Thirteen years old is awfully young to have the weight of the world on your shoulders. But there Andy Ogletree stood, in the 18th fairway at Okatoma Country Club in Collins, Mississippi, just a 3-wood away from the green, where an eagle could tie the lead at the Mississippi high school golf championship — and give Ogletree a chance at a state championship as a seventh-grader.
About this time, the TV cameras came rushing in. The media, the crowd, they all sensed the moment. Something bigger than a high school golf tournament was happening here.
Ogletree’s lie was uneven, but his confidence wasn’t. With 220 yards between him and the green, Ogletree pulled the club all the way back, delivered — and topped the ball into the water.
An unceremonious double bogey later, Ogletree settled for third place — still a remarkable achievement for seventh-grader.
More remarkable results were still to come: Ogletree won his next five state championships. They stand as evidence of a truism that, by now, Ogletree knows well: in golf, as in life, usually there’s a second chance coming, if you’re patient enough to wait for it.
. . .
Literally and figuratively, Ogletree has come a long way from his hometown of Little Rock, Mississippi. Since August, Ogletree has blossomed from a solid collegiate player to one of amateur golf’s leading figures: winning the U.S. Amateur at Pinehurst, and helping lead the United States to a victorious Walker Cup at Royal Liverpool. After entering the summer outside the amateur rankings’ top 100, Ogletree currently finds himself ranked 27th in the world, with tee times at the 2020 Masters and U.S. Open on tap thanks to his win in the U.S. Am.
Andy Ogletree crushes a drive at East Lake Golf Club in August 2018. Photo credit: Danny Karnik, Georgia Tech Athletics.
Appreciating the arc of Ogletree’s rise requires understanding whence he comes. Describing Little Rock as Ogletree’s “hometown” is a bit misleading, since Little Rock is technically unincorporated — and, therefore, not a town at all. There’s a post office, and a gas station with a restaurant that serves catfish and gravy fries. The closest town is Union (population 1,924) — home of the Union High School Yellow Jackets, and Ogletree’s five state championships. And the closest golf course is Northwood Country Club, in nearby Meridian. When Ogletree was two or three years old, his parents took him to a putt-putt course, and he couldn’t miss. After a couple of years of fiddling around, Ogletree’s father took him to Northwood to meet the pro, Jimmy Gamblin.
“Andy was a very different kid — when he would practice, he would practice almost like an adult,” Gamblin said. “He handled himself more maturely than the age he was. There was something about him. He didn’t just want to run around and play while he was out there on the golf course — he was interested in playing golf.”
Ogletree was not so different in those days than he is today: thoughtful, deliberate — not shy, but quiet. And patient.
By the time Ogletree got to be 8 or 9 years old, his work was paying obvious dividends: he was regularly beating kids in higher age divisions. He won his age group at the Mississippi Junior Amateur seven times. But there was never any raucous celebration or taunting: it was always go out, win, and then on to the next event. At that age, Ogletree had slightly above-average length off the tee; his greatest skill, Gamblin said, was quiet confidence.
“He’d gotten to the point that he knew he could hit the golf ball pretty much anywhere he wanted to,” Gamblin said. “He didn’t get up there and just think about, ‘What have I gotta do to hit this shot?’ He got up there to hit a shot.”
Around the time Ogletree was beginning his domination of Mississippi high school golf, he played in a junior golf tournament in north Georgia. Georgia Tech coach Bruce Heppler stood on the first tee, watching the field tee off. Ogletree caught his eye: a quiet, skinny kid with glasses who mashed it. Ogletree won the tournament — and Heppler’s attention. By his sophomore year of high school, Ogletree committed to Tech.
“Andy is pretty chilled out. I think his favorite thing to do is to sit on a porch on Friday night and talk,” Heppler said. “He loves to talk to people. He loves visiting. That’s what his family is like. I really think that when he plays, that laidback nature is really helpful. Most of the time, he doesn’t get too upset about stuff. And he has kind of a rhythm to him that’s not fast, so when he’s playing and he gets nervous, his rhythm doesn’t change — he’s able to stay relaxed, because of his nature.”
. . .
If Ogletree was a can’t-miss prospect, then his first two-and-a-half years at Georgia Tech certainly didn’t prove it. His freshman year, Ogletree tallied four top-20 finishes in 10 events, but none higher than T12. As a sophomore, five top-20 finishes in 11 tournaments included a T7 finish — but more than halfway through his college career, Ogletree still had not won. “I felt like I was a really good player, but I just wasn’t getting enough out of it,” Ogletree said.
Ogletree was a good college player, but he had come to Georgia Tech with the hopes of becoming a good pro.
