PGA Tour rookie Mackenzie Hughes sees ways to keep improving
On a 38-degree November morning at Sea Island Golf Club in southeast Georgia, Mackenzie Hughes stood just off the 17th green wondering if his life was about to change once again at the RSM Classic.
Less than four months earlier, he was struggling on the Web.com Tour and thinking his golf season was headed to Q-School, but a tie for fifth in the LECOM Health Challenge in New York ignited a wondrous change to the arc of his career. A few weeks later he won his first event on the developmental tour at the Price Cutter Charity Championship in Missouri. A month later he locked up his PGA Tour card at the Albertsons Boise Open in Idaho.
A couple rounds paired with Phil Mickelson in the Safeway Open in California in his first start as a PGA Tour member proved educational and pivotal, and the tie for 13th proved profitable.
Six days later he married longtime girlfriend Jenna Shaw.
So riding his momentum, Hughes got into contention — and then into a five-man playoff — at Sea Island in the last tournament of the fall portion of the 2016-17 season. And after canning a 15-footer from off the green for par on the second hole of the playoff, he waited to see if the other survivors would force a third playoff hole. None did and Hughes exhaled in celebration of his first Tour victory.
Now he’s in Maui — where it's 40 degrees warmer — for the SBS Tournament of Champions at the Plantation Course in Kapalua, where 32 winners from last year will reignite the 2016-17 season on Thursday.
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“I am the first guy to recognize how things turned around and changed for me, but I guess for me it was something I always thought I could do,” Hughes, 26, said of his first Tour title. “I always thought I’d get to the PGA Tour but just wasn’t sure when. Obviously it happened much faster than I hoped.
“Coming from the LECOM Health Challenge to where I am today, it’s very humbling and very surreal still.”
Since he left Sea Island, Hughes didn’t play much golf. He honeymooned in Thailand and received an invitation to play in the Masters. And he relished the much-needed down time, which allowed him to think about the changes coming up in 2017, like trips to Hawaii, Augusta, The Players Championship, World Golf Championships events and the PGA Championship.
It’s a long way from the 10-year-old boy in Canada who hung a picture of a fist-pumping Tiger Woods during his epic win against Ernie Els in Kapalua in the 2000 Tournament of Champions (then the Mercedes Championship).
“I was still just playing golf for fun, but I remember watching that and thinking how cool it was to watch them go head to head,” Hughes said.
So while he’s on his second honeymoon this week — “My wife is not disappointed, I’ll tell you that. She doesn’t mind spending a week in Hawaii,” Hughes said — and has job security through 2019, the Tour rookie knows he has work to do as he gets set to face the best players in the world on the game’s biggest stages.
“If I finish second at Sea Island I’d still be fighting for my card,” Hughes said. “Knowing I have the job security is something you can’t put a price tag on. … I’ve had five weeks to let the win sink in, enjoy it, and then put it behind me. It’s time to get ready for the next tournament.
“I know I won at Sea Island, but I want to win majors, and to win majors you have to beat the likes of Jason Day and Rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth and Dustin Johnson, so the level you have to get your game to is so much higher. But I know there is still so much left in the tank to work on. There are always so many things to improve on. I like to keep my goals high so you work hard to achieve them.”