Under Pressure

By MATTHEW FUTTERMAN

(See Corrections and Amplifications item below.)

The Martin Family

Josh Martin, age 4, in 2001.

Bowie and Julie Martin shuttled their sons for five years to a never-ending series of practices, lessons and games in a half-dozen sports before finally suggesting the boys focus on a single pursuit, golf, the game where the children showed the most promise.

Josh and Zach Martin were 6 and 8.

"I just wanted them to be great at something," Mr. Martin explains.

So far, so good. Today, the Martin family's single-minded pursuit has produced perhaps the two best young golfers living under the same roof anywhere. Their two-bedroom townhouse beside the 17th hole of a golf course in Pinehurst, N.C., is an exhibit space for dozens of oversized silver and crystal trophies that Josh and Zach have won, including 11 at international tournaments.

Soft-spoken but intense, driven and supportive rather than overbearing and abusive, Bowie and Julie Martin symbolize an era when seven-year-olds sign up for speed and agility training and the singular pursuit of greatness has become both acceptable and commonplace. From the athletic field to the classroom to the recital hall, parental involvement -- some say over-involvement -- in the minutiae of their children's lives is as widespread as it has ever been.

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Experts in child development say a broad swath of today's parents, who generally have smaller families and greater resources, are pouring enormous amounts of time, money and psychic energy into raising exceptional children. Today's young parents were the "latch-key" kids of the 1970s and 1980s, reared by hands-off parents who were among the least restrictive in generations, says Neil Howe, author of the 2000 book "Millennials Rising."

When their kids were born, this generation went the other direction, he says, taking on the job of protecting them from all the dangers they saw around them; popularizing V-chips for TVs and Baby On Board signs for car windows. "They're very protective almost in reaction to their own upbringing," Mr. Howe says.

Some of them were influenced by best-selling books by the era's leading child experts, including William and Martha Sears, who coined the phrase "attachment parenting," which encourages mothers to have a "magnet-like" bond with their children. In a child's early infancy, they said, mothers should read their babies' faces for clues about their needs and look for signs that their parenting was appreciated. As their kids have grown, psychologists say these working parents have dealt with their limited family time, and their guilt about leaving their kids at home, by being more intensely involved when they are with their kids.

The percentage of adults with a college degree has nearly doubled in the last three decades, and now experts say more parents see raising talented kids as another chapter in their own pursuit of success.

The children often stay unusually close to their parents. Marketing surveys show parents and kids listen to the same music and have similar tastes in clothes. In response to a first-ever question in the National Survey of Student Engagement last year, 75% of college freshman and seniors said they almost always took their parents' advice -- a number that surprised the study's director, Indiana University professor George Kuh.

Children of very involved parents do achieve, but not always in a healthy way. A new study from the University of Montreal to be published this fall in the Journal of Personality found that the children of controlling parents were more likely to turn their hobbies into anxiety-producing obsessions, while the children of more laid-back parents were more likely to just enjoy it, says professor Genevieve Mageau, who studied 588 children and teenagers, many of them musicians and athletes.

DL Anderson for The Wall Street Journal

Josh Martin, 11, left, and his older brother, Zachary, 13, Sept. 20 at Pinehurst Country Club, Pinehurst, N.C.

Henry David Feldman, a professor of child development at Tufts University who has followed a group of musical and chess prodigies since the 1970s, said such standouts, especially in music, can show a higher rate of depression as they grow older.

In sports, where the competition is explicit and obsessive parents have long been part of the scenery, many of these warnings are being ignored. The consensus among experts is that the best approach is a narrow one. Golf coach Hank Haney, who is Tiger Woods's current coach, insists a future champion needs to pick his game by the third grade.

"You've got to steer kids in a direction," he says. "I'm not saying this creates the most well-rounded person, but if the question is, 'What does it take to be great?' That is what it takes. You need to be focused."

STEADY AND RESERVED

Josh Martin, who is 11, has a Harry Potter poster next to his bed and the butter-smooth golf swing of a player twice his age. He is steady and reserved, unusual traits for a kid his age, almost as unusual as his ability to repeat his exact swing with every stroke, a feat even some touring pros struggle with. He has won his division in nearly every major junior tournament the past four years and is generally considered the best golfer in the world at his age.

DL Anderson for The Wall Street Journal

From left: Josh, Julie, Bowie and Zach Martin outside Pinehurst Country Club in Pinehurst, N.C., last month.

This summer, he is averaging just 69.6 strokes for each round of 18 holes on courses with an average length of 5,614 yards. Professional golfers play courses between 7,000 and 7,500 yards, but Josh Martin weighs about half of what they do. His low round is a 62. "Sometimes I'll get a little nervous, but I just try to play my game and that usually works," he says.

Zach Martin, who is 13, already takes high-school math, which he says is easy, but his favorite subject is reading. Though he still usually beats his little brother on the course, he is more erratic, a lefty who will spray the ball all over the practice range, then hit every shot down the center of the fairway in competition. His swing sometimes looks like an attempt to swat a fly inside a phone booth. Still, he picked up his fifth championship in a top-tier tournament this summer.

