From drugstore to lush fairways

BRYCE ALDERTON

First of two parts

Come next month, Ray Carrasco will leave his Irvine home, where he

lives with his wife and, occasionally two children, and spend five

months at his summer job.

But this is no ordinary job in no ordinary place.

Carrasco, Pelican Hill Golf Club’s senior touring professional,

will travel across the Atlantic Ocean, headed for Europe to play

golf.

His employer is the European Seniors Tour and he has six years of

seniority to boot.

He also has three victories, the most recent at last year’s Ryder

Cup Wales Senior Open, where he holed a 45-foot putt on the final

green to win by a stroke.

Carrasco stays with friends to help him “feel more at home” during

the summers overseas.

The family, which includes wife Suzanne -- the two will celebrate

their 37th wedding anniversary in December -- and grown children Ryan

and Ali, have visited Carrasco in Europe on occasion, but mostly keep

up to date on his rounds with television and the Internet.

He yearns to play regularly on the Champions Tour, a.k.a. senior

tour, in the United States.

If he did, he would play in the Toshiba Senior Classic every March

at Newport Beach Country Club.

Full-exempt status would be nice.

For now, Carrasco splits his time as an instructor at Pelican Hill

in Newport Coast and Oak Creek Golf Club in Irvine -- they are both

owned by the Irvine Company -- and a professional golfer.

He is living the life he imagined when he bought a putter for 35

cents at age 9, using some of the money he earned from a paper route

around the Garden Grove neighborhood he grew up in.

Carrasco comes from Mexican descent. His grandparents were born in

Mexico and his parents were born in the states.

Carrasco vividly remembers the thrift store in a mall where he

purchased his first clubs.

“I walked up the musty floor and looked in the corner barrel,” he

said. “I saw sticks with things at the end. They were golf clubs. I

had never seen one or touched one. My heart was pounding. Could I

afford one? Thirty-five cents, yes, I could buy it.”

Carrasco, who earned $1 per week from the route, was enamored by

the game the moment he met it.

He would incessantly chip and putt on a makeshift putting surface

on grass in his backyard.

“I was fascinated with how the ball would break,” Carrasco said.

He used a rubber-coated baseball as the golf ball and dug a hole

in the grass with a soup can that, when inverted, acted as the cup

inside of the hole.

He bought “cheap” golf balls at a drugstore and soon began to use

his club.

“The rattle as the ball settled in a hole was a positive,

Pavlovian auditory response,” Carrasco said in reference to Ivan

Pavlov, the Russian scientist noted for his research into conditioned

responses to stimuli.

Every week Carrasco tried to buy one more club with money earned

and he eventually had a set, with a bag and more balls.

To learn about the game, he visited the library and read every

book he could find on golf.

He tried to emulate lessons from “Ben Hogan’s 5 Lessons; The

Modern Fundamentals of Golf.”

Carrasco first set foot on a course when he was 11, at Pine Tree Pitch-and-Putt, a par-3 course in Santa Ana he said is no longer

there.

He shot 3-over 30.

The next time out, he shot 28.

“I loved chipping and putting,” Carrasco said.

Once when his father, Ray Carrasco Sr., prepared to put cement

over part of the grass for a basketball court.

Carrasco said the tractor’s weight made it sink into the grass.

At first the younger Carrasco thought it would ruin the practice

area he loved, but it made it even better.

The sinking actually created irregular bumps and slopes Carrasco

said made for challenging chips and changes in elevation.

“I could move the pin around and play the breaks,” Carrasco said.

Gradually Carrasco gravitated toward golf, eventually playing for

the team at Garden Grove High, where he met Suzanne, before competing

on the Santa Ana College men’s team that claimed a state championship

in 1965.

Carrasco was an All-CIF performer at Garden Grove.

Carrasco credits former Santa Ana men’s golf coach Arlin Pirtle,

who helped him purchase his first set of “pro-line” clubs when he was

15.

Both Ray and Suzanne Carrasco attended San Diego State -- Ray was

an all-conference player on the Aztec men’s golf team and studied

foreign languages. Suzanne Carrasco studied education and is

currently a sixth-grade teacher. They married in December 1968 after

graduating the previous spring.

Ray Carrasco also liked teaching and was accepted into graduate

school in San Diego State’s Spanish department.

“At that point, I was thinking I would get my master’s, teach at a

[junior college] and become a college golf coach,” Carrasco said.

For a time Carrasco taught Spanish at San Diego State, but golf

kept tugging at his heart.

“In grad school, all I wanted to do was play golf,” he said. “I

had a hidden desire to turn pro.”

In 1971, he decided to turn pro. Suzanne supported him all along.

“We were fairly secure with a stable income and no kids,” she

said.

Carrasco then honed his game for the PGA Tour’s qualifying school.