Jake Knapp shines as golf's stars fade

The 29-year-old scuffler gets the job done, winning in his ninth PGA Tour start.

Jake Knapp

The PGA Tour’s top players, the ones who still claim The Best Play Here, are taking the Chick-Fil-A approach to Sundays these days.

Mostly, they’re waiting around for the no-cut, $20 million “signature” or “elevated” events, the easiest money they’ve ever made. Jordan Spieth hasn’t won on this tour since April of 2022, Patrick Cantlay since August of 2022, Justin Thomas since the PGA Championship of 2022. Rory McIlroy and Xander Schauffele did win last year. Scottie Scheffler did, too, and was a constant contender even though his putter turned to salt. All of them will win again and again. But golf goes on when they’re not there, or if they’re on a treadmill when they are there. The Tour’s doors are not closed on Sunday like Chick-Fil-A’s. Its Sundays, more often than not, are still tasty.

At the Vidanta resort in Puerto Vallarta, Jake Knapp woke up with a 4-stroke lead in the Mexico Open Sunday morning. Except he did so at 5:30 a.m., and the circumstances wouldn’t let him sleep again. It was his ninth PGA Tour event, and he was 29 years old, having slogged his way through the Canadian and Korn Ferry Tours, trying to sync up his towering game with the tyranny of the numbers on his scorecard. The lead was gone in the space of seven holes, and Knapp was dealing with a driver that was acting like a West Point cadet — left, right, left, right — and the knowledge that considerable milk and honey was hiding behind Door No. 1.

Fortunately for him, he was only being challenged by fellow rookie Sami Valimaki, of Finland, and Valimaki was playing right beside him. At the end, Valimaki’s last drive wedged itself under a fence on the out-of-bounds line, and Knapp could have 3-putted and won. He took care of it in two, and won his first PGA Tour event.

Waiting for him was Makena White, his girlfriend. Knapp laughingly told her on Monday that if he was ahead by three strokes going into Sunday, he expected her to be on the scene. She cooperated, and they kissed on the 18th hole, but there were lots of others in Knapp’s village — his mom and dad, holding a watch party back home in Costa Mesa, Ca., his brother Ryan, his coach John Ortega, and his grandfather Gordon Bowley, who passed away last April and whose initials are tattooed on Knapp’s arm.

The worst and laziest supposition about golf is that the PGA tourists are faceless facsimiles, a parade of white belts with brains filled up by sports psychologists.  Knapp, through good and bad times, has been original and unmistakable. He was a brilliant young player. When he was 12 he shot a 58 on the shorter of Costa Mesa Country Club’s two layouts, and when he was 20 he shot a 61 in a U.S. Open qualifying round at Newport Beach CC, as his caddie showed up only a few minutes before tee time. He was famous for moonshot drives that landed where no man had gone before, and yet he was slogging his way across Canada, playing to break even, while less talented rivals were on the yellow brick road. Last year Hayden Springer won the Canadian Tour championship. It was worth $40,000, plus a $25,000 bonus, plus membership on Korn Ferry, the final ramp to the big tour. By then Knapp was on Korn Ferry and finished 13th, good enough for a promotion this year. On Sunday he won $1.458 million.

At one point, Knapp had to take a day job. Actually it was a night job at The Country Club, a bar/restaurant in Costa Mesa that features “after dinner dancing, complete with live entertainment and complete VIP table services.” Knapp was the designated bouncer, although he is only 5-foot-11 and reckoned that he had to learn to “look mean.” But he didn’t have to bring down the hammer very often, and as the nights went on he longed for the game that had frustrated him so.

As he told PGATour.com, he was on the range at nearby Mesa Verde CC one day and was talking to Tom Sargent, the longtime pro. Sargent told him to get some information on Chinese bamboo trees. Knapp did, and learned that their tendency is to lay fallow for a long time before suddenly skyrocketing 30 feet. Sargent thought Knapp’s talent was just as volcanic.

“You see a lot of guys with endless talent,” Sargent said on Sunday. “As you go along, you find some of them on the roadside. It takes some of them longer, and maybe they don’t have the nerve to hang in there. You have to have that tenacity and perseverance. Look at the way Jake conditions himself. He’s not a big guy, but he’s ripped. He told me two years ago that he hadn’t missed a day in the gym in six years.

“He’s enormously talented. I think he’ll be the longest driver out there (Knapp ranks fifth currently in distance). He’s a really good athlete, could be playing a number of sports. Most people who have long swings like his break down mechanically. Guys swing as hard as they can because they have to. But he’s strong and flexible enough to do this for a long time. People have wanted to shorten his swing, but all the pros who work with him have said, no, he’s doing pretty good.”

Jake was six years old when he first appeared on Sargent’s range, “with a bag that was as big as he was,” as Sargent said. “I had a lesson scheduled with his brother (who eeventually played at UC Irvine). But even at six, what I saw from him was swagger. There was no doubt that he belonged on that range. He is accustomed to going low. He’s shot 62s and 63s at our course a number of times. He shot a 60 on a good course at Camarillo. People have tried to pick apart his putting, but when you go that low, you can putt.”

You have heard that a Sunday on the PGA Tour is one of the few true life-changing events in sports. For guys like Knapp or Mathieu Pavon, who won the Torrey Pines event as Knapp was finishing third, that is no exaggeration. They are two of the three rookie winners in 2024 tournaments — the other, Nick Dunlap, was an amateur when he won at PGA West. When Knapp holed his final putt, he was suddenly thrust into the Masters, the PGA Championship, the U.S. Open, the Players Championship, the signature/elevated events, and basically any tournaments he wants to play over the next two years. He can buy The Country Club now.

And that is why the PGA Tour still matters, despite the reluctance of its headliners to dominate. Certainly there is no evidence that the younger players live in fear of Thomas, Spieth, Cantlay and Viktor Hovland, and maybe not even Scheffler or McIlroy. The more ominous names on the leader board are now playing on the LIV Tour, like Jon Rahm, Brooks Koepka and Dustin Johnson. But when they or Cam Smith or Joaquin Niemann win on the LIV Tour, nothing really changes, except their bank accounts.

The stories aren’t new. They are barely stories, really. It’s more contextual, more substantial, when Camilo Villegas wins nine years after his last previous victory and three years after his 22-month daughter died. Or when Jake Knapp proves he can not only maximize his good days (64-63 on Friday and Saturday) but survive his bad ones (hitting only two fairways on Sunday).

If Jake Knapp keeps winning, he probably will get handled and filtered, hidden behind barriers of blandness. It happened to Rickie Fowler, among many others. But maybe he’s too old, too callused, to disappear. When asked to list some of his most memorable days, Knapp cited the day that he got the notoriously stoic Cantlay to actually laugh. Presumably it didn’t happen on a Sunday.