ORLANDO, Fla. — You want to talk about inspiration and motivation? It was oozing from everywhere when Olympia High’s Eric Cole teed off for the first time at The Arnold Palmer Invitational on Thursday.
It seemed the emotion emanated from every blade of Bermuda grass on every green at Bay Hill; every grain of sand in every bunker; every leaf on every oak tree lining every fairway throughout the breathtaking 270 acres on the shores of the Butler Chain of Lakes.
After all, Cole grew up playing on this course when his mother remarried a lawyer who was a member at Bay Hill. He caddied the tournament when his boyhood buddy Sam Saunders — Arnold Palmer’s grandson — played in it. He even won the member-guest club championship here as a 16-year-old.
Now the improbable journey of this 34-year-old PGA Tour rookie had come full circle. All those years and fears of wondering, waiting, worrying if he would ever become a PGA Tour player were omnipresent on that first tee.
As was his mother — his famous mother. She is Laura Baugh, the former LPGA golfer and calendar girl whose own improbable journey and ability to overcome adversity has been an impetus for her son to endure and overcome.
“She is an incredible woman,” says Cole, who was 2-under through five holes Thursday before settling for an even-par 72. “I’m lucky that she’s my mom. Everyone has some kind of hardship or something that you have to deal with in your life. The way she dealt with it proves her character. I’m just proud of her.”
Cole was just a young boy when his mother battled alcoholism as one of the LPGA’s most marketable stars in the 1970s. At 16, Baugh became the youngest champion in U.S. Women’s Amateur history and skipped college to turn pro.
With her game and good looks, she quickly became the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Marilyn Monroe of the LPGA Tour. In 1972, Golf Digest named her its “Most Beautiful Golfer” and she morphed into an endorsement machine, making television commercials for Ultrabrite toothpaste and other national brands such as Ford, Rolex and Suzuki.
However, her fame came with enormous trappings. She married four times and became addicted to alcohol. Baugh once said drinking 20 glasses of wine was routine, and it was only after her “bleed out” in 1996 that she somehow found the resolve to finally put down the bottle.
“I was drinking so much I started bleeding spontaneously from every place you can imagine,” she once told Golf Digest. “My eyes, fingernails, toenails, ears, mouth, nose, private parts — I was bleeding inside my brain. It was very painful. When this happens, you’re dying. The doctors had pretty much given up on me, and people came to the hospital to say goodbye. I was given the last rites. The fact I recovered is extraordinary. I can never drink again, or I’ll bleed out again almost immediately and die.”
Through all the personal turmoil, Baugh persevered and pressed on and worked hard to be a good mother to Eric and the six other children she had with former PGA Tour golfer Bobby Cole.
Obviously, Eric inherited some of his mom’s grit, guts, perseverance and persistence. How else do you explain him being a 34-year-rookie on the PGA Tour after years of toiling in obscurity on the minor league mini-tours. There were times he thought about giving up and becoming a golf instructor, but something inside him told him he was good enough to make it.
Maybe it was an ability to grind that he learned in his boyhood when he grew up in Winter Garden, playing all day, every day in the suffocating summer sun at West Orange Country Club. Or maybe it was the confidence he built winning club championships at Bay Hill and state championships at Olympia High School.
Last week at the Honda Classic, all of the sweating and grinding finally paid off. Even though he lost to Chris Kirk in a playoff when his birdie putt lipped out, Cole finished second and won $907,200. If you’re scoring at home, the last check Cole cashed a few months ago as a minor league golfer was for $1,500.
And then came Thursday when he teed it up for the first time at The Arnie.
As the first-tee announcer called out his name to the small gallery, his mother took a deep breath, smiled through quivering lips and held up her cell phone to record her son’s first shot.
Earlier in this column, Eric Cole told us how proud he is of his mother’s ability to overcome and endure.
From the look of joy, love and pride on Laura Baugh’s face Thursday, the feeling is obviously mutual.
