PLAYER RECORD
1 PGA Tour Win: 2018 Barracuda Championship
CYBER ATTACK
LINKS PLAYERS MAGAZINE 2019 ANNUAL EDITION
If you know anything about golf, it is this: The game is played upside-down. Lowest score wins.
But an old, wise head once decided it did not always have to be this way. And Andrew Putnam is glad for that.
Dr. Frank Stableford lived to nearly 90, but when he was not yet 30, he proposed a new format for scoring in golf at Glamorganshire Golf Club in Wales. In Stableford’s game, first played in 1898, every score was assigned a point value, with a premium placed on birdies and eagles. The allure for middling golfers was that with every score at double bogey or worse, the points were the same. There was no penalty for a really big score. Pick up your ball and move on.
While the Stableford scoring system is still quite common, especially during play in the United Kingdom, the game has been more slowly adopted among professionals. But once a year on the PGA Tour, the leaderboard flips and the guys with a + next to their total find themselves at the top.
That’s where Putnam landed last summer, at the Barracuda Championship. Played at the Montreux Country Club, a Jack Nicklaus design midway between Reno, Nevada, and Lake Tahoe, California, Putnam knew and enjoyed the area, and his plan was to relax that week—a working vacation, if you will, but with the emphasis on vacation. He walked away with much more.
The Tacoma, Washington, native came into the final round with a three-point lead over Sam Saunders. Both were seeking their first PGA Tour win. It was veteran Chad Campbell, though, who pushed hardest on Sunday, missing a short eagle putt on the fifteenth hole that would have put him in front of Putnam. Playing behind Campbell, Putnam birdied that same hole, then the two matched cards to close the day. In the end, Putnam’s 23-foot birdie putt from off the green at the last sealed the victory.
“I felt really great all week and, more importantly, on Saturday and Sunday,” Putnam reflected as the new 2018-19 season moved toward its winter break. “I just had this peace, and I felt like this is where I am supposed to be, and I’m supposed to be one of those guys playing in those final groups.”
Where Putnam was supposed to be, now that he’d won, was at January’s Sentry Tournament of Champions in Maui. And that, you should know, is a long, long way from where his Tour career began.
Andrew Putnam, who slips into his 30s in 2019, played his college golf at Pepperdine, just like his brother Michael before him. Five years apart, the two never played high school or college golf on the same teams, but in 2014-15 they both possessed PGA Tour cards.
“He had a couple of kids and his wife he was traveling with, and I was single,” Andrew says. “So we weren’t together all the time, but we made it a point to play a practice round together each week.”
That was a big help to the rookie, as Michael had already spent three full seasons on the PGA Tour. “He was great at helping me understand the golf course and what to expect,” Andrew remembers.
“There is a big learning curve when you get on the Tour—really any new level of golf. It always takes time to feel comfortable and to kind of get into your rhythm, and he was great at giving me advice on how courses play during a tournament. A lot of people don’t understand that. On a Tuesday, the course is going to play one way, but on a Sunday the course is going to play extremely difficult. They let the course firm out and it is just a whole other animal.”
By mid-season, though, the adjustments weren’t working out. In early June, just nine months removed from finishing second on the Web.com season money list, Putnam shot 82 in the final round of the Memorial, then 80 in the second round of the FedEx St. Jude Classic a week later. He would make only one cut the rest of the season.
“I felt like I didn’t know exactly why I had success and I was trying to change things because I felt like I needed to match the players on the PGA Tour. I went down a totally dark hole. Any golfer has gone through those kinds of moments, and it feels like your world is falling apart.”
Putnam’s words bleed honesty and frustration.
“I specifically remember one event when things were just spiraling and I basically lost all my confidence. I played in a pro-am, and I think I lost six or seven balls. It was a pretty open course! The guys in my group were like, ‘Are you sure you’re playing in this tournament on the PGA Tour?’ I ended up withdrawing and taking a few weeks off because I was in a really bad spot.”
“There’s certain times when you’re fearful of the future or fearful of things you can’t control. You have a bad week and you turn that into, ‘Well, if I keep doing this for 10 weeks, I’m not going to have a job, and if I don’t have a job, then what’s going to happen to my wife and kids?’ It’s easy to get into that freefall.”Those weeks off weren’t easy. Putnam knew he was leaving his chance for a share in millions of dollars on the table each week. But he calls that time away “a watershed” in his professional career. His confidence was shot, but his team was still there. His brother stuck with him, and so did his long-time mentor Micah Brechtel, a ministry leader in Arizona.
“I was in a really bad spot, but I had a lot of people around me to lean on and support me,” Putnam says.
Putnam was single then. He and his wife Tawny met on a blind date when she was working in medical sales in Arizona, where he had settled so he could play and work on his game year-round. They married in August 2017.
Both active outdoors, they hike in the nearby mountains and enjoy water sports, including SCUBA diving. Tawny is also certified as a Holy Yoga instructor, an endeavor she has started bringing on the road as the two follow the Tour’s schedule. There she teaches others connected to the Tour in a setting they may already be familiar with, but according to a different set of underlying principles.
