667 Days

843 days ago, on March 27th, 2024, my first article with No Laying Up was published, called “Let’s Stay Together.”

I wrote about why I was deciding to play professional golf after graduation. I noted that my college career had been, by any conceivable metric, a failure. Usually this is the kind of thing that pushes a person away from pursuing a professional sport. But I noted a certain feeling that I’d been carrying around for years.

Enough failure congeals like cold fat in a jar, solid and tough to scrub out. Scar tissue is this kind of lingering doubt turned inductive: the notion that, after a series of steps forward that were never enough, why should this one get me there? Why should the next? After all the debriefs, retools, technical tweaks, workout programs, nutrition plans, performance drills, mindset shifts—after all these without the desired results, whatever problem remains seems that much more evasive, cunning, potent. Whatever’s left to be developed or adjusted or overcome or exorcized feels closer and closer to the core of the self, some vital part of the identity. That maybe it’s not something about me, or some part of me, but me.

I officially turned professional on September 18th, 2024 — 668 days ago.

For 665 days — a year, nine months, and 28 days — I carried around that feeling I described two years ago. I got a lot better at golf, at least so I thought. I woke up every three or six months as a better player than I had been prior. But I had nothing to show for it. I had missed every single cut in every professional tournament I played. Most of them weren’t even close. I would show up to an event feeling solid, shoot a front-nine 39, find myself nine shots outside the cutline with 27 holes to play, and I’d grind out whatever I could for the rest of the event.

Sometimes I’d find something late. I remember one event where, in the second round, I had it –6 through 12 holes with a chance to backdoor the cut. I think I missed by two in the end. Other times I wasn’t even close and finished near DFL.

In either case, the following logic would present itself:

• I had determined that I had played poorly at the previous event on account of [X], [Y], and [Z].

• I had worked very hard to fix [X], [Y], and [Z] over the past several weeks. I believed I had made substantial progress, and I was in good enough shape to compete in this event.

• I would play poorly in that event and be completely non-competitive.

• Repeat.

It’s pretty easy to make the logical conclusion that there’s one constant in all of this, and it’s the guy swinging the golf clubs. If the fixes aren’t working, and all this energy that I’m investing into my game isn’t producing any results — then maybe I’m just not good enough. Maybe the problem is me.

Yesterday — one day ago — I played the third round of the GPro tournament at the Pete Dye River Course in Radford, VA. This is significant because, to play the third round of a GPro event, you have to first make the cut.

Yesterday, after 667 days of playing professional golf, I cashed my first check as a professional golfer.

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I played in my first pro tournament at the 2017 Met Open. My flight north to play my qualifier was delayed, and the MGA was able to bump my tee time into the last slot. I rolled out of the car and onto the first tee, and I think I shot -1. When I signed my card, I was as surprised as anyone else to find I got through.

I played in that event, then qualified for the 2018 Met Am and 2018 Met Open. I remember thinking, “I guess I’m just good enough to play in all these now.”

In 2024, I decided I would try to qualify for the Met Open in the hopes of making my pro debut there. My last event as an amateur would hopefully be the Met Am. I showed up to the qualifying site in New Jersey, sat through a 75 minute weather delay, and turned in a bogey-free 68 to make it into the field.

I played three MGA majors in 2017 and 2018. From 2019 to 2023, I only played in one — the 2021 Ike. For that five year stretch, it ate at me to watch my peers play in these events while I sat on the sidelines. It took until I qualified for the 2024 Met Am to realize that, actually, qualifying for a Met major is really, really hard. It’s not something you can ever take for granted. It’s not something you’re “supposed” to do, in any regard. It’s just difficult to do, and it’s an accomplishment when you do it.

I didn’t qualify for the 2024 Met Open, and so I didn’t make my debut until September. But I’ve effectively been a professional for two years. Prior to that, I was a college golfer who could only crack the lineup once in his last two years, needing a 62 in qualifying to do so. Really, my last significant golfing success was a stretch of decent showings in college events my sophomore year.

And so, for the last four years, I’ve carried around a latent feeling of deep embarrassment. I haven’t talked about this much — or, if I have, I haven’t talked about how pervasive it can be. This is by design; you can’t acknowledge its existence, because it’ll eat you alive. But there’s some sort of stratification in your mind, and at the bedrock level there are two factors: the self-belief that you can fulfill your vision for yourself, and a deep discomfort that you fall short of this vision in the present day. These two feelings do bloody battle against each other nearly every moment of every day.

For four years, I have silently been deeply embarrassed to call myself a serious competitive golfer. I have learned to live with this feeling. I’ve learned to feed my self-belief such that it can grow and become real. But, for four years (two of which I’ve called myself a fucking professional), that self-belief has been under siege by a relentless onslaught of poor competitive results. Results, at the end of the day, are all that matter in this business. Results are ruthlessly credible. And, for four years, I’ve lied to myself over and over, telling myself “I’m pretty good at this game and I’ll figure it out,” and I’ve hung on as long as I possibly could as the evidence against myself stacked up stronger and stronger.

This morning, a transfer hit my bank account for $862. Mind you, I paid an even grand to enter the tournament, along with a few hundred bucks for an AirBNB and probably two hundred for gas each way of the 500-mile drive. The week was a net loss, financially — not even an insignificant one.

But it’s a huge win. For the first time in my career, I played well enough to take money from other professional golfers. It makes no sense to put a monetary value on that because there’s no way to buy it. You have to earn it by beating other professionals at golf. If you pull it off, you’re rewarded with the knowledge that this is something you’re capable of doing. You have made money playing professional golf, and there’s nothing in the world anyone could do to take that away from you.

