On the practice tee, Ray Romano is a rock star.

At least on this May day. Not a minute goes by that some fan at Morgan Run Resort in northern San Diego County doesn’t yell You Can Do It, Ray! in his general direction. That’s because everybody knows Ray — and his singular golfing goal, that magical ‘Break 80’ number 79, thanks to Golf Channel’s Hank Haney Project and tons of publicity.

But right now, even with fans lining the driving range, Haney taking stock and big, bangin’ Billy Joe Tolliver bombing drives from the next stall over, Ray is rippin’ it. After a few minutes with Hank working on his position at the top of the backswing — set up, address, swing back, stop, make the downswing, repeat ... over and over again — he’s got a hybrid in hand and shot after shot is starting just right of center with a nice, easy draw.

“What the hell’s wrong with that?” asks Rollie Fingers. “I’ll take it,” responds Romano, who has begun referring to himself as Range Ray. Haney and Tolliver start whispering amongst themselves, questioning where this “new Ray” has come from all of a sudden.

Maybe this is the day he breaks 80?

“Right, I was rope-a-dopin’ the first six months,” Romano responds with a smile. “I’ve been waiting all this time to show what I can really do.”

That’s why we still love Raymond. Despite the fame and good fortune, Romano plays this game like most of us, just hoping to hit it better today than he did the day before, knowing that it’s all fun, even when the pressure is on.

And there’s no doubt the pressure is on. You can see it in his face, his swing, his pre-shot routine as he’s working out the kinks in his mind with that Haney top-position swing thought — which some might call a fidget somewhere between Mike Weir and Sergio Garcia.

“The problem was that it was a work in progress,” Romano told Fairways + Greens months later, just as he started to jump into production on his TNT drama, Men of a Certain Age. “You were catching me in the middle of working on this with Hank. So you have to think about it, when you’re changing your swing, you have to ingrain it, so you have to deliberately think about it.

Then, when you’ve crossed over and you’ve played round after round after round, and you’ve incorporated the new move and the new swing, then you should go out on the course and free yourself up and free your mind up and just feel that swing and not think too much about it.

“But I couldn’t at that time because I didn’t have it then, so I was overthinking. Having said that, now I’m playing better. When I play the best is when I can somehow free my mind up and not be thinking about hitting the ball, and that’s what happened today — all I thought of was turning back and turning through, and the ball wasn’t even there.”

And Ray played so much better that he almost broke the 80 barrier that very day during an early-morning August round with Matthew, one of his 17-year-old twin sons, who was playing his first-ever complete round of golf.

“I shot 39 on the front, and I was saying, ‘Matt, you may witness my only breaking 80,’ Romano says. “Of course, golf came up and snapped me back into reality, and I shot 46 on the back and shot an 85. But I was flirting with it — I was even par after six holes.”

Back at Morgan Run in May, he never quite flirted with it, as much as everyone cheering him on wished he would. But he did bring the funny from the very first tee, with a stellar impersonation of Charles Barkley’s crazy, stop-on-the-downswing motion, which Romano’s coach had tried to cure, unsuccessfully, during the first Haney Project.

With the wind whipping and his new move far from grooved, it was a tough day to just play golf, let alone swing in the public eye. Out on No. 2, he crushed that same hybrid he’d been striping on the range, only dead left this time, scattering the group on the No. 3 tee.

Haney hung around through eight holes for moral support, but Romano’s day consisted more of his humorous
one-liners than the kind of shots that make up a round in the 70s.

“The three worst words in golf: saved an eight,” he said after rolling in a decent-length putt, one of the few that didn’t get away from him in the shaky conditions.

On No. 9, he smoked a drive, his best of the day to that point, only to find the fairway bunker 90 yards out. “Even when I hit it good, I can’t catch a break,” he said in his best everyman golf gripe voice.

Finally, on No. 16, after finding his stride on the back nine, Ray carded his lone birdie of the day on a hole where his threesome — fellow funnyman Tom Dreesen and John Ashton of Beverly Hills Cop fame — went collectively four-under, thanks in part to Ashton’s dunk eagle from the fairway.

“Now if we were a three-man team and only had to play one hole, we might be winning,” Dreesen surmised.

