With 131 days until the Curtis Cup Match tees off at Merion Golf Club’s iconic East Course, it seemed like a good time to do my annual look at how some of those guys on the 2009 U.S. team that won the Walker Cup over Great Britain & Ireland at Merion are doing 13 years later. Plus, the wind chill is below zero in the Philadelphia area as I start writing this post, so yeah, thinking warm thoughts helps on January nights like this.
A check of the final leaderboard in The American Express – it will always be the Bob Hope Desert Classic in my book, even if it is only 72 holes, instead of the 90 it once was – last weekend revealed that Brian Harman, the former Georgia standout who helped the United States claim a 16.5-9.5 victory over Great Britain & Ireland in the 42nd Walker Cup Match in September of 2009 at Merion Golf Club’s East Course, finished in a tie for third place.
It was a reminder that it was time for my annual look at how some of the guys from that team are doing these days. I covered the Walker Cup at Merion in my previous life as a sportswriter for the Delaware County Daily Times, a labor of love for a guy who was a proud Merion looper for 12 years as a youngster and into young adulthood.
And wouldn’t you know it, as I scoured the Internet for updates on members of that U.S. team last week, there was Cameron Tringale, who starred collegiately at Georgia Tech, climbing the leaderboard at the Farmers Insurance Open, which concluded Saturday at Torrey Pines Golf Club in La Jolla, Calif. Like Harman a week earlier, Tringale finished in a tie for third place, a shot out of the playoff between eventual winner Luke List and Will Zalatoris.
Most of those 2009 U.S. Walker Cuppers are in their early to mid-30s now, no longer the hotshot young guns on the PGA Tour. A lot of them are married and have kids. None are superstars, even if Rickie Fowler seemed to be headed that way for the longest time.
But Harman, Tringale and Fowler are solid touring professionals. And if you follow guys who would give anything to be able to set a schedule year after year on the PGA Tour – a couple of the other 2009 U.S. Walker Cuppers are among that group – you realize how tough it can be to get there and how focused you have to be to stay there.
I knew that week at Merion that I was looking at guys I’d be watching on television playing on the PGA Tour for the next decade or two.
Harman turned 35 the day before teeing off in The American Express at La Quinta Country Club in the desert near Palm Springs. He went 67-64 on the weekend and finished with a 20-under 268 total, three shots behind the winner, Harris Swafford.
Harman is off to a great start in the wraparound 2021-2022 PGA Tour season, his tie for third in The American Express giving him $472,398 in earnings. His career earnings now stand at more than $20 million.
At 5-7 and 150 pounds, Harman hardly fits what people think the ideal PGA Tour guy should be. While Bryson DeChambeau was bashing balls all over the place last year, the little left-hander was making 24 cuts in 28 starts.
Harman had five top 10s, including a tie for third in The Players Championship, and finished with $3.2 million in earnings. Harman had some of his best showings on the biggest stages, finishing in a tie for 12th place in The Masters, tied for 19th in the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines and tied for 19th again in The Open Championship at Royal St. George’s.
Harman advanced to the FedEx Cup playoffs for the 10th straight year. He hasn’t won since capturing the Wells Fargo Championship in 2017, his second career PGA Tour victory, but his consistency has been nothing short of remarkable.
The 34-year-old Tringale is one of the names that comes up when the subject is most money won without a win on the PGA Tour. His third-place finish in the Farmers put his career earnings at just more than $16 million. But as Tringale proved again at Torrey Pines this weekend, he keeps knocking on the door and eventually he’ll kick that door down. Tringale can take a little solace in the fact that List’s first career PGA Tour win Saturday came in his 206th career start.
The strong showing in the Farmers continued what has been a solid start to the 2021-’22 season for Tringale. He got close to that elusive first victory with a tie for second place in the ZOZO Championship in Japan in late October and a tie for seventh a couple of weeks later in the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Houston Open. After this weekend, Tringale has already won $1,811,528 in the still young season.
