PLAYER RECORD
1 PGA TOUR WIN: 2017 RBC Heritage Classic
THE TREAT BEYOND THE TRICKS
LINKS PLAYERS MAGAZINE 2018 ANNUAL EDITION
By Jeff Hopper
Sure, Wesley Bryan is an internet sensation and a PGA Tour winner, but he’s pretty much always been living the dream. At least as far as golfers go. After all, he grew up with a practice range in his backyard.
Wesley is the younger of two golfing brothers, the sons of a do-it-yourself professional from South Carolina. George III (the dad—Wesley’s brother is George IV) purchased 10 acres to call his own when the boys were in their teens. Dad went to work building a golf academy while Wesley and George IV, along with their younger sister Mary, went to work on their short games.
“Our backyard was basically a wedge tee box” are Wesley’s words to describe it. “We had a couple of oak trees that you could use to work on hitting different shots, different trajectories, shaping it around the trees.”
It was good for the short game, certainly. But it was good for something else, too. The boys were becoming ridiculously clever with a golf club in their hands. The creative wedge play and ball-bouncing antics seemed a sideshow skill to the main event as Wesley progressed through high school, when he was one of the best competitive players in the state, then moved to the University of South Carolina and instantly established himself as one of the better players on the team.
But golf can be a faithless friend, and when Wesley returned to school for his junior year, his game stayed home. He fell into a funk that he calls his low point in golf, and he hoped his game would return. Christmas apparently worked wonders, because when he returned for the spring, his game was back, along with big aspirations that continued through his senior season.
“I felt like upon graduation, I wasn’t going to let anybody work harder than me,” he says. “I wanted to claw and see how far I could get in the game.”
Good thing for the work ethic, because there was another grown-up aspect to Wesley’s young 20-something life. He was getting married, to Elizabeth, a girl he’d known since preschool. She was working hard herself, as a masters student in a physician’s assistant program. Like a lot of young couples, they were hungry in their stomachs and hungry in their drive. They lived above a garage and watched every penny. Wesley added dollars to his mini-tour pockets by caddying at Sage Valley Golf Club.
Then came the videos.
Trick shot artists have been around for decades. They’ve barnstormed their way from club to club, dressed in gorilla suits and packing clubs with rubber hose shafts. They would stack balls three and four high to hit them every which way off an 18-inch tee. It’s always been entertaining, even for non-golfers, but its vaudevillian nature meant it was aging. Gone, really.
But the internet belonged to everybody and with the coming of the smartphone, so did cameras. It was time for golf’s best trick shots to go viral. Dude Perfect, a bunch of hyped-up sports lovers purveying good clean fun with balls of every kind, may have started the trend. But fortunately for the Bryan Bros—yes, that’s how you’ll find them on Google, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook—the few attempts at trick shot fame online were haphazard and shoddy. Those others also didn’t have the clout of one Rickie Fowler.
It was Fowler’s little push (a retweet of their second video) that turned the brothers into a sensation. Pretty soon they were tossing and bouncing and batting balls from club to club and off toward the horizon. George’s finesse set up Wesley’s ability to meet a ball in mid-air and send it sailing out of sight.
Soon there was no stopping them. Millions of views brought partnerships with Callaway, GoPro, Bose, Richard Branson, and others. It also brought miles of travel and hours of production, so much so that the brothers’ competitive schedule got gobbled up in the whirlwind of it all. And yet there was an upside.
“For the first time in my life, I’d gotten a little money in my pocket and I didn’t have the stress that mini-tour golf brings,” Wesley explains. “I was able to live a little freer financially. I knew I could continue to chase my dream of playing professional golf, because I was funding myself and didn’t have to rely on anybody else.”
And while he wasn’t playing, he was practicing. A lot. Wesley played only three or four mini-tour events in 2015—not the recommended program for preparing to go through Q-School. Yet with all the additional practice, he was ready.
For a time, he had neglected his short game in order to improve his swing. “I recognized for the first time in my life that I was struggling around the greens,” he remembers. “I decided to pay a lot more attention to that part of the game and was still able to carry on hitting the ball well. I think that’s where the lightning struck in a bottle through Q-School. I really started to putt it and chip it and was able to maintain the full swing.”
But Q-School wasn’t all. After qualifying for the 2016 season on the Web.com Tour, Wesley went out and won his third event, the Chitimacha Louisiana Open. Three events later, he won again. Now he was on the verge of a battlefield promotion, that instant upgrade to the PGA Tour for any Web.com player who wins three times in a season.
He got a couple of June starts on the PGA Tour, making the cut each time. Then in July he came close again on the Web.com Tour, tying for second at the Lincoln Land Charity Championship. His next start, at the Digital Ally Open, he won. Wesley Bryan was suddenly a PGA Tour player, a move that happened so fast, he said, “I could not have dreamed about that in a million years.”
