If somebody had asked you to guess which member of the victorious United States team, captained by Merion Golf Club member George “Buddy” Marucci, in the 2009 Walker Cup Match at Merion’s historic East Course would have the best season as a pro 13 years down the road in 2022, I’m guessing Brian Harman, the little left-hander from the University of Georgia, might have been pretty far down the list.
But when the curtain closed on the wraparound 2021-2022 season, there was Harman, who turned 36 last week, with $3,226,839 in earnings in 27 starts on the PGA Tour. He reached the Tour Championship at Atlanta’s East Lake Golf Club for the first time since 2017 and finished 32nd on the final money list.
Harman got off to a pretty fast start for the 2022-’23 season, too, with a pair of runnerup finishes before the calendar turned to 2023. Not sure if the number on his PGA Tour page for Harman’s career earnings count the $2 million-plus he’s already made for this season, but either way, $25,743,670 is a pretty nice chunk of change for a guy who, I’m fairly certain, can walk up and down the aisle of the grocery store without being recognized as the player ranked 23rd in the Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR).
Harman did all of this in the midst of unprecedented upheaval in professional golf as LIV Golf arrived on the scene, luring many PGA Tour professionals to a new worldwide tour financed by what many consider fistfuls of soiled money from the sheiks of Saudi Arabia.
It’s always been a fun little exercise to watch the progress
of the 10 guys who represented the United States at Merion, an event I got a
chance to cover in a past life as a sports writer at the Delaware County
Daily Times. The U.S. claimed a convincing 16.5-9.5 victory over Great Britain & Ireland.
The end of January has been a pretty quiet time for the stuff I pursue to fill up my golf blog and It’s been really interesting to watch the twists and turns in the careers of all these guys.
And in searching around to see how some of the members of that U.S. team have fared in the last year, I discovered that a couple of them left the PGA Tour behind for LIV Golf. Can’t say I really had heard about the defections of Peter Uihlein and Cameron Tringale, but both were at a bit of a crossroads in their professional careers and I guess the price was right.
Not totally shocked that Uihlein took the money from the Saudis. If you had asked me the day after that Walker Cup was completed which player on that Rickie Fowler-led U.S. team had the most potential, I would have said Uihlein.
A teammate of Fowler’s on a really talented Oklahoma State team, Uihlein would go on to win the U.S. Amateur at Chambers Bay in 2010. It looked like his professional career was prepared for takeoff.
Never really happened, though. Not that Uihlein was terrible. He took the unusual step of playing a couple of years on the European Tour and was named the winner of the Sir Henry Cotton Rookie of the Year Award in 2013.
Uihlein got a couple of PGA Tour starts with sponsor’s exemptions and eventually earned enough status to get into the Web.com Tour Finals. A victory in the Nationwide Children’s Hospital Championship on The Ohio State University’s Scarlet Course in 2017 punched his ticket to the PGA Tour.
Uihlein had his moments in his rookie season in 2017-’18, making the FedEx Cup Playoffs. But by 2021 Uihlein was back on the Korn Ferry Tour. A victory in the MGM Resorts Championship at Paiute near Las Vegas in April of 2021 would prove to be his ticket back to the PGA Tour.
But Uihlein made just seven cuts in 15 events in the early going of the 2021-’22 season. He had earned just $142,276 for the season when LIV Golf came calling and Uihlein pulled the plug on his PGA Tour career last May.
Uihlein was never the prototypical struggling PGA Tour pro. His father is Wally Uihlein, president and CEO of the Acushnet Company, you know, Titleist. He’ll always land on his feet.
Tringale, a product of the powerful Georgia Tech program, played out the 2021-’22 season, reaching the BMW Championship at Wilmington Country Club’s South Course in August, but not advancing to the Tour Championship.
It was a typically solid campaign for the 35-year-old Tringale as he earned just more than $3 million, making 20 cuts in 29 starts with five top-10 finishes. It didn’t include any wins, but that was also typical for Tringale as, with $17.4 million career earnings, he had become the player who had won more money without a win in the history of the PGA Tour.
