Back in 2024, Chris Gotterup started his rookie season in Honolulu, just not by playing the Sony Open. Instead, Gotterup was among several Korn Ferry Tour graduates who had been unexpectedly buried on the alternate list for the tournament yet still mandated to attend the PGA Tour\u2019s rookie orientation at the Royal Hawaiian Resort on Waikiki Beach. With no time to practice for the Monday qualifier, Gotterup withdrew from that and flew home.<\/p>\n
What a difference two years can make.<\/p>\n
Gotterup will crack the top 20 in the Official World Golf Ranking for the first time on Monday, climbing to No. 17 on the heels of Sunday\u2019s two-shot Sony Open victory, his third in as many years. He\u2019s unquestionably, at age 26, one of the sport\u2019s rising stars, no longer just a burly masher who broke out as the NCAA player of the year his graduate season at Oklahoma but so far had been an all-or-nothing tour pro.<\/p>\n
Two years ago, Gotterup missed over half his cuts (13 of 25) but kept his card thanks to an opposite-event win in Myrtle Beach. Last season, Gotterup kicked off his year at The Sentry, but he beat only 12 guys there before missing the Sony cut to begin a run of seven missed weekends in nine events. But again, Gotterup won, at the Genesis Scottish Open, and after not posting a top-10 finish prior to that, he rattled off a third at The Open and T-10 at the 3M to advance to the BMW Championship and secure spots in all the signature events this year.<\/p>\n
Though he earned an invite to Tiger Woods\u2019 Hero World Challenge, was top 30 in the world at year\u2019s end and was in line to join TGL as a reserve, Gotterup was realistic. In his mind, he hadn\u2019t fully arrived, still too feast or famine for his liking.<\/p>\n
\u201cI like to think I\u2019m a good listener of my productive criticism from my team,\u201d Gotterup said. \u201cWe sat down a did a bunch of stats stuff at the end of the year. There were a couple things that stood out.\u201d<\/p>\n
1. He lost a \u201csevere amount\u201d of strokes from 100 to 150 yards.<\/p>\n
2. He didn\u2019t make nearly enough putts from 9 to 20 feet.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s all I really practiced,\u201d Gotterup said of his offseason work, which came in his new home state of Florida, where he moved to late last year from Oklahoma. (Gotterup is originally from New Jersey.)<\/p>\n
\u201cThis week,\u201d he added, \u201cI feel like everything I practiced, I had those numbers and those putts \u2026 and I felt a little more confident in what I was doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
While Gotterup\u2019s approach play wasn\u2019t necessarily sharp this week, he only carded three bogeys with a wedge in hand, none on Sunday. Last year at Sony, he had two in 36 holes. On the greens this weekend, Gotterup converted six birdie putts in the focus range, plus two from even longer on the back nine Sunday.<\/p>\n
Add further improvement to his already top-10 game off the tee \u2013 he led the Sony field in that facet, gaining over four strokes \u2013 and Gotterup will feast much more often.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe more you play, the more comfortable you are, the more you don\u2019t feel like you have to press and grind all the time,\u201d Gotterup said. \u201cYou just get comfortable with being out here, and it\u2019s a marathon of a season and all this stuff. I think that is a much more freeing feeling than being like, I got to play well this week, and it\u2019s the first week. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhere it\u2019s like now, all right let\u2019s see what happens.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back in 2024, Chris Gotterup started his rookie season in Honolulu, just not by playing the Sony Open.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":417062,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-417061","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-golf","9":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417061\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/417062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}