It’s a little later than I usually get to this, but I always like to look back at the 2009 U.S. team that claimed a 16.5-9.5 victory over Great Britain & Ireland in the biennial Walker Cup Match held at Merion Golf Club’s historic East Course in the Ardmore section of Haverford Township and see how those guys are doing.
Hard to believe it’s been 12 years since I had the opportunity to cover the Walker Cup since Haverford Township is in Delaware County and I was, at the time, employed by the Delaware County Daily Times. I had some history at the East Course, having walked it, oh, about a thousand times or so as a Merion looper, mostly in the 1970s. So, the prestige of the event and the site, which became my favorite golf course in the whole world – certainly the best course that I knew a lot about – combined to make it a very memorable weekend.
All that and, of course, the players. I knew I was seeing guys I’d be watching on TV playing on the PGA Tour for years to come.
When Golf Digest ranked the top 100 players on the PGA Tour for 2021 in the first week of the new year, I held onto it for just this occasion.
In a lot of ways, the group as a whole has disappointed as far as professional achievements are concerned. Maybe it was a matter of the sum of the parts being better than the individual pieces. Give some credit to the United States Golf Association’s International Team Selection Committee and to the captain, George “Buddy” Marucci, who couldn’t have been prouder to win a Walker Cup on a golf course that was, quite literally, in the backyard of the house he grew up in on Golf View Road. It really was a good team, in every sense of the word.
The star of that team, even though he was still a few months removed from turning 21, was Rickie Fowler and he was the highest ranked player from that 2009 U.S. team on the Golf Digest list of the top 100 PGA Tour players for 2021 at No. 57.
At 32, Fowler is at a crossroads of what has been a pretty good 12 years of professional golf. It’s kind of hard to call his career a disappointment. The guy has banked more than $39 million. But he has won only five times and, while he has frequently been near the top of the leaderboard in major championships, he has never finished at the very top of one of those leaderboards.
Fowler was very clearly, at a very young age, the leader of that U.S. Walker Cup team. He was the only holdover from the 2017 team that, also under captain Marucci, defeated a GB&I team that included Rory McIlroy, 12.5-11.5, in a dramatic finish at Royal County Down in Northern Ireland.
Fowler would be delaying the start of his professional career by playing in another Walker Cup. But I always got the impression he had promised Marucci he’d be there and he was a man of his word. Fowler was an Oklahoma State guy and that connection might have played a bit of a role in his decision to play another Walker Cup as two of his fellow Cowboys, Peter Uihlein and Morgan Hoffmann, were also on the U.S. side.
Fowler has certainly been a team player over the years, representing the Red, White & Blue in the Presidents Cup in 2015, 2017 and 2019 and in the Ryder Cup in 2010, 2014, 2016 and 2018. Golf is very much an individual sport and those individuals don’t always translate to a team dynamic. Fowler, though, has always seemed to have grasped that team concept better than most.
Fowler’s Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) has drifted back to No. 65, so he’ll have to get going to make the field for the Masters and it’s starting to seem unlikely that he’ll make the U.S. team for this year’s rescheduled Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits.
Fowler quite famously finished in the top five in all four majors in 2014 and was a runnerup to Patrick Reed in the Masters as recently as 2018. His victory in 2015 in The Players Championship was dramatic and seemed to portend of bigger things to come, but it hasn’t quite worked out that way.
Plenty of guys have won their first major in their 30s and, once they got that first one, it has led to another or even more. You could hardly blame almost anyone for getting thrown off by the events of 2020. Fowler had a pair of top-10 finishes in January of last year, but never seemed to get it going when the PGA Tour resumed from its coronavirus-enforced hiatus.
Fowler did finish in a tie for 20th place in The Genesis Invitational – it will always be the L.A. Open in my book – last weekend at a classic course in Riviera Country Club. Not sure why he didn’t tee it up in The World Golf Championship Workday Championship at Concession in Bradenton, Fla., this past weekend – maybe No. 65 in the OWGR doesn’t get you in -- but maybe the performance at Riviera was the beginning of a bit of a turnaround.
If you were around for the Walker Cup Match at Merion 12 years ago, a victory in a major championship by Fowler wouldn’t be the least bit surprising.
Only two other 2009 U.S. Walker Cup alumni appear on the Golf Digest list of the top 100 PGA Tour players going into 2021, Brian Harman, the persistent, consistent left-hander at 63rd, and Cameron Tringale at 88th.
