It was Cohen Trolio’s moment to do whatever he wanted with it. And he shared it with his dad.
Cohen’s six-foot putt had just found the right half of the cup on Pinehurst No. 2’s 17th green, closing out his quarterfinals match at the U.S. Amateur and making Cohen — all 17 years old of him — the tournament’s youngest semifinalist in 25 years. Whatever else Cohen achieves in golf, this was the biggest moment thus far in his career. And of all the ways he could have celebrated it, he pumped his fist and locked eyes with his father, V.J. Trolio. The assembled crowd cheered, and the TV broadcast’s audience marveled. But on that 17th green, in the middle of it all, for just a second — Cohen and his father shared something, just a moment, that no one else will ever be part of.
The moment ended as quickly as it began. Cohen pulled his ball from the hole, doffed his soaking wet Ping cap, and shook his opponent’s hand. He walked back over to V.J. — his father, caddie, swing coach, confidant, manager, and everything else that a father is to a 17-year-old son — for one more fist bump. The same look of satisfaction came across their faces, but not because of the win. Cohen and V.J. smiled because the road that Cohen had chosen — a road they’d walked together — had led them to this moment: the process to which they’d committed had worked, does work.
As one of the preeminent swing coaches in the Southeast, process is V.J.’s central ethos. It’s at the core of his teaching philosophy: develop a plan to prepare, and then follow it; stick to the plan, even when results don’t fall into place; amend the plan if need be, but don’t do it arbitrarily; and eventually, the results will come. That’s the process.
Process has helped lift Cohen to heights uncommon in junior and amateur golf. But process isn’t all about golf.
. . .
Cohen’s success at the U.S. Am was no accident; it was the result of a lifelong fascination with golf and with the work that goes into playing it well. In his father’s office at Old Waverly Golf Club in West Point, Miss., there’s an old, black-and-white photograph of a toddler — perhaps two years old — standing in a pair of adult golf shoes, holding a club. It’s Cohen. He doesn’t remember the first time he played golf. It was just always there.
“I just remember hitting it, going to get it, and trying to hit it again,” Cohen said. “I’ve loved it forever.”
That success, as V.J. and Cohen both acknowledge, comes from an entire architecture of exceedingly rare opportunities. Cohen has done his part in seizing those opportunities, but most people don’t have them. That includes his father.
The Hattiesburg American (April 8, 1998).
V.J. Trolio didn’t grow up planning to be a swing instructor. But he did grow up both curious and hardworking (as a 12-year-old, he earned money cleaning up a local golf course for a penny per pinecone). That caught the eye of Randy Watkins, a local golf pro and one of the most recognizable figures in Mississippi golf.
“He was just a kid from the country, with a moppy head and a head full of hair who just needed an opportunity,” Watkins said. “He was always listening and watching — trying to figure out a way to do it, or trying to figure out a way to make something better. ‘How do you do that? How do you hit this shot? Why did you hit that shot? When do you hit that shot? Where do you hit that shot? What club did you use? Why did you use that club? Why don’t you use this?’ It was on and on. He just wanted to know more all the time.”
That curiosity and drive helped V.J. win three state high school championships in the early 1990s and land a scholarship to play golf at Southern Miss. As a senior, he tallied five top-10 finishes (including a win) and became the school’s first player to advance to the NCAA Tournament. After college, V.J. cobbled together $4,000 to make a run at a pro career and played for a year on the Hooters Tour. He entered Q-School, but failed to make it through. In October 1999, he Monday-qualified into the Southern Farm Bureau Classic (now the Sanderson Farms Championship), but didn’t make the cut. By that point, the $4,000 was gone. So his run as a pro was gone, too.
“I started teaching selfishly,” V.J. said. “I wanted to know why I didn’t make it.”
After working briefly as an assistant pro at a golf course in Hattiesburg, V.J. came to Old Waverly; the club built a teaching center, and V.J. filled it out with equipment. Soon, students started filling it out too. In 2003, V.J. and a partner invented a practice aid called the Putting Arc; proceeds from those sales helped fill out the teaching center even more. Jim Gallagher, Jr., started working with V.J.; so did other stalwart amateurs and budding Tour pros. Old Waverly’s teaching center grew into a laboratory — and Cohen grew up in it.
“I can remember Cohen being around there in his diapers,” Gallagher said. “He would watch me, and he would watch old videos of my swing.”
Now 17 years old and a junior at Oak Hill Academy in West Point, Cohen is an apple that did not fall far from its tree. Like his father, Cohen is easy-going, with a wide smile and a thick southern accent that he doesn’t care to varnish. Also like his father, Cohen is thoughtful and curious: he thinks through questions before answering them, and he’s interested in learning how things work.
