By Christopher Powers
After witnessing what happened on Sunday at Kiawah Island, we were all left wondering the same thing – how? How did Phil Mickelson pull off winning a major at 50? How did this notorious high-wire act of a golfer keep it together on such a hard golf course for four straight days? How was he so focused? How did he keep calm and hit BOMBS? How?!

As Mickelson has told us, there are a myriad reasons. A tireless work ethic, the love of competition, a major diet change, meditation, other brain exercises, flexibility, coffee concoctions, etc., etc. Despite all of that stuff, though, even Lefty himself admitted he had a tough time continuing to believe he could get it done, especially against the ever-growing group of talented young players.

Even after winning Sunday, becoming the oldest major champion in the process, Mickelson still had a hard time believing what he had just done. On Wednesday at Colonial, where the now six-time major champion is back in action, he was asked about his never-ending self belief, even after weeks when he’d violently miss the cut, which were becoming more and more prevalent as he aged.

“It’s obviously been a struggle,” said Mickelson. “A big thing for me in getting things turned around has been the opportunity to play with a lot of good, young players, and so just prior to Innisbrook I had a chance to play with Rory McIlroy and Rickie Fowler at The Grove in Florida and I had a chance to play a lot of golf in the last year and a half with Charley Hoffman and Xander Schauffele in San Diego and that’s made a big difference for me.”

Mickelson went on to expand specifically on Schauffele, whom he played a ton of golf with during the lockdown. Apparently, X gave it to him, regularly, and it may have inadvertently led to Mickelson’s history-making win.

“I remember a year ago almost to the day where I was playing a few rounds at the Farms with Xander,” Mickelson said. “And we played a match and he went out and shot 64 and I’m like, wow, all right, you gave me a pretty good beating and I wanted to do this again so a few days later we went and played again and he shot 63. I’m like, wow, okay. Let me try one more time.

“So we go out next time and he shoots 62, and on a 220-yard par 3, I had to press and hit one four feet and he makes a hole-in-one. I went back and talked to Amy and I’m like, I don’t know how I’m going to beat this guy. He’s probably playing the best of any player in the world right now. Then he came to Colonial the following week and almost won here. Seeing that, and the way he played with this calm, and didn’t try to overpower every hole but overpowered the holes he should and keep the ball in play and keep the ball on the ground and hit his iron shots pin-high and being solid from inside 15 feet. I saw what it looked like to play at the highest level and so forth.”

That is … um … some seriously high praise from one San Diegan to another. Little did Schauffele know that, at the time, he was inspiring a legend to eventually break a record that stood for 53 years.

“Just prior to Innisbrook, I started shooting those same scores at the same course,” added Mickelson. “And I felt like I should be able to compete and then I went to Innisbrook and I missed the cut and I didn’t shoot the scores and I didn’t execute on Tour the way I had been at home. So I still had a barrier to break through and that’s why I was so frustrated is that I wasn’t bringing my best out when I knew I could, and I had a glimpse there obviously at Charlotte in one round but wasn’t able to sustain it.

“Then to hold it together and play some really good golf over 72 holes last week meant a lot because I had seen the progress but I had not seen the results, and so that’s why I say, I had a belief but until you actually do it, it’s tough to really fully believe it.”

Ipso, facto, Xander is semi-responsible for Mickelson’s legendary PGA Championship win. For that, Xander, the golf world is forever in your debt. As for the golf gods, well, that remains to be seen.

The post Xander Schauffele beating Phil Mickelson’s brains in during the lockdown may have inadvertently led to history appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

On Friday morning, Sky Sports cameras captured an even better one from a club pro on the Kiawah Island range, and it didn’t involve a cigarette or a Diet Coke. Here’s Brad Marek channeling his inner Miguel Ángel Jiménez prior to his 2:38 p.m. ET tee time:

BIG RANDY SIGHTING! @NoLayingUp @BigRandyNLU pic.twitter.com/a8rH51q2jS

— Jamie Weir (@jamiecweir) May 21, 2021

What in tarnation is that? The air traffic controller? Never seen anything like it, not even in a yoga class. Guess this is the type of stuff you do when you spend more time folding shirts in the pro shop then actually playing golf. Gotta get as loosey-goosey as possible, even if it means looking like a herb on live TV. MAJ has some serious competition in the absurd stretching routine department:

Marek, a former mini-tour pro turned teaching pro who is now based out of California, opened with a one-over 73 on Thursday and has come out firing on Friday with back-to-back birdies on 10 and 11 to reach one-under for the week. As of this writing he’s just four off the lead, and you can be damn sure if by some miracle he seriously contends, everyone will be doing the Air Traffic Controller stretch at their home range next week.

