The Curious Disappearance Of 1990 Players’ Winner Jodie Mudd
The golf world is full of one-time phenoms who for whatever reason couldn’t sustain their on-course greatness. Ian Baker-Finch, Bill Rogers and even Byron Nelson (retiring at age 34) come to mind. And, don’t forget 1990 Players winner Jodie Mudd.
Mudd was money back in his prime but faded away for reasons unknown–at least he’s not telling us why. GolfWeek’s Eamon Lynch attempts to find some answers.
“Jodie used to have a gorgeous golf swing. He made the game look so simple.”
“I’m not sure anyone was really close to him.”
“Funny how you remember things about someone. He had a huge forward press as he started his swing. Then he just flushed it.”
“He was a quiet man.”
This week is when Mudd makes his annual appearance on Tour, albeit only as a ghostly figure on Players Championship highlight reels. It’s been 28 years since he won and almost that long since he walked away from the game.
The soft-spoken Kentuckian always let his game speak for him, and it had plenty to say. He won the U.S. Amateur Public Links back to back in 1980-81. In 1982 he finished as low amateur at the Masters and turned pro. Five years later he finished T-4 at Augusta National, one shot out of that epic Mize-Shark-Seve playoff. He got his first win at the FedEx St. Jude in 1988 and his second a year later at the Byron Nelson. Seven months after that Players victory he added the Nabisco Championship, which has become the Tour Championship.
Four wins in a little over two years, plus a half-dozen top-7 finishes in majors. And then it was over. He didn’t win again. Didn’t even play in a major after 1992.
Mudd made 25 starts in that 1990 season, but by ‘95 he was down to nine events, surviving just one cut. He played five tournaments early in 1996 but didn’t make a weekend. On Feb. 9 of that year he signed for a second-round 76 at Torrey Pines. It was the last round he ever played on Tour. He was 35 years old.
“He was still exempt when he walked away,” says one of his nodding acquaintances from that time. “That never happens out here.”
In the spring of 2010, 14 years after he left the game and a week after he turned 50, Mudd showed up on the PGA Tour Champions. He made four starts and told a reporter that he was having fun despite periodic back pain. Then just 44 days after he became eligible, he left that Tour behind, too, and went home to Kentucky.
I reached out to Mudd to ask if I could call him to talk about that Players win and what came afterward. A few hours later, I received a short but polite email that hinted at a man happy with his life and thoroughly uninterested in poking at the long-extinguished embers of his career.
“I appreciate your interest in an old past champion,” he wrote. “But I can’t offer you any enlightenment other than I have an eight-year-old daughter that’s keeping me young. Cheers, Jodie.”
