Wyndham Clark at Silverado—for himself and the team
NAPA — Wyndham Clark was playing ping pong in a garage when notified he had won the AT&T, which is a tournament of golf, not table tennis. It was February at Pebble Beach, and you’ve heard this before, officials decided to cancel the already rescheduled fourth round. Clark, of course, received the $3.6 million winner’s check, but something was missing.
“I would obviously would have gone back and played the fourth round and had the nerves and excitement that you do in the final round,” said Clark Wednesday. “And to come down 18 and hopefully with a lead and to win.”
Now it is September, a week and some seven months and roughly 150 miles north of Pebble Beach. Clark is back in Northern California at Silverado where starting Thursday he’ll be in the new Procore tournament. New in name, if not location.
This is a restart of sorts of the PGA Tour, using the term restart loosely. The Tour Championship was two weeks ago, there was a week off, and now here we go again, which is fine for Clark. He wants to improve his own game, and he wants to get ready for the Presidents Cup matches in two weeks at Montreal. Clark is 30 and has a major championship, the 2023 U.S. Open, yet he sounds like a kid just out of college when it comes to the way he approaches the game.
“I stopped trying to win and went out and played as well as I could,” he said.
The philosophy has been around for a long time, concentrating on the swing rather than the score. If you hit the ball properly and get a few putts in the hole you will succeed to a point.
He spoke of the consistency of Tiger Woods and currently Scottie Scheffler.
“That’s what you want,” he said, “to be there at the time and give yourself a chance to win.”
Golf is the most individual of sports. You are alone on a course aside from a caddy. That’s why so many of the pros, including Clark, enjoy the team competition such as the Ryder Cup or Presidents Cup.
“It’s amazing,” said Clark. “I feel like when you kind of get into that inner circle with some of the top players in the world, and this is all just coming from my perspective, I feel like it helps you stay in that circle because you’re around—iron sharpens iron, so when you’re around these great players, you feed off of their confidence and the things that they do and you pick up little things here and there that help your game.”
As does playing Silverado, says Clark.
“But the golf course itself presents challenges off the tee,” he said. “It’s very narrow and it usually gets very firm and you just end up having some kind of really cool awkward shots into greens that makes it really fun. I’ve always really enjoyed this golf course.”
Probably more than ping pong in a garage.