The post This club pro’s WILD stretching routine puts Miguel Ángel Jiménez’s stretching routine to shame appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Joel Beall
KIAWAH ISLAND, S.C — A 5-5 finish turned Branden Grace’s one-stroke lead into a two-shot deficit on Friday afternoon at the PGA Championship. Though the Ocean Course’s final four-hole stretch has left many a pro wanting to walk into the Atlantic, Grace remained level-headed.

“You kind of knew that final stretch was going to play tough. I want to say, even with that bad couple of holes, I still got the most out of my round,” Grace said after the round, posting a one-under 71 to sit at three-under 141 through 36 holes, two back of Phil Mickelson. “I hit some shots where I shouldn’t have and I made some up and downs. I’ll take it. I’m exactly where anybody would want to be going into the weekend.”

It’s a patience and perspective that’s endearing. But it’s a patience and perspective Grace learned the hard way at this championship last August.

Two days before Monday’s practice round at TPC Harding Park, Grace was in a tie for second at the PGA Tour’s Barracuda Championship. However, the South African was forced to drop out of the tournament prior to the third round due to a positive COVID-19 test, which also resulted in Grace having to withdraw from the PGA in San Francisco.

Due to CDC guidelines, Grace had to go into quarantine. And he did so in interesting fashion.

“I was actually sitting in my RV,” Grace said of what he did during the 2020 PGA Championship. “I had a guy that was driving me from San Francisco—I was actually onsite. Obviously, my RV was down there, and the RV driver actually drove me down to the Wyndham Championship [in North Carolina]. I think I’ve seen more of America than most Americans, let me put it that way, and it took me four days to get there. So it was pretty long.”

Grace later expanded on the journey, calling it “tough.” Not so much because of the virus, but because he couldn’t get a TV signal.

“I couldn’t really watch the golf, and I didn’t actually want to watch the golf, to be quite honest. It was not emotional, but it was tough to know that I wasn’t playing,” Grace said. “I think the last time I was [at Harding Park] was in the [WGC] match play [in 2015], and I actually really played well. This place, again, you have to really shape your shots and things, so I was really looking forward to it.”

Luckily, the trip wasn’t a total bummer for Grace. He said he particularly enjoyed seeing the different terrains as he ventured through the country’s heartland.

“It sounds simple, but it is. When you come out of California, everything is nice and just California, and then you go to the desert, and then you come and get all the farm lands after that, and then you get into the mountains,” Grace said. “So it was pretty cool. It felt like forever, but it was a nice trip.”

The post One of the Kiawah leaders spent last year’s PGA quarantined in an RV appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Alan Shipnuck
KIAWAH ISLAND, S.C. — There was no evidence that anything is amiss in Rickie Fowler’s world when he rolled up to the first tee of the Ocean Course on Thursday morning. Two teenage girls whispered conspiratorially, stimulated by his presence. Fowler’s perfect drive received the loudest ovation even though he was playing with former Masters champ Adam Scott and Tyrrell Hatton, the World No, 9. Into a stiff wind Fowler hit a gorgeous, sawed-off short-iron perfectly pin high, the only player in the group to hold the green. By all appearances, it could have been 2015, when Fowler won three times around the world, including the Scottish Open and the Players. It could have been 2018, when he contended until the bitter end at Augusta. Or maybe 2019, when Fowler took the Phoenix Open and then broke down in tears because he had unleashed so much want and will.

