Miles’ long journey

Mike Miles is comfortable with his golf game, so he said he hasn’t done a ton of research on Hazeltine National Golf Club in Chaska, Minn.

Miles knows the course on which he tees off today is long. As a matter of fact, it’s 7,685 yards, the longest ever for a major.

A 1.46 mile-long course? Miles, the Huntington Beach resident, would expect nothing less for the site of the 91st PGA Championship.

Long courses don’t bother the PGA professional, because he’s already taken a long road to get there. Neither do numbers, like the 47 that signifies his age.

After all, he’s playing in his second major this year after he nearly made the cut at the U.S. Open in June. You bet there’s confidence there. His goal this weekend at Hazeltine is a top 10 finish.

“At the PGA level, there’s a super-fine line between Tiger [Woods] and the next guy,” said Miles, an assistant pro at Virginia Country Club in Long Beach. “It doesn’t cost me any extra money to go out and think that I can beat him. I have the ability to hit all the shots that he hits. It’s not like walking onto the basketball court and I’m 5-foot-8, and I’m not going to able to do anything that a normal basketball player can do, physically. [In golf] I’m not limited physically ... par is the measure and I can birdie every hole on every golf course I play.

“We teach that to our players here at the club. Anything’s possible and so why think differently? You saw Tom Watson at 59 almost win a major championship [at the British Open in July].”

Miles has been at Virginia Country Club since 2002. A standout golfer at Cypress High and later Long Beach State, he received his PGA Tour card at the ripe-old age of 24. He played on the Asian Tour, and the former Ben Hogan Tour (later known as the Nike Tour and now the Nationwide Tour). His best finish in a PGA Tour event was when he tied for 10th at the BellSouth Atlanta Golf Classic in 1989.

“It was a dream come true, playing in tournaments with Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson and Tom Kite,” he said. “That’s the big leagues. It’s like when guys get drafted when they’re in their 20s up into baseball, and now you have to throw the baseball at Reggie Jackson and try to strike him out. It was the big leagues and it was fantastic.”

Except that after a while, it really wasn’t.

Frustrated with not making any progress, Miles quit the tour. For several years, he said he didn’t own a set of clubs. He went from being an athlete to a businessman, dabbling in real estate and later auto racing. One day, while flipping through channels, Miles saw a friend of his doing well in a tournament on the Nationwide Tour.

Suddenly, he wanted back in.

“My wife [Stacey] came into the room and I wasn’t exactly all together at that point,” he said. “I said, ‘I think I need to play golf again.’ And she said, ‘Well, you should do it.’ ”

Soon after, his friend Jamie Mulligan told Miles he was coming to Virginia Country Club to be chief operating officer. He asked Miles if he wanted to get back into golf.

Last year, Miles won the Southern California PGA Section championship. Earlier this year, he qualified for his first U.S. Open since 1987 and, although he missed the cut by three strokes, shot a second-round 69 (one under par).

“I shot one-under on a U.S. Open golf course,” Miles said. “For me, at my age and the amount I play, that’s a feat. Those are the best players in the world and I beat a lot of them and that’s a neat thing. It’s a lot of satisfaction, and it tells me that I’m pretty good and I should keep playing.”

Charlene Alfonso, a former UCLA standout who’s also an assistant pro at Virginia, believes it too. She’s been Miles’ caddy for the last couple of years, through this whole run.

Alfonso was there when Miles tied for 16th at the PGA Professional National Championship July 1 in Santa Ana Pueblo, N.M. The top 20 qualified for the PGA Championship.

Miles shot a 70, 73 and 73 the first three days. But he pulled it together with a round of 66 on the final day — the top final-round score among all qualifiers — then survived a playoff to advance.

“He definitely was a bit frustrated, didn’t really feel like he was hitting the shots he could hit,” Alfonso said. “He was making saves for par, but those were kind of courses where you needed to make a lot of birdies. A par there can feel like you missed an opportunity to make a birdie. When your game’s not quite where you want it to be, it’s really frustrating. You tend to get in your own way ... The last day, he basically just let himself play golf the way he knows how to play golf.”

Alfonso said she shares Miles’ confidence about his chances this weekend.

“If he does what he’s capable of doing, there’s no doubt he could win the tournament,” she said. “I like that he’s thinking that way.”

But golf can be a very personal sport, too, where battles can be internal. And, while Miles enjoys talking about the 69 he shot at the U.S. Open, or the top 10 finish he hopes for this weekend, the fact remains that he no longer plays golf for a living

“It’s extremely hard if you try to play it for a living,” he said. “Ask David Duval and a lot of other guys who were world No. 1s just 10 years ago, and now they’re barely making cuts and aren’t making any money ... Golf isn’t first in my life like it was when I was young. When I was young, that’s all I did, that’s what I was. I was consumed by it, but now I have it in a different perspective. I’m able to play, do well or do badly, but then come back and do it another day.”

Miles will be satisfied with four good days in a row this weekend. Either way, though, it won’t define him.

“I’ll have a good time no matter what happens,” he said.