Tim Petrovic is unique among the Connecticut Golf Hall of Fame’s 90 inductees. He’s a lover of Van Halen, and Jim Morrison and The Doors. He plays guitar and performs trick shots on a pool table. He won on the PGA Tour after overcoming bankruptcy by selling cell phones, delivering newspapers and working with wife Julie at a Pizza Hut in Florida.
“I worked so hard for so long to get out on the PGA Tour and then stay out on Tour. I am grateful to have that work recognized.”
“It’s a huge honor to be included among so many golf greats,” said Petrovic, who lives in Austin, Texas, with Julie and their two daughters. “I just bought a picture and canceled check of Gene Sarazen’s because I’m a fan, and now we’re both in the Hall of Fame together? Crazy!”
Petrovic starred at Glastonbury High before becoming an All-American and four-time All-New England selection at the University of Hartford, where he played with two other future PGA Tour players, Jerry Kelly and Patrick Sheehan. He graduated in 1988 with a degree in communications and four consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances.
Petrovic won the 1986 New England Amateur, and the 1988 Connecticut Amateur. He turned pro in 1988 but didn’t play a full season on the PGA Tour until 2002. In the interim, he competed on six mini-tours, scraping by with a bizarre collection of odd jobs.
He met his wife while hawking cell phones and delivering The Hartford Courant. The latter was the worst of his tough jobs when done in the dead of Connecticut winters. The printers’ ink rubbed off on every bit of his clothing. Customers complained about the paper not being inside the door. Petrovic’s old Volkswagen strained under the load of the Sunday edition.
“I’ve got 600 pounds of paper in the back, and the Volkswagen is doing a wheelie,” Petrovic said. “It’s dark, cold. I remember delivering papers and freezing to death.”
Pressure wasn’t having to make a 5-foot putt to make the cut in a $6 million tournament. It was having to get a good tip from that next pizza delivery to fill the gas tank. That was especially true when Petrovic’s sponsor pulled out while he was on the Nike Tour.
The Petrovics drove through tour stops in a non-air conditioned Ford Tempo with a luggage rack on the roof, often taking ice from hotels so they wouldn’t have to buy it for their cooler and loading up on extra mustard and ketchup packets from McDonald’s. Julie bought 50-cent tortillas and filled them with sour cream, shredded cheese and Buddings meat, which cost 55 cents a packet.
“We ate those for breakfast, lunch and dinner for months,” Julie said. “To this day, Tim will not eat any kind of tortilla roll.”
Despite their frugality, Tim and Julie were $35,000 in the red as they left Arizona for Florida. On the trip home, they stopped to visit Julie’s sister, Jennifer, at Trinity College in San Antonio, Texas. They found an empty dorm room next to Jennifer’s, put two mattresses together and slept on the floor.
“We weren’t supposed to be in there,” Petrovic said. “Then Jennifer fed us on her student meal card. She wasn’t supposed to do that, either.”
“We came home pretty deeply in debt,” said Julie, who sometimes caddied for Tim on the mini-tours. “Our combined income was like $13,000. We were eating a lot of peanut butter and jelly. We were sleeping in our van. My friends and family were worried about me. They wondered where we were going to live. I was always defending him, saying, ‘He can do it. I know he can do it.’ ”
“Julie is my rock,” Tim said. “She’s always kept me on the right path and supported my dream 100 percent. I would not be where I am today without her. We make a great team. She actually quit her job and moved to Florida with me so I could pursue my dream.”
The Petrovics began to emerge from their financial woes in an unexpected way when Tim won $30,000 for finishing third in the Dave Pelz World Putting Championship.
“It basically gave me an opportunity to really work on my game and play when I was down and out,” Petrovic said. “Otherwise I probably would have stopped playing [competitively]. That’s where I really started figuring things out. I made $30,000 finishing third in putting tournament! Go figure.”
In 2000 Tim was named Player of the Year on the Golden Bear Tour after winning four times and finishing first on the money list with $166,000. He followed that up by earning the cherished PGA Tour card in 2001 when he finished seventh on the Buy.com Tour money list with $239,010.
As a rookie on the PGA Tour in 2002, he tied for second in the FedEx St. Jude Classic and had earned more than $1.1 million on three tours. He remained on golf’s biggest stage for more than a decade and earned nearly $12.2 million thanks in part to his younger brother Steve, who caddied for Tim off and on from 1989 to 2009, including during Tim’s only PGA Tour victory, the Zurich Classic of New Orleans in 2005.
Tim made a 20-foot birdie putt on the final hole of regulation to get in a playoff and then parred the first extra hole to earn the $990,000 first prize.
“I knew we were in good shape because Tim had never lost in a playoff,” said Steve, who lives in Farmington with wife Andrea and their two daughters. “The win was really big for the whole family because it had been 18 years of working so hard, but I never doubted Tim would get on the PGA Tour.”
“When we went to Timberlin (Golf Club in Kensington) as kids, he would never come home. He hit balls all the time and was like the brother that everyone hated because he always won. He could get up-and-down from the center of the earth and was the best putter that I ever saw until we played with Tiger.”
Now 51, Petrovic has added $343,171 in 20 starts since joining the Champions Tour in 2016. That includes playing in the first PGA Tour-sanctioned event in Japan, the Japan Airlines Open, in September with youngest daughter Mackenzie, 16, caddying for him (Bayleigh is 18).
“It was a great trip,” Petrovic said. “She even carried the big bag on Sunday.”
Golf has always been a family affair for Petrovic, who started playing the game at age 7, hitting balls with his father, Bob, at Indian Hill Country Club in Newington.
“I would go with him to the range and just start beating balls,” said Tim, who will be presented for induction by his father. “Sometimes he would go play a round with his buddies, and I would stay on the putting green for 5-6 hours until they finished, so putting really became my strong suit throughout my career.”
It was around that same time that Petrovic became a devoted fan of the 1960s rock group, The Doors, whose lead singer Morrison was one of Tim’s heroes growing up.
“I’ve always been a big Doors fan and Nirvana groupie,” Petrovic said. “I also play the guitar as a hobby, and my girls took it one step further and actually compose music as well.”
Fittingly, Petrovic’s favorite Doors songs are “Waiting for the Sun” and “Strange Days.”
“Those titles pretty much sum up my story,” Petrovic said.
Article by: Bruce Berlet, 2009 Connecticut Golf Hall of Fame Inductee