“She’s very likeable and she has a way to invite people she has met at tournaments to come to these Holy Yoga sessions where she can pray over them and read Scripture over them and allow them to take a break from the go-go-go of life,” Andrew says of Tawny’s efforts. “I’m really thankful that she is taking on the risks to do these things and put herself out there. It’s really made her excited about being out on the road.”
Talking openly about faith is easier for some people than for others. In 2018, it became the three-quarter-million-dollar question for Putnam.
At the FedEx St. Jude Classic, the very tournament in which he had burned way out three years before, Putnam found himself in the final group on Sunday that week too. But this time he was going toe-to-toe with world number one Dustin Johnson. Putnam wouldn’t win the trophy that week, but he came out on top in a side competition known as the MetLife Matchup.
Throughout the season, MetLife sponsored a one-on-one popularity contest of sorts between two players near the top of the leaderboard. The broadcasting network would choose a key par save from each of the players, then encourage fans to vote online for their favorite up-and-down. The winner’s designated charity received $20,000. Bigger than this, the winning player advanced to the year-end vote, where the final winner’s charity received $750,000.
Putnam’s campaign may have received a perfectly timed boost: the week-long final vote kicked off the same day he won the Barracuda Championship. But more than this, the tech-savvy demographic of Putnam’s chosen charity came through, and when the voting was finished, they made some big money—more even than Putnam won in his Barracuda victory. The charity was College Golf Fellowship (CGF).
Putnam himself had grown up in church in Tacoma. The lineage of Christian faith in his family traces back to his grandparents. “I was just one of the lucky ones to grow up in that environment,” Putnam says. “I found Jesus when I was young and made a decision to follow him, and it has been an ongoing journey.”
But college will throw hard arguments at anyone’s childhood faith, and it was no different for this young man. That’s where CGF came alongside him. The 35-year-old ministry supports college players on site at their campuses and during tournaments, as well as offering retreats during school breaks, often hosted by PGA Tour players, including Davis Love III, Lee Janzen, Tom Lehman, Ben Crane, and Scott Stallings.
“I am very lucky that every stage of my spiritual journey has had some type of support or some person there that I can learn from and lean on,” Putnam says. At Pepperdine, that was College Golf Fellowship.
In fact, CGF has continued to be an important part of Putnam’s faith, just as they are for many Tour players. CGF’s Brad Payne and Stephen Bunn help conduct the weekly fellowship on Tour.
Faith is a curious thing in the eyes of many sports fans. Are athletes who say they believe in God latching on to some sort of talisman, hoping it helps them win? How is this any different than the baseball player who rubs his bat with chicken bones or the golfer who makes sure her marker is heads-up each time she puts it down? How far removed is faith from superstition?
Putnam reasons that it’s more about handling your identity as a professional golfer, where so much is tied up in how you perform. “You know, there’s certain times when you’re fearful of the future or fearful of things you can’t control. You have a bad week and you turn that into, ‘Well, if I keep doing this for 10 weeks, I’m not going to have a job, and if I don’t have a job, then what’s going to happen to my wife and kids?’ It’s easy to get into that freefall,” he says.
This is where faith moves in. Rather than an attempt to influence the outcome of one’s work, it is an avenue to maintaining perspective in the midst of that work. It’s no quick fix.
“It takes a lot of time, a lot of self-reflection and pausing,” Putnam explains. “That is something that is very hard to do in our day and age. I have been working on getting hours of solitude and meditation, because those are ways that help re-center me and allow me to know that my worth is not based on my performance and my identity is not based on my performance. God is the one who gives me my worth and my identity. From that I have so much ability to enjoy my job and enjoy my life, and it’s amazing.”
Respectfully, Putnam recognizes that the role of faith in her identity is significant for Tawny, too, as a Tour wife.
“A lot of people will say, ‘Oh man, those wives have it so good—they go to tournaments, they get treated so well, they are just on a free ride.’ I think that is a lie. Tawny gave up working after seven years, because she knew that God had a different plan for her. That’s a big transition. It’s been really cool to see how God is working in her life. She has been open with me and a lot of her friends about the struggle of identity being out there and sometimes feeling with the other wives that they don’t have a purpose or they’re not moving forward.”
Here the Holy Yoga certification has provided a healthy opportunity, but ahead of that, says Andrew, Tawny had opportunity to hit her own pause button and “reflect and process all that God had in store for her moving forward.”
The Putnams have stared change and challenge in the face and for now they seem to be on the easier side of it. Andrew’s PGA Tour status is secure through 2020 as a winner in 2018. He stays connected with Pepperdine’s golf program through coach Michael Beard, whose own playing career at the school intersected with that of Michael Putnam. And Andrew hopes to host a CGF retreat at his house, too.
“It’s really a cool cycle you can go through with College Golf Fellowship. You can be one of the guys that is being supported and then hopefully you can grow—and I think that is their goal—into being someone who can support these college guys. That is what is exciting for me as a professional golfer. I can be involved with them as a professional golfer and give back to the organization.”