Just when I was starting to wonder if anyone from the United States team that claimed a 16.5-9.5 victory over Great Britain & Ireland in the 42nd Walker Cup Match at Merion Golf Club’s iconic East Course in 2009 would ever win a major championship, there was Brian Harman last summer running away with a six-shot victory in The 151st Open Championship at Royal Liverpool Golf Club.
I’ve tried to take the occasion of the dark days of January, when there’s not a lot of golf going on -- at least in the northern hemisphere -- to check in and see how the guys who teed it up for captain George “Buddy” Marcucci on his home course at Merion have fared over the years.
They’re still not old in their early to mid-30s, but this September will mark 15 years since the U.S. and GB&I did battle at Merion in about as pure a golf event as you’ll ever see.
I got to cover that Walker Cup in my past life as a sportswriter with the Delaware County Daily Times over an East Course layout that I had grown quite familiar with as a looper for 12 years in my youth. I grew up just blocks away from the eighth tee at the East and when you walk the Hugh Wilson design (with, I’m convinced, a lot of finishing touches from the East Course’s first greenkeeper, one William Flynn) a thousand times or so, the history of the game flows up from the ground and becomes a part of your bones.
I knew I would follow all those U.S. Walker Cuppers, although the thought of a golf blog hadn’t really been on my mind until T Mac Tees Off was born a couple of years later as a supplement to the golf stuff that I was able to jam into the pages of the Daily Times.
With the newspaper business dying all around me – you know, sort of like that part in “Titanic” when the ship starts listing and bodies go sliding into the ocean – I was laid off early in 2016, but decided maybe I’d try to keep the blog going.
The guys who wore the Stars & Stripes that weekend nearly 15 years ago have certainly had their moments. Rickie Fowler, the unquestioned leader of the U.S. team even though he was only 20-years old, had that dramatic win in The Players Championship in 2015 and finished in the top five in all four major championships in 2014.
Tommy Fleetwood from that GB&I team has turned into a world-class player, but has never won a major and somehow can’t seem to get a win on U.S. soil. He was at it again a couple of weeks ago, taking advantage of a Rory McIlroy mistake to claim a big win in the inaugural Dubai Invitational at Dubai Creek.
But there were no majors until the little left-hander and proud product of the powerful Georgia golf program captured one of professional golf’s most coveted trophies, the claret jug that goes to the Champion Golf of the Year, in dominant fashion.
Harman, who turned 37 last week, is not a big guy, listed at 5-7 and 150 pounds. But in the wake of his victory in The Open Championship, there were plenty of testaments, especially from his teammates and his coach at Georgia, Chris Haack, about Harman’s sheer competitiveness.
Even though it was only Harman’s third PGA Tour victory and his first since the 2017 Wells Fargo Championship, he has been a model of consistency since joining the PGA Tour full-time in 2012.
Last year was typical of the kind of year Harman churns out year after year. In 28 starts, including the victory at Royal Liverpool, Harman was also a runnerup three times and had seven top-10 finishes while earning more than $9 million.
After finishing in a tie for 18th place in the Sony Open a couple of weeks ago, Harman’s career earnings on the PGA Tour are just short of $34 million.
If you had been paying attention, you could have seen Harman’s major moment coming. He had finished in a tie for sixth place in The Open Championship at the Old Course at St. Andrews in 2022.
In the weeks leading up to The Open Championship at Royal Liverpool, Harman finished in a tie for second place in the Travelers Championship at TPC River Highlands in Cromwell, Conn. and in a tie for ninth in the Rocket Mortgage Classic at Detroit Golf Club before hopping over the pond and finishing in a tie for 12th in the Genesis Scottish Open at the Renaissance Club.
So maybe a lot of golf fans weren’t sure what to think when Harman jumped the field at Royal Liverpool by adding a 65 in the second round to his opening-round 67 to take command of the championship. But if they were waiting for Harman to falter, it didn’t happen as he showed the steely nerves of the veteran he is, adding a 69 in the third round before closing out his first major championship with a 2-under 70.
In becoming just the second Georgia native to win The Open Championship after that Bobby Jones fella, Harman claimed a major championship in typical Brian Harman fashion – drama free. Harman has risen to No. 9 in the Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR).
Harman got his 2024 season off to a solid start in Hawaii with a tie for fifth place in The Sentry Tournament of Champions followed by his tie for 18th at the Sony Open. Harman took a trip to the Middle East last week and finished in a tie for 70th place in the Dubai Desert Classic.
But wherever he goes, Harman will forever be a major champion.
Always thought it would be Fowler who would be the first alumni of that 2009 Walker Cup weekend at Merion to emerge as a major champion. He has finished in the top 10 at a major 13 times, including those four top-fives in 2014.