Exactly where this all came from remains a mystery. Bowie and Julie Martin, both 45 years old, don't play golf. Bowie Martin was once ranked among the better junior ping-pong players in the country but says he never excelled at anything else. Before they became parents their direct involvement in sports was limited to operating the Martins' family business, Butterfly N.A., based in Wilson, N.C., which distributes $5 million worth of premium table-tennis equipment throughout North America each year.

Once Mr. Martin became a father though, simply buying bats and balls to teach his kids to play sports on his own, like the rest of the parents in the neighborhood, would not suffice. "I wanted them to have the best coaching no matter what they did," Mr. Martin says. "I was definitely on the lunatic fringe."

Mr. Martin, who played soccer and tennis in high school, in addition to ping pong, says he wished he'd concentrated on a single sport growing up. Then he might have had a chance to play on a team in college at the University of North Carolina. When he became a parent, he wanted to see how good his children could become if they focused on a single sport and had top instruction.

The Granger Collection

Alexander the Great

Parental Guidance

While the Martins may be part of a new, more enlightened era, history abounds with examples of ambitious parents whose methods have had varying results.

• When Alexander the Great ascended the throne following the assassination of his father, Philip II, in 336 B.C., his mother Olympias, his fervent promoter, arranged to have his potential rivals killed, says Ian Morris, a classics professor at Stanford. Some evidence suggests Olympias, one of several wives to Philip, arranged for Philip's murder when he began turning against his son. Alexander went on to conquer most of the known world, and is credited with spreading Greek civilization.
• Leopold Mozart insisted that his children become musical virtuosi at a very early age, says Jonathan Coopersmith, a musical-studies professor at the Curtis Institute of Music. Leopold was the first teacher for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Maria Anna, called Nannerl, and eventually gave up his own musical career to showcase their talent in European tours.
• Though Edward Barrett Moulton encouraged the education of his daughter Elizabeth Barrett Browning, he "did his best to limit her private life," says Barnard English professor William Sharpe. He forbade the renowned poet and her siblings from marrying, for unclear reasons, and never spoke with Elizabeth again after she eloped with Robert Browning, at the age of 40.
• Mama Rose gained notoriety as the ultimate stage mother in the Broadway musical "Gypsy," based on the 1957 memoir of her daughter, Gypsy Rose Lee. In the play, Mama Rose pushes her daughters into the spotlight. After June runs away, Mama Rose transforms the mousy teenaged Louise into a feted stripper.
• Earl Woods started teaching his son, Tiger, to play golf when he was 2 years old. Mr. Woods used to try to break his son's concentration by dropping a bag of clubs during his swing. By the time Tiger was a teenager, he'd been touring all over the country under his father's strict guidance. Mr. Woods has won 14 major tournaments and is expected to be the first athlete to earn more than $1 billion in prize money and endorsements.

Juliet Chung

When Zach was a toddler, his father hired a baseball coach at nearby Barton College to teach him the fundamentals of hitting and throwing. He paid women on the Barton College soccer team $20 an hour for kicking and dribbling lessons, turning the kids into top players on their travel and recreational league teams.

At 5, Zach attended tennis camp at North Carolina State University. The next year, when the boys were 4 and 6, Mr. Martin signed them up for weekly golf lessons with a friend who was an assistant pro at a local club. Both exhibited decent hand-eye coordination. Josh had that sweet, natural pendulum stroke.

With regular practice and lessons, their games improved, as did their results in local tournaments their father signed them up for. By the summer of 2003, both were state champions and top 10 finishers at the U.S. Kids World Championship in Virginia. "That's when I said, 'It's on,'" Mr. Martin says.

The Martin boys' baseball, soccer and tennis careers were officially over. "I was just excited we weren't going to have to shuttle them around to all these different sports and practices anymore," Mrs. Martin says. "We were getting pretty stressed."

Zach Martin says he misses other sports, especially the camaraderie his friends enjoy in team sports. "I do love golf, though," he adds. "Really, I do."

Golf long ago ceased being a game in the Martin family. It is a way of life that sucks up nearly every penny of disposable income. Most weekends are spent traveling to tournaments or to other courses, perhaps in the Appalachians or down at Myrtle Beach, that expose the boys to new challenges. The Martins drive the carts or carry the clubs while the kids play.

Three years ago, the Martins decided to sell their four-bedroom home in Wilson and move two hours east to a two-bedroom, $289,000 townhouse in Pinehurst, a golf Mecca with thousands of retirees, towering pine trees and eight sprawling courses, including the legendary Pinehurst No. 2, host of the men's 1999 U.S. Open Championship. Pinehurst offered proximity to a variety of courses and the best coaching available.

Parents who want their kids to become great golfers have surprisingly few options. Golf, unlike virtually every other sport in the U.S., has no institutional pipeline to develop the next generation of stars. While the U.S. Tennis Association keeps a close eye on local clinics and regularly places the best kids, some as young as eight, into special subsidized camps, golf has no similar programs. Decent coaching is hard to find, and access to courses is a major obstacle for kids. There may be a lot of nine-year olds with the potential to become the next Tiger Woods, but they are probably bouncing basketballs right now.

