CHASKA, MINN. ? Tom Lehman was at a crossroads in his career.

Unable to make a decent living on the PGA Tour, unwilling to give up his passion for the game, he interviewed to be the golf coach at the University of Minnesota, his alma mater.

Tom Lehman putts on the ninth green at Hazeltine National Golf Club. Lehman, who was preparing Tuesday for the PGA Championship in Chaska Minn., is one of three PGA tour players from Minnesota who qualified for the tournament on their home turf.

Only the job came with a hitch.

“The thing that broke the deal besides the fact that I probably wasn’t going to be any good was they wanted me to rent cross-country skis in the winter,” he said.

This wasn’t a big surprise.

Lehman grew up in Minnesota, a state with hardly any summer. He remembers the time he played golf in weather that would chill an Eskimo, for no other reason than he could see grass.

“You couldn’t wait for just a patch of grass to pop through in the spring so you could start hitting balls,” he said.

The guy who nearly sold skis at the University of Minnesota golf course made a wise decision. In 1996, Lehman won the British Open, the PGA Tour money title and was voted PGA Tour player of the year.

Lehman returns to his native state this week to play in the PGA Championship at Hazeltine National Golf Club. What makes this occasion even better is that he has company.

Also in the field at Hazeltine is Tim Herron, who honed his game weather permitting down the road at Wayzata Country Club. The lovable “Lumpy” has played golf when the temperature was in the teens, but he figured out how to score.

“I remember hopping on courses before they were open,” he said. “There were no pins in the greens. You try to remember the hole locations where they were from the fall.”

He will be paired the first two rounds with Cameron Beckman, another familiar face.

Beckman grew up in Burnsville, a suburb of Minneapolis where he played golf to kill time between hockey and soccer seasons. When he couldn’t envision a career in either sport, Beckman took a golf scholarship to Texas Lutheran University in San Antonio.

“If you can’t go to a bigger college than that, you pretty much stink,” Beckman said.

A guy who learned to play golf by laying carpet on turf that was still soggy from melting snow managed just fine. He won the NAIA Championship in 1991, survived three straight trips to the finals of Q-school and bagged his first PGA Tour victory late last year.

“It’s pretty cool,” Beckman said. “I remember saying when they announced the PGA was coming here, ‘I’m going to be playing in this tournament.”‘

Even cooler is the fact there are three players at Hazeltine who didn’t have the advantages of year-round golf offered in states like Florida and California.

“There’s always been many, many talented golfers from this state,” Lehman said. “Just because you were born and raised in Minnesota doesn’t mean you have a lack of talent. It just means you have a lack of experience.”

What they gained were well-rounded experiences in other aspects of life.

Herron spent five months a year playing golf. The rest of the time, he played hockey until he realized he wasn’t fast enough on skates, swam until the ninth grade (“That’s when I started to get my nickname,” Lumpy said) and skiied.

Lehman used to go duck hunting before school in Alexandria, then hunt pheasant in the afternoon when football practice was over. Beckman was a center on the hockey team for Burnsville High.

Lehman’s best memory of growing up with golf in Minnesota was the time he played a high school tournament when it was 34 degrees and sleeting.

“You play when it’s cold, you play the leaf rule, where you can’t find your ball because there are so many leaves on the ground,” Herron said. “You’re playing just to play golf, because you love the game.”

They love it even better this week. They’re at home in Minnesota, playing in the final major championship of the year.

Snow is not in the forecast for at least another week.