Alas, the Fowler of today has the same flashy wardrobe and familiar whipsaw action but he is not the player he used to be. He arrived at this PGA Championship having fallen to 128th in the World Ranking and got into the field thanks only to the largesse of the PGA of America, which extended him a special exemption. This was a nod to Fowler’s continued prominence in the marketplace and enduring good manners, which has made him one of the game’s most popular ambassadors. There was so much chatter about Fowler’s free pass that touring pro James Nitties tweeted sardonically during the first round, ”Is Fowler on a special invite??? They haven’t mentioned it all.” Fowler stayed in character, acting like a grateful guest as he shot a 71 that left him only four strokes off the lead. Asked afterward if he felt pressure to justify the exemption, Fowler said, ”Not necessarily. A little extra motivation, maybe.”

Fowler’s fire has long been hotly debated. In 2017, his then swing coach Butch Harmon famously questioned his pupil’s focus, telling Sky Sports, “I said, ‘You gotta decide are you going to be a Kardashian or are you going to be a golf pro?’ You’re the king of social media, you’re all over these Snapchats and all these things. You need to reach down and grab your ears and get your head out of your you know what and get back to work.”

In the fall of 2019 Fowler fired Harmon and began working with John Tillery. He has been out of sorts ever since. Since January 2020, Fowler hasn’t had a single top-10 finish and he’s currently 184th on the PGA Tour in strokes gained/approach. He didn’t earn a spot in the Masters for the first time in his pro career. This led to a snarky Nick Faldo tweet: “Good news is if he misses the Masters he can shoot another six commercials that week!” Like all good zingers it contained an element of truth: Fowler’s domination of the TV airwaves is hardly commensurate with a very-good-but-not-great career.

As his slump deepened there were rumblings out of South Florida that Fowler had retreated from the cut-throat money games against tour pros at Medalist in favor of hanging out with the pigeons at Michael Jordan’s more user-friendly club, the Grove. Fowler confirmed on Thursday that he’s spending more time at the Grove but cited prosaic reasons: “The practice facility is bigger and less people over there.”

Yet Fowler clearly enjoys money games against Jordan, saying that it offers a different kind of challenge having to give 10 strokes to a dude who routinely shoots in the 70s on a course literally built for his game; Fowler says he recently was seven-under through 17 holes and still got taken to the cleaners by Jordan. The competitive juice is strong: “He’s not quiet,” Fowler said in a loosey-goosey press conference following the first round. The comfort had carried over from his time between the ropes.

“I’m starting to feel pretty darn good,” he said. “The last few months, it’s been a lot more just go play golf and not play golf swing. Put a lot of time in prior to the last few months of working on my swing and doing the stuff we kind of needed to work on and accomplish. Now it’s just go play golf.

“Unfortunately,” he added, ”through that time, the putter has gone pretty cold, if not the coldest it’s ever been for me, and that’s been a club I’ve been able to rely on through my career from junior golf on up.”

During the first round on the Ocean Course he missed a shortie for par on the sixth hole but otherwise putted beautifully. Fowler’s long game was solid, too, including a sexy driver-off-the-deck on the par-5 16th to salvage a par after a misadventure in a fairway bunker. He’s always been more of a feel player than a driving-range automaton and shaping shots in the wind and using the swales around the greens has helped Fowler access his creative side.

Patrick Smith

The good vibes Fowler radiated on Thursday owe much to an enlarged perspective. He mentioned in his press conference his friend Jarrod Lyle, the tour player who died of leukemia in 2018, as well as a fan in Phoenix who used to follow Fowler every year but died at a tragically young age. Compared to these things a dip in form on the golf course means nothing and Fowler knows it. “In a way, it’s just putting things into perspective and understanding that I get to do this for a living,” Fowler said. “And that’s awesome. I’ve had a great run so far out here. I definitely want more.”

At 32, he has plenty of time. Whether Fowler’s reconstituted swing can hold up for three more days remains to be seen. There is zero doubt he will retain a good attitude. “At the end of the day, we get to play an amazing game for a living,” Fowler said. “We have it pretty darn good out here, and we have fun.” So what’s his game plan for the rest of this PGA?

“Go play golf.”