In the end, Romano beat his front-nine 50 with a respectable 42 on the back, edging Dreesen over the final nine holes as a consolation prize. And on the 18th green, he got fans laughing as only he can with a shout of “Who’s the drunkest?” — the winner of which received his golf ball as a trophy.

Hank’s post-tourney analysis echoed what Ray has known all along.

“It’s not easy to change, and it comes and goes and then you get a little tease of it when you get it going good,” Haney told reporters the week after Morgan Run during a conference call for Romano’s next marquee event, the American Century Celebrity Championship at Edgewood Tahoe. “But we’re just working on his swing, getting him to come from a better angle when he’s swinging not so good. He’s steep and then he’s hitting the ball real high and off to the right. When he’s swinging better, he’s flighting the ball better and hitting it with a little draw. So it’s just getting his swing and plane a little better and getting his release better at the bottom.”

At Edgewood, things wouldn’t get much better, even with the helpful Modified Stableford scoring system.

Ray ended up in negative points (minus-33, just 117 behind Tolliver’s record winning score of 84), got very little TV time since he was playing the opposite nine from the leaders, and for some reason he was sentenced to play with Barkley — perhaps karma for his joke on the Morgan Run first tee? — who was trying out a whole new swing of his own ... from the left side of the ball.

At least Ray can take comfort in knowing he’s far from the toughest test Haney has ever faced. In fact, when asked about his students, most would be surprised by the answer.
“When you have somebody who is arguably the greatest player in the history of the game and then you’re trying to look for things to get better, that’s a tough task,” Haney says. “With Charles, any improvement is huge. It’s just a little easier when you’re working with those margins as opposed to working with somebody like Tiger, who’s just so talented and so good. You’re thinking how much better could he be — it’s just a lot more difficult challenge. And then as players are better, their improvement is just harder to come by. It’s easy to go from a beginner to somebody who can get the ball in the air. It’s hard to make these little incremental improvements as your game gets better and better.”

And make no mistake, Barkley makes Romano look great on the course, in more ways than one. Watching Ray practice, especially his improved short game with a soft touch on chips and pitches thanks to Haney, you can imagine a day when he’ll get it all together and make a run for that lifetime best number. Who knows, maybe he’ll shoot 78 or 77?

Mid-Life Exploration
But for now, heading into fall, golf will have to take a back seat to Ray’s true passion — acting. After nine seasons on the hitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, he knew he wanted to do something different for his next television project. So he and Raymond co-executive producer Mike Royce came up with an idea for an hourlong drama about three friends at different stages of adulthood development.

“We knew we didn’t want to do a sitcom, because he had written on Raymond and I was Raymond,” he recalls. “We wanted to do something in a different form of telling a story, and we wanted to do a drama — and of course there would be comedy in it — and our experience is to write what we know. It worked in my stand-up, it worked in the sitcom and that’s what was going to work here — write about something that’s organic, something that you’re either living or you’ve seen or you’ve been around. And both of us were at a point in our lives where we had this feeling, this kind of mid-life void, this existential crisis, searching about what’s the next purposeful thing we’re going to do, what are we going to be passionate about? Is there anything left to accomplish? This thing you get maybe around this age where you wonder what’s your next journey?”

So they started there and began writing. The result is TNT’s Men of a Certain Age, which returns for Season Two in November, co-starring Andre Braugher (Homicide: Life on the Street) and Scott Bakula (Quantum Leap).

“I had already done the married guy,” Ray says, “so I wanted to explore the single guy at my age, whose marriage had just ended. And in my life — I’m married 22 years — I had never been single, but neither had this guy, Joe, so it wasn’t like I was writing without experience because this is how I would be experiencing it.”

