Maybe you’re like me, starting to feel old. Or you’re already old. Or you are, by most measures, young, but getting older.
Such stages of life are the only inevitability we all have in common, right? Until death, at least.
Fred Couples started feeling old more than 20 years ago. He had a hard time with it. By 2002, the 14-time winner on the PGA Tour had gone four years without a victory and was rarely in contention anymore. He felt like the game had raced by him.
The young guys were too good, too strong. He looked around and saw Tiger Woods and Ernie Els and didn’t recognize the sport.
Couples wrote about it all in a March 2002 issue of Sports Illustrated. In a forgotten chapter in golf history, he was a front-facing backer for a possible new entity known as the Majors Tour. The venture — what one might call a *raises eyebrows* breakaway league — was meant to offer a platform for prominent players in the shallow swamp between their prime play and their senior tour eligibility.
At the time, guys like Couples, Nick Faldo and Greg Norman were still out there playing a regular schedule but feeling borderline embarrassed.
When I asked Couples after his round if he cared about being an inspiration to folks of a certain age, he dodged the question, cracked a joke and said, again, he just wished he had a better day out there.
But he said, yeah, he knows, from 30 to 70, all the people trekking around out here want to relate to him.
The smart ones do.
GO FURTHER
Masters 2025: Fred Couples is timeless. We can all learn something from him