By Brian Wacker
The college class of 2019 didn’t take long to make its mark on the PGA Tour. In the last 12 months, three of its members—Collin Morikawa, Matthew Wolff and Viktor Hovland—have already combined for five victories, including a major championship after Morikawa won last month’s PGA Championship.

Then there’s Justin Suh.

Thursday, the 23-year-old shot a five-under 67 to sit near the top of the leader board after the opening round of the Corales Puntacana Resort & Club Championship. It’s his best score in a dozen starts on the tour. It’s also, perhaps, a sign that he isn’t far behind in joining his 2019 classmates after what has so far been a bumpy ride in the professional ranks.

Last summer, Suh, the former top-ranked amateur out of the University of Southern California, turned pro at the Memorial and three weeks later joined Morikawa, Wolff and Hovland in a pre-tournament press conference at the Travelers Championship as a way of introducing golf’s next wave of young stars. While the rest of the group saw their careers take off, Suh missed the cut in six of his first seven starts and battled through a nagging left wrist injury born from overuse in his transition from college golf to the heavier workload of the pro game.

It wasn’t long before Suh’s mind got beat up, too.

While Morikawa, Wolff and Hovland all flourished, Suh struggled not just with his game but with expectations and what he called “noise” on social media when his results didn’t compare to the other.

Viktor Hovland, Collin Morikawa, Justin Suh and Matthew Wolff were all given sponsor’s exemptions into the 2019 Travelers Championship after each had just turned pro.

“The second half of last year, I spent a lot of down time in my hotel room, just me and my phone and I was just scrolling and scrolling,” he told Golf Digest on Thursday. “It was toxic. You start looking at 10,000 golf videos, it’s going to creep into your swing.”

Eventually, the wrist got better following physical therapy and a swing adjustment that included a change in his set-up and swinging longer and less snappy. So did the results. After failing to advance out of the first stage of Korn Ferry Tour Q School last September, Suh headed for PGA Tour Latinoamerica, where he had four top 10s on the circuit, including a T-2 in Argentina, to earn full status for this year.

Putting the phone away helped, too.

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Though he missed the cut in of his three starts on the PGA Tour in 2020 at Torrey Pines, Pebble Beach and Puerto Rico, Suh could see that he was turning the corner. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, shutting down the sport for three months.

The time off turned out to be blessing for Suh, though. He visited his former college coach, Chris Zambri, and went back to doing the same drills that propelled him to eight victories while at USC, where he was also a two-time All American.

“Ever since then I’ve been playing really good,” he said.

Indeed. In a handful of attempts to Monday qualify once the tour did resume its season, Suh narrowly missed out each time but shot a combined 30 under in that span. He also finished T-21 at the Barracuda Championship last month for his highest finish yet on tour. And coming into this week’s tournament in the Dominican Republic he finished in the top 10 in three of his last four starts on the LocaliQ Series, which consists of players from the Mackenzie Tour, PGA Tour Latinoamerica and PGA Tour China after those seasons were wiped out because of the pandemic.

Along the way Suh also managed to sneak in an 18-hole match with Morikawa two weeks ago.

“I got him,” Suh said. “So the game’s there, it’s just a matter of putting it together at a tournament.”

The post He was expected to rival Morikawa, Hovland and Wolff when they turned pro in 2019. Now Justin Suh is playing catch up appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Ryan Herrington
Early in the final round of the 57th Northeast Amateur, it was clear who was walking off with the title and the victor’s honorary navy blue blazer. Justin Suh, a rising senior at USC, had been leading since Day 1 after shooting an opening 63 at Wannamoisett Country Club outside of Providence, R.I. He started Saturday with a three-stroke edge, then made a birdie on the first hole, essentially letting the rest of the field there would be no Suh slide.

The only question, then, lingering was by how much would the 21-year-old from San Jose, Calif., win by and would it be enough to break the tournament’s all-time scoring mark. The final answers: six strokes and not quite.

Suh’s closing three-under 66 gave him a 15-under 261 total on the par-69 Donald Ross gem, which tied the 72-hole scoring mark set by Peter Uihlein in 2011. In outpacing runner-up Sebastian Crampton, Suh became the first wire-to-wire winner since Stewart Jolly in 2014.

It was Suh’s debut at the Northeast Amateur, having missed the event the previous summer to play in the California Amateur. It made the convincing way in which the rookie claimed the title—it was the largest margin of victory in the event since Jonathan Byrd beat Aaron Baddeley by seven strokes in 1999—all the more impressive.

“It feels unbelievable. This is always known as such a big event, one of the best,” Suh said. “To get to win my first time out here, it means a lot.”

For the week, Suh made 21 birdies (a tournament-best) to just six bogeys. And he outpaced a field that had plenty of star power. Luis Gagne and Matt Parizale, the low amateurs at the U.S. Open, finished T-4 (10 strokes back) and T-15 (15 strokes back).

Mind you, anyone who watched Suh play this past season for the Trojans knows his potential. In 11 starts during the 2017-’18 season, Suh posted five wins, including the Pac-12 title, and eight top-four finishes. He earned first-team All-American honours and was named Pac-12 player of the year, after finishing with a 68.73 stroke average, crushing USC’s previous single-season mark of 70.10 set by Jamie Lovemark in 2007.

While the Pac-12’s other dominant star—Oregon’s Norman Xiong—decided to leave school at the end of the spring to turn professional, Suh says he’s committed to finishing his last year at USC and earning his degree in business administration.

“Graduating is important for me. Mentally it’s a lot more comforting having a paper in hand when you go out there,” he said. “Paper from USC means a lot. It’s what I’ve had to look forward to for quite a while.”

The post USC’s Justin Suh picks up where he left off the college season, winning the Northeast Amateur in a runaway appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.