The money wasn't anything like the seven figures for winning on the PGA Tour, or even last place money of $51,000 this week at Kapalua. But it was enough for Austin to go home and pay his entry fee for Q-school.
"If I don't do well at Waterloo, I'm done, period," Austin said. "Because I've got no money to even keep going to the Dakotas to play."
Where would he be now? Hard to say. Austin only knows he would not have been at Q-school in 1993, where he did well enough to earn full status on the Nike Tour and stop working at the bank and tending bar in Tampa.
He won Q-school the following year when it was held in Florida, then he broke through as a PGA Tour rookie by winning the Buick Open in a playoff and qualifying for the Tour Championship, where he tied for fourth.
In between, he repaid a favor.
Having qualified for the PGA Tour for the first time, Austin and a group of other Americans decided to travel to South America to play a couple of tournaments. Austin asked Dunakey if he wanted to tag along. The cost was $3,000.
"I told him, 'Woody, I don't have any money,"' Dunakey recalled. "He said, 'I'll give you the money.' I told him I didn't know if I could pay him back and he said, 'Don't worry. You'll do fine."'
Dunakey did better than that. He won the first tournament they played and earned $15,000.
"They paid me in cash, in $100 bills," Dunakey recalled. "We're staying in this resort where they've got guards with machine guns. I was paid in the back room of the pro shop, thinking I was going to get my throat slit. I was a nervous wreck. I paid him $3,000 right there, stayed one more week and went back a week early. He never let me live that down.
Dunakey could not help but notice the coincidence of friends helping each other out. He gave Austin $300 with no strings attached, and Austin won his next two tournaments to jump-start his career.
"When he had a chance to help me, he did," Dunakey said. "It took me a couple of more years to get on tour, but that was the start."