Fowler has been the most accomplished player from that group, although his career had hit the wall a little in the last couple of years, which coincided with his marriage to Allison Stokke and the birth of their first child in November of 2021. He also went through some pretty significant swing changes during that period.
But Fowler, who turned 35 last year, had not forgotten how to play golf at the highest levels and he bounced back in a big way last year. His victory in the Rocket Mortgage Classic was his first PGA Tour win since the 2019 Waste Management Phoenix Open and sixth of his career.
A couple of weeks before the Rocket Mortgage, Fowler became the first player in U.S. Open history to card a 62, a feat matched a couple of groups behind him behind him by fellow native Californian, Xander Schauffele, at Los Angeles Country Club. Fowler ended up finishing in a tie for fifth place at L.A. Country Club.
Fowler, who is closing in on $49 million in career earnings on the PGA Tour, will be back in the field for the Masters this spring after missing the season’s first major the last three years. The Rocket Mortgage was one of Fowler’s eight top-10 finishes in the wraparound 2022-2023 season as he pocketed $7.8 million-plus in earnings.
Fowler missed the cut in The American Express last weekend in the desert at Palm Springs, but his strong summer of 2023 vaulted Fowler from outside the top 100 in the OWGR to 27th. You’ll see him in all of the majors this year and I wouldn’t be shocked at all to see him hoisting the winner’s trophy in a major before his career is done.
In putting together a look back at the 2009 U.S. Walker Cuppers around this time last year, I discovered that two of the guys, Peter Uihlein and Cameron Tringale, were among the players who bolted the PGA Tour for LIV Golf, the Saudi-financed challenger to the world golf order.
I always though Uihlein, a teammate of Fowler’s at Oklahoma State and the 2010 U.S. Amateur winner at Chambers Bay, was the most talented player on that U.S. team.
After starting his professional career on the European Tour, Uihlein found his way to the PGA Tour, where he was a middle-of-the-road player, hovering around the 125-mark on the earnings list.
The 34-year-old Uihlein had a good year in LIV Golf, which emphasizes its team concept. Uihlein had three top-five finishes individually and finished in third place in the season-long individual championship.
Uihlein has made more than $12 million in a year-and-a-half with LIV Golf, in addition to whatever bonus he received just to join LIV in the first place.
The 36-year-old Tringale was a college standout at Georgia Tech and had carved out a pretty nice career for himself on the PGA Tour. He just couldn’t get a win and had become that guy who had won the most money without a PGA Tour victory.
Tringale, a member of Phil Mickelson’s Hy Flyers GC team, has won almost $6 million in a little over a year, which ranked him 26th on one list I found of leading LIV money winners. Again, Tringale probably got some kind of bonus up front to join LIV Golf.
The PGA Tour banned any LIV players from participating in any PGA Tour events, although there is some serious negotiations going on among the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour (formerly known as the European Tour) and LIV Golf to create some kind of world golf tour, which might allow guys like Uihlein and Tringale to rejoin the PGA Tour at some point.
While some of the big names who joined LIV Golf might be welcomed back to PGA Tour events, it might not be as easy for rank-and-file guys like Uihlein and Tringale to earn the right to tee it up at something like this weekend’s Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines in San Diego.
Don’t forget, none of the four professional major championships, The Masters, the PGA Championship, the U.S. Open and The Open Championship, is run by the PGA Tour and all have their own qualification standards.
I was starting to wonder if I’d ever see Bud Cauley or Morgan Hoffmann playing in a PGA Tour event again as both saw promising careers compromised by injury in Cauley’s case as he was involved in a car accident and illness in Hoffmann’s case as he was diagnosed with facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy.
But there they were teeing it up in the first two stops on the Korn Ferry Tour in the Bahamas the last couple weeks.
The 33-year-old Cauley starred collegiately at Alabama and was off to a great start to his professional career when his life hit a major speed bump when he suffered multiple injuries in a serious car accident after he missed the cut in The Memorial in Dublin, Ohio in 2018.
Cauley made a couple of attempts at comebacks, even playing through the pain well enough to make the FedEx Playoffs at the end of the 2019-’20 season. But after finishing in a tie for 14th place in the Fortinet Championship in the fall of 2020, he realized that his body still wasn’t in good enough shape for the rigors of the PGA Tour.
Cauley had multiple procedures in 2021 and more significant surgery on his ribs and his chest wall in 2022. A Google search revealed a nice story on the PGA Tour website by PGA Tour insider Adam Stanley earlier this month that chronicles the long road back for Cauley, the father of a newborn son.