Not exactly what you want to be known for, but not the worst thing in the world either. Regardless, Tringale was off for LIV Golf, which released its 14-event schedule for 2023 this week.
LIV Golf had sued the PGA Tour for suspending all the players that fled its tour for the fledgling league, although this week, the PGA Tour countersued. Sounds like the PGA Tour would like to legally establish what is already a fairly open secret, that LIV Golf is being financed by the families that run Saudi Arabia.
I guess that’s an issue for a lot of high-priced lawyers to sort out.
In the short term, it seems like guys like Uihlein and Tringale both accepted a big pile of money, probably not as a big a pile of money as it took to lure guys like Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson and Brooks Koepka, to basically retire from competitive golf at a fairly young age.
Maybe LIV Golf will become a third worldwide tour, as competitive as the PGA Tour and the European Tour, rebranded as the DP World Tour. Right now, though, it would seem unlikely Uihlein or Tringale would be welcome to tee it up in a PGA Tour event anytime soon.
It’s easy to forget that none of the four major championships, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the Open Championship or the PGA Championship, is run by the PGA Tour. And, unlike the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour will still allow LIV Golf players to tee it up in its events, but I have no idea if exiles from the PGA Tour can just show up at a DP World Tour event and get in the field.
Meanwhile, Harman is continuing on his merry way on the PGA Tour. He made 21 cuts in 27 starts and had six top-10 finishes during the 2021-’22 season. His tie for sixth place in the Open Championship at the Old Course at St. Andrews last summer was his second top 10 in a major championship to go with his tie for second behind Koepka in the U.S. Open at Erin Hills in 2017.
Harman finished in a tie for third place in the FedEx St. Jude Championship, the first step on the FedEx Cup Playoffs at TPC Southwind in Memphis, Tenn., and ended up in a tie for 35th place in the BMW Championship at Wilmington, although his strong showing in Memphis propelled him to the Tour Championship.
When the PGA Tour resumed in the fall, Harman kept right on going. He was the runnerup in the World Wide Technology Championship at Mayakoba in Mexico. Then, in a home game for the Sea Island, Ga. resident, he got a share of second place in The RSM Classic at the Sea Island Golf Club’s Seaside Course.
Harman failed to survive the 54-hole cut in The American Express last weekend in the Southern California desert, but he is playing some of the best golf of his career right now.
Fowler, who turned 34 in December, and his revamped swing were very much in evidence at The American Express – it will always be the Bob Hope Desert Classic in my mind. Fowler finished in a tie for 54th place in The American Express at 13-under par, but there have been signs that Fowler, who hasn’t won since capturing the Waste Management Phoenix Open in 2019, is finding his groove again.
Fowler is clearly the most successful of the members of that U.S. team that won retained the Walker Cup in 2009 at Merion. He has five PGA Tour victories and career earnings of more than $42 million. He has 12 top-10 finishes in major championships, quite memorably finishing no worse than fifth while contending in all four majors in 2014.
But he is coming off a forgettable 2022, during which he wasn’t even in the field for three of the majors. Fowler made 13 cuts in 22 events, earning just more than $1 million and failing to make the FedEx Playoffs. There have been rumblings that LIV Golf has been trying to get him to join, but he has resisted their offers.
He and his wife, Allison Stokke, good enough of a pole vaulter to have competed in the Olympic Trials in 2012, became parents for the first time late in 2021, so Fowler can be forgiven for paying more attention to his newborn daughter than his golf game in 2022.
Fowler, though, is off to a good start in the wraparound 2022-’23 season with four made cuts in five starts and two top-10 finishes. He was the runnerup in the Zozo Championship in October in Japan after having at least a share of the lead following the second and third rounds. He has already won more money this season than he did in 2021-’22.
If you had told me in 2009 that in 2023 I’d still be rooting for a major champion to emerge from that U.S. team at Merion, I would have been surprised. Do I think now, as I did then, that Fowler was the most likely member of that team to be crowned a major champion? I do, yes I do.
