100 golfdigest.com | may 2019
presumably right after the British Open.
Except Kuchar didn’t turn pro. He went
back to Georgia Tech for his junior year.
“I talked to a lot of [players], and most
of them said, ‘Yeah, strike while the iron
is hot. You’re definitely ready to play out
here.’ But I played a practice round at the
British with Payne Stewart and Paul Az-
inger, and Payne said to me, ‘You can play
out here for 25 years, but you’ll never get
back your last two years of college.’ That
resonated with me.”
After Kuchar graduated with his degree
in business in the spring of 2000, people
were stunned when he bypassed the tour to
work for a boutique investment firm run by
Joe Wortley in Boca Raton, Fla.
“He had this idea that I could follow the
Bobby Jones amateur model,” Kuchar says.
“Stay amateur, but still play golf and build
a life off the course. I was intrigued. Bobby
Jones had gone to Georgia Tech, and I
thought it might be cool to be good enough
to get back into the Masters as an amateur;
maybe play half-a-dozen tour events a year
and play golf with clients.”
He smiles. “Lasted less than a year.”
The tipping point came when he missed
the cut by one at the Texas Open in Sep-
tember 2000 and was dying to play the next
week but couldn’t because he didn’t have
another sponsor’s exemption. He decided
he had to find out how good he could be-
come if he played golf for a living.
The quick answer: very good. In March
2002, he won the Honda Classic. He was
only 23 and on his way.
“Little did I know, I wouldn’t win again
for seven years,” he says, laughing. “Seven
years! That was a long time. Of course, a lot
happened during those seven years. Some
of it good/great. Some of it not as good.”
The great was his courtship of Sybi
Parker, whom he had met at Georgia Tech.
Sybi was a tennis player, and the two be-
came friends when the school’s jocks would
go to “athlete bars” in Buckhead. “We all
tended to hang out together,” Kuchar says.
“We always liked one another, but it never
went beyond that in college. We were both
focused on moving our lives along.”
After graduation, Sybi moved to San
Francisco to teach tennis. In 2002, Matt
invited her to come to Pebble Beach to see
him play.
That didn’t work out very well. Sybi
brought her boyfriend, and the two
searched for Matt at Pebble Beach. He was
playing at Poppy Hills.
“They didn’t realize the tournament
was on three courses, because it says Pebble
Beach in the name,” Matt says. “They spent
an hour wandering around Pebble looking
for me before the boyfriend said, ‘Let’s get
out of here.’ ”
Matt and Sybi saw one another that fall
at Georgia Tech’s homecoming football
game. By then, the boyfriend was no more,
and Sybi was moving back to Atlanta. Soon
after, Matt asked her to come to the Shark
Shootout. She accepted. Less than a year
later, they were married.
Cameron came along in 2007, and
Carson in 2009. The family moved to Sea
Island, where Sybi had spent much of her
childhood. “Great place to live,” Matt says.
“Plus, grandparents right nearby. Perfect.”SAVED FROM A LONG SLUMP
K
uchar’s career wasn’t nearly
as perfect. Putting had always
been his strength, but when he
began to struggle with his ball-
striking, his putting also went
downhill. “When you think you
have to make every putt, you
don’t putt as well,” he says. “I’d
always been a good putter—now I had to be
great just to have a chance.”
Early in 2006, back on the Nationwide
Tour, college teammate Matt Weibring
told Kuchar he should see teacher Chris
O’Connell outside Dallas. Kuchar was open
to almost anything at that point.
O’Connell suggested that Kuchar do
something completely counterintuitive:
aim right to hit the fade he liked to play.
Kuchar, naturally, had always aimed left.
“At first it felt really awkward,” he says.
“I was aiming right and trying to start the
ball left and fade it. It was as if I was hitting
a pull/cut. It makes no sense, but it worked.
The more often I hit a good shot that way,
the less awkward I felt.”
Armed with his flatter-looking swing,
Kuchar won a Nationwide event in 2006
and was back on the big tour in 2007. He
has never come close to leaving since then.
“After I got back to the tour, I played
solidly for three years, but the win at
Turning Stone [late in 2009] was a huge
breakthrough for me,” Kuchar says. “I was
beginning to wonder if I’d ever win again.”
He won the first playoff event the next
year and earned $4.9 million overall—first
on the money list. More important, he
made his first Ryder Cup team.
From there, he won the Players Cham-
pionship in 2012, the WGC-Match Play in
2013 and the Memorial later that year. He
contended consistently in majors but never
had a serious chance to win until the Open
Championship at Birkdale in 2017. On that
Sunday, paired in the final group with Jor-
dan Spieth, Kuchar rallied to a share of the
lead with six holes to go.
“I knew I had a real chance,” Kuchar
says. “After he hit his drive on 13, I think I
thought, This is my day. I’m going to win.”
But Spieth made a miraculous bogeyand then went birdie-eagle-birdie-birdie.
After the two men holed out on 18 and
embraced, Kuchar was stunned by what he
saw next: Sybi, Cameron and Carson were
behind the green waiting for him. With
Matt in contention on Friday, Sybi decided
to fly to England to be there on Sunday.
“I thought that if he won, we absolutely
wanted to be there to share it with him,”
she said. “If he didn’t win, he would need
us there.”
They stayed in their hotel room until
the last few holes—Sybi didn’t want Matt
distracted by their sudden presence and
was worried that the two boys might be
over-enthusiastic cheering for their dad.
“They both love Jordan,” she says, “but not
that day.”
After the awards ceremony, Kuchar
went to speak to the media, bringing the
boys with him. As they walked out of the
media center, they encountered Spieth,
carrying the claret jug. At Kuchar’s request,
Spieth showed the boys where his name
was engraved on the trophy. Then Spieth
bent down and told the two boys how proud
they should be of their father: “Not because
he’s a great golfer, but because he’s a great
person and a great dad.”
Kuchar admits that Birkdale might have
haunted him just a bit last year. He missed
making the Ryder Cup team for the first
time since 2008, although Furyk asked him
to be a vice captain in the same phone call
in which he told him he wasn’t picking him
for the team.
“I would have loved to have had him
on the team,” Furyk says, “but the guys
I picked were playing so well, I had to pick
them. Plus, Matt hadn’t had a Matt Kuchar-
type year.”
Kuchar knew that. And his 40th birth-
day affected him more than he thought it
would. “Maybe it was just because I wasn’t
playing that well, but I was very aware of it,”
he says. “I’ve never hit the ball that far, and
the kids today hit it so far, and they’re so
talented, I wondered if I could still compete
in my 40s.”
No one was more surprised by Matt’s
reaction than the person who knows him
best. “It’s just not like him,” Sybi says. “He’s
usually so optimistic about things because
he’s always known that he’ll find a way to
play better. I never doubted that he would.”
“Golf beats you up a lot,” Kuchar says. “I
think we all understand that. But when you
don’t play well for a while and you turn 40,
you worry.”
But two months after Mayakoba, on an-
other family vacation, Kuchar won in
Hawaii by four shots. He’d survived his
mid-life golf crisis. And now he’s figured
out—better late than never—how to right a
wrong.