The three-friend dynamic is rounded out with Owen (Braugher), the guy with the happy marriage but health and extended family issues of his own, and Terry (Bakula), the good-looking sometimes actor who spends most of his days working temp jobs, bedding younger women and dabbling in relaxation herbs.
“Terry was a single guy which we actually based on one of the writers in the Raymond room who was the only single writer,” Romano explains. “He would come in and tell us his stories, and we all would live vicariously through him, you know, and he would tell us his philosophies on dating and this and that, and we just thought it was so bizarre and unique and almost sad ... and we said, yeah, these will be our characters.”
As for Ray’s new TV persona, Joe Tranelli, the parallels to his own interests and passions peek through. Joe is a golfer with an unfulfilled dream of playing professionally on the Champions Tour, but he also has a dark side — a gambling jones that manifests itself in online poker and sports betting.
“With golf, that’s keeping it as close to home as I can,” Romano says. “I’ve always fantasized about what it would be like to play professionally, and now I’m getting to play a character who’s a little closer than I’ll ever be.

“And the gambling is not a dream, it’s more of a vice for him, unfortunately, which fills the void temporarily that he’s feeling, and he has to deal with that. And I’ve never been in that kind of a situation that Joe’s in, but I’ve been around it enough, you know I play poker and I’ve made my share of bets, to know that world well enough to write about it.”

As for fulfilling Joe’s golf dream?

All Ray will say is that we’ll see more golf this season as they explore the story.

World Series Dreams
An avid poker player, Romano is a mainstay on ESPN’s World Series of Poker Main Event coverage, always good for laughs and a bit of drama. This year, he hit the rail in just seven hours on Day One — much of which he spent at the televised featured table — after being crippled with ace-queen on a hand where he flopped trips only to have an opponent with pocket jacks turn a full house.

Last year, he was out in just five hours, but the previous year, Ray made it all the way to Day Two, and nearly found himself playing on Day Three.

“I made it to the last hour of Day Two,” he recalls. “It was right before the final break. I had struggled back — I got crippled in the morning, went from 60,000 in chips to 10,000 when I had pocket kings and a guy had pocket aces. But from 1 o’clock in the afternoon to 10:30 at night, I chipped my way back up to 45,000, and right before the break, I went heads-up against this guy who hit a flush and I busted out.”

Pretty good for a busy man who spends little time at the tables, especially compared to the average, up-all-night, multi-table online players who crowd the WSOP these days.

“Here’s my poker schedule these days,” Romano says. “Every five or six weeks, we play a home game — I play with Brad Garrett and Jason Alexander and Cheryl Hines and a couple of non-showbiz friends. We play one night, but those are turbo games, little turbo tournaments we play, so it takes skill but it also takes a lot of luck.”
And while you might catch him in a casino every once in a while — he plays a game at The Venetian from time to time when he’s on the road without his family — pretty much his serious card-playing comes down to a few days a year on the world’s biggest poker stage.
“For the most part, the only time I play a legitimate tournament poker game, it’s a charity event, and those are still kind of five-hour events, so they are a little sped up. And the only time I play a true hold ’em poker event is when I play the Main Event, and that’s once a year.

“I’m good at it, I know poker, but I don’t play enough legitimate tournament poker to really hone it. I get scattered little tournaments, but I’m not going down to the Commerce Casino to play in tournaments or anything like that.”
The Next Step Toward 79?

“Golf, on the other hand, is different,” he says. “If I have any free time, I’ll go out and play golf. But, unfortunately, right now, as soon as this phone call ends, that’s the end of my free time — we’re diving right into the fire starting tomorrow.”

Gone are the days when he could sneak over to the golf course across the street from Warner Bros. while shooting Raymond. So where does that leave him when it comes to practicing the swing and short game he’s spent months learning? And with Hank moving on to his next Project, Rush Limbaugh, will Ray seek instruction down the road?

“I will, but unfortunately I’m not going to see Hank a lot — he’s got other things, I’ve got the show to do, so it’s just going to be piecemeal,” Romano says. “I’m going to be as dedicated and obsessed as I can, but I also have this other obsession and this other passion with this TV show, which for now is going to take up all my time.

“I’m going to keep at it, but I don’t know how much better I’ll get in the next six months. I’m going to squeeze it in as I can, and when Pebble [the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am in February] comes around, I’m gonna start crammin’ again. I’ll never lose the urge and the passion for it, but I won’t have time in the next couple months.”

In the meantime, we’ll have to get our Romano golf fix this fall by rooting for the flawed but likeable Joe Tranelli. If he’s anything like Ray, we know he’ll work hard and never give up his passion for the game, regardless of his score at the end of the day.