The post Rickie Fowler wants to compete in more than just Michael Jordan money games appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

Only once in the last decade has a course yielded a higher scoring average than the Ocean Course’s 74.57 when it last held the PGA Championship (only outdone by the borderline setup for the 2018 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills)​.​ For this year’s PGA Championship the Ocean Course added seven new tee boxes and has the flexibility to stretch to nearly 7,900 yards, which with the coastal winds might as well be equivalent to the distance to the sun. It may not ever play that distance, but regardless, Kerry Haigh, the PGA’s director of championships and wizard of course setups, believes the Ocean Course remains “second to none in terms of challenges.”

We used average player data to showcase the myriad ways the Ocean Course is a different challenge for tour players than it is average golfers.

This is, of course, understatement, like saying the Taj Mahal is second to none in terms of Mahals. Haigh is well regarded for finding the most fair of tests for his course setups, but put what he says about the Ocean Course (“the golf course itself is probably one of the most difficult golf courses in the country, depending on if the wind blows”) through Google Translate, and it actually sounds like what a traumatic brain injury feels like. In practical, real-world statistical, deep-dive analytics, the picture of the Ocean Course’s difficulty is much more stark, its relentlessness akin to the evil forces in Tenet. For example, the number of double bogeys/others recorded at the Ocean Course the last time the PGA Championship was played there (339) is nearly three times the average of tour events and major championships on an annual basis. Only three times have more big numbers been posted at an event since—all three being majors. The average score in the second round in 2012 was 78, the highest since the PGA Championship went to stroke play during the Eisenhower administration. There were 52 rounds of 80 or higher, including two in the 90s. Of the final 15 holes, 14 averaged over par for the week. And, again, they’ve made the Ocean Course longer and harder this time. Several holes could play 30, 40 or more than 50 yards further back, including the par-4 finishing hole which could set the markers at 505 yards compared to the 439-yard tee the last time around.

All of this, for those with a sense of history, is not news, of course. The Ocean Course has been wicked hard since it debuted 30 years ago for the 1991 Ryder Cup, whose commemorative video should be filed under Horror in your Netflix queue. Grizzled Ray Floyd, notorious for eating tough courses for breakfast, said at the time, “It’s so hard it’s unbelievable…If you had to play this golf course with a scorecard, I don’t see how you could finish.” That year in the Sunday singles matches, not one player on either side finished under par.

And yet, average golfers, like the Flagellants of the 13th century, continue to flock to it, as Brian Gerard, director of golf at Kiawah Island Resort, told Derek Duncan.

“People didn’t care what their scorecard read—they were there to play one of the most challenging, difficult golf courses in the country. …They would come in and say it was a hard golf course, but they didn’t complain about it.”

Using data from Arccos we can determine the discrepancy between how average players and tour players play a hole like Kiawah Island’s par-5 16th, beginning with their tee shots.

Still, none of those average golfers were stepping to the tee boxes that will be used for the PGA Championship. Indeed, many are not even marked on the yardage book available in the pro shop. Heck, even for the pros at the last PGA the full-length 18th tee that will be in play this year was blocked by a grandstand.

But the Ocean Course’s difficulty is probably best understood not by what the pros have done or what they might face this time around. No, a more practical reference might be what an average golfer might do at the Ocean Course in its full-throated PGA Championship setup. Since those back tees weren’t really open for play, we’re going to do some projections on what us Joes might do from the way-way-backs, courtesy of the crack research team at Arccos, whose GPS sensors track all sorts of average golfer stats. They’ve even dug up some impressively depressing numbers on what Arccos users have done on the Ocean Course. In short, welcome to Thunderdome.

The challenge on long holes like the 16th at Kiawah also extend to where players are laying up to. Average players, according to Arccos data, still leave themselves with more than 200 yards into the green, whereas tour players have a mere wedge.

The challenge on long holes like the 16th at Kiawah also extend to where players are laying up to. Average players, according to Arccos data, still leave themselves with more than 200 yards into the green, whereas tour players have a mere wedge.

According to Arccos data, the average score of its users playing the Ocean Course is 85, with a healthy supply of those being single-digit players. While the average handicap of Arccos users playing the Ocean Course is 11, their strokes gained numbers show they’re losing 10 shots to a scratch on just the tee shot and approach shots alone.

