“Everything in their family that had been built around golf was just taken away from one day to the next."

The Jhonattan Vegas stories keep coming (and don't get old!), first Sean Martin wrote up this profile from the Hope and now he's getting the full New York Times treatment from Larry Dorman.

In case you were wondering why Vegas sidestepped President Hugo Chavez's remarks last week (besides the obvious), there's this from his childhood:

Several years ago, Chávez closed three courses in the Vegas family’s home state, Monagas. All were essentially clubs for workers in the nation’s wealthy oil industry. Vegas’s father, Carlos, who at one time worked as a caddie and later became a food concessionaire to two of the clubs, decided his son would have to leave Venezuela if he were to pursue golf seriously.

Vegas was 17 and spoke no English when he was separated from his parents and three brothers. He was eventually placed in the care of Franci Betancourt, a Venezuelan golf pro, and his wife, Alba, who had settled in Houston. Under the tutelage of the Betancourts and Kevin Kirk, a prominent golf instructor in Texas who had been taught by Franci, Vegas learned the language and American culture, and he worked on his game. He went on to graduate from the University of Texas with a degree in kinesiology, to make the second-tier Nationwide Tour and ultimately to reach the PGA Tour.

“All of a sudden, his father didn’t have a job; the kids didn’t have anywhere to play golf,” Jonathan Coles, an eight-time Venezuelan national champion golfer who is from Cambridge, Mass., said of Vegas’s departure. “Everything in their family that had been built around golf was just taken away from one day to the next.