A-List actor joins golf fans at Oak Hill for PGA Championship

Thousands of golf fans filled the Oak Hill galleries Sunday to watch Brooks Koepka win the 2023 PGA Championship and cheer Michael Block — especially after his amazing hole-in-one on 15.

Among them was actor William Fichtner, who stopped to take photos with a few fans of his own, including Buffalo Bills reporter and WGR 550 host Sal Capaccio.

Even if you don’t recognize Fichtner’s name, you know his face, because he’s one of Hollywood’s most prolific character actors.

He played Allison Janney’s fiancé Adam Janikowski on the CBS sitcom Mom, producer Phil Yagoda on HBO’s Entourage and FBI special agent Alexander Mahone on Fox’s Prison Break.

Roles in The Perfect Storm, Go, Armageddon, Black Hawk Down, The Dark Knight and Contact opposite Jodie Foster — in town this week to accept the George Eastman Award — represent a mere fraction of his big-screen work.

And if not for enrolling at SUNY Brockport, he might never have made the leap to acting.

Raised in Cheektowaga, Fichtner earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from the school in 1978. But an acting improv class he took there to fulfill a fine arts requirement “changed my entire existence,” he said while speaking at the college in 2011.

“What happened was somewhere inside myself, with the help of really incredible people that were teaching me and guiding me and showing me things and telling me things that I knew nothing about … my world did change,” he said. “It changed here. It didn’t matter what my degree was in. I walked out of Brockport ready for something.”

After graduating, he moved to New York City, where he trained in theater and “became an extremely good waiter and a really good bartender,” he said.

What he actually did, though, was “I set myself up to be open to let new things into my life.”

It took years for him to achieve his goal of landing his first movie role, which finally came at 36, and he’s been going strong ever since.

Fichtner is visiting the area for much of the month with his wife, Kym, the Buffalo News reported.

Besides picking up their son from college in Syracuse (where Fichtner showed up at a restaurant May 10), getting together with high school friends and dropping by the PGA, he attended a memorial service for the victims of the May 14, 2022, mass shooting at a Tops store on Buffalo’s east side, WIVB-TV reported.

“This is my town, those are my people,” he told the station. “I wanted to be back here, I wanted to be with Mayor Brown and remember.”

Reporter Marcia Greenwood covers general assignments. Send story tips to mgreenwo@rocheste.gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @MarciaGreenwood.

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: William Fichtner joins golf fans at Oak Hill for PGA Championship