps in the road? Damn right. But there are bumps on the golf course, too. You deal with them. That is how Eric Cole had faced the curious loss of weight when he went to college at Nova Southeastern University in 2006-07. The explanation was a one-two punch that unsettled mother and son.
Eric Cole was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Oh, and with Addison’s disease.
“I think he dropped to about 110 pounds,” said Baugh. “It was very rare, but we’re extremely fortunate they diagnosed it.
“But he just didn’t share that for a long time.”
No, but he did win freshman of the year in the Sunshine State Conference, because to Cole, you play it as it lies – on the golf course and in life.
“It took them a while to diagnose it, but once they did, it was my job to stay on top of it,” he said.
The golf job? Well, he stayed on that, too. Far from the spotlight, mind you, but he was willing to prove himself on every mini tour. He left Nova in 2008 and focused on the Minor League Golf Tour. Based in southern Florida, it was hard to turn down – especially when you were winning and winning and winning.
The victory total is at 56, most recently in early January, right before Cole shifted his sights back to the PGA Tour and flew to Honolulu for the Sony Open in Hawaii.
One of those MLGT wins on Cole’s résumé came at Adamonis’ expense. He thought he was in the clubhouse with a winning 64. “Then Eric comes in and shoots 61. I mean, no BS. He did it to me again,” said Adamonis.
But Adamonis quickly laughs and tells you, “I love it.”
Why? “Because nothing has been given to that kid. He’s earned it.”
• • •
Yes, it’s minor league golf, but you have to win, right? Isn’t that the saying?
“You don’t play for a lot of money, so you can’t have a lot of quit in your game,” said Cole. “Every shot is important. You have to grind out rounds just to pay your bills. It’s a different pressure, but it definitely keeps you sharp.”
That he has adjusted fairly well to the major leagues has given him a sense of comfort. Six cuts made in 11 tries, a T-27 at the World Wide Technology Championship at Mayakoba in Mexico and a T-15 at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am indicate that Cole, who is 115th on the money list, has game.
As the PGA Tour swings into this week’s Honda Classic where Cole is qualified and next week’s $20 million designated event at the Arnold Palmer Invitational where he has a sponsor’s exemption, a mother’s anguish is soothed by a heart that overflows with joy, thanks to the oldest son.
Apparently, he certainly also has that gentle and caring soul his mother raves about, because during a practice round at Pebble, Cole got down on one knee and proposed to his longtime girlfriend, Stephanie Williams.
“I didn’t expect it,” said Williams, who grew up in the Philadelphia area, graduated from Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts, with a master’s degree and works for Edward Jones in Southern Florida. “He totally surprised me.”
Cole, who would shoot 71 and 69 in his two trips around Pebble once the tournament began (he mixed in a 65 at Monterey Peninsula and a 73 at Spyglass), Cole could only smile. “It was a long time coming,” he laughed. “But better late than never. I got the answer I wanted.”
As the PGA Tour swings into this week’s Honda Classic where Cole is qualified and next week’s $20 million designated event at the Arnold Palmer Invitational where he has a sponsor’s exemption, a mother’s anguish is soothed by a heart that overflows with joy, thanks to the oldest son.
“He’s an inspiration,” said Baugh. “It’s all him. He’s done it.”