Almost all of golf’s recent and current elite players were pegged for stardom at a young age.
Tiger, Phil, Rory, Jordan, Rickie, Sergio, Adam and Jason Day were all projected as future standouts in their teens, and Dustin Johnson was barely into his 20s when he was tagged as an emerging star.
Only a handful of the game’s top performers were not identified as sure things from the moment they first walked out on golf’s national or international stage, with one of them (Bubba Watson) taking a while to harness his enormous talent.
The other two most prominent individuals to rise from unheralded young tour pros to hard-earned status as one of golf’s most successful performers are Jim Furyk and Zach Johnson, who have followed entirely different paths from Watson to get where they are today.
Johnson joined Watson as a two-time major champion when he added the recent British Open to his list of 12 career victories that includes the 2007 Masters, putting him even with the slightly more heralded Jordan Spieth in his quest for a career grand slam.
Johnson, who has been a St. Simons Island resident since shortly after his Masters victory in 2007, emerged from a crowded leader board the final day in Augusta to score a come-from-behind victory, matching the low score of the round. He followed a similar path at St. Andrews, beginning the fourth round three shots off the lead before again equaling the best score that day.
This time however, Johnson needed extra holes to capture the championship, defeating Louis Oosthuizen and Marc Leishman in a four-hole playoff. Johnson and Oosthuizen nearly had to continue, but Oosthuizen missed a short birdie putt on the final hole that would have transformed the four-hole, aggregate score playoff into sudden death.
Oosthuizen’s miss ended what had been a stirring final round battle among multiple players on a somewhat anticlimactic note, but did nothing to take away from Johnson’s exceptional final round performance.
Johnson began the day three shots behind co-leaders Oosthuizen, Day and amateur Paul Dunne, but surged to the top of the leader board with seven birdies on his first 12 holes. He quickly lost the outright lead with a bogey at the 13th, and gave up a share of first place when he bogeyed the brutally difficult Road Hole 17th.
But Johnson had wielded a hot putter throughout the final round, and rolled in a lengthy birdie attempt at the 18th to post 15-under. Leishman bogeyed the 16th to fall back into a tie with Johnson, and Spieth bogeyed the 17th to lose his share of the lead. Leishman managed a par at the 17th but missed his birdie try at 18 for the win, with Oosthuizen making it a three-way playoff when he birdied the 18th.
Both Spieth and Day had birdie tries at the 18th to get into the playoff, but neither could convert difficult putts. The miss cost Spieth a shot at a third straight major title, while Day settled for his 12th straight par to end his final round and another close call in a major championship.
Johnson quickly took control of the playoff when he birdied the first two holes, giving him nine birdies on the day. All three players bogeyed 17, the third extra hole, with Johnson matching Oosthuizen’s par on 18th to win the playoff by one shot with a 1-under total.
The previous week in the John Deere Classic, played near Johnson’s home town of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Johnson had a putt on the 72nd hole to get into a three-way playoff that included Spieth, but missed to finish one shot back.
With the British Open championship on the line, Johnson did not miss on the 72nd hole this time, and his demonstrative reaction to the putt going in was evidence of how much it meant to him.
“There was emotion there,” he said in his post-round interview. “Clearly because it was the 72nd hole and I had a good round going. That was part of it. I missed one on 18 last week, which was frustrating because I hit a good putt.”
Johnson hit a lot of good putts the final day, leading the field with just 26 putts on St. Andrews’ massive greens. He began his birdie run with a putt of some 25 feet on the second hole, and holed one from off the green at the fourth. After missing from relatively close range for eagle at 5 and birdie at 6, Johnson birdied four of the next six holes, combining some superb tee-to-green play with his torrid putting.
“I hit good shots. I had opportunities and I actually made some putts.”
After making the trip from the Quad Cities area to Scotland after the John Deere Classic along with Spieth and other players who competed in that tournament, Johnson got off to a hot start in the opening round with four birdies on his first six holes. He was 6-under after 10, and after the same bogey-birdie finish he would record three days later, Johnson had a 66, one behind Dustin Johnson’s 65.
Following a 71 the next day, Zach trailed Dustin by three after the weather-delayed conclusion of the second round, with Zach getting all of Saturday off. He began the third round with 13 consecutive pars, but birdied three of his last five holes for a 70 to stay within three of the leaders.
“I managed to make some birdies coming in, which was crucial just to get my round under par. It was bunched coming into today. I felt like if I can get a little bit of momentum early on in the day, then who knows what’s going to happen. And then I’m seven-under through twelve.”
Johnson now has 12 wins in his 12 seasons on the PGA Tour, winning at least once in nine seasons, including eight of the last nine. His first three PGA Tour victories came in Georgia, beginning with the 2004 BellSouth Classic at TPC Sugarloaf during his rookie season. He won again at Sugarloaf three years later following his Masters triumph, and since then has won the Texas Open and Colonial Invitational twice each, and has two wins in Hawaii including the 2014 Tournament of Champions.
The Iowa native scored an emotional victory in the John Deere Classic in 2012, and followed with a win in the BMW Championship, one of the FedExCup Playoffs events, the next year.
Johnson’s career PGA Tour earnings are approaching $40 million, a remarkable achievement for someone who spent his early years as a pro scraping out a living at the mini-tour level.
From the beginning of his career, Johnson has had to gradually work his way up golf’s ladder. He wanted to play at the University of Iowa, not exactly a collegiate golf powerhouse, but had to settle for Drake, a lesser Division I program in the state.
Johnson turned pro in 1998 after graduating from Drake, and toiled in golf’s minor leagues for several years before making it to the PGA Tour in 2004. He won three times in two years on the Prairie Tour and four times in two years on the Hooters Tour, including victories in three consecutive events in 2001 en route to Player of the Year honors.
In 2000, Johnson made it to the Buy.com (now Web.com) Tour, but missed his first six cuts and barely cracked the top 175 on the money list, dropping back from Class AAA to the Class AA Hooters Tour for the next two years. He began to make his name there, enjoying a breakout season in 2001, and made his first splash at the national level the next year, again in Georgia.
Johnson played his way into the 2002 BellSouth Classic in a Monday qualifier, and came to the 72nd hole with a shot at a top-10 finish before ending up in a tie for 17th. Later that year, he again earned status on the Buy.com Tour, which was re-named the Nationwide Tour in 2003.
This time, Johnson was more than ready to compete at the Class AAA level, and responded with one of the best seasons in the 25-year history of the PGA Tour’s developmental circuit.
Johnson placed third, first and fourth in his first three starts of the season and went on to lead the tour in earnings with two wins, four runner-up finishes (including three in consecutive weeks) and a trio of third place showings. He made almost $500,000, a tour record that stood for a number of years, and quickly established himself as a PGA Tour rookie, winning the BellSouth Classic in his ninth start in 2004.
In the first eight seasons of the FedExCup, Johnson has been among the final top 10 three times and the top 20 three other times. His British Open title moved him up to sixth this year, and was his eighth top 10 of the season, including a T9 in the Masters.
Johnson is virtually assured a spot in this year’s Tour Championship at East Lake, where he holds the course and tournament record with a 60 in 2007.
Off the course, Johnson is known for his charitable work in his home town of Cedar Rapids, and played a key role in the creation of the PGA Tour event in his adopted home town of St. Simons Island. McGladrey, one of Johnson’s sponsors, is the tournament’s title sponsor.