The gumption of Sam Bennett, the Masters most shocking contender

May 2024 · 11 minute read

AUGUSTA, Ga. — Sam Bennett is not a petrified amateur. Amer-ter, he’d say in his Texas twang. He thinks he’s prepared. He thinks he’s experienced. He thinks his golf is good enough to beat anyone when it’s on. He’s the kind of guy that noticed you weren’t expecting much from him, the kind who’s seen tougher things than these greens or these Masters crowds and will tell you about it.

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You’re not even sure he’s that young as he struts around Augusta National, as he acts like playing partner Scottie Scheffler is just another peer, as he tucks his hat down low and just his mustache and chin hair poke out.

Then he takes off the hat as he walks up the 18th green and the southern boy bangs pop out. The facial features become a little clearer and his slight 165-pound frame becomes more apparent and you realize this is a young-as-hell amateur in second place at the Masters. This should not be happening.

He’s already the people’s champ by now. They’ve learned his story. They know this previously foreign name posted on the leaderboard with the (a) next to it, the Texas A&M athlete who won the 2022 U.S. Amateur to earn this spot. Now they get to see it, and the gallery around the 18th green rises to their feet for one of the louder standing ovations of the day.

Then Bennett turns and looks over his right shoulder and sees the large leaderboard. There’s his name with red numbers all the way down the line.

OK, maybe he didn’t expect this.

“I wasn’t looking where I was at,” Bennett said. “I was just kind of soaking it all in I guess.”

Sam Bennett is not his tragedy. That’s part of him. Damn right it is. But it’s not all of him. He loves his late father, Mark, and he gets it. He understands it’s an interesting story and that we all heard about the tattoo — the one on his left forearm with the words “DON’T WAIT TO DO SOMETHING” marking his father’s last words. He knows we all want to write stories about the shocking amateur overcoming adversity, and he’s told it so many times. He’s talked about it at past tournaments. He’s done the big feature with the Golf Channel.

But when Bennett was asked following his opening round 68 at Augusta National about Mark’s death in 2021 after an eight-year fight with Alzheimer’s, he didn’t bite. Not this time.

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“I think I’ve talked about that enough.”

Grief doesn’t stop when you keep living. It comes back in all the little moments you don’t expect. It comes back in the ones you do, like when playing at The Masters and not being able to share it with your father. The tattoo lives on his forearm already, so it’s with him on every shot. But grief also doesn’t need to be in the first line of your bio. It doesn’t need to become the fundamental narrative during the most exciting week of your life.

This week is about Sam Bennett, and maybe just this once he wants to enjoy it.

“I want to start talking about golf, and you know, I’m more than what’s happened to me and what I’ve been through,” he said. “So it comes up a lot, and I’m ready for it to stop coming up quite as much.”

Sam Bennett is not the amateur you were talking about on Wednesday. He knows it. He remembers it. He’s not the marketable face of the next generation, or at least he wasn’t before this week. He’s not the one who played practice rounds with Rory McIlroy, Max Homa and Justin Thomas.

No, that was Vanderbilt’s Gordon Sargent, the exciting bomber who every media outlet is getting in on as early as possible. Then there’s Sweden’s Ludvig Aberg who finished T24 at the Arnold Palmer Invitational and made the cut at Valspar.

Sam Bennett is now in second place. Only two other amateurs have reached this level at some point during a Masters Tournament. #themasters pic.twitter.com/8vqsRj8RGY

— The Masters (@TheMasters) April 7, 2023

“I don’t care who I play with,” Bennett said. “I’ve seen (Sargent) play. I’ve got my work done. That’s all that matters.”

So who actually is Bennett? He’s a 23-year-old Aggie who came back for a fifth year because he wasn’t ready. He’s somebody who didn’t really succeed in amateur competitions, at one point saying he preferred college golf to amateur golf. But under Texas A&M coach Brian Kortan, Bennett was named SEC Golfer of the Year in 2022. He went to the 2022 U.S. Amateur Championship at Ridgewood Country Club far from the biggest name. Even in the finals, the crowd was firmly on the side of Georgia Southern’s Ben Carr.

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“Everybody was yelling ‘Ben,’ and I was like, ‘This is exactly what I want,’” Bennett said then. “Just to play and try to hush the crowd a little bit.”

And maybe the growing chip on his shoulder is a little contrived. He is the reigning U.S. Amateur champ after all. He was the one paired with Homa and Scheffler this week. But this is also how somebody like Bennett gets here. By always believing he has something to prove.

Kortan laughed when asked where this trait comes from, saying “You’re clearly not the smallest guy in the room.” That’s an insecurity and drive they share. The story goes that the first time Kortan watched Bennett while recruiting him, Bennett was carrying his own clubs in 100 degree weather with a boot on one foot because of a sprained ankle while playing a junior tournament. So when Bennett gets compared to other golfers, that need to belong doesn’t just go away.

“Yeah, I don’t hit it far like Sargent,” he said Friday. “I don’t have 190 ball speed. I don’t have a pretty swing like some of the other amateurs. It’s golf, not a golf swing.”

Sam Bennett is not interested in a golf lesson. He’s not interested in your thoughts on his swing. Or his pace of play. He’s heard all that before. He’s been told his back isn’t going to hold up because of style, and he rolls his eyes at it.

It is a different swing. It has a whipping upper body motion with his head tilted to stay low through impact, putting much of the torque in that upper body.