Both have figured out how to – as Delco’s own Ed Dougherty used to say during his brief, but profitable run on what is now the PGA Tour Champions – keep their day job.
The wraparound 2019-’20 PGA Tour season, such as it was, was not Harman’s best. But in typical Harman fashion, he made the cut 17 times in 22 starts. The former Georgia standout, No. 92 in the OWGR, had only one top 10, but he easily retained his spot in the big leagues of professional golf.
The 34-year-old has made $18 million with two wins in his career and is probably best remembered as the gritty runnerup to Brooks Koepka in the 2017 U.S. Open at Erin Hills. Go ahead and call him a rank-and-file PGA Tour guy if you want, but by doing so you would be revealing how little you know about how difficult it is to grind it out year after year against the best players in the world.
The 33-year-old Tringale knows a thing or two about that. The former Georgia Tech standout made 14 cuts in 17 starts in 2019-’20 and a third-place finish in the RSM Classic at Sea Island Golf Club on St. Simons Island, Ga. in the last event in calendar year 2020 has him off to a decent start in the wraparound 2020-’21 season.
Tringale has inched ahead of his U.S. Walker Cup teammate Harman to No. 91 on the OWGR and he’s closing in on $13 million in career earnings. He hasn’t won – yet. But, like Harman, Tringale keeps grinding.
The one guy, beside Fowler, who I had pegged as a can’t-miss star on that 2009 U.S. Walker Cup team was Fowler’s Oklahoma State teammate Uihlein.
It hasn’t really happened, though. At 31, Uihlein entered the wraparound 2020-’21 season in the limbo of guys who finished between 126 and 150 on last season’s money list. It gets you in a lot of tournaments, but it makes it nearly impossible to map out a schedule.
This past weekend, Uihlein finished in a tie for 39th place in the Puerto Rico Open, an event opposite the WGC Workday at Concession that is the perfect opportunity for a guy like Uihein to get a victory that would make his status on the PGA Tour more stable. He made the cut and finished 6-under, 1-over in Sunday’s final round, but you just know he has more talent than he’s been showing.
Uihlein, who captured the 2010 U.S. Amateur at Chambers Bay, took an unusual path to the PGA Tour, playing on the European Tour for a few years, even earning that tour’s Sir Henry Cotton Award, which goes to the Rookie of the Year, in 2013. A victory in the Nationwide Children’s Hospital Championship at the Ohio State Golf Club’s Scarlet Course on the Web.com Tour (the Korn Ferry Tour now, of course) in 2017 gave Uihlein the opening he needed to join the PGA Tour.
I still think Uihlein is going to put together four good rounds and win a tournament one of these days and everybody is going to be left to wonder where this guy has been all this time.
Bud Cauley made a million dollars, played in the PGA Tour playoffs and retained his tour card for the wraparound 2020-’21 season, but hasn’t played since finishing in a tie for 14th place in the season opener, the Safeway Open at the Silverado Resort & Spa in Napa, Calif.
The career of the 30-year-old former Alabama star could have easily veered off the rails when he was involved in a serious car accident after missing the cut at The Memorial in Columbus, Ohio in 2018. But Cauley fought back and never so much as lost his PGA Tour card.
Cauley made it to the PGA Tour in 2011 by making enough money in events he got in via sponsor’s exemptions, one of a small fraternity of players to go right from college golf to the big leagues that way. He’s won more than $9 million on the PGA Tour, although when he was briefly banished to the Web.com in 2014 he won the Hotel Fitness Championship at Sycamore Hills Golf Club in Fort Wayne, Ind., which got him back to the Big Show.
When I did this post in 2019, it was mostly a tribute to Cauley’s recovery from his car accident and to the third Oklahoma State player on that 2009 U.S. Walker Cup roster, Hoffmann, who, after years of trying to figure out why his right pectoral muscle seemed to be atrophying, received a devastating diagnosis in 2016 that he has muscular dystrophy.
It would appear that Hoffmann’s days of playing on the PGA Tour are over, although, remarkably, he made 12 cuts in 17 starts, earned $1.2 million and made the PGA Tour playoffs in the 2016-’17 season, during which he first had the muscular dystrophy diagnosis confirmed late in 2016.
Not long after I updated the progress of the 2009 U.S. Walker Cup guys a year ago, Hoffmann received the 2020 PGA Tour Courage Award. If you google him, you can find a really nice profile of Hoffmann done on the eve of last year’s Honda Classic by Dave Shedloski of Golf Digest.
