Champions Tour Insider: Haskins' long road to glory

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Don Haskins coached the Texas Western to the 1966 NCAA basketball championship.

A recent phone call from Detroit to El Paso was a flashback for Steve Haskins. Once again, he was reminded what might have been, how fate alters the course of events and changes lives. That's because there is a subplot to the Haskins family story that involves the Motor City.

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Haskins is the son of the late, great college basketball coach, Don Haskins. Steve Haskins, 51, was raised in El Paso, where his famous father was a legend. Don Haskins coached Texas Western to the 1966 NCAA basketball championship. Haskins and his team were immortalized in a 2006 movie entitled, "Glory Road."

Don Haskins made coaching history at Texas Western time and again but the signature victory came in 1966 when he started five black players for the first time in the championship game against a heavily-favored Kentucky team coached by another legend, Adolph Rupp.

Haskins won 14 Western Athletic Conference titles, four WAC tournament titles and made 14 appearances in the NCAA tournament on his way to being enshrined into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1997. Ten years later, the entire 1966 Texas Western team was enshrined alongside its coach. The star player on the team was Bobby Joe Hill, a guard from Highland Park, a suburb entirely within the Detroit boundaries.

Steve Haskins learned much about life and competition from his father, lessons that he still lives every day. And he wonders how things might have been if Don Haskins had made a different decision in 1969. This is where Detroit comes into the story, a fact that Haskins reflected on when I called him from my home in Detroit to discuss his career in golf.

The University of Detroit fired its basketball coach, Bob Calihan, after the 1968-69 season and made Haskins an offer he couldn't refuse. Haskins took the job in a move that set abuzz the basketball hotbed of Detroit. Within a few days, Haskins called back to say he had a change of heart and was staying at Texas Western.

Let Steve Haskins pick up the story.

"Dad asked for four times more money than the high school coaching salary he was making in El Paso, thinking Detroit wouldn't pay that much," Haskins said. "They paid it."

Steve Haskins was 11 at the time and in Detroit the favorite sport during the winter months isn't basketball and certainly not golf. It's hockey.

"If Dad had taken the Detroit job and we had moved, I might have been a hockey player," said Haskins, one of five golfers who recently advanced to the 2010 Champions Tour through the Qualifying Tournament.

Haskins is an example of good things happening to those who persevere. He reached the final stage of the PGA TOUR Qualifying School 14 times in 17 years -- but never made it.

Last month, in his first try at the Champions Tour Qualifying Tournament, he finally closed the deal.

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Steve Haskins earned a spot on the Champions Tour for 2010.

How does somebody find enough dedication and perseverance to keep trying in the face of the many disappointments and so much adversity?

"I try to find some part of it that's positive," Haskins said. "I went to the final 14 times. I gave myself an opportunity. How many get to the final stage ... even once? But when I got there, I just tried too hard or just didn't play well. To get your card, you have to play well. For whatever reason I didn't get it done."

There's not a morsel of negativity in what Haskins says or how he says it. He has always been ultra-competitive -- that's the result of growing up in such a competitive environment.

"My dad was the most competitive person I have ever known," he said. "I learned how to hang tough when things aren't going well, to handle pressure and get the most out of it."

Don Haskins, an avid golfer himself who died in September, 2008, admired the ability to grind out victories. He loved it when Steve hit only seven or eight greens and still found a way to shoot 71.

"It's like a basketball team shooting 32 percent and having a chance to win at the end," Steve Haskins said.

"Defense first, then offense. He taught me to compete. He wanted it so bad for me that sometimes he was intense with my golf. In golf, sometimes it's not so good to be intense. He knew that."

Don Haskins, at his prime, played off a 2-handicap.

"He didn't have a great swing but he had great feel and great touch," Steve said. "He was tough, just like he was on a basketball court."

After a long Nationwide Tour career, Steve Haskins stepped away from competitive golf three years ago to work as a salesman for a staff employment/payroll agency in El Paso. But on those rare occasions he did play this year, he played extremely well, including a T22 finish at the U.S. Senior Open and, of course, the success at the Champions Tour Qualifying Tournament.

On both occasions, his goals were modest, just as they will be on the Champions Tour next year.

"When I start getting to a level where I expect more and more, that's usually when I suffered," Haskins said, looking back on his career.

"What's working for me right now is I work to make a living. I'm going to play golf to have fun and see what happens. My expectations are that. And I did (have fun) when I was out there but sometimes for the wrong reasons. I play golf because I love the game. It would be nice to do well and make some money and all that - that's the balance I'm looking at."

The Senior Open at Crooked Stick was an eye-opener for Haskins.

"I wondered what it's like playing golf just to go play golf," he said. "I truly didn't have expectations at Crooked Stick. I hadn't played in anything. I shot 64 in the qualifier, went up to Crooked Stick, loved the course, and I was up there -- got to eighth or ninth late in the third round -- with that attitude. Not bad for an employee leasing salesman."

Or somebody who might have been a hockey player.