Climbing the Stairway
A weekend of satisfying winners
On a Sunday of satisfying winners all over the place in golf, I remembered what the father of one of them said to me half a dozen years ago about his young daughter’s competitive journey.
“It’s a long process, like climbing a stairway,” Rick Pano told Masters.com. “Every once in a while, you get to a level and have you a mirror there. And you’ve got to look in the mirror and say, ‘Here I am. What do I want to do with it? What do I want to go to next?’ And the stairway never stops.”
Alexa Pano was just 12 years old then, a returning participant at the Drive, Chip & Putt National Finals. She had been playing in tournaments more than half her life at that point, had won a bunch of them, and already was something of a celebrity after having been one of the main subjects in “The Short Game,” a 2013 film about junior golf.
Over the weekend, at an LPGA event in Northern Ireland, on her 19th birthday, Pano took a giant step by winning her first LPGA title, the ISPS Handa World Invitational. Prevailing in a playoff, Pano didn’t look like the 402nd-ranked player in the world. A final-round 66, in which she sprinkled nine birdies, was a 10-stroke improvement from her first round in County Antrim. It remains to be seen how “The Short Game” star will fare over the long haul in professional golf, but the victory perked up her rookie LPGA season and put her career in a new gear.
The same could be said of Pano’s fellow 19-year-old Nick Dunlap, whose 4-and-3 victory over Neal Shipley at Cherry Hills in the 123rd U.S. Amateur capped quite a summer of achievements and brought him a neat distinction in the world of USGA championships.
Dunlap, the 2021 U.S. Junior Amateur champion, joins Tiger Woods as the only men to win the Junior (first played in 1948) and Amateur titles. His victory in the scheduled 36-hole final at the site of the 1960 U.S. Open comes on the heels of victories in the prestigious Northeast and North & South Amateurs. Winning at Wannamoisett, Pinehurst and Cherry Hills has a nice ring to it.
Viktor Hovland knows what Dunlap experienced, having won the 2018 U.S. Amateur at Pebble Beach. Hovland is 25 years old now, and the Norwegian had a show-off Sunday of his own. Trailing by four strokes with nine holes to play in the BMW Championship at Olympia Fields outside Chicago, Hovland put together a dream finish.
Olympia Fields is known for the long putts holed there—Jerry Barber’s trio of sea-goers in the 1961 PGA Championship; Jon Rahm’s 66-footer to win the 2020 BMW—but Hovland did it another way. Peppering the flagstick to set up multiple birdie putts inside 10 feet, Hovland made eight 3s on the back-nine in shooting a seven-under 28 to zoom past Scottie Scheffler with a final-round 61, the lowest round in the FedEx Cup Playoffs, which began in 2007. Hovland finished at 17 under, two ahead of Scheffler and Matt Fitzpatrick, with Rory McIlroy in fourth, five strokes behind the winner.
Scheffler still goes into this week’s season-ending Tour Championship in the “pole” position, at 10 under in the “starting strokes” format, followed by Hovland (-8), McIlroy (-7), Jon Rahm (-6) and Lucas Glover (-5). The staggered start is more sensible than the permutation-heavy way the playoffs were before, and after the first round at East Lake things are easy enough to follow.
It’s a pipe dream to imagine a match-play scenario, but if the finale began with a 32-man opening day of 16 matches, players seeded by how they rank with a week to go, it sure would make for a compelling first round. Then the remaining 16 players could keep going at it mano-a-mano or do a reverse Western Amateur and play stroke play from there. Either way would heighten the tension and make it more interesting for fans on site or watching on television.
Whether in the actual or wishful formats, Hovland is a threat. The BMW is his second of 2023 and fifth in his young career. That handful of victories matches the career total of another Oklahoma State standout and U.S. Amateur champion, Scott Verplank, whose first PGA Tour win came as an amateur in the 1985 Western Open.
When he was in his 20s, Verplank was so talented and so dogged, it appeared as if his golf stairway would lead to the pinnacle of the sport. But the reality of Type 1 diabetes and debilitating injuries made his an uneven and, compared to expectations, unspectacular, climb. That Verplank’s final victory came 22 years after his maiden one, though, in 2007, at the Byron Nelson, not far from where he grew up, was a testament to his grit. And despite how many players develop their skills early in the current generation, only one player—Phil Mickelson, in 1991—has won a PGA Tour event as an amateur since Verplank did so 38 years ago. Perhaps Dunlap has the mettle to do so if he gets the opportunity to test himself against the pros as Verplank did.
But beating the likes of Hovland won’t be easy. Viktor, cheerful and able and seemingly past a chipping weakness, figures to be on lots of leaderboards. He stands out like a glow cup containing something cold from Eskimo Joe’s in his beloved Stillwater, even more brightly after a spectacular Sunday that figures to fuel his journey.