Cauley finished in a tie for 21st place at 7-under-par, going 4-under in the final round, in The Bahamas Great Exuma Classic at Sandal’s Emerald Bay’s Emerald Reef Course last week and finished in a tie for 35th at 1-over in some tough conditions in The Bahamas Great Abaco Classic, which wrapped up Wednesday at The Abaco Club on Winding Bay.
Cauley is using these tuneups on the Korn Ferry Tour to prepare him for the PGA Tour. He has 27 PGA Tour starts left on a Major Medical Exemption. It’s hard not to root for a guy who has gone through as much as Cauley has since that fateful car accident in 2018.
The 34-year-old Hoffmann was the third Oklahoma State Cowboy on that U.S. Walker Cup team in 2009 along with Fowler and Uihlein and, like Cauley, had a strong start to his professional career.
It was at the end of 2016 when Hoffmann, trying to figure out why his pectoral muscle seemed to be atrophying, got the devastating muscular dystrophy diagnosis. He kept the diagnosis under wraps while continuing to play at a high level, including a runnerup finish in the 2017 Honda Classic.
He was the subject of a fascinating story authored by Dan Rappaport in Golf Digest a couple of years ago when Rappaport caught up with Hoffman in a remote section of Costa Rica, where Hoffmann was giving just about any approach, be it alternative medicine, holistic or whatever, that was out there to try to fight off the effects of the disease that had changed his life.
Another Golf Digest writer, Christopher Powers, did an update on Hoffmann back home in New Jersey in October of last year. Hoffmann has challenged his body, building on a lot of the things he learned during his Costa Rican retreat, and seems to be getting some results.
Hoffmann failed to make the cut in The Bahamas Great Exuma Classic and in The Bahamas Great Abaco Classic this week, but just teeing it up in competition again is something of a triumph in its own right.
Hoffmann does not have a lot of starts left in the Major Medical Exemption Category. He didn’t ask for it, but his story might be the most interesting of all of the 10 players who teed it up on the U.S. side at Merion almost 15 years ago.
Hoffmann received the PGA Tour Courage Award in the summer of 2021 and has continued to display an indomitable spirit that can only serve as an inspiration for sufferers of muscular dystrophy.
As I mentioned in last year’s update on the 2009 U.S. Walker Cuppers, the Walker Cup experience will come full circle for western Pennsylvania’s Nathan Smith, the one member of that team who has remained an amateur, when he captains the U.S. side next summer in the 50th edition of the series at the iconic Cypress Point Club on northern California’s Monterey Peninsula.
Smith, the 1994 PIAA champion as a sophomore at Brookville, added three more U.S. Mid-Amateur titles to the one he won in 2003 in the years following the Walker Cup at Merion. Smith also played on two more U.S. Walker Cup teams.
Smith has won the Pennsylvania Golf Association’s R. Jay Sigel Match Play Championship six times. The guy just knows what it takes to succeed in golf’s most inscrutable format.
A Google search yielded a pretty interesting Q&A with Smith conducted by Cameron Jourdan of Golfweek in November.
Smith’s appointment as U.S. captain for the 2025 Walker Cup Match earned him a trip to the Old Course at St. Andrews last summer to observe his predecessor, Mike McCoy, as the U.S., led by Gordon Sargent and that Nick Dunlap kid – all he did was become the first amateur since Phil Mickelson did it in 1991 to win a PGA Tour event last weekend in The American Express – rallied for a 14.5-11.5 victory over talented bunch from GB&I.
To say that Smith sounds psyched for the Walker Cup Match at Cypress Point would be an immense understatement.
Drew Weaver’s emotional victory in The Amateur Championship at Royal Lytham & St. Annes in 2007 got him on the radar for a spot on the U.S. Walker Cup team two years later.
A standout at Virginia Tech, Weaver’s Amateur Championship win, the first by an American since Jay Sigel did it in 1979, came a few months after the campus in Blacksburg was stunned by one of the worst mass killings in U.S. history, a man gunning down 32 people.
Weaver was there that day and has always carried the emotional baggage of Virginia Tech’s darkest day. Weaver played a lot on the Korn Ferry Tour, but never quite became a PGA Tour regular. Weaver hasn’t shown up on any of the major tours for a couple of years.
The final two members of the 2009 U.S. Walker Cup team, Adam Mitchell, a teammate of Harman’s at Georgia, and Wake Forest product Brendan Gielow, appear to have gone on with their lives after brief forays on professional tours.
But I’m sure they and the rest of that special U.S. Walker Cup team celebrated when one of their own, Brian Harman, put the hammer down on his way to a major championship last summer at Royal Liverpool.
No comments:
Post a Comment