Mark Calcavecchia continues Charles Schwab Cup Playoffs drive

Mark Calcavecchia’s hope for this week’s Invesco QQQ Championship, the second event in the PGA TOUR Champions Charles Schwab Cup Playoffs, is that he drives the golf ball as well as he drives his “bus.”

Calcavecchia, his wife, Brenda, and their Jack Russell terriers, Lucie and Brutus, hopped in their 2016 Prevost, a 45-foot quad slide RV, on Sunday night in Richmond, Virginia, to begin the trek to the Invesco QQQ in Thousand Oaks, California, some 2,650 miles.

Calcavecchia, who said he and Brenda have been “doing the bus life as much as we can for the past eight years,” wasn’t happy with his play at the Dominion Energy Classic over the weekend. He shot three rounds in the 70s, posted a T46 and put himself on the bubble to make the playoff finale, the Charles Schwab Cup Championship in Phoenix. He dropped three spots in the standings to 35th; only the top 36 make the field.

“I didn’t drive it very well, and this was a bad week for that. The rough was pretty thick,” Calcavecchia said from somewhere on I-40 West in Oklahoma on Tuesday. “It’s a fairly long golf course. I was in the rough too much.”

Calcavecchia’s driving accuracy for the season is 69.53 percent, which ranks 40th. At the DECC, he hit only 20 of 42 fairways, for 47.62 percent. It ranked 61st In the field.

Calcavecchia, who got his fourth PGA TOUR Champions victory at this year’s Boca Raton Championship, said he’s having a new driver sent ahead to the course in Thousand Oaks. He’ll use it on the range on Thursday morning before his pro-am tee time at 12:30 p.m., and he probably will use it in that event. Based on how he hits it, he’ll decide whether he puts it in play for the first round on Friday.

“I hit it better on Sunday,” said Calcavecchia, who hit only four fairways on Friday but hit eight on Sunday. “The thing is, I putted well all week. I’d rather feel like I’m putting well and hitting it poorly than the other way around. I just have to figure out how to get to the greens a little bit faster.”

Calcavecchia, 58, always has been a streaky player. And he did putt it well in Richmond, ranking T15 in putts per green in regulation (he’s a respectable 24th for the year). But he tied for 61st in GIR, which means a lot of his one-putts were to save par.

But if he can just drive it like he drives his bus …

“It’s nice. It’s a smooth ride,” Calcavecchia said of his new-to-him Prevost. Three months ago he traded in his 2006 Prevost which he got in 2011 for this one, a quad slide with 1.5 bathrooms, a king-sized bed, a washer and dryer – “the whole deal” as Calcavecchia says -- and only 20,000 miles on it.

Calcavecchia doesn’t trust anyone else to drive it, nor did he the last one. He does all of the driving himself. As of Tuesday he was ahead of schedule for California, having covered nearly 2,000 miles.

Is it lunacy or genius? Consider this: He never has to check in to a hotel. He never has to put his clubs on an airplane; at least two players have had their Tour sets destroyed by airlines this year. The RV’s generator is 20,000 watts, so he doesn’t even need a hookup to power the bus’ four air conditioners, heater, TVs or stereo. He pulls over and he’s home.

They go about 300 miles at a clip. Overnights might be in rest areas along the highway, campgrounds or … yes … in lighted Walmart parking lots.

They love having Brutus, 14, and Lucie, 6, with them. Brutus is a veteran of the bus life; Lucie is a rescue they adopted this year. Brenda doesn’t like being away from the dogs for more than a week or two anyway, so this works out well for everybody.

It takes about 15 minutes to fill up the Prevost with gas, so Brenda usually makes sandwiches, walks the dogs and then it’s back on the road. They have all of the creature comforts – DirecTV, cable, AppleTV, DVD players, Netflix, SiriusXM radio.

Calcavecchia mostly listens to music while driving. He rattled off his favorite SiriusXM stations -- Classic Rewind, Lithium, Ozzy’s Boneyard and Turbo, though Turbo, which plays alternative metal from the 1990s and 2000s “is a little bit too much sometimes.”

When they take the RV the Calcavecchias don’t avail themselves of whatever hotel accommodations the tournament has for players. They simply stay in their home away from home.

“A lot of the guys totally get it,” Calcavecchia said. “John Daly drives his a lot. Tim Petrovic drives his. Two TOUR officials, Brian Claar and Mike Sullivan, also have buses.

“The way the schedule sets up next year I think we might be in it for four straight months.”

Oh, and just in case you were wondering, Phoenix, site of the Charles Schwab Cup Championship, is on next week’s travel itinerary. So if he drives his ball better he can drive his bus to one more stop.