"The great mass of children playing in Little League or Pop Warner don't get exposed until an older age," said Pete Bevacqua, chief business officer for the USGA.

That's where Bowie Martin sees his opening, because there is no aspect of golf he has not exposed his children to already. On a series of Excel spread sheets Mr. Martin keeps statistics on nearly every competitive round his children have played in the past five years. After the boys drop their final putts, the family goes out to lunch and the boys spend several minutes replaying each hole in their minds, writing down the number of fairways and greens hit, sand shots, saves and putts; or in other words, every calculation a pro golfer keeps.

Mr. Martin then processes the data so, for instance, he can show Zach he hit the fairway on just 70% of his drives this summer compared with 78% during his winter play, but his putts per round dropped from 31.6 to 30.2 for an average of 1.87 putts per hole compared with 1.93.

PLAYING UNTIL DUSK

Before a major tournament, the Martins will go to a driving range carrying orange cones, walkie-talkies, and a tape measure. Mr. Martin will walk off an exact distance, drop a cone, then radio the boys to hit five wedges 92 yards. He records the distance of each shot from the target. That shows exactly how far they can expect to hit each club. He also calculates both the average distance from the target and a standard deviation, so the boys can then see if their accuracy is getting better or worse.

"It shows me what I need to work on," Zach Martin says of all the number-crunching. "And it gives you confidence when you are doing well at something because it becomes a fact."

The boys play as many as five rounds each week. Most days they arrive home from school, wolf down a bowl of chicken noodle soup, and head out to the course. During the summer, they tee off for 18 holes at 7 a.m. nearly every day they are not at a tournament. They rest during the afternoon, then go back out at 5 p.m. and play until dusk.

The devotion comes with a steep price. The Martins paid $15,000 to join Pinehurst, and nearly $5,000 a year for their membership. Cart fees are $18 each time the boys play. Lessons with Pinehurst pro Eric Alpenfels, rated one of the country's top 50 teachers by Golf Digest, cost another $2,500 annually.

The boys play 25 to 30 tournaments each year with entry fees that range from $100-$300 for each player. A five-day trip to the Callaway World Junior Championships near San Diego can cost more than $3,000 if they can't use frequent flier miles. Gas for their minivan for a trip down and back to the two tournaments in Florida can run another $1,200. The boys' custom clubs cost about $3,000 for each set and have to be changed every other year.

"No one can understand when we show up to a course and ask for two carts but say we only have two golfers," Mr. Martin says. "Right now, Julie and I can't afford to play."

In 2006, a few months after the Martins moved to Pinehurst, Zach, who was 11 at the time, told his parents he didn't want to play anymore.

"I'd turned it into a grind," Mr. Martin says. "Josh is a machine. He can deal with that. Zach is different."

The confrontation was a reminder of just how fragile the relationship between families and sports can be. Years of commitment can blow up at any moment. Zach would enter tournaments but he refused to practice. Mr. Martin told him this was the time the competitive juices were supposed to begin to flow. The harder the father pushed, the less the son wanted to play. "I was just bored," says Zach, who wears a rhinestone stud in his left ear and has bleached hair. "It was too much. I wanted to do something else."

Finally, Bowie Martin gave up and left Zach alone to his friends and his video games.

Once he did that, Zach decided to start working again. By midsummer, the brothers were back to their tricks. At the Optimist International Junior Golf Championship in Florida, Zach knocked in three birdies over four playoff holes to win the 10-11 division over a junior champion from Chile.

A week later at the Kids Golf World Championships, Josh was two shots down in the final round with four holes left. He finished with two pars and two birdies, the last coming on a 30-foot putt. When his partner lipped out a four-footer for par, Josh was the champion.

Zach burned out once again in the spring of 2007. But he regained his fire in the summer and finished the year winning seven of his final nine tournaments.

This summer's highlight came in August at the National Junior Golf Club Championships in North Carolina, where both boys played in the 12-13-year-old division. Josh shot a 142 over 18 holes to take second place, two shots behind his brother, who shot a 140 and won.

The Martins watch their kids haul off more hardware, then drive home listening to the golf channel on satellite radio. It's hard not to dream of seeing the boys don green jackets, the ones awarded to the Masters champion each year. Yet even now, as long as they have been at this, the dream feels like a lifetime away.

"Remember, these boys got serious when they were 6 and 8," Mr. Martin says. "This is a long haul for us."

-- Ellen Gamerman contributed to this article.

Write to Matthew Futterman at matthew.futterman@wsj.com

Corrections and Amplifications:

Zach Martin shot 140 over 36 holes at the National Junior Golf Club Championships in North Carolina this summer. This article incorrectly stated the number of holes as 18. Also, Zach averaged 1.68 putts per hole this summer, down from 1.76 putts per hole during the winter. This story incorrectly listed those averages as 1.87 and 1.93, respectively.