The Modest Beginnings Of Golf's 2020 Major Champions
/Nothing against elite country clubs or clubby junior golf circuits, but 2020’s three major championships were each won by sons of less conventional
Collin Morikawa, the PGA Championship winner at Harding Park, got his start at southern California’s Chevy Chase Country Club, which is not to be confused with Riviera.
Bryson DeChambeau, the U.S. Open champion at Winged Foot, refined his game at Madera’s Dragonfly.
And the 2020 Masters winner got his start at Weed Hill driving range, the family operation of golf architect Bobby Weed.
From Adam Schupak’s Golfweek story:
Johnson cut his teeth digging up the sod at the driving range that gave Weed his start in the golf business, Weed Hill. Johnson’s father, the head professional at Mid Carolina Club, would take him there as a young boy. Growing up in Colombia, just over an hour from Augusta National, the Masters was the biggest week of the year and Johnson recalled how every putting contest with brother A.J. was to win the Green Jacket. Here is a where a dream that would one day become fulfilled was born.
“They had lights on the range, and most nights I would shut the lights off when I was leaving,” Johnson said.
And there is this nice recognition of the Weed family:
Weed has built courses around the world, but none is as near and dear to his heart as the driving range he built in his hometown of Irmo, South Carolina.
It was 40 years ago and Weed, a high-school junior, talked his father into letting him convert some bean fields the family owned into Weed Hill Driving Range, where a bucket of balls cost 75 cents and Grandma called the shots until he got home from school.
“I remember getting off the bus and running up the hill and I’d go in there and ask, ‘Grandma, how’s everything going?’ ‘Oh, Bobby,’ she’d say, ‘these people have been out there tearing up your grass,’ ” Weed recalled.
“She would hand wash every ball,” he added. “She’d treat them like they were eggs in a basket.”