Tringale made the FedEx Cup playoffs for the third year in a row in 2021 and for the ninth time overall.
Harman and Tringale are both on the verge of joining the top 50 in the Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR), which opens up all sorts of opportunities, including a starting time at that little gathering at Augusta National Golf Club in April.
Harman’s third-place finish in The American Express bumped him up to No. 56 in the OWGR. Tringale began the week at No. 58 and figures to move up a little with his third-place finish in the Farmers.
You have to go to the second page of the OWGR to find the 33-year-old Fowler’s name, albeit at the top of that page at No. 101. When I did this update at this time a year ago, Fowler was 65th in the OWGR.
Even though he was only 20 at the time, Fowler was the unquestioned leader of that winning U.S. side at Merion in 2009. Fowler had played in 41 straight major championships before missing the Masters and the U.S. Open in 2021. For just the second time in his professional career, Fowler was not a member of the U.S. team that was such an impressive winner in last year’s Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits. He missed the FedEx Cup playoffs for the first time.
A week after Thanksgiving, Fowler and his wife Allison Stokke, who competed in the pole vault at the U.S. Olympic Trials in 2012, announced the birth of their first child, Maya, a daughter. So, we’ll give him a little bit of a pass for last year.
Fowler showed some signs of his old self when he finished in a tie for third place in The CJ Cup at Summit, which was held at Shadow Creek Golf Course in Las Vegas in October.
But he’s starting slowly in calendar year 2022, missing the cut at The American Express and coming up just a shot off the cutline with a 2-under total in two rounds at Torrey Pines.
Like Harman, at 5-9, 150 pounds, Fowler is hardly a big guy, but he has won more than $40 million in his 12-year PGA Tour career. He has finished in the top 10 in 11 major championships, including top-five finishes in all four majors in 2014. Even in a disappointing 2021, Fowler’s lone top-10 was a tie for eighth place in the PGA Championship at Kiawah Island on the South Carolina coast.
He has always been at his best on the biggest stages. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’ll be the least surprised person if and when Fowler captures a major championship.
I walked away from that 2009 Walker Cup thinking Peter Uihlein, one of Fowler’s two Oklahoma State teammates on the U.S. team, was the most talented player I had seen that week, but he has never been the breakout star I thought he had the potential to be.
Not that the guy hasn’t had his moments. He won the 2010 U.S. Amateur at Chambers Bay and, taking the road less traveled to the PGA Tour by playing across the pond, was named the European Tour’s Sir Henry Cotton Rookie of the Year in 2013.
The 32-year-old Uihlein just snuck into the PGA Tour for the 2021-’22 season by finishing in 24th place in the Korn Ferry Tour Championship Finals at Victoria National Golf Club in Newburgh, Ind. With limited status on the PGA Tour in 2021, Uihlein did claim a victory in the Korn Ferry’s MGM Resorts Championship at Paiute in April.
Uihlein has won nearly $4 million on the PGA Tour, but he has struggled at the start of the 2021-’22 season with four straight missed cuts. He shot 1-under for two rounds that left him two shots off the cutline in the Farmers.
Uihlein still has his PGA Tour card for 2022 and he still has the talent and plenty of time to stay in golf’s big leagues. It’s one thing to get there. Staying there can be the challenge sometimes.
Another member of that 2009 U.S. Walker Cup team, former Alabama standout Bud Cauley, is in pro golf limbo these days.
The 31-year-old Cauley has never fully recovered from injuries he incurred in a car accident after he had missed the cut in The Memorial in 2018, even though he qualified for the FedEx Cup playoffs that year and again in 2019 and 2020.
Cauley hasn’t played in a PGA Tour event since the Safeway Open at the beginning of the 2020-’21 season. Checked out a little of his appearance on Golf.com’s Subpar podcast with Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz last fall.