Bennett’s claim to fame is he’s never had a golf lesson. That’s not entirely true. He had one when he was in middle school.

It didn’t take.

Bennett just kind of does things how he wants. He’s gotten to this point by an odd mix of irrational confidence and the constant fight against internal doubt. Like when he won the U.S. Amateur, a large portion of the online discourse centered around his slow pace of play. He sometimes stands over the ball, bobbing the club repeatedly until he’s completely ready to pull the trigger. On Golf Digest’s The Loop podcast, he defended himself:

“I got a bunch of heat. I just want to tell those people: I already have anxiety. It’s pretty bad. Having anxiety and then getting over a golf ball with all these thoughts in your head, and then put me in that moment at the U.S. Am with the whole golf world watching. I mean, what can you expect?”

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And maybe this informs us a little more about Bennett. He’s not some cocky college kid who thinks nobody can touch him. It might be that he has to train himself to get in the mental space to believe he is the best. We all have to do that. A golf tournament is really just 100 or so people who believe that if they finally get their own game right they can beat everyone else in the field. Greatness is learning to thrive in the margins of an imperfect game.

“It’s that feeling of belonging,” Kortan said. “The further he gets from having to prove he’s capable, the less that there is of the doubt and the anxiety.”

As the reigning U.S. Amateur champ, Bennett, left, was paired with defending Masters champ Scottie Scheffler. (Patrick Smith / Getty Images)

But is there a balance that needs to be found between channeling that doubt and anxiety and wanting to eliminate it? He needs to be mentally healthy, but he also needs to keep that drive.

“Well, there’s an imbalance, that he would admit,” Kortan said, “that he uses that fire way more here playing in tournaments or playing competitive rounds of golf when he needs to use it more in terms of improving and getting better and working.”

Sam Bennett is not intimidated by this golf course. He reveres it, sure. Of course he does. He’s giddy about playing it. “Geez, I’m playing Augusta National, it can’t get any better,” he said. But Bennett is not a golfer unsure of whether his game can hang around.

When discussing the difficult challenge of the amateur circuit, he said: “The championship golf courses, I mean, Ridgewood, it’s harder than this place, I’ll tell you that, and some of the other courses I’ve played.”

Watching him play 36 holes makes you believe it. He’s not some high-upside college kid getting hot at the right time hunting pins or bombing it deep in a way that makes you think it will revert to the mean and slow down. Bennett is 8-under primarily by playing consistent, reliable, on-schedule golf. Thursday was a bogey-free round with 12 consecutive pars. His eagle on No. 2 was an impressive chip-in, but he just put himself in good spots. “I didn’t hit any just outstanding ones,” he said after Round 1, “but I was just stacking shots all day.”

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Friday was much of the same. His birdie on 3 was more about the impressive 14-foot putt he made. Same for his par on 5 and his birdie on 13. Maybe that’s the primary thing to watch these next 36 holes, to see if his 1 1/2 putts per hole average continues or if it proves to be unsustainable. But the truth is Bennett is here because of control, not some absurd raw talent.

“It’s the question I get a lot, ‘What does he do so well?’ beyond being just a competitive dude,” Kortan said. “The answer is he is spectacularly unspectacular.”

Bennett doesn’t hit it 330 yards. He’s a smaller human being. But the thing he does best, Kortan said, is consistently get great contact with the ball. In turn, he can control his numbers well.

And he’s also gotten to this point with Kortan, his college coach, caddying for him. He’s a goateed man who operates as a second father to Bennett. He was his lifeline as he dealt with Mark’s decline, and it only developed after Mark’s death. Kortan also lost a father at a young age, two parallel golf souls trying to win something in golf nirvana. But Bennett also understands this is just really fun. “He’s pretty tired in that caddie suit,” Bennett said. “He lets you know, too.

“Without him, I would not be able to be in the situation that I am. Just some of the numbers that he’s given me, some of the club selections, some of the stuff he said to help me calm down, I mean, all credit to him. Just like at the Am, without him, I wouldn’t be sitting right here.”

Then, he was asked why he believes he can catch the 12-under leader Brooks Koepka, somebody with four majors who often seems unstoppable when healthy.

“Because I know that my good golf is good enough,” he said.

And Sam Bennett is not a fully formed adult yet. That’s what makes this all so cool, keep in mind. He’s a 23-year-old college kid going from SEC golf to the biggest tournament in the world. He was up until midnight Thursday night scrolling through the incessant messages and notifications until he finally had to turn them off and get some sleep. He is not used to this.

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Bennett didn’t know who Ken Venturi was (the last amateur to shoot this low at Augusta in 1956). He barely knows a thing about Bobby Jones. Yes, his amateur status means he’ll not earn this weekend on the course (the winner’s payout: $2.7 million). But he lives in the days of NIL. He has deals with Ping, Suncast and Veritex Bank. He’s making money. And instead of going down any of the history lessons some reporters wanted to revisit, he smiled talking about all his buddies from Texas A&M and Madisonville, Texas, who are in town. “I think we are going to be able to have a little fun tonight,” he said.

Bennett’s press conference was a 17-minute thriller of dry confidence and silencing the haters. Again, those traits are how he got here. But then there was that stiff reminder of where he’s really at. The reminder of why this moment should be savored.

Do you have any college work to get done this week?

He dropped his head with an ashamed smile.

“I’m not worried about school right now.”

(Top photo: Patrick Smith / Getty Images)

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