Whitt wins 2022 PGA Men's Open Club Championship
Feb. 21—Stewart Whitt has been swinging a golf club since he can remember.
"I would say somewhere around five or six I started to pick it up", he said. "My dad and my two brothers, we all have played for a really long time."
His family has been members of the Canebrake Golf Club since it opened, and he's an Athens guy through and through.
"Grew up in Athens and been here my whole life. Went to Athens High School, and I still live in Athens," Whitt said.
And, if that last name sounds familiar, that's because his grandfather's brother was the founder of Whitt's BBQ. The BBQ joint has expanded, and while his immediate family isn't still in the business, his dad's cousin operates some of the locations in the Decatur area.
Whitt says he gets that question a lot. But, what he's known for around here should be golf considering he has won the Canebrake Club Championship ten times, including last year.
"It's pretty cool to have won it as many times as I have. There's a lot of competition out at Canebrake. There's a really good group of guys that I play with, and we're very competitive. That helps keep the competitive edge, and when you go away from Canebrake you feel prepared," he said. "Micky Wolfe does a great job of running the golf course."
That win sent him back to the PGA National Club Championship on Feb. 15-17. He's represented Canebrake and Athens since the PGA Club Championship's first year after winning the Canebrake championship in 2020. He placed third at the 2020 PGA Club Championship in Pinehurst, North Carolina, earning himself an invite to the 2021 Championship in Palm Springs, California. Now, he's been invited to play the 2023 Championship in Scottsdale, Arizona, after winning this year's tournament at Kiawah Island, South Carolina.
The tournament was played on the Ocean, Turtle Point, and Cougar Point courses on Kiawah where other famous PGA tournaments have been played.
"The Ocean course, the main golf course, it's fantastic. They've hosted a couple of Major championships out there as well as a Ryder Cup, which very few courses have done. It was a treat to be able to go play it," Whitt said.
He said the Ocean course is more of a links style course while the other two are more standard country club style courses. He said they were narrow and had a lot of water and the Ocean course as well brought its own challenges, but even though he had never played on these courses before being familiar with the tournament itself was helpful.
"Each day I felt more and more comfortable with how I was playing, and I think that was probably the key to playing well on Friday, the last day, because I had played the five days prior," he said.
He said the second day of the competition was his worst round as far as the score goes. He ended that round tied for 11th place. He said the last round is when everything started to fall into place for him.
"Started hitting shots a little closer. I obviously didn't make as many putts as I would've liked, but I was able to make enough and have some things go my way towards the back end of the round that kind of kept me in it and allowed me to come out with a win," he said.
He ended that day four under par and with a three-day score of 217 just one over par, but he had no idea.
"There's an app ... now it's a lot easier to know where you stand throughout the day, but I didn't look at all. I don't know why. I just never did, never really felt like I was going to be in the hunt I guess," Whitt said. "Rather than looking at it and trying to figure out where I was — I was playing well. I wanted to keep playing well. I didn't want any distractions from that."
In other tournaments, he said he has looked at the leaderboard and realized he was close and put some pressure on himself that he could've avoided. Golf is a mental game, he said.
"You can really talk yourself into playing well and definitely talk yourself out of playing well just by things that you think are going on — or you hit a bad shot or you get a bad break. It's easy to fall into that trap of 'it's just not my day' or 'woe is me' kind of thing," Whitt said.
He was able to stay positive, he said, because he was in a good group, but he also had a little extra encouragement from his wife who was his caddy. She's been there for him in each of the PGA National Club Championships.
"She was getting more and more involved as the week got on, and obviously the last day playing well it was good to have her there to walk around with. It was fun," he said. "She's always got a job caddying."
People travel from all over the country to play in the Club Championship, and Whitt said great athletes can come from anywhere.
"It really doesn't matter, especially in golf, how small your town is. It's really just about the competition and having things kind of fall into place at the right time, which happened to happen for me last week," Whitt said.
