His run for the presidency will have to wait.
Rob Rashell has many rounds of golf to play before he seeks this country’s highest office.
If he were to run, and if he were to devote the same amount of work, perseverance and conscientiousness to his campaign that he has to his golf game, he’d be a hard man to beat. But really, why would anyone want to be president when he can play golf for a living, in such exotic spots as Hong Kong and Capetown, South Africa?
Besides, he never really said he wanted to be president. That thought was floated by his preschool teacher, who found young Rob to be very bright. “Someday,” she said, “I think he’s going to be president.”
Some might have thought he’d be a better fit as commissioner of the NFL. When he was 2 years old, Rashell was carrying on conversations with adults, mostly about football. “He knew everything about football,” his mother, Donna, said.
Twenty-five years later, he’s focused not on football, but on golf, and that focus has taken him to new heights in recent weeks.
Last weekend, less than a month after he came out of qualifying school, the 27-year-old Lake Stevens native played his first tournament on the PGA European International Tour. And what a debut it was.
Shooting a 5-under-par 275, Rashell finished in a five-way tie for 10th place in the Omega Hong Kong Open at the Hong Kong Golf Club. He was two strokes out of the lead after three rounds, but slipped to a 1-over 71 on the final 18 on Sunday to finish six shots behind the winner, Padraig Harrington of Ireland.
Competing against some of the best golfers in the world, including four players ranked in the top 25, Rashell earned a little more than $12,000. And came away confident that he has the stuff to do well in this, the second biggest golf tour in the world next to the PGA.
“I’m a little bit disappointed with my finish on Sunday,” Rashell said by phone from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, where he was awaiting a flight that would take him to his home in Scottsdale, Ariz. “Obviously, I was happy with finishing 10th, but when you get in the thick of things, you want to win. And I feel I have the ability to go out and win.”
To do as well as he did after what he’s been through the last month or so tells you a great deal about Rashell’s strength of character. At one time, back in late October, early November, he was trying to qualify not only for the European Tour overseas, but also for the PGA Tour here in the states.
He flew to Germany for the first stage of the European Qualifying School, passed it, came back to the U.S. for the first round of the PGA Qualifying School, had a “bad week at the wrong time,” which ended that quest, then flew back to Europe for the final two stages of that school (in France and Spain, respectively).
Armed with his European Tour card, he returned to Scottsdale to await word on whether he would be accepted for the Hong Kong tournament. Two days before he was to fly to the Far East, his grandmother, Sue Jensen, passed away from emphysema. Rob said he felt that he should come home, but his parents said there was nothing he could do here and that his grandmother “would be sitting on his shoulder” as he went to tee it up last week.
“It was a long week of ups and downs,” he said. “I thought about her a bunch. I was hoping to pull one out for her on Sunday.”
All of this doesn’t even take into account the four summer months he spent on the Gateway Tour, a mini-tour based in Scottsdale.
Somehow, through all of this, he has managed to keep his bearings, which is not at all surprising to those who know him well.
“He’s well adjusted. He’s not living or dying on every shot,” said his swing coach, Jeff Coston, a former PGA Tour player. “That develops patience. He’s a patient and persevering warrior. The strength of Rob is he realizes golf is not a sprint but a marathon. He’s willing to run a marathon.”
A marathon is 26.2 miles. Sometimes you have to grind to finish it. You have to grit your teeth and just keep putting one foot in front of the other, no matter how much you hurt.
Rashell is more than willing to grind.
“Rob is probably what you would call your proverbial blue-collar golfer,” said his father, Don, who has his own roofing business. “Everything he has accomplished has been through hard work and self determination.”
Rashell grew up playing on public courses and on his grandfather Jensen’s “back 40.”
A friend of Milo Jensen’s, Jerry Endicott, who was a club pro, gave Rob and his brother Mark some cutdown clubs when they were boys and they’d go out in Milo’s big backyard and “hit golf balls for all they were worth.”
“They both just swung like they were born to swing,” Milo said. “They just swung like the guys on TV.”
Neither boy took golf lessons growing up. In fact, Rob didn’t have his first lesson until he got to college.
So he’s essentially a self-made golfer. “You betcha,” his grandfather said.