Andy Ogletree tees off at Old North State Club in North Carolina during the 2019 ACC Championship. Photo credit: Nell Redmond.
If that were going to happen, then something had to change, and both Ogletree and Heppler knew it. In November 2018, with Ogletree’s junior year nearly halfway behind him, Heppler and Ogletree went out for pizza, and Heppler laid it out: Ogletree wasn’t good enough for the PGA Tour. Not then, anyway.
“He didn’t putt well enough, wasn’t a good enough bunker player, wasn’t a good enough wedge player,” Heppler recalled. “He needed to decide what he was gonna do.”
Ogletree is a prodigious ball-striker — “certainly one of the best drivers of the ball I’ve ever watched,” Heppler says — but by Ogletree’s own admission, his short game has always been a weakness. Like most players, Ogletree’s practice sessions gravitated toward his strengths; as a result, his strengths stayed strong, but his weaknesses got weaker.
“We’re all that way. And to go fumble around in a bunker or flub some chips isn’t a whole lot of fun,” Heppler said. “But I explained to him that in life, the people who make it are the people who do hard things. Anybody can do easy stuff.”
Most people react to confrontation defensively; they confuse bluntness for hostility, and they meet it in kind. But Ogletree listened. Heppler wasn’t saying anything that Ogletree didn’t already know. And this time, Heppler’s message resonated. Heppler still isn’t quite sure why — whether he phrased it differently, or whether Ogletree simply had matured enough to be ready for the message.
“I just needed to hear it from someone else, and I think he knew that,” Ogletree said. “I didn’t take it personally at all; he was just trying to help.”
Ogletree and Heppler developed a plan to begin raising Ogletree’s touch around the greens to the same standards as his ball-striking. Ogletree dived head-first into the new approach over the last few weeks of 2018. When the calendar turned over to 2019, everything had changed: between February and April, Ogletree scored four top-10 finishes in five events, including second place at the ACC Championship.
Then began the wildest summer of Ogletree’s life. Two weeks after winning the Monroe Invitational — his first victory since arriving at Georgia Tech in 2016 — Ogletree made a foreshadowing run at the North & South Championship at Pinehurst No. 2. Ogletree lost his quarterfinals match 3-and-2 against Florida’s Ricky Castillo, but the loss reaffirmed the importance of patience.
“He beat me like I beat everyone else during the Am: he didn’t really make any mistakes, he was never very aggressive. He just kept putting himself in position and made me make mistakes,” Ogletree said. “I learned a lot being behind against him. I would be behind and go for shots, trying to force it like you would do on any other golf course, but it’s just different at Pinehurst. You just have to stay conservative and stick to your plan, no matter what the other person is doing.”
. . .
Heppler is no revisionist historian: he didn’t expect Ogletree to win the U.S. Amateur. Ogletree had played the event three times before, without success: qualifying as a high schooler in 2015, but advancing to match play just once (in 2017, when he lost in the round of 64).
But no one in their right mind ever expects anyone to win the Am. It is a brutal, weeklong gauntlet: two days of stroke play, followed by up to five rounds of loser-go-home match play, leading up to a 36-hole championship match. The tournament is an exercise in survival as much as golf; like marching through a minefield for seven days, whoever remains as the last man standing is always there by something of a minor miracle. Throw in the fact that 2019 brought the U.S. Am to Pinehurst No. 2, one of the most exacting tests of golf in America, and the event promised to live up to its reputation as the most difficult week in amateur golf.
That said, Heppler had a feeling.
“I knew where he was going fit his skill set to a tee, because Andy doesn’t curve the ball,” Heppler said. “On those greens over there — Donald Ross stuff, where it looks like it’s a pretty big green — they’re not very big. They just roll off everywhere, and if you’ve got balls coming in with hook spin or cut spin, they land and just keep moving away from the hole. His ball just kind of comes down and stays right where it lands. I knew, one, that he could drive the golf ball versus anybody in the tournament; he could match anybody tee to green. And you think to yourself, ‘Well, if his ball stays on those greens more often than not, then he doesn’t have those hard pitches and chips over there.’ It doesn’t surprise me that he won; I certainly didn’t expect him to. But if you add up his skillset, I don’t know that there’s a better place for him to have played.”
Andy Ogletree reads a putt on Pinehurst No. 4 during the championship match of the U.S. Amateur in August 2019. Photo credit: USGA.
It showed. Over the course of the week, Ogletree quietly took Pinehurst apart: after finishing the Am’s two rounds of stroke play T19, three of his first four matches never lasted past the 15th hole. Day by day, Ogletree built a reputation as the skinny, unassuming guy quietly eating lunch in the corner with his caddie, Georgia Tech assistant coach Devin Stanton, and dismantling the day’s opposition.