In truth, Wesley Bryan is not given to looking too far ahead. He’ll watch a scoreboard, but it doesn’t mean much to him. He came to the PGA Tour the same way.
He says, “I just like to keep my head down and go to work and concentrate on being the best I possibly can be, instead of, ‘Oh, if I finish here, that will get me there, this will move me up here, which will unlock this tournament for me to play in, blah blah blah.’ I just go to work every single day and after a lot of years look up and see where I’m at.”
Still, there was one tournament on the PGA Tour that Wesley Bryan, the rookie, couldn’t take his eyes off of. It was the Heritage Classic, played every year at storied Harbour Town on Hilton Head Island in Bryan’s home state of South Carolina. Even though he lives in Augusta, Georgia, now, he still has a heart for home.
The Heritage is held the week after the Masters on a golf course quite different in nature. Augusta National is expansive and the terrain moves up and down. Harbour Town requires precise course management through tunnels of trees across the flat coastal lowland. Its short yardages give players of all lengths a chance to compete.
Wesley describes his game as strong from 120 yards in—“as good as anybody in the world”—and he knows his weakness to be managing his game off the tee. Any other tight course might eat Bryan’s lunch. But Harbour Town is a course he could almost play blindfolded (which is actually something he and George have done in their videos!).
“It’s kind of like my home course,” Wesley says of Harbour Town. “I know where I can miss it and still play golf. It really comes down to plotting yourself and missing it correctly. I was able to do that out there.”
Do it, as in put the ball in play, close to the hole, and in the cup often enough to find yourself in the lead on the seventeenth hole on Sunday. That’s when Bryan found himself going viral all over again. He looked at the scoreboard, and as he told every fan watching his post-round interview with Jim Nantz and Nick Faldo, “Honestly I just threw up a little bit in my mouth, and I was like, well, shoot, I guess this is what nervous feels like.” Nantz and Faldo laughed with Bryan—which was only natural at this point, because he was sitting in that broadcast booth as the first native-born South Carolinian to win the Heritage in its 49-year history.
That win means Bryan won’t have the week before Harbour Town off in 2018. He’ll head to the Masters. “I’ve had the longest possible chance to look forward to the Masters other than past champions, since I won the week after,” he says. “And then I get to go back to Harbour Town and defend my title. So I’ll get to experience those back-to-back weeks, which should be a fun little stretch in April.”
When it comes to planning a season, every Tour professional will tell you the same thing: it’s nice to know ahead of time where you can play. The scheduling luxuries afforded to tournament winners are freeing. Winners know they’re welcome at the Tournament of Champions, the Masters, the Players Championship, and nearly every other event over a two-year span.
Apart from tournaments, though, Bryan also maintains a spiritual discipline derived from his faith in Jesus, something he and Elizabeth have been open about on both traditional and social media platforms.
“The only tangible way I can know I’m maturing in my faith—which is really for Jesus to decide—is to gain more knowledge and wisdom by every single day waking up, reading my Bible, reading a devotional, reading various books,” he says. “If I feel like I’m growing in knowledge of Jesus and growing in my relationship with him, feeling more intimate with him every single week, that’s how I’m maturing in my faith.”
Growing follows planting, of course, and Bryan reaches back into high school for his spiritual roots, when a friend kept reminding him of the importance of making a decision to follow Jesus. “I would have told him I was a Christian,” Bryan admits, “just because I grew up in church. But there was nothing in my life that would have pointed to Jesus other than the fact that I went to church most Sundays.”
As a senior in high school, he decided to “follow Jesus and accept him as my Lord and Savior. It gave me more of an eternal perspective. Basically, Jesus was telling me that there’s more to life than going out to try to please my flesh each and every week. That was the biggest difference maker for me.”
At home the Bryans do what Wesley calls “normal couple things.” They go for walks and to the gym, cook together, and sometimes go out dancing, though that’s more Elizabeth’s idea of fun than Wesley’s. What may not be normal is that they also try to commit daily time to praying together and reading together. “We need to make sure we’re not getting complacent where we’re at,” he says.
As he says, this isn’t easy to measure. It’s practiced in days but assessed in years.
“I know I’m definitely not the same guy today that I was two years ago,” he explains in some moments of self-observation, “but I don’t know where or what’s changed. I’m also not the same golfer I was two or three years ago. I don’t know what’s changed, I don’t know what’s different, but I definitely know I’m better based on some of the results I see. Honestly, when I look at it on a day-to-day basis, I think, Geez, I was way better three years ago. This sucks. But the fact of the matter is that’s not true.”
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