Arccos Caddie, which uses artificial intelligence to estimate the best possible strategy for the lowest possible score on every hole, predicts some very bad things for the average golfer should he or she sneak to the championship tees. As an example, a run-of-the-mill 13 handicapper’s best-case scenario is shooting 94. But that’s playing extraordinarily consistent golf, most especially hitting it relatively long and straight from both the tee and to the green. In other words, a wholly unlikely scenario on a golf course with a slope rating that registers at the USGA’s limit of 155. With massive length, doglegs and danger lurking on every hole and wind that sucks not only the life out of the average golfer’s mishits but his soul as well, every miss that seems compounded for the pros is doubly bad for the average Joes.

For example, on the par-4 4th hole, elite players might have to throttle back on their tee shots to avoid running into the marsh at 320 yards from the back tee. Paying customers, meanwhile, would need three good shots to reach the green, but the odds are not with them. On the tee shot, they’ve got barely a 50-50 chance of hitting the fairway, while the second shot is also missing the fairway nearly a third of the time and the third shot (a wedge from about a hundred yards) only hits the green a third of the time. Average golfers, per Arccos data, are failing to get up and down more than 75 percent of the time, and from one of those greenside bunkers on No. 6, the odds are barely one in 10 that an average golfer will get in the hole in two shots.

What makes a trip to the Championship tees even more intimidating is that average golfers almost never play courses of that length. Nearly 90 percent of the rounds recorded by Arccos users were from tees measuring 6,800 yards or less, more than a thousand yards shorter than the Ocean Course’s full measurement. Furthermore, of course, while the elite player is tested sternly by the Ocean Course’s mammoth length, he is still attacking the green from a much shorter distance with much more skill. In raw numbers from Arccos, an average golfer might play the benign opening hole with a driver and a 3-wood, while the elite player is often at most hitting his tee ball 80-plus yards farther and approaching the green with a short iron or wedge. The average proximity to the hole for the pro might be 20 feet while hitting the green 80-plus percent of the time. The average Joe ends up five times that distance from the hole with his approach shot, and he only hits the green one in 15 tries. Nothing like starting the day wishing you had contracted raging botulism.

A perfect snapshot of the difficulty for the average golfer playing the back tees at Kiawah is its diabolical finish. For elite players, it starts with a reprieve at the par-5 16th, which played as the easiest hole at the 2012 PGA and then wraps up with the terror-laden par-3 17th and the brutish 18th, which might require a final full swing of more than 200 yards.

Naturally, the longer a club a player has into a green, the smaller the chance they have of hitting within close proximity of the hole.

Naturally, the longer a club a player has into a green, the smaller the chance they have of hitting within close proximity of the hole.

For average golfers, however, turning for home at the Ocean Course offers nothing but the lash, especially all the way back. Where average pros most likely are playing those last three holes at an average of half-a-stroke over par combined, average Joes at best typically limp home having dropped nearly four shots to par.

At 608 yards, the 16th hole basically plays as a par-6. It likely would require a drive and back-to-back, well-struck 3-woods, a phrase the average golfer is about as familiar with as the average 8-year-old is with swallows’ nest soup.

The 17th hole might require a driver to reach the putting surface, but Arccos data says that club in the average golfer’s hands is going to produce a mis-hit short or right more than 60 percent of the time, and short and right at 17 is only Aeschylus and Euripides: Tragedy and Sorrow. It also affords the Average Joe the opportunity to do the same thing all over again. It only gets a little better from the drop area, which is one tee box closer and still a full 3-wood to the green. That club is going to be short and right for Mr. Average 58 percent of the time.

If the average golfer hasn’t run out of balls playing the 17th hole, the tee shot on 18 might make him wish he had. From the back tee, it’s likely a 210-yard carry just to reach the fairway, which the average golfer will miss 60 percent of the time. Even with a good shot, it’s still a three-shot hole and Arccos Caddie projects a score of 6 or higher is four times more likely than a score of 5 or lower.

