I was not an athletically gifted kid. Nothing ever clicked easily when I tried a sport, including golf. We lived on London Downs, a public golf course in Virginia, and every evening when my dad got home from work, we\u2019d walk out and play a few holes. I didn\u2019t care about being great, I just wanted to spend time with him. As I got older and entered tournaments, that changed. I fell in love with golf and competing and knew I wanted to play professionally.<\/p>\n
There weren\u2019t many kids where I played, so we\u2019d drive pretty far for tournaments. I\u2019d play OK but rarely win. That always left me feeling motivated. My dad is a chiropractor with an engineering background, so he really likes stats. He\u2019d look up what the tour guys were doing and make up specific short-game drills that he believed mirrored their levels.<\/p>\n
I went to Oklahoma State but was far from the best player on the team. I overlapped with Wyndham Clark, Viktor Hovland, Matthew Wolff and Austin Eckroat. I saw playing up as a catalyst for improvement. Some matches got heated. Once against Hovy, our group got so intense that we didn\u2019t eat dinner together afterwards. The next day we were all great friends again. It was a great experience. My first year, I was in and out of the lineup. My last three years, I didn\u2019t miss a tournament.<\/p>\n
After graduation, I was living in Viktor\u2019s house when his career took off quickly. Mine started by not getting through Korn Ferry Q School. I got status on the Asian Tour but that shut down during the pandemic. I went back to Oklahoma and suddenly started slicing my driver\u2014bad. I was hitting it 100 yards right. I\u2019d make the turn, compensate, and hit an 80-yard hook. It really freaked me out, and that fear crept into the rest of my game. Putting, my left hand would start shaking uncontrollably. I was literally shooting in the 100s.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d seen guys go through the yips. They\u2019d take a month off, hoping to come back and somehow be normal again. None ever made it to the tour, so I decided to keep playing. I teed it up every day. I\u2019d shoot 102 and hope that tomorrow would be a 98. Some coaches gave me advice, and other friends didn\u2019t know what to say. My swing videos looked pretty good, making it even more baffling. Friends from college heard I was struggling and came to play with me.<\/p>\n
The chaos of my game seeped into my mind. I\u2019d always been mentally very stable, was never a wild kid, but I\u2019d lost control. I was scared and confused and couldn\u2019t stop feeling that way. I listened to podcasts about psychology and self-help. I stopped entering mini tour events, afraid of what might happen. This was my game during 2021.<\/p>\n
I thought I had to quit. I didn\u2019t have any money, I didn\u2019t have any status, and most importantly, I didn\u2019t have any game. Then I talked to one more coach, Denny Lucas in Palm Beach Gardens. He told me to weaken my grip, which I thought was insane because I was slicing it so hard. We also took the orthotics out of my shoes, so I could feel the ground better. I was also rotating too hard, so we worked on that, too.<\/p>\n
After a few months, I was at least keeping the ball on the golf course. I played in mini tour events again. I was chipping cross-handed to get out of my head. This was the spring of 2023, my wife was pregnant, and we made a deal that if she went into labor, I\u2019d leave no matter where I was and be there for her and our baby. Right around this time I also bought a long putter off the rack. Five days after the purchase, I Monday-qualified for the Korn Ferry event in Wichita by making a 30-footer in a playoff. I made the cut and shot 64-63 on the weekend.<\/p>\n
I was on the Korn Ferry Tour and had locked in some status. If I could finish in the top five in the finals, I\u2019d get my PGA Tour card for 2024. A rules official came up to me during the first round. My wife was in labor, five weeks early. The decision had already been made. My playing partners were shocked when I walked off. I got on a plane and was there for the birth of our first son, and I don\u2019t regret it.<\/p>\n
I kept at it on the Korn Ferry Tour and in 2025 finished 11th on the season-long points list to earn my PGA Tour card. I went through something brutal and confusing to get here, and I came out on the other side with my game and my mind intact. I still don\u2019t understand why things happened the way they did. Now I\u2019m competing against the best players in the world every week. It\u2019s crazy that not long ago I was shooting in the 100s. I survived it, and that makes me confident that I can persevere.\u00a0\u2014With Keely Levins<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I was not an athletically gifted kid. Nothing ever clicked easily when I tried a sport, including golf.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30136,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[44,2608,589,588,82,2035,424,1604,12113],"class_list":["post-30135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-golf","tag-golf-history","tag-magazine","tag-plus","tag-story","tag-viktor-hovland","tag-wyndham-clark","tag-zach-bauchou","tag-zach-bauchous-journey-from-shooting-in-the-100s-to-tour-pro"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}