It sounded like something that was never really fully healed from the car accident had come back and caused him so much pain he could no longer play. He’s had surgery and rehabilitation and will try to earn his way back to the PGA Tour by way of sponsor’s exemptions. It’s a tough road, but he is one of that small group of players who earned his way onto the PGA Tour at the beginning of his career without going through the old Qualifying School process.
On the podcast, Cauley, another little guy at 5-7, 160 pounds, correctly recalled winning a couple of points for the U.S. while partnering with Fowler, once in a foursome match and another in a four-ball match, at Merion.
Nobody has ever questioned the guy’s talent and the $9 million he’s won on the PGA Tour is a testament to that talent. Don’t think we’ve heard the last from Bud Cauley.
I devoted most of my annual 2009 U.S. Walker Cup update post three years ago to the toughness displayed in 2018 by Cauley, in recovering from the car accident he was in, and to Morgan Hoffmann, the third Oklahoma State Cowboy on that U.S. team at Merion.
Late in 2016, Hoffmann was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy. It didn’t stop him from winning more than $1.2 million during the 2016-’17 season. It wasn’t until late in 2017 that he revealed the diagnosis to the rest of the world.
It appears the 32-year-old Hoffmann’s days on the PGA Tour are over. He has devoted his life to finding a cure for muscular dystrophy through his Morgan Hoffmann Foundation.
Last summer, Hoffman received the PGA Tour Courage Award, which was presented to him at the Morgan Hoffmann Foundation Celebrity Pro-Am at Arcola Country Club in Paramus, N.J., near where Hoffman grew up. Several PGA Tour pros were able to come out in support of their colleague, including Tringale, one of his teammates in the 2009 U.S. Walker Cup team at Merion.
The PGA Tour release on Hoffman’s PGA Tour Courage Award said that Hoffmann has made it his goal to find a cure and become a role model for those affected by muscular dystrophy and similar neuromuscular diseases.
Obviously, it was a special group that U.S. captain George “Buddy” Marucci gathered for that 2009 Walker Cup at Merion’s East Course, where Marucci, who won a U.S. Senior Amateur crown in 2008 in between his two stints as U.S. Walker Cup captain, is a member.
I’ve always been a fan of Drew Weaver, the Virginia Tech standout who, just weeks after the mass shooting that left 32 dead at the Blacksburg campus in 2007, went across the pond and won The Amateur Championship at Royal Lytham & St. Annes, the first American to win it since the great Jay Sigel in 1979.
I can’t find the 34-year-old Weaver on any of the big pro tours in this first month of 2022. It wasn’t for lack of trying. Weaver teed it up 38 times on the Korn Ferry Tour schedule that stretched from early 2020 through the summer of 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic, but he only made 15 cuts.
There was a player on that U.S. Walker Cup team at Merion who never turned pro, Nathan Smith, an amateur from Pittsburgh who had won the first of his four U.S. Mid-Amateur titles in 2003. Smith and Uihlein returned for the U.S. Walker Cup side in a 14-12 loss to Great Britain & Ireland in 2011 at Royal Aberdeen in Scotland.
Smith made a third appearance for the U.S. in the 2013 Walker Cup Match at the National Golf Links of America on Long Island, a 17-9 victory for the Stars & Stripes.
The 43-year-old Smith remains a force on the Pennsylvania amateur scene. His proficiency in match play is evident in his six wins in the Pennsylvania Golf Association’s R. Jay Sigel Match Play Championship. As recently as last summer, Smith, the 1994 PIAA champion as a sophomore at Brookville, reached the semifinals of the Sigel Match Play at Sewickley Heights Golf Club before falling to the eventual champion, Palmer Jackson, a junior at Notre Dame and winner of the PIAA Class AAA crown in 2018 as a senior at Franklin Regional.
It is partially all those memories from the 2009 Walker Cup Match at Merion that has me so looking forward to the Curtis Cup Match in June. And yeah, I’ll probably keep tabs on some of the members of captain Sarah Ingram’s U.S. team in the years to come. I know I’ll be watching some future stars on the historic East Course layout in Ardmore section of Haverford Township.
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