Even at a young age, Gallagher said, Cohen was attentive — businesslike, even. He would watch players like Gallagher practicing, learning their movements, and then he would grab a club and grind over the details until he had it down.
“I saw that a lot of curve in the golf ball wasn’t good,” Cohen said. “When you’re 11 or 12, a draw is gonna go 20 yards further, but I saw Jim hitting cuts out there — but not big ones. You just realize that you don’t have to curve it a whole bunch to be good.”
Cohen didn’t know it at the time, of course, but he was already developing a process.
. . .
V.J. bristles at the suggestion that Cohen owes his success to having a swing coach for a father. It suggests that Cohen hasn’t earned his success. But V.J. bristles at the suggestion for another reason too: in V.J.’s view, it gives himself too much credit.
“I can’t make Cohen love golf, but I can make him hate it,” V.J. said. “I can’t make Cohen love the game; I can’t make him work hard. I can’t do any of that. But what I can do is I can make him hate it; I can stay on him too hard. I never thought about Cohen being a good player. I always just kind of thought of it as making sure I don’t hand him to somebody later in life and that he’s screwed up; let’s make sure I don’t take that love for the game that he has and squash it.”
On the one hand, V.J. was a swing instructor with a wealth of knowledge; on the other hand, he was also Dad. The only way to keep the roles straight — and, more importantly, to give Cohen the support he needed from both roles — was to keep the roles delineated.
“Out here, and on any golf course in America, when Dad’s toting the bag around for me on the golf course, he’s Coach,” Cohen said. “And on the 18th green, as soon as we put the flag in, or as soon as we lock the door out here [on the practice facility] and go home, he’s my Dad. That relationship means a lot. That’s what matters.”
“I just remember hitting it, going to get it, and trying to hit it again,” Cohen said. “I’ve loved it forever.” Photo credit: V.J. Trolio.
Cohen played in his first tournament at age 6. By 8, he was beating older kids. At 10, he was shooting even par from the forward tees. Around that time, Watkins — who hosts a statewide junior golf tournament every year — met his former protege’s son. “I got tickled the first time I met him, because he was just like a little V.J.,” Watkins said. “He was small, and he was well mannered, and his fundamentals were perfect already. To watch him set up to a golf ball, it made me laugh: his grip was perfect, and his posture was perfect. It made me laugh just to look at him; I thought, ‘There’s little V.J. It looks like the club just belongs in his hand.’”
Cohen racked up six junior state championships and a long list of AJGA successes. After his freshman year of high school, Cohen committed to play at LSU.
Throughout it all, V.J. helped keep Cohen from getting too high or too low by staying focused on the process. That didn’t mean playing tournaments without expectations, or even without hoping to win. But it did mean avoiding the temptation to measure progress by tournament results rather than personal development.
“I enjoy seeing people accomplish what they want to accomplish. I’ve also been around this business long enough to know that there’s gonna be ebbs and flows,” V.J. said. “And there’s positive ways to get out of one of those ebbs and get back into the flow, and there’s negative ways. I get super-excited, very fired up, very emotional. But I don’t really get extremely ‘here we go, this is it.’ Because there’s never an ‘it.’”
That’s why missing out on U.S. Am qualifying in July wouldn’t have been the end of the world — nor was it the end-all, be-all when Cohen shot 67-67 to win medalist honors at his qualifying site. Nor would it have been a failure if Cohen had arrived at Pinehurst and hadn’t advanced from stroke play — although he did, with a T44 finish. Nor would there have been disappointment if Cohen hadn’t won his first three matches and rolled to the U.S. Am quarterfinals — but he did.
“Every day, we were just going into it, starting in the round of 64, going literally, ‘Let’s just go see if what we’ve been doing works.’ Obviously, it kept working,” Cohen said. “I hit golf balls every day, and I’d trained for it. We said, ‘Let’s just go see if it works.’”
. . .
There is a helplessness to parenting. You can spend years preparing a child for the outside world, teaching him and reminding him and extracting promises that he won’t forget what he’s learned. And for a while, you can protect the child from the consequences of falling short. But a day approaches when you can’t anymore. Every baby bird eventually leaps from the nest; some fly, and some don’t. Either way, the parent can only watch. And it is agony.
Watching Cohen win match after match at the U.S. Am brought V.J. tremendous pride. But along with Cohen’s success came moments that brought trepidation; no parent in his right mind yearns for his son to face a roomful of national media at a USGA press conference. Yet that is what Cohen’s success demanded; he leaped from the nest, and fly or fall, all V.J. could do was watch him flap his wings.
At one point, a reporter asked Cohen whether he was feeling the pressure of the country’s biggest amateur event. “Not really,” Cohen said. “I mean, I'm just kind of here. I do this every day. I mean, I play golf every day. So not really, to be honest with you.”