In my case, I’m especially proud of myself, because I did this while shouldering four years of golfing failures without any discernible successes. What does this prove? That my powers of self-belief are stronger than my sources of doubt. And I can measure my sources of doubt as quantifiably huge.

I’ve learned so much more about myself than I ever could have if I’d come out of the gates hot as a professional. I’m like a weed. I don’t need fertilizer or soil pH or recent memories of success. I can just fucking grow through a crack in the concrete.

A cynical part of me feels silly for bat-flipping a net-loss T30 in a mini tour event. It’s been two years, and I should be onto bigger and better things by now. Maybe you’re thinking it yourself. That’s fine. I don’t need you to be impressed, nor do I need that cynical voice in the back of my head to be impressed. I did it. I can look back and see how hard it’s been to make money playing golf, and I did it. Riding this wave of confidence, the reified knowledge of what I’m capable of, I can’t wait to see what happens next.

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Right now it’s 4:55pm on Friday. I’ve been sitting at my laptop since 4:10pm, and I’ll keep sitting here until about 5:20. At 5:20, I’ll be picked up and driven into Brunswick to AutoZone, then driven back home.

I drove the 9 hours home to St. Simons last night, during which time my maintenance indicator in my truck went off. I have another drive into Valdosta on Sunday, and so I have to change my oil in the next 48 hours. So, this morning, I drove into Brunswick to the AutoZone to pick up parts.

As I lay everything on the counter, I asked the kid behind the counter to idiot-check the parts for me on the computer. He said everything looked good except the oil filter, which I had gotten in the wrong size. He went out onto the floor, grabbed a different one, and handed it to me. I bought everything and left.

At 3pm, I went out to the parking lot, pulled my truck onto the concrete slab with the car wash hose attached, and started changing my oil. I had a new ratchet set and some instructions on the internet to help me with the parts I forgot, which were few. I drained the block through the drain plug, replaced the plug with a new gasket, removed the filter capsule, removed the filter from the capsule, checked it for debris (there wasn’t much), and put the new filter in the capsule to replace it.

Except the filter wouldn’t fit. I was holding the wrong size. I checked again, and I did have the right size before — the kid behind the desk switched my correct filter out for the wrong one.

So now I’m stuck here. My truck has no lube in it and I couldn’t even start it. I’m waiting for my buddy to get off work, so he can drive me 20 minutes to Brunswick and back to swap out this filter, a favor for which I’ll owe him a burger and a beer.

I say all this because, while it’s wildly frustrating to me, hopefully it’s funny to you. And — cynically, but honestly I might just be this cynical now — it’s a reminder that nearly everyone fucking sucks at their job, and it’s legitimately rare to find someone who’s actually good at what they do.

There’s a larger point that I want to make about personal identity. There are things we believe to be true about ourselves, good or bad, but — even if they are true, which is probably debatable in the first place — these are merely temporary qualities, and they’re subject to change. Personal development means identifying the good qualities and working to keep them, and also identifying the bad qualities and working to improve them. There’s no law that says that such things are immutable or they aren’t; nothing prevents each from moving in its own positive direction.

So it’s probably a cheap shot I’m taking at the AutoZone kid. I guess there’s hope for him.

But I want to make a larger point. Every day, I work with some of the most competent people I’ve ever met. I showed up to Sea Island to play professional golf as a failed college golfer with good hands and 190+ ball speed and nothing else to show for it. I couldn’t hit basic chips without chunking it. I had been hitting driver all over the map, even though I’d cut my teeth as a wildly accurate driver of the golf ball. I didn’t even have a reliable stock swing.

Over the last two years, I’ve had the privilege of working with astoundingly competent professionals who have given me the tools to reach this level of golf. They’ll remind me that it’s been my own work and effort that’s gotten me to this place, and I’m proud of that effort. But all the effort in the world will get you nowhere if it’s not properly guided. Golf is a complex game of complex problems, but the solutions must be expressed simply enough to stand up to tournament pressure. The team here has helped me identify, conceptualize, and solve a wildly diverse and intimidating set of problems, and this work has been immensely rewarding to me.

A word comes to mind, right now: Kafkaesque. When I reread the above paragraph from my article in 2024, that’s how golf felt to me. I would get better, and I would start to see a clearer picture of my success, and then the kaleidoscope would turn and the sand would shift beneath my feet and I was right back where I started, or worse. Golf felt Sisyphean. Golf felt futile. I was given two options: either accept that the world of golf didn’t make a lick of sense, or accept that I wasn’t good enough to play it. In choosing between believing in oneself or one’s own rationality, the choice isn’t always so simple — it’s more comfortable to be bad than insane.

But I chose neither of these. I bet on myself and the kernel of belief I had in myself that, surely, I was good at this game. I knew I was. Some part of me always knew I was good.

Again, maybe this is all silly, to be pimp-stepping a T-30 finish in a mini tour event. But the world makes a lot more sense today. My self-belief and my reality don’t run opposite each other today. I needed all the effort I could muster over the last two years to get here. But I also wouldn’t have had a prayer without the efforts of a lot of great people around me, all of whom decide that it’s worth their time to help me play better golf. I’ll keep telling everyone in person as I get the chances to, but, as a blanket statement: thank you all, so much.

I’m overwhelmed by gratitude. After 667 days, the good finally beat the bad. The belief beat the doubt. A lot had to happen to get to this point. A lot still has to happen to get to the next point. But I really needed the first domino to fall, a proof of concept that success in golf is possible for me. The journey ahead is lit a little brighter, and I can’t wait for the next step.