Wagner vows to stay focused

After six years on the PGA Tour, Johnson Wagner is all too aware of how goofy golf can be.

After he won his first tournament in 2008, he took 10th at his Tournament of Champions debut at big and constantly blowing Kapalua Plantation. He could not wait to get to the Sony Open in Hawaii.

"I was like, golf is easy, I’m going to blow this field away," Wagner recalled Wednesday on the eve of his title defense at Waialae Country Club. "I missed the cut by a mile."

He would miss three straight cuts at the Sony before opening with five birdies on the back nine in last year’s first round.

"I started planning my interview for the 59 I was going to shoot," he joked. "Then I made four bogeys in a row or something on the front nine and it brought me back down to Earth a little bit."

Three days later, Wagner separated himself from a massive pack — at one point on Sunday 23 players were within three shots of the lead — to win the Sony. His final-round 67 was two shots better than Carl Pettersson, Sean O’Hair, Harrison Frazar and Charles Howell III.

Those two strokes and many others can be traced to Waialae’s back nine, where Wagner was 14 under par, bogey-free, and blissfully happy when he claimed his third tour title.

He finished second the next week, giving him three consecutive top 10s and more than $1.5 million in January. Wagner collected another $435,000 the next two months, missed the cut at the Masters and never got inside the top 35 the rest of the year.

"I missed the cut at the Masters after a good week in Houston, and I think I just got really focused on making a Ryder Cup team, getting into the U.S. Open," Wagner recalled. "I was worried about playing in tournaments as opposed to winning tournaments, and I kind of lost my train of thought that I had at the beginning of the year, which was just go out, play good golf, and hopefully find myself in position on Sunday."

He believes he is just as well prepared — on the course and in the head — for this season as he was a year ago. He focused on chipping and bunker play — "a glaring weakness" — in the offseason. If a few more putts had fallen last week at windy Kapalua he feels he could have been in contention.

The goal now, at 32, is not to get ahead of himself again. Too much planning has gone into this career.

Wagner was captain of his high school hockey team. He caddied in the summer and went to Virginia Tech mostly because he knew he could play in every tournament.

"I wanted to go to North Carolina, to Oklahoma, someplace that was a big-name golf school," Wagner said. "If I had, I would have had to walk on, probably never would have played or maybe I would have played my senior year.

"I think going to a place that you can play your freshman year or at least have a chance to play early is the best thing to do because if you’re not playing, you’re not getting better.

He plays a lot now — 27 events last year and at least 25 every other — and when it comes to January, he knows precisely where he wants to be.

"To me, January means coming to Hawaii, and it’s an amazing time," Wagner said. "I think anybody would be lucky to come to Hawaii in January, and I’m lucky enough to play golf and play golf for money and make a great living out here.

"It’s kind of a working vacation for me. There’s so much to do on the islands, and to me it’s just not a new year unless I’m in Hawaii."