At first glance, Trevor Immelman's life in Orlando, Florida, looks a lot like the sunbaked existence of a golf-crazed retiree. The 28-year-old wakes up early each day in his huge house with a fairway for a backyard. Parked in the garage are matching golf carts for him and his wife, Carmenita, to putt around Lake Nona, the gated golf community where they live. Over at the clubhouse, littered with member newsletters and schmaltzy piano music, he keeps his Nike polos in a locker next to former governor Jeb Bush's. But Immelman, who in April beat Tiger Woods by three strokes to become only the second South African to win the Masters — Gary Player notched three — is far from his twilight years. As the only golfer on the PGA Tour in his twenties with a Grand Slam title to his name, he's barely getting started.
Today, Immelman is relaxing with his wife and their two-year-old son, Jacob. While competing, he travels around 35 weeks a year, but since recovering from the flu that caused him to withdraw from the Players Championship, he has had a full two weeks off. "I'm a bit of a homebody," he says, noting that he hasn't swung a club in five days. "The travel is so demanding, you need to make sure you have the right breaks at the right time so you don't burn out."
In the weeks after slipping into his green jacket (42 Regular), Immelman looked on the verge of burning out from something else — media attention. His victory lap included presenting on David Letterman the top 10 ways his life had changed ("I've been elevated from 'unknown' to 'obscure'"), suffering through a tag team jabberfest with Regis and Kelly, and meeting the Boston Celtics in their locker room during an away game because their coach, Doc Rivers, wanted them to commune with a champion. Back on the links, though, Immelman failed to break par in the three tournaments following the Masters and made the cut only once. "After something as big as winning the Masters happens to you, I think you have to make sure to get away from it for a little bit," he says by way of explanation. "I stayed on too much of a high for too long and just ran out of steam."
It's impossible to blame Immelman for going full bore. Last year at Augusta, he was throwing up after the 18th hole due to a stomach parasite. Over the course of three weeks he lost 25 pounds — weight that had taken three years of intense strength training (five days a week off the tour, three days a week on) to put on. Then in December, he had an operation to remove a tumor from his diaphragm, which, cruelly, was unrelated to the parasite. It was two days before he learned the tumor was benign. Four months before he was to dash Tiger's hopes of a Grand Slam, Immelman lay in a hospital bed thinking he might never play golf again. The tumor turned out to be about the size of the dimpled ball and today, by his lower-right rib, runs a scar the length of a gimme putt.