Many a summer day was spent playing at Cedarcrest Golf Course in Marysville. “That’s where they learned to play golf,” Don said of his sons.
Their parents would drop them off in the morning and pick them up when the sun was setting. “It was a great babysitter,” Don said, laughing. “They did that all summer for two or three years.”
While golf was fun, Rob never talked about making a career of it. “I had no real plans of playing college golf until I arrived at the University of Washington,” he once wrote in a profile.
He had no real plans of playing high school golf, either, because when he was coming up, Lake Stevens had no golf team. It was brother Mark, two years older, who got up a petition to start a program his sophomore year.
Larry Palmer was the first coach, and he said having the Rashell brothers playing for him was like having a pair of 20-somethings on his team.
“There were a lot of things that separated him (Rob) and his brother from other kids,” Palmer said. “There was a certain maturity they had. They also had a commitment to excellence; they were willing to put in the extra time.”
Rob also had confidence in himself.
“That makes a big difference in golf because a lot of times your swing deserts you,” Palmer said. “That’s the reason a lot of people don’t make it (in the pros). He had tenacity.”
Norm Lowery, Rob’s high school basketball coach, detected an “edge” in the younger Rashell. “The good athletes have that when they put it on the line,” said Lowery, now a counselor at Everett High School.
When Mark was a senior and Rob a sophomore, they represented Lake Stevens in the state golf tournament, and brought home sixth place. Two years later, Rob had a scoring average of 77.2, a school record that still stands.
Rashell went to the UW on an Evans Scholarship, which he earned through outstanding academic achievement and two years of caddying at Everett Golf and Country Club. He did 100 “loops” a summer and sometimes toted two bags.
“I know what it means to work hard for something,” he said in his profile.
With the Evans scholarship in hand, he decided to give golf a try at the UW as a walk on. He won two walk-on qualifying tournaments, but the Husky coach never got back to him. Rashell said he pestered him with phone calls and when they finally did talk, the coach told him “there wasn’t enough room on the team.”
The Huskies had a new coach the next year, and when O.D. Vincent said he was going to have a walk-on qualifying tournament, he meant it.
“It was held in January of my sophomore year, eight guys after one spot,” Rashell recalled. “We played two weeks, nine holes every day.”
Rashell had forged a two-stroke lead on the field when he got a phone call one morning. Vincent was on the other end. “It’s snowing, we’re not playing today, you’re on the team,” the coach said. “We’re leaving for Hawaii tomorrow, talk to you when we get back.”
That spring, the Huskies opened with a tournament in Oregon.
Rashell started off a little shaky, shooting an 85 in the practice round.
Then this walk-on who had never played in a college tournament, who had been shunned by the former coach, fashioned rounds of 73, 76 and 70 for a 219 total to finish 12th overall and beat everyone on the Husky varsity.
When he spoke recently, Vincent still vividly recalled Rashell’s 219. “From there on, he was our best player for the next 3 1/2years.”
It was Vincent who gave Rashell his first golf lesson. “He didn’t need much coaching,” said Vincent, now the head coach at UCLA. “He just needed the opportunities.”
Like others who have watched Rashell grow, Vincent praised him for his competitiveness. “He never did anything half-heartedly,” Vincent said. “He was our team captain, a guy you could count on.”
It wasn’t until the end of his junior year that Rashell decided to try to make a career as a golf pro. After graduating, he played on the Golden Bear Tour for two years and on the Canadian Tour for part of a year. He also qualified for the Australian Tour, but passed on it because he was guaranteed just three or four tournaments.
Then came the Gateway Tour, where he flourished with second-place finishes in money winnings the past two years, including more than $102,000 this past summer.
Rashell has been helped financially by a stable of investors. He keeps them up to date with a monthly newsletter that his father calls “brutally truthful.”
To which Rob replied, “It helps me to be honest with myself. If I have a weakness, it (the newsletter) exposes it and I can work on it.”
Rob’s competitive nature never lags, especially when he plays brother Mark, the assistant pro at Harbour Pointe Golf Course in Mukilteo. “When they play, no quarter is given,” their father said. “They go at it tooth and nail.”
When all is said and done, the older brother stands back and beams about his little brother.
“He’s a good dude,” Mark said. “I’m proud of him.”
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