The 31-year-old has made it his life’s work to find a cure of muscular dystrophy through the Morgan Hoffmann Foundation. He doesn’t speak about it in terms of if he’ll find a cure, but when. At the end of Shedloski’s story, he quotes Hoffmann’s wife Chelsea as saying, “He’s a pretty inspiring guy.”
Makes me think maybe the lessons guys like Cauley and Hoffmann have given us about things that have nothing to do with golf may turn out to be the most valuable contributions the 2009 U.S. Walker Cup team will make.
I was inspired in 2007 when Drew Weaver, the horror of the deadly killing spree on his Virginia Tech campus still fresh in his mind, won The Amateur Championship at Royal Lytham & St. Annes Golf Club. No American has won that prestigious title since and he was the first American to win it since, believe it or not, the great Jay Sigel captured the crown in 1979 at Hillside Golf Club.
Professional golf has been a struggle for Weaver, yet in anything I’ve ever read about him, there is not a trace of bitterness about his journey. The 33-year-old is on the Korn Ferry Tour, which is in the midst of playing a two-year-long “season,” since there was no Qualifying School for the developmental circuit due to, what else, the pandemic.
Weaver finished in a tie for seventh place in the LECOM Suncoast Classic right before the Korn Ferry was shut down and came back to finish in a tie for 31st in the same event last month, which was the first tournament in calendar year 2021 after a four-month hiatus. The long 2020-’21 season picks up again in earnest later this month.
Weaver has never won on the Korn Ferry Tour, but did survive a five-man playoff by making birdies on all three holes to win the PC Financial Open on the Mackenzie Tour – PGA Tour Canada in 2015. He has earned $255,220 on the Korn Ferry Tour.
Still, Weaver is where a lot of young professional golfers aspire to be with status on the Korn Ferry Tour, just a hot streak away from the Big Show, the PGA Tour.
One member of that 2009 U.S. Walker Cup team remains an amateur. That, of course, would be Nathan Smith, the 1994 PIAA champion as a sophomore at Brookville. Smith had one U.S. Mid-Amateur Championship victory to his credit when he arrived at Merion in 2009.
Smith has won three more since and played on two more U.S. Walker Cup sides. He remains one of the great purveyors of match play as his six wins in the Pennsylvania Golf Association’s J. Sigel Match Play Championship attest.
There isn’t a lot to find on the last two members of that 2009 U.S. Walker Cup team.
The professional career of Brendan Gielow, a Wake Forest product, dries up following a Mackenzie Tour start in 2014. Can’t find much on Adam Mitchell, like Harman a Georgia product, since he played a full season on the Web.com in 2016.
No matter where the golf journey has taken them, though, Gielow and Mitchell can point with pride to that weekend in September of 2009 when they helped their country win the Walker Cup on one of the world’s great golf courses. Nobody can take that away from any of those 2009 U.S. Walker Cuppers.
There was one player on the other side, on the GB&I team, who was ranked No. 23 on the Golf Digest list of the top 100 PGA Tour players for 2021 and that would be England’s Tommy Fleetwood.
The 30-year-old, as PGA Tour broadcasts never fail to remind you, has yet to win on the PGA Tour. But the guy can play. He was fourth behind Koepka (and Harman) in the 2017 U.S. Open at Erin Hills and the runnerup the following year as Koepka won at Shinnecock Hills to become the first repeat winner of the National Open since Curtis Strange did in 1988 and 1989. Fleetwood recorded the sixth 63 in U.S. Open history in the final round at Shinnecock Hills.
Fleetwood, No. 21 in the OWGR, finished in a tie for 44th place at 2-over in the World Golf Association Workday Championship at Concession over the weekend. In the process, he became the 199th player in PGA Tour history to surpass $10 million in career earnings, so he’s doing all right for himself.
The best female players from the United States and Great Britain & Ireland are scheduled to battle it out in the Curtis Cup Match in 2022 at Merion’s East Course.
The 2020 Curtis Cup Match was supposed to be played last year at Conwy Golf Club in Caernarvonshire, Wales, but was rescheduled for August of this year. Haven’t heard if that will affect the timing of next year’s Curtis Cup Match. Wouldn’t mind having a talented group of U.S. women to follow as they move on to bigger and better things after performing as amateurs at the East Course.
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