A professional golf career doesn’t always follow a path from Point A to Point B and beyond. In fact, the trip from tee to green is rarely a straight line.
Austen Truslow’s current route is quite a series of doglegs.
He’s done pretty well on the Asian Tour, but it was a February win in New Zealand that helped cement a successful effort to play in this week’s British Open. That’s three continents, none of them close to his new home base of Huntsville, Alabama.
Yep, Huntsville, where the 30-year-old will spend plenty of time while the Asian Tour is on its summer break due to the rainy season.
“Great town. I have nothing bad to say about Huntsville, except I’m a Floridian and I’m used to being near the water,” says Truslow, who grew up in New Smyrna Beach, was part of Spruce Creek High’s 2010 state championship, and now piles up frequent-flier miles by the boatload.
Austen Truslow gets a taste of the Royal Birkdale rough during a practice round this week ahead of the 154th Open Championship.
This week, he has a tee time in England, north of Liverpool, near Southport on the northwest coast, where the 154th Open Championship is now underway at a sunburned Royal Birkdale, considered the best of England’s championship offerings.
“The course is baked out, but it’s fantastic,” Truslow said by phone Tuesday from a United Kingdom dealing with a rare 1-2 punch of summer — both dry and, by their standards, hot (low-80s! Can you imagine?).
His first-round tee time is 11 a.m. Eastern, and he’s paired with Aussie Cameron John and Englishman Sam Bairstow.
Our winter and springtime winds a good prep for links golf
For a guy rather far away from the big-league spotlight, Truslow is playing his third major in the past three years — he qualified for the U.S. Open in 2023 and 2025. He earned his current major championship start through a qualifier down the British coast in Somerset, at Burnham and Berrow Golf Club, where he finished fourth in a field of 72, from which five advanced to the Open.
He got that opportunity in rather humble fashion — by getting inside the top 800 in the official world golf rankings, which exempted him from going through a pre-qualifier. He’s well inside that now — No. 389 — thanks in large part to his first professional win on a “legitimate” tour.
Austen Truslow, shown here at last year’s U.S. Open, is making his third major championship start this week at the Open Championship.
In February, in New Zealand, he won the NZ PGA Championship, which is part of the PGA Tour of Australasia. And he won it on a true links course on the New Zealand coast.
“It’s very much a true links golf course,” Truslow says of the old course with a funny name: Paraparaumu. “It was blowing 30 to 40 the entire week. I had success there and played well at Burnham and Berrow, so I think it suits me. I do like hitting it low, I like flighting irons, like hitting a lot of approach shots that aren’t full shots.”
In the U.S., when you get big winds in a tournament week, the stereotypes suggest the large number of players who grew up in either Texas or Florida are at an advantage. Truslow seems to agree, and as a big wind target at 6-foot-5, he hopes the theory holds.
“I can’t say I was in love with that style of play, but I came over to Ireland two summers ago and played a bunch of courses. The shots that you hit favor my game. Growing up in New Smyrna Beach, you get used to hitting it low.
“Being from Florida, it does help you a lot if you can flight it. Because not only is it windy but the greens are typically soft. When I was growing up, you were gonna get winds at 20-plus miles per hour, especially in February, March and April.”
More road trips ahead, but first, a major opportunity
Truslow entered the Asian Tour break sitting 12th on the tour’s Order of Merit points standings. In seven starts, he’s earned about $150,000, with two-thirds of that coming from a fourth-place finish in Japan.
The season is scheduled to restart in September, but beyond that, there’s now a question mark. The Asian Tour formed a relationship last year with the LIV Tour, which included a large influx of LIV money that has boosted the Asian Tour’s prize purses. With LIV’s future now in flux, Truslow is unsure of what’s to come.
“There are some issues with the tour right now,” he said.
Along with whatever happens in Asia, Truslow’s New Zealand win earned him berths in two prestigious wintertime tournaments Down Under — the Australian PGA Championship in Sydney followed by the Australian Open at historic Kingston Heath in Melbourne.
Through an Asian Tour international points system, he also thinks there’s a good shot he’ll return to the UK in October for the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship, played in and around St. Andrews.
The Scottish tournament is part of the old European Tour, now known as the DP World Tour, which also co-sanctions the two Australia tournaments. So Truslow’s winding path will offer the possibility of more side roads ahead.
“There’s no clear path, but if I do well in those events, it could open some DP World Tour opportunities,” he says.
Same can be said about this week, of course, on one of golf’s biggest stages. He’s keeping such thoughts boiled down to the basics, however.
“I’m just trying to execute,” he says. “Copying Scottie Scheffler’s mindset isn’t easy to do. To bring the mindset he does to every shot, that’s hard to do.
“But at the end of the round, if I can look back and say, ‘OK, over 90-percent of the shots I hit today, I was fully committed to.’ I want to walk into the ball with good intention and hit the swing I was intending when I was behind the ball.”
— Email Ken Willis at ken.willis@news-jrnl.com
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Austen Truslow’s current GPS reading: The 154th Open Championship