"I buried my dad on my birthday."

I finally got around to Steve Elling's story on former high school teammates Christo Greyling and Ty Tryon qualifying for the U.S. Open Monday and it is well worth your time. Warning though, it's emotional and upsetting at times (Greyling's father committed suicide), and downright bizarre when reading about the effects the acne drug Accutane had on their golf games.

But the ending is a happy one and it'll be impossible not to be rooting for these two this week.

They propped each other up at the qualifier last Monday in Rockville, Md., and when Greyling saw Tryon slogging up the 36th hole, shoulders slumped and dragging, he assumed the worst.

"I thought, 'Come on, Ty, you can do this,'" Greyling said. "We didn't come all this way not to make it."

All this way, that way, every which way, actually. The pair charted their own separate paths but never much diverged.

As nearly everybody knows, at a point in time where every top American prospect went the college route, Tryon turned pro during his junior year of high school and became the youngest ever to earn a PGA Tour card, at age 17.

"I was the original 'young guy,'" Tryon laughed.