GREG BARNETT
Sports Editor
The Pepperdine men’s golf team’s spring season begins this week with the John Hayt Collegiate Invitational in Jacksonville, Flor. Head Coach John Geiberger recently sat down with the Graphic to discuss his goals for the team this season, his annual fundraiser tournament and his recent experience caddying for Jason Gore at the PGA Tour’s Bob Hope Chrysler Classic.
What do you enjoy doing away from the golf course?
“I like my time at home actually. We travel so much, and I’m so busy during the year that I just like to be at home and doing stuff around the house. It feels good to be home when you go to the airport probably 20 to 25 times a year. I try to play a little bit of golf in the summer and a little bit during December. I like to hang out with my wife and come over to Malibu, hang out and go to the beach in the summer.”
Your team had a pretty good fall season with two victories. Are you expecting the same in the spring season?
“I think it showed our team that we can win, and that’s important. You don’t want to get to the end of the year and not have a victory and kind of think, ‘Well, are we good enough to win?’ To win twice, I think will shout some confidence through the team all the way through no matter who’s playing. Our goal for this year is to get in contention in all the tournaments we play in. I feel like we’re good enough to do that and sustain that. You don’t always win, but we pretty much accomplished that in four of our five tournaments in the fall.”
You played golf at Pepperdine in the late 80s and early 90s. Do you see any similarities or differences between your current team and yourself when you played?
“You see the struggles of time demands and school. Your day is so structured with school, practice and workouts and everything else you need to do in the day, but you see the same ups and downs and improvement of players. It’s hard to actually measure the game because the game has changed so much with technology. You see the players come in as freshmen and what their expectations are and where you are as a senior. I think the biggest change with school, for the good and the bad, is technology. With cell phones and everyone going into class with their laptops, that’s a lot different than when we were in school. There are also a lot of advantages for doing research and getting papers done on the road. That’s a big advantage — they can sit down and pump out a paper and just e-mail it to a teacher now. When we had to do a research paper, we had to spend close to a week in the library going through Microfish and taking notes out of books and then trying to put that all together. Now you can Google a subject and end up with hundreds of thousands of pages on that subject. I guess there’s more going on, but they can get more stuff done.”
You organize a couple fundraiser tournaments a year for the team. Can you talk about those?
“Our large fundraiser is called ‘A Day with the Pros’ — we try to bring back some of our alumni that have now made their way out on to various professional tours. We have a golf tournament, a dinner and a silent auction where we have about 20 items such as rounds of golf, signed memorabilia from the Ryder Cup, and just odds and ends stuff that people will enjoy. That’s kind of our bread and butter to get us through the year. We have to raise money to have the program where we want it so that’s an important day for our program each year. It’s been pretty successful the last 10 to 12 years and even more successful the last few.”
What tournament do you enjoy going to every year?
“I do enjoy going [to Hawaii], but I think the kids enjoy it more to tell you the truth. It’s a fun trip but it can also be a distraction. I like to travel back to the central part of the country and the east and see some of those teams. Every trip you go on you learn something about yourself or your game. We try to go east two or three times a year because it’s hard to go east and play well. The more we do it, it’s a better experience for the kids. I used to love going to the Austin, Texas, tournament. I don’t know why but the club there and the tournament they run is always fun, but I like to try and provide the best experience for the kids and see different parts of the country.”
You recently caddied for former Pepperdine player, Jason Gore, at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic on the PGA Tour. What was that like?
“It was a fun week — he called me kind of in a panic. His caddy had just quit and I was actually down in Florida at a coach’s convention and I pick up the phone and he says, ‘Can you work for me this week?’ I had just gotten out of a nine-hour seminar and wasn’t flying home until Tuesday night and the tournament started on Wednesday. He needed a caddy for the Bob Hope and the Buick Invitational, and I told him I could work one of the two weeks. I changed my flight and flew home a day early and met up with him on Tuesday. It was fun and good to spend some time with him. I usually only see him a couple times a year and it’s quick, normally at our fundraiser. He actually played on the celebrity rotation. Each day he played with three or four different ones. He played with Jimmy Fallon, and I got to meet Don Cheadle and Samuel Jackson. It’s funny, Jason is so popular. All the so-called celebrities actually come up to him on the driving range and talk to him. I knew he was popular but he’s so popular with not only outsiders, but all the players on tour also.”
When your team won the NCAA championship in 1997, you were so sick with the chicken pox that you didn’t see the golf course. That must have been difficult.
“I was so sick for the first 80 percent of the trip, the guys would crack open my door and tell me how they played and that was it. They kind of did their thing but I started to feel a little better the last day and fortunately it was on ESPN. I was, obviously, very nervous watching it on television. It was pretty remarkable what that team accomplished. I never saw the course, we were there for eight days, and I never saw the golf course.”
Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
“Right here. I love it here. I went here, and when I started here that was the first year of having the program full-time and to see the evolution that’s taken place. I mean, we were begging to get tournaments and driving to the Bay Area every two weeks. I mean, the kids talk about uniforms and stuff. We had three ugly uniforms and a big trip for us was going to play in Boise State’s tournament my first year. Each year our schedule got better and we got better and things kind of evolved. We started getting national recruits and that led up to qualifying for nationals in ‘96 and then winning the championship in ‘97. We’ve tried to maintain that level since then. I love it here — every year is like the first year and that’s the fun part about coaching.”
02-14-2008