Another time, a reporter asked Cohen whether he was surprised to be beating highly ranked amateurs. “I train hard enough, I practice hard enough,” he said. “I don’t practice just to beat juniors, I don’t practice just to beat amateurs. I practice to beat everybody.”
Most people understood Cohen’s responses for what they were: forthright. A smaller handful painted the comments as cocky.
“Twitter can be a sewer pit. It gives people license to bash other people,” Gallagher said. “One morning, I texted Cohen just say say, ‘Enjoy yourself out there today.’ He wrote me back and said, ‘I gotta stay off social media.’ If you need to make a 17-year-old kid feel bad, then you need to take a long look in the mirror.”
Any process changes when need be. And the peanut gallery doesn’t belong in the process.
By Friday, Cohen’s process has worked for five straight rounds and brought him all the way to the quarterfinals. For his part, V.J. stuck to his part of the process: being the caddie when need be, and being Dad when need be. When Cohen needed a joke, V.J. told it; when Cohen needed a cover yardage, V.J. gave him that. Mostly, though, V.J. did what every parent is ultimately forced to do: just watch and hope.
On the ninth hole, Cohen snuck in a four-footer for birdie to stay 2-up on Cincinnati rising junior Austin Squires. “Putting Arc!” shouted someone in the gallery. At the 13th, Squires made eagle to bring the match all square. But two holes later, at the par-3 15th, Cohen countered by hitting his tee shot to 10 feet; he made par to go 1-up.
The 17th hole at Pinehurst No. 2 is a medium-length par-3, with trouble in play for a shot played anywhere but the center of the green. Cohen stood on the 17th tee 2-up, needing only to avoid losing one of the final two holes. Full of adrenaline, many players would’ve taken on the flag and all the trouble surrounding it on the green’s righthand side — but Cohen, with wisdom beyond his 17 years, played to the middle of the green. Two putts later, he closed out the match 3 and 1 with a fist pump — and, for just a moment, a shared look with the person who knew how much it meant.
“It was one of those joyful, C.S. Lewis Surprised by Joy joyful moments,” V.J. said. “With athletes and performance, you carry the burden when it’s not good. As a parent, you carry the burden when it’s not good. … So the thing I remember most from that was ‘Bam, yeah, there we go. Cool. Rock on.’”
. . .
Twenty-four hours later, Cohen struggled for 17 holes in his semifinals match en route to a 3-and-1 loss to eventual tournament champion Andy Ogletree. But by then, the point had been made; the process had worked. And just as all the week’s successes hadn’t overshadowed the process, neither did the loss to Ogletree.
“It’s golf. It’s not like basketball or football, where everybody is shooting on the same rims or everybody is playing on the same field,” Cohen said. “Putts might not go in, and you can hit the same putt right after it, and it’ll go in. It’s gonna happen — it’s golf. That’s just how it works, so there’s no reason to get ultra-angry or ultra-happy.”
V.J. is not a laconic person; when asked a question, the gears in his head begin spinning, and his eyes flash, with any number of possible responses all jockeying for space on the tip of his tongue. But four months after watching Cohen’s quarterfinals-ending putt fall on the 17th hole, V.J. is still slow to pull together words that can explain it all.
“A lot of people make a big deal out of closing out the match,” V.J. said. “But that was the intent when we got there. The whole intent of us driving to Pinehurst wasn’t for us to have a vacation. It was for him to go run his process.”
By now, Cohen has ridden the process nearly as far as one can in junior golf: he is Mississippi’s highest-ranked member of his high school class, and the state’s second-ranked junior golfer overall. In a year and a half, he’ll begin a college career. Between now and then, at least one more U.S. Am qualifying opportunity invariably awaits. Undoubtedly, Cohen would like another shot at the tournament. But as always, his process is less concerned with week-by-week results than it is with long-term growth. And Cohen has grown.
Both V.J. and Cohen know — as every father and son know — that a day soon comes when Cohen will be responsible for his own process; he’ll leap from the nest and flap, and V.J. will hope for the best.
But the process was always less about raising a golfer than it was about raising a son, and about growing up. A father foresees as many dangers as he can, teaches as much as he can; a son tries to learn, tries not to disappoint. For both father and son, failures are inevitable; when they happen, both adapt. But either way, day-by-day successes and failures cannot be the goalposts by which progress is marked. For a 17-year-old, a berth in the semifinals in the U.S. Am — no more than a 31 on the ACT — is no guarantee of what lies ahead. But it is a vindication of the process that brought the result.
“If you accomplish something, cool,” V.J. said. “That means your process works. Keep doing that. Don’t worry about the rest of it.”
. . .
Cover photo: credit USGA
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