The third Oklahoma State Cowboy on that 2009 U.S. Walker Cup team was Morgan Hoffmann, who was in the midst of a solid career on the PGA Tour when he was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy.
Not long after I put together my annual update on the 2009 U.S. Walker Cup team a year ago, Hoffmann was the subject of a fascinating story authored by Dan Rappaport in Golf Digest, as good a piece as I read about golf, or anything else for that matter, in 2022.
Rappaport visited Hoffmann in a faraway corner of Costa Rica, where he was taking a holistic approach to try to overcome a disease that has no cure. If you Google Hoffman, you can find the story. I can’t really do it justice in this post.
Hoffmann was working toward a return to the PGA Tour and he did just that. He didn’t make enough money while using a medical exemption to retain his playing privileges. While making the cut at the Travelers Championship and again at the John Deere Classic might not seem like a big deal for most players, they were tremendous testaments to Hoffmann’s indomitable spirit.
Another talented guy from that U.S. Walker Cup team, Bud Cauley, has never quite recovered from the injuries he suffered in a car accident he was involved in after he missed the cut at the Memorial Tournament in 2018.
Late in 2021 it sounded like Cauley was planning to make a comeback, but I couldn’t find any mention of him playing in 2022. Too soon, though, to say that the final chapter of Cauley’s golf career has been written.
The Walker Cup experience for western Pennsylvania amateur standout Nathan Smith will come full circle when he captains the U.S. team in 2025 at Cypress Point, the classic layout on northern California’s Monterey Peninsula.
The 44-year-old Smith had won the first of his four U.S. Mid-Amateur Championship titles in 2003 when the USGA selected him to be part of the U.S. team at Merion in 2009. He would play in two more Walker Cups for the U.S.
Smith, the 1994 PIAA champion as a sophomore at Brookville, just missed making the match-play bracket in last summer’s Pennsylvania Golf Association R. Jay Sigel Match Play Championship, an event he’s won six times. Smith teamed with Todd White to win the title in the inaugural U.S. Amateur Four-Ball Championship in 2015 at The Olympic Club’s Lake Course. Guy’s got this match-play thing down.
The USGA had taken to making captainships for the Walker Cup and the Curtis Cup last for two cycles. Marucci had been the captain for the U.S. in a Walker Cup win in 2007 at Royal County Down in Northern Ireland – bunch of major champions came out of that group on both sides, Dustin Johnson and Webb Simpson from the U.S. and that McIlroy fella and Danny Willett from GB&I.
Nathaniel Crosby was the winning U.S. captain on either side of the coronavirus pandemic in 2019 at Royal Liverpool in Hoylake, England and again on his home course, the iconic Seminole Golf Club in Juno Beach, Fla., in the unusual spring Walker Cup edition in 2021.
But the USGA has split up its captains for the next two playings of the Walker Cup with Mike McCoy, winner of the U.S. Mid-Am in 2013 at age 50 and a member of the U.S. Walker Cup team in 2015 at Royal Lytham & St Annes Golf Club in England, getting the plum assignment for this year’s edition at the Old Course at St. Andrews.
I imagine Smith will get a free trip to the home of golf out of it this summer and Cypress Point figures to be quite a memorable setting to be a U.S. Walker Cup captain.
Drew Weaver was a standout on the Virginia Tech golf team and was on the campus in Blacksburg that fateful day in the spring of 2007 when a man slaughtered 32 people in one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history. A few weeks later, Weaver became the first American since Jay Sigel did it in 1979 to win The Amateur Championship at Royal Lytham & St Annes.
That victory had a lot to do with him getting a berth on the U.S. team for the 2009 Walker Cup Match at Merion. Weaver kept banging away, mostly on the Korn Ferry Tour, but never was quite able to make it to the big leagues of pro golf. It looks like he might have moved on in 2022.
Harman’s fellow Georgia Bulldog, Adam Mitchell, and former Wake Forest standout Brendan Gielow rounded out the U.S. roster for that Walker Cup at Merion. They never quite made it to the PGA Tour either, but they share a bond with all of their U.S. teammates that lasts a lifetime.
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