“He’s a quiet guy,” said Shane Bacon, who handled Fox Sports’ play-by-play duties for the week. “He was kind of that quiet assassin: you get to the tee and shake his hand, and you get to the fourth hole, and all of a sudden you’re 3-down.”
No one in their right mind ever begins the Am expecting to win, but it was around Ogletree’s 6-and-5 quarterfinals win that he called his mother. “You need to come,” he told her, “because I plan on winning this golf tournament, and I think I’m going to.”
Ogletree’s strategy was meticulous, with a gameplan for each individual shot, all the way down to which putts to hit aggressively and which putts to approach cautiously. “Pinehurst is different than most courses in match play, because a lot of match play is about how many birdies you can make, and whoever makes the most usually wins,” Ogletree said. “But Pinehurst is more about eliminating bogeys and eliminating careless mistakes, because you’re always five feet away from running 40 yards off the green.”
And even during the 36-hole championship match, when Vanderbilt’s John Augenstein went 4-up after just five holes, Ogletree never abandoned his plan. “I felt super-relaxed, still,” Ogletree said. “I didn’t really worry about what John was doing. I still had 31 holes to go, and I only had to win five of them. Five’s not that many. I just kept telling myself that if I take care of Andy, I’m gonna win this match.”
On the 18th hole of the morning round at Pinehurst No. 4, Ogletree’s birdie from just off the green trimmed Augenstein’s lead to 2-up. On the first hole of the afternoon round, Ogletree birdied Pinehurst No. 2’s opening hole to creep within one. For most of the afternoon, he and Augenstein answered one another’s punches, with Augenstein never extending his lead beyond 2-up.
“What’s so funny about match play is that people really think birdies win holes, and they think, ‘If I want to win this thing, then I’ve gotta go out and make a bunch of birdies,’” Bacon said. “And in match play, if you’re the guy who avoids making careless mistakes, you’re gonna win some holes because you’re gonna make some pars. Ogletree was was just parring Augenstein to death: he was making the pars that he needed to make.”
Andy Ogletree hoists the U.S. Amateur championship trophy in August 2019 at Pinehurst, N.C. Photo credit: USGA.
Finally, on the day’s 31st hole — the No. 2 course’s tricky, uphill par-4 13th — Ogletree wedged his approach to two feet and drained a birdie putt to tie the match. It had taken all day, but Ogletree had completed the comeback.
Par on No. 2’s downhill 14th hole put Ogletree 1-up. Three holes later, on the No. 2 course’s penultimate par-3, Ogletree played his tee shot safely to the left side of the green; Augenstein narrowly missed, also on the left side. Augenstein’s aggressive putt from off the green streaked eight feet past the hole; meanwhile, Ogletree conservatively tucked his second stroke close, guaranteeing no worse than bogey. Two putts later, Augenstein picked up his ball and reached for Ogletree’s hand. Like dripping water on a rock, Ogletree’s patience had slowly worn his opponent down — and then, after 35 holes, broke through.
. . .
The remarkable thing about Ogletree’s run at the U.S. Am is not that he won, nor merely that he won by sticking to his gameplan long past the point when most players would’ve succumbed to desperation. Ogletree’s win is remarkable principally because it brought together so many potential indicators of future success: naturally outstanding ball-striking, a rejuvenated short game, and a thoughtful, methodical approach that is a genuine reflection of a deeply engrained patience. Whatever becomes of Ogletree’s pro career, it will not lack for deliberate practice, because that is what he does; it will not lack for patience on the course, because that is who he is. And now, with the U.S. Am and a Walker Cup victory to his name, Ogletree has seen in a remarkably short period of time the fruit that these labors will bear.
“I think now, with his skill set — if you look at all the different things you need to have, from bunker play to wedge play to chipping and pitching to long irons, I think he’s ready to go try those guys out up there,” Heppler said. “He’s really become a complete player.”
Ogletree says his game is close to being ready for pro golf — the closest thing to bragging that he’ll indulge. Pro golf is less than a year away; Ogletree doesn’t quite have the details worked out yet, but in 2020, the USGA will allow pros to play the U.S. Open under exemptions earned as amateurs. Ogletree would be among the first to qualify for that rule change.
“On the course, I just want to keep getting better,” Ogletree said. “I want to be great in every category. I know that’s maybe not attainable but that’s the goal: I want to drive it best, I want to wedge it best, I want to hit irons best, and I’m gonna keep doing everything that I know how and never change, just keep getting better.”
That will require a lot of work and patience. But Ogletree has been there before.
. . .
Cover photo: credit USGA
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