Thirty-four-year-old rookie, Tom Whitney, is making his first ever start as a PGA Tour member at this week’s American Express.

Whitney served in the Air Force as a Nuclear Missile Operator prior to becoming a professional golfer. At his pre-tournament press conference, he spoke about what that was like.

“Yes, a nuclear missile operator, 24-hour shifts with a crew partner, eight times a month. I think in total spent around 200 shifts underground by the time it was all said and done. Yeah, a lot of dull moments. It’s not a sexy job while you’re doing it, and at times it cannot even be very enjoyable, but I’ll tell you, it didn’t take very long after I separated and left that job and started golf full-time to where I missed it. I completely misgauged what I had, and you think the grass is literally greener as you’re entering the career of golf, and, man, I had it easy. People told me where I had to be, when I had to be there, what I had to wear, how long I had to be there for, what I was going to get paid. I pretty much knew what I was going to be fed. I mean, all the hard decisions were made for me. I just kind of had to follow a checklist.”

The veteran added that he’s not surprised anyone knows about his story.

“No, I’m not surprised anymore. I mean, I’ve been grinding away for almost 10 years now. I’ve put myself in the public spotlight or tried to get myself in that spotlight for 10 years. Yeah, there’s been a lot of fantastic writers that have written on my behalf and given a glimpse into what my life has looked like in the past, part of the Air Force and the journey afterwards with my wife and our four kids and being 34 as a rookie and, yeah, it’s cool that people get to know my background and how I got where I am.”

Whitney then went further into detail on his job requirements with the Air Force.

“Yes, I was a nuclear missile operator. That means me and a crew partner were positioned about a hundred feet underground in a personnel silo directly wired and attached to our nuclear missiles. So, we have three nuclear missile bases in the United States, one in Wyoming, one in Montana, one in North Dakota, and I was stationed in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Of those 150 missiles, myself and my crew partner would be in, primarily in charge of 10 of them.

You would show up to the base, let’s say on a Monday, and mission plan for two to three hours. You talk about expected weather, expected maintenance, maintenance that happens over the last 24-hour period, any intelligent, relevant intelligence threats or situations. Then just anything else that can overall affect your upcoming alert. Then you drive out to the site, which can be anywhere from 45 minutes to two and a half hours from the base. Everything’s spread out among Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska. So, it’s a good-sized field, or we call it the missile field. It’s about, the entire complex is about the size of Rhode Island. If you think about it, there’s 150 missiles, 15 personnel sites, and the base, and everything is hard wired underground. So, just the engineering and planning that went into it to install these pressure sensitive cables, and trenching all that to connect everything, it’s a really cool weapons system. So, you get out to the site, you go underground, and you transfer over with the previous crew, get briefed up on everything that happened. Then, once they’re gone, you have anywhere from an hour to three hours of just routine checklist items, going through all your daily test, inventorying everything. Then, it’s just whatever is scheduled for that specific alert.

Sometimes you have maintenance scheduled on one of the missiles, sometimes you have retargeting measures that all the crews have to send out, where we change the targets of where the missiles are aimed, based on current intelligence. Sometimes there’s just communications systems repairs or maintenance we have to accomplish. We respond to security situations. So, basically, we have like, I don’t know, 1,500 pages of technical data and, as missileers, we are trained to know how to prioritize what happens and where to look to follow the checklist. So, anything that happens to the missile goes through the missile crew, which I was a part of.

So, if maintenance is happening, a security response is happening, if a test, exercise, fire, underground shocks from an earthquake, whatever, we have to respond to, basically, we’re the go-between, between security, maintenance, and everything else. Ultimately, our main training part of the mission is we are the ones that launch the missile if the President sends the order. And it goes from the President to the USSTRATCOM, USSTRATCOM to us. So, there’s only one entity in between us and the President, if we are launching a nuclear missile.”

Whitney’s service to the United States of America changed his perspective on life.

“I mean, golf is just what I am currently doing, and I’m completely blessed to do it. But I could still be in the Air Force, at a place I don’t want to be. I could be in harm’s way. I could be fighting enemies. I’ve lost friends and loved ones in the armed forces. I have friends that are deployed. And I’m here in Palm Springs with two miles per hour wind, 75 degrees, getting paid to play these fantastic golf courses. Absolutely, I have a different perspective, because, you know, I signed up to basically saying I’m willing to give my life for this country, and never came anywhere close to that point.

But I mean, that’s kind of what you’re agreeing to when you join the military. Just understanding that, like, Man, there’s tough days out here, but in the grand scheme of things, I get to play golf for a living, I get to represent some awesome companies, I get to do what I love, and pretty much have control over my schedule and what I do day-to-day. So, yeah, it’s definitely fixed my perspective on life.”

The entire country will be rooting for Tom Whitney at the American Express this week and for the rest of the season. The Colorado resident is also set to compete at Torrey Pines for next week’s Farmers Invitational.

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