The long road: Austin Smotherman claims first PGA Tour victory at Bank of Utah Championship - Golfweek

There is a little piece of Austin Smotherman’s journey hanging on a wall inside the pro shop at Haggin Oaks Golf Complex.

It is a caddie bib, signed by the local boy who made good.

Earlier this year, Smotherman returned to the Sacramento municipal course where much of his golfing life began. He met with junior golfers, kids just starting to dream about where the game might take them. He told them what he had learned through years of struggle, setbacks and second chances: Work hard. Keep going. Believe that your dream can come true.

On Sunday, amid the red rocks and black lava of Black Desert Resort in Ivins, Utah, Smotherman finally got to prove his own words. At 32 years old, after 100 career starts on the PGA Tour, the Sacramento-area native became a PGA Tour winner.

Smotherman shot a final-round 3-under 68 to win the Bank of Utah Championship by two strokes over Doug Ghim (69) and three better than David Ford (64) and Trace Crowe (66). He finished at 26-under 258, lifting the trophy that had seemed, at different points in his career, both tantalizingly close and impossibly far away.

His road to that moment was anything but straight. It began in Loomis, California, where golf clubs seemed to be everywhere around the family house as well as his grandfather’s place in Lincoln. Smotherman's first clubs as a kid was a set of plastic Snoopy irons. Eventually, his grandpa, Bill, who turned 89 this week, cut a Sam Snead 7-iron blade and persimmon head 5-wood down to size and used duct tape and electrical tape for grips. Smotherman still counts both as treasured possessions tucked away at his mom’s house.

His earliest golf memory is hitting balls in his front yard with his dad. He was five years old when he hit one onto the roof of their one-story house, and he eventually hit a ball over it and into the backyard. Before long, he joined Little Linkers, a developmental skill building program designed to help kids develop their athleticism and learn the game, at Haggin Oaks. “That was my first real consistent go and practice and be with a junior group activity,” Smotherman recalled.

Mostly a self-taught player, he estimates he had fewer than 10 lessons by his junior year of high school. During those formative years, he worked as a cart boy at Twelve Bridges — now Catta Verdera Country Club — earning practice privileges in exchange for his labor. He played wherever he could. And around Northern California, he developed a reputation. His generation included future stars such as Cameron Champ and Bryson DeChambeau. While some of those players took a faster, more celebrated route to the PGA Tour, Smotherman was carving out his own path.

In 2011, he beat DeChambeau by one stroke at the California Junior Amateur, with an 18th hole birdie. SMU men’s golf coach Josh Gregory, who has helped Smotherman with his short game and putting this season, walked that final round with DeChambeau, his star recruit, but by the end of the round he was ready to offer Smotherman a scholarship too.  

“Two weeks later, I was having an official visit and six months later, I was starting college golf at SMU and Bryson and I had become teammates,” Smotherman said.

The bond with DeChambeau grew in college and when Smotherman graduated he and his wife, Jessica, got a townhouse in Dallas and DeChambeau became their tenant.

“It was just a glorified storage unit for him where he knew everything was going to be safe because he was hardly ever there, and it was a way for him to help us out with paying some rent,” Smotherman said. “He knew I wasn't necessarily rolling in the dough.”

Smotherman needed all the help he could get. That first summer after college, he was bouncing between state Opens and the Adams mini tour, trying to scrape together enough money to continue chasing professional golf. Then DeChambeau stepped in. He wrote Smotherman a check for $5,200 to cover his entry fee for PGA Tour Q-School. Smotherman shot a bogey-free final-round 5-under 67 with a birdie at the last and was T-8 when he finished. The top 19 and ties would advance to the final stage and lock up at least Korn Ferry Tour status. Smotherman drove home, sat on his couch enjoying a late lunch and watched in horror as he tumbled to T-21. He ended up playing two seasons on PGA Tour Latinoamerica, the equivalent of AA baseball. At the time, it may have felt like another detour, but it turned out to be the best thing for him as a person. 

Smotherman earned his PGA Tour card by finishing 25th on the 2020-21 Korn Ferry Tour money list, earning the final card available. But making the PGA Tour and staying there were two very different things. In 2022, he needed to make the cut at the Wyndham Championship, the final regular season event to qualify for the FedEx Cup playoffs. Play was suspended because of darkness. He had to go to sleep knowing the next morning could determine his immediate future. He missed a birdie putt and then made double bogey to fall short. Once again, the dream had moved farther away. But instead of allowing disappointment to define him, Smotherman changed the way he looked at his career.

“I took it as, Hey, there's, there's a bigger plan here. We're going to come back. We're not playing seasons to just keep our card. We're going to build up to where these things are just an afterthought,” he said.

He played the following season with conditional status and then had to return to the Korn Ferry Tour last season as a savvy 30-year-old veteran. He won twice to return to the big leagues, notched a T-8 at The American Express in January and T-2 at the Cognizant Classic in late February. The question was no longer whether Smotherman belonged. He had answered that. The question was when would his moment come?

After building a one-stroke lead at Black Desert Resort and setting a 54-hole tournament record, he birdied three of the first five holes on a sun-soaked day to stretch his lead to three. He led the filed with 32 birdies for the week. But he had a hiccup at 13, plugged lie in a bunker led to double bogey, and when Trace Crowe canned a 40-foot eagle putt at 14, Smotherman’s lead had been trimmed to one.

All Smotherman did was step up and rip 3-wood at the drivable 14th to 6 feet. He missed the putt but the birdie stretched his lead back to two and restored Smotherman's composure. He rolled in another birdie at 16 and despite a 3-putt bogey at 17, he birdied the 18th to edge Ghim.

"Today was Austin's day. I did everything that I could, and hopefully I'll learn from some of the mistakes and be a little bit more comfortable next time," Ghim said.

It took Smotherman longer than some of his peers to taste this level of success. But perhaps that is what makes the victory that much sweeter. He has never been particularly interested in measuring his life against someone else's timeline.

“Comparison is kind of a thief of joy,” he said.

While others were collecting trophies, Smotherman was building a life. He married his high school sweetheart. He and Jessica traveled. They supported one another through the lean years and the long road. And now they are raising three daughters: Adeline, Penelope and Grace, who was born in April. His life, he learned, could be full even when the trophies were missing. Then, at last, one arrived.

On Sunday, after 100 career starts, the road finally led him to the place he had dreamed about since he was a five-year-old boy hitting golf balls over the roof of his family's house. And this time, nobody could take it away.

Adam Schupak is a Golfweek senior writer covering the PGA Tour.