From Loomis to the Leaderboard

This article originally appeared in the March issue of NCGA Golf Magazine  

Austin Smotherman’s journey to the PGA has not always been a straight line but he’s still living his dream.
By Adam Schupak

Hanging in the pro shop of the Haggin Oaks Golf Complex is a recent addition. It is the signed caddie bib from The American Express PGA Tour event in Palm Springs of the local boy who made good. That’s where Austin Smotherman met with junior golfers from the Sacramento municipal courses and told them that if they work hard, they too could some day make their dreams come true. 

Smotherman, a 32-year-old pro, cut his teeth at Haggin Oaks and Ancil Hoffman and grew up playing all over Northern California and the state against the likes of Cameron Champ, John Catlin and Bryson DeChambeau, who also graduated through the ranks to make it on to the world stage. Having regained his PGA Tour status for this season and recently enjoyed his best result, a T-2 at the Cognizant Classic in the Palm Beaches, Smotherman is reaching new heights, but knows his work is far from over.

“The journey is still the journey,” Smotherman said.

That journey started long ago in Loomis, where golf clubs were ever present around the family house as well as at his grandfather’s place in Lincoln. Smotherman's first clubs as a kid was a set of plastic Snoopy irons. Eventually, his grandpa cut a Sam Snead 7-iron blade and persimmon head 5-wood down to size and used duct tape and electrical tape for grips. Smotherman still counts both as treasured possessions tucked away at his mom’s house. His earliest golf memory is hitting foam balls in his front yard with his dad. He was five years old when he hit one onto the roof of their one-story house, and he eventually hit a ball over it and into the backyard. Before long, he joined Little Linkers, a developmental skill building program designed to help kids develop their athleticism and learn the game, at Haggin Oaks. “That was my first real consistent go and practice with a junior group activity,” Smotherman recalled.

Mostly a self-taught player, he estimates he had fewer than 10 lessons by his junior year of high school. During those formative years, he worked as a cart boy at Twelve Bridges (now Catta Verdera Country Club in Lincoln) to earn practice privileges. He became good enough to start playing junior tournaments, and was 12 when he first noticed Bryson wearing his trademark flat Ben Hogan-style Kangol cap. That wasn’t the only thing that made Bryson stand out from the crowd.

“He was changing out weights and calibrating the speed of his Edel putter on the greens, and I was over there just trying to put one foot in front of the other,” Smotherman recalled. “He's over here doing his thing even at that age. 

“We didn't really become super-friendly until we started getting on some of the same Northern California teams. That would probably have been more 14-15. We both qualified for a couple U.S. Junior Amateurs and would travel together as part of the NCGA group, do dinners off site. There was always a lot of respect between us as competitors.”

They famously dueled against each other at the 2011 California State Junior Amateur, beating DeChambeau by one stroke with an 18th hole birdie, cementing his reputation as a standout Sacramento-area talent. That year, Smotherman finished fourth in the California Interscholastic Federation High School State Championship and runner-up in the Big “I” National Championship, the third-oldest junior tournament in the country. SMU men’s golf coach Josh Gregory walked that final round of the Cal Am at The Country Club at Soboba Springs with Bryson, his star recruit, but by the end of the round he was ready to offer Smotherman a scholarship, too.  
“Two weeks later, I was having an official visit and six months later, I was starting college golf at SMU, and Bryson and I had become teammates,” Smotherman said.

The bond with Bryson grew in college – they teamed together in the inaugural U.S. Amateur Four-Ball at The Olympic Club – and when Smotherman graduated he and his wife, Jesse, got a townhouse in Dallas, and Bryson became their tenant.

“It was just a glorified storage unit for him where he knew everything was going to be safe because he was hardly ever there, and it was a way for him to help us out with paying some rent,” Smotherman said. “He knew I wasn't necessarily rolling in the dough.”

That first summer out of college, Smotherman was playing state opens and the Adams mini tour. He was squeaking by but as a measure of his belief in Smotherman, Bryson wrote a check for $5,200 to pay his entry fee into PGA Tour Q-School. Smotherman shot a bogey-free final-round 5-under 67 with a birdie at the last and was T-8 when he finished. The top 19 and ties would advance to the final stage and lock up at least Korn Ferry Tour status. Smotherman drove home, sat on his couch, but while enjoying a late lunch, watched in horror as he tumbled to T-21. He ended up playing two seasons on PGA Tour Latinoamerica, the equivalent of AA Minor-League baseball, but it turned out to be the best thing for his development not just as a golfer but as a person. 

“Going to South America was an incredible experience,” said Smotherman, who won the 2018 Mexican Open. “If you have the opportunity and that's where your journey takes you, I always tell guys to lean into it.”

Next, he’d experience more seasoning on the Korn Ferry Tour in 2019, where his best friend from high school and groomsman in his wedding, Eric Ash, kept a promise they had made to each other and caddied for him.

“It was a cool full circle,” said Smotherman, who won for the first time on that circuit at the 2021 Simmons Bank Open. “When we were in high school, I asked him, ‘When I first make it on tour, would you ever consider caddying?’ He dropped everything he was doing at the time and we just hit the road and spent the next 24 out of 28 weeks together and grinded our butts off.”

Smotherman earned his PGA Tour card by finishing 25th on the 2020-21 Korn Ferry Tour money list, earning the final card available. But keeping it would prove tougher than he imagined. In 2022, he needed to make the cut at the Wyndham Championship, the final regular season event to qualify for the FedEx Cup playoffs. Play was suspended due to darkness, and he had to sleep on it overnight. He missed a birdie putt and then made double bogey to fall short. 

“I took it as, Hey, there's, there's a bigger plan here. We're going to come back. We're not playing seasons to just keep our card. We're going to build up to where these things are just an afterthought,” he said.

He played the following season with conditional status and then had to return to the Korn Ferry Tour last season as a savvy 30-year-old veteran. He won twice to return to the PGA Tour, notched a T-8 at The American Express in January and held the 54-hole lead at the Cognizant Classic in late February. While he didn’t get that elusive first win, settling for a runner-up finish, he proved that his game now is built to last. His version of success may have taken longer to achieve but his life is full of so much more than trophies. 

“Comparison is kind of a thief of joy. I got to marry my high school sweetheart. We got to travel. We got to support each other. We got to do all these things. And now we're raising a family, about to have our third kid,” said the father of daughters Adeline and Penelope.

As he hits what typically are the peak years for a tour pro, Smotherman has earned wisdom beyond his years.  

“I think it's understanding right now that the golf for me is becoming less of who I am and more of what I do,” he said. “Becoming a father and raising a family has made me realize just how you can do both and not sacrifice one or the other.” 

What has endured is the bond that was formed nearly two decades ago with Bryson. While they play on different tours and don’t see each other quite as much as they might otherwise have imagined when they were kids, both still live in Dallas and get together enough that Bryson has become an unofficial uncle to his girls.
 
“Occasionally, we'll throw on some of the LIV Tour on TV just to be able to have Bryson up there because they just know him as Uncle B,” Smotherman said. “Literally, we just go, ‘There's Uncle B on TV,’ or a commercial of his pops on, like, ‘Oh, there's Uncle B.’ And then it was kind of a cool full circle for me to get some TV time in the coverage and post-round highlights, and my wife sent me videos of my girls looking up there and just saying, ‘Oh, hey, there's Dada.’ That was pretty cool getting those videos from my living room.”