Break gives 18-year-old pro golfer Akshay Bhatia a chance to regroup, refresh, retool
At the moment, Akshay Bhatia isn’t unlike any other 18-year-old. At loose ends. Playing a lot of golf when the sun is up. Watching Netflix at home in Wake Forest when it isn’t. It’s the one place he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be very often when he made his ambitious leap to professional golf last fall.
For longtime pros, this break might be a welcome time to relax with their families and take a deep breath. When the coronavirus derailed golf along with everything else, Bhatia was just getting started. And he’s not the kind of teen who sits around waiting for things to happen. His impatience to move ahead in his golf career is what got him so far, so fast.
Now there’s nowhere to go but home.
“I’m trying to make my way to the PGA Tour and become the best golfer in the world,” Bhatia said. “But this could be a blessing in disguise. I think I’m coming out of this a better person right now than just a golfer. Sitting back, learning some things with my family, understanding that rest is OK because I don’t have to prep for anything. That’s hard for me.”
It’s an unexpected moment to regroup in a historic season that didn’t exactly start out how Bhatia had envisioned. When Bhatia decided to skip college and head directly to the PGA Tour, he was counting on using his limited number of sponsor’s exemptions — the world’s former No. 1 ranked junior has no shortage of cachet — to make a few cuts, get on the money list and get a head-start on his pro career.
This was an audacious plan, a path successfully followed by few. Kevin Na and Tony Finau have done it, but Raleigh’s Ty Tryon tried it 20 years ago at 16 and became a footnote, and even Tiger Woods spent two years at Stanford. Bhatia, who had gone as far as he figured he could go in amateur golf, was ready to jump into the deep end of the pool — with an endorsement deal with Callaway in his pocket.
Starting in September, he played in five PGA Tour events before his 18th birthday in January, going from Mississippi to California to Nevada in consecutive weeks of September and October, then Georgia in November, California in January. He missed the cut in all of them.
In the middle of that, he went through Q School, trying to earn a spot on the second-tier Korn Ferry Tour. He failed to advance out of the penultimate stage. And he criss-crossed the country to Monday qualify for a few PGA Tour events, also without success.
“It’s not like I was missing the cut by 10 or whatever, that I wasn’t even close to making the cut,” Bhatia said. “I was playing pretty good golf. When you put a 17-year-old at the highest stage, you never know what to expect. I talked to so many people on my team about it, my coaches and everything, and it would have been great if I got my tour card right away or I would have won.
“But there are so many players who didn’t really learn that early in their career, if they won right away and had early success and high expectations, and then it kind of plateaus a little bit. At the end of the day, if I look back at it, I played a lot of really good holes. You’re only going to learn by failing. If it’s going to be like this for a year or two more, then something clicks and I’ve gone through the worst of the worst, I won’t mind it hopefully in 10 years. I’ll look back at it as the best five missed cuts I’ve ever played.”
Saving his final two Tour exemptions this season for the home-state Wells Fargo in May and the Wyndham in August, he was onto plan B. He finished in the top-40 at qualifying for Canada’s Mackenzie Tour in the first week of March, earning conditional status on that mini-tour starting in May, and was ready to leave for New Delhi to play on an exemption in the Hero Indian Open when everything shut down.
So now he’s back at Wakefield Plantation, his rookie season unexpectedly interrupted, trying to stay sharp by playing with local pros and college players while doing some swing tune-ups with Chase Duncan, an assistant pro at N.C. State’s Lonnie Poole Golf Course.
And while it isn’t exactly ideal, maybe it’s not the worst thing that could have happened.
With his career earnings at $0 in seven months as a professional, it’s a chance to regroup mentally and retool physically, taking a step back to polish his game and his mind at a time when he’d normally be traveling and grinding, week after week. It’s not something he very often has had time to do.
“This offseason, you can call it, I’ve been gaining a lot of clubhead speed, ballspeed,” Bhatia said. “Hitting way more different shots now. It’s fun. I can do it and not sweat if I hit a bad shot or not. I’m playing for whatever, against my friends. It’s been really good. I’m definitely gaining a lot more confidence as time is going on.”
In some ways, Bhatia has been grinding for years. Top junior players can play national schedules that aren’t far behind top pros, and he was home-schooled around his golf commitments, so there’s no break there. As much as Bhatia loves to compete, and will again soon and for many years ahead, it’s been a long time since he had a chance to get out and play with no crowds, no prize money, no pressure.
That will return soon enough. For now, it’s the first time in years he can swing a club merely for the love of the game.
This story was originally published April 27, 2020 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Break gives 18-year-old pro golfer Akshay Bhatia a chance to regroup, refresh, retool."