As a final insult, don’t think it gets any easier for average golfers once they reach the vicinity of the greens at the Ocean Course. Arccos data says the average 11-handicapper loses almost five strokes compared to a scratch in terms of strokes gained around the greens and putting. Bernhard Langer’s final putt at the 1991 Ryder Cup infamously just sliding by the edge of the hole seems only as unfair as it is a fitting Ocean Course denouement.

And yet for all its ferocity, the Ocean Course’s allure remains, a golfing Siren song if there ever was. Dye knew it not just because of what the Ocean Course turned out to be, but because of who golfers are deep in their joyously masochistic souls.

“I think it’s great that they say it’s the hardest golf course in the world, but we’re still getting all the play we can handle, repeat play is up, too,” he said on the eve of the 2012 PGA Championship. “Listen, if Pine Valley were open to the public, they would line up all the way to Los Angeles to play it. That’s just what golfers do.”

Looking at these numbers from Arccos, though, the thought occurs: Move up a box.

The post PROS V JOES: How hard is Kiawah for the average golfer? This data says very hard appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Collin Morikawa
Collin Morikawa remembers virtually every detail about the week that changed his life. It wasn’t all that long ago he won the first men’s major championship of the post-COVID world, and he’s still nine months away from his 25th birthday, so this recollection is not quite a miracle of memory science.

There is, however, one tidbit that he cannot answer for.

“On that 16th hole,” Morikawa says of the driveable par-4 16th at TPC Harding Park, where his eagle proved the decisive blow in last year’s PGA Championship, “I don’t remember a single person standing out there. Normally, at tournaments, I know where my coach, agent and girlfriend are. I’ve never been that focused in my life. Ever. I’m still trying to tap into that mental state, that focus that I had those 18 holes. You could’ve thrown anything at me and I would not have known.”

It wasn’t the first (or second) time Morikawa had won on the PGA Tour. But like his mental state that day, this victory was different. While every week can feel like life-or-death inside the golf bubble, the general population only has eyes for a handful of golf tournaments. Win one of those, and all of a sudden you’re no longer just a big deal in the golf world—you’re famous.

And while he’s still not ready to concede it, Collin Morikawa became famous that day in San Francisco. Just 14 months after he graduated from Cal-Berkeley with a BS from the Haas Business School, Morikawa joined Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy as the only players to win PGA Championships before turning 24. In just his second start in a major championship, he became a major champion.

LISTEN: Collin Morikawa in his own words

Ahead of his title defence this week at Kiawah’s Ocean Course, we sat down with the World No. 6, recorded a Local Knowledge podcast episode and had him explain in his own words the human side of his remarkable rise to superstardom-—what’s it like to go from a college student to the center of a multi-person business; when was the moment he realized he could hang with the players he grew up idolizing; how he slept the night before Sunday at a major; and how has life changed since that 16th hole at TPC Harding Park, where he can’t remember seeing a single person. —Daniel Rapaport

People have been saying my name wrong for as long as I can remember. It’s pronounced Mo-REE, not Mo-RUH. It’s, Mo-REE-kah-wuh. Before the final round of the PGA, the first-tee announcer butchered my last name so badly. It wasn’t even close to Morikawa. I really wish I remember right now, because it was so bad that I had to stop and smile. It’s not the first time it’s happened.

You see it every year—guys who are scouted to be the next big thing and they never do. Of course, there’s some fear in your head that it might be you. But I spent four years in college for a reason—to get fully prepped, to fully get ready out here. I sat down with Justin Thomas for dinner at the RBC Canadian Open in 2019, the first event I played after turning pro. He told me, Look, if you’ve gotten here to where you’re getting all these sponsor’s invites, you know your golf game is going to be good enough. I don’t know what your timeline is, but you’ve got what it takes to take on the PGA Tour. You’re not here by accident. And that really stuck with me.

My first tee shot as a pro couldn’t have felt more normal—surprisingly so. I can’t remember where it went, but I wasn’t, like, nervous. It wasn’t, My dreams just came true. I was just playing. But I didn’t really believe I could win until my third event, at the Travelers. I heard Brooks Koepka answer a question about how he slowly progressed from thinking about making cuts, to thinking about top-20s, to top-10s, to winning. I thought to myself, Why can’t I just skip those steps and think about winning right away?

