Later Derrick and Tadd waded into waist-deep water to hunt octopuses with spears, poking into the holes where the mysterious creatures like to hide. They were having a ball, but with a sigh Derrick cut short the trip. "We have to get to the course or Moms is going to be pissed."
"Practice always comes first," said Tadd, who in his short professional career has already discovered that in golf it is not quite so easy to land the big one.
In July, when Fujikawa turned pro, the move occasioned plenty of head-scratching, and some undisguised scorn. The day Tadd made his announcement, John Francis, whose son Phillip is a top amateur now enrolled at UCLA, told SI, "I would personally be embarrassed for my son to do that."
Because Fujikawa is a teenager from Hawaii it is irresistible to draw comparisons with Michelle Wie, who has become a $10 million-a-year cautionary tale. Like Wie, Fujikawa burst onto the scene at the Sony Open in Hawaii. In his case it was last January, when he became the youngest player in a half century to make the cut at a PGA Tour event. It wasn't only the achievement that resonated but also Fujikawa's panache. On his 36th hole he made a spectacular eagle, chasing the ball into the hole with a roundhouse fist-pump that was pure exuberance. The next day he shot a 66 to surge into a tie for eighth, and Hawaii fairly shook. Fujikawa ran out of magic on Sunday, shooting 72, but still finished a very creditable 20th. (He would have collected $54,228.57 had he not been an amateur.) What made Fujikawa impossible not to root for was the figure he cut on the course: Born more than three months premature and weighing less than two pounds, he has topped out at 5'1" and 135.
As diminutive as Fujikawa is, it would be a mistake to underestimate his fighting spirit. "In judo he was like a wild animal," says Derrick, an instructor at the Salt Lake Judo Club, which has been run for decades by his father, Danny. "All the kids were a head taller, but they would cry when they had to face him because they were so scared." A month after the Sony, Fujikawa won the Pearl Open, a pro tournament in Hawaii that attracts regulars from the Japanese tour. Fujikawa iced the tournament with approach shots to two feet or less on two of the final three holes.
His success against the pros convinced Fujikawa that he had outgrown amateur golf, but his parents were tortured about letting him play for pay and spent months trying to talk him out of it. Tadd ultimately wore them down. In many quarters Wie's career has come to be viewed as little more than a cynical cash grab, and Fujikawa's decision to go pro was inevitably seen in the same light. "The comparisons are unfair because we're different people and our situations are very different," Tadd says.
