"Oh yeah, there were plenty of guys on the Nationwide Tour who smoked in the middle of the round...We always talked about it. You could go in the Porta John and take your drags."

It's always fun to read a well done player profile, especially when the player is interesting and his story is bound to have men in Oxford's running around PGA Tour offices trying to figure out the spin.

So while all the stuff Dave Shedloski tells us about in the Robert Garrigus story--Memphis last year, the 2011 U.S. Open and his struggle with addiction--these are the comments bound to be brought up the next time Tim Finchem claims that PGA Tour pros are all angels and drug testing was unnecessary.

When he arrived at Scottsdale Community College, he majored in golf but excelled in chemistry. "It was all golf and partying," Garrigus says. "I never did hard drugs. I never did coke or LSD. It was just smoking and drinking and hanging out with friends. It was just a change for me, but the smoking got to be habitual: five, 10, maybe 20 times a day. I didn't keep track of how much. I constantly needed to be high. And I took it to the max. Every single day. Mostly just smoking, smoking, smoking."

And he took it with him when he turned professional in 1997, first to the Hooters and Gateway tours, and then, in 2000, to the Buy.com Tour (today's Nationwide Tour). It was as much a part of his routine as hitting golf balls. Not surprisingly, his scores got high, too.

"I played well in spurts, but I would be really inconsistent," he says. "I had no idea what the hell I was doing. It's hard to be consistent if your body isn't right, but it was part of my everyday life."

That included lighting up inside the ropes, if you must know.

"Oh yeah, there were plenty of guys on the Nationwide Tour who smoked in the middle of the round," Garrigus says without blanching. "We always talked about it. You could go in the Porta John and take your drags.

"I had a very high tolerance, and I didn't know that it wasn't helping me," he says. "All you're thinking is that it feels good, so it must be good for what you're doing. It wasn't until I quit that I realized how stupid it was. But I don't regret any of it because it put me on the path I'm on now."

The period in question is the 2002 season, six years before the tour instituted drug testing. Ty Votaw, PGA Tour vice president of communications, said the tour had no comment.

No comment? Come on!