People made it seem like we played TPC Harding Park every single day in college, or that we practiced there, which wasn’t the case. I definitely felt comfortable coming into that week—I was playing well, and I lived in the San Francisco area for four years. And I’d played the course probably eight times. But it actually wasn’t my favorite course in the city, if I’m being honest. Now, obviously, that’s changed.

My agent and my coach drove from San Franscisco to L.A. on Friday evening. Guess they didn’t have much faith in me! Then I shot 65 on Saturday and they told me they were going to drive back first thing Sunday morning. I was like, Why? I’m two shots out of the lead, there are eight guys within three and DJ is leading. But they said they wanted to do it, and if they want to wake up at some crazy hour to drive, why not?

Sean M. Haffey

I slept like a baby on Saturday night. I’m 24, I sleep really well just in general. There’s only been one thing in my golf career that’s caused me to lose sleep, and that’s switching to my saw putting grip. That’s the only time where I woke up thinking about it, went to bed thinking about it. But I sleep really well.

That week was cool because my girlfriend was in town, but she wasn’t at the course for the first three days. So on Saturday, while I was playing, she was just out hanging with her good friend who lives there. We all had dinner that night at a ramen restaurant and didn’t talk about golf. They don’t care what I’m shooting, and that’s the best thing I can ask for.

It’s a terrible habit, but like everyone else, first thing I do in the morning is scroll through my phone. That Sunday was no different. Then I just take my time to get into the day. Relax, stretch, no stress. It’s kind of like waking up on a weekend morning for a guy who just grinded Monday-Friday. Then I begin to get myself focused. It’s not quite pumping yourself up, it’s focused. I don’t meditate—maybe I should start—but I think I do a good job of getting myself in a meditative state before rounds.

After the trophy ceremony—and we don’t need to talk about me dropping the lid anymore!—we took so many pictures. With the superintendents, the volunteers, the people from the PGA of America, my girlfriend, my coach, my caddie. Then it was media until it got dark. We headed up to the clubhouse for a dinner they’d set up for us. I drank some wine out of plastic cups, and some of the locker room attendants were trying to get me to take shots or shotgun beers with them. I was tempted to, but you’re also thinking … I just won a major championship, do people want to see me doing that? I’m sure there’s a big crowd that would say yes. But there’s also a crowd that would think huh, that’s who he is.

I don’t want this ego to spring up just because I won a tournament. I don’t feel entitled to anything because I won. I try to respect every one around me. But yes, now I have to step a line. I love going out to eat-—it’s a huge passion of mine, going out and trying these restaurants in whatever city we’re in. Every week we’ve been at a tournament since the PGA, I’ve been recognized. And I still think I won’t be recognized, but I am. At the Players, my agent and I were at this barbecue spot. We’re eating dinner and I’m thinking great, we’re in this corner, no one’s paying attention. And then as soon as I stand up, We’re such huge fans! I’m like oh, man, people really are watching and listening to what I’m doing.

I don’t order packages under my own name anymore. I like to throw out some really random names. To be honest, I might use your name next time, because it’s a great name. I come up with some really random ones when I’m making a reservation for dinner. It gets really creative.

I don’t think that week really changed what other pros thought of me, though it was so cool to have Tiger and Rory tell me, “Welcome to the club.” I’d already won twice in less than a year, which is a pace I’d love to keep up for the rest of my career. I think after guys saw me win they were like, OK, this kid can play golf. Then you become competition to them. You’re no longer the young guy trying to find his footing. JT wasn’t playing great the first year after I turned pro, and I was playing really well. He had a tough little stretch. And we were talking with my agent, and he was like “maybe I shouldn’t have given him that advice at dinner!” Just a funny story to look back on, but you really do have to watch what advice you give out here. We’re all trying to beat every single person out here.

I don’t mind the added attention that’s come since TPC Harding Park. It’s just part of this life I’m going to be living. Sometimes when you see a little kid and you answer a question for two minutes, that could change their entire life, change the way they look at things. And that’s the coolest thing. At 24, that I can hope to have that impact on people. I love where I’m at in life.

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