It's Impossible To Tell The Story Of Professional Golfer Thomas Brent (Boo) Weekley without bringing up the orangutan. When Weekley was 15 he and some friends went to a county fair near Milton, Weekley's hometown on the Florida Panhandle. A man at the fair had an orangutan in a cage and was offering $50 to anyone who could lay a hand on the ape. Weekley jumped in the cage. "The next thing I remember I was in the back of my buddy's pickup truck, bleeding," he says. This type of thing never happened during the childhood of Tiger Woods, who was groomed from birth to become the greatest golfer in the world. Weekley wasn't supposed to be a PGA Tour golfer (even though his Milton high school has miraculously produced three of them). He'll tell anyone within earshot that he'd rather be bass fishing than taking a stroll down the fairways of Augusta National. He likes beer in cans and eats at Hooters. He flunked out of college after one year. He cleaned chemical tanks during 12-hour shifts at a Monsanto factory until he got laid off. When he finally gained entrance to the PGA Tour in 2002 he flunked out of that, too, and nearly gave up on the game. "I took golf for granted for a long time," he says.rnWeekley is not the best player on the tour (he's ranked number 57), nor does he make the most endorsement money (about $2 million annually); both of those honors still belong to Woods (number one in the world, with an estimated $90 million in annual endorsements). At 35, Weekley is not a fresh-faced prodigy like the confident 23-year-old American Anthony Kim or the floppy-haired 19-year-old Rory Mcllroy from Northern Ireland. He does not create the escape-artist drama of Phil Mickelson.
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