It would be difficult to overstate how far Robby Shelton has come in the past eight months.
At the end of 2018, Shelton was lost. He’d been tinkering with his swing, and the results weren’t pretty: he missed cuts in eight of his last nine Web Tour events and finished a distant 51st on the tour’s money list, far outside the top 25 earners who snagged PGA Tour cards. But even that was an improvement: two years prior, he’d finished 194th.
So Shelton swallowed hard and took his medicine, in a way that most players of his caliber would have resisted. He played 2017 on the MacKenzie Tour in Canada (tallying eight top-10 finishes in 11 events) and the Swing Thought mini-tour (where he won his first pro event in February 2017).
And for the first three months of 2019, Shelton was playing well enough to prove that 2018 was in the rearview mirror: he made five of his first seven cuts, with two top-25 finishes. Not out-of-this-world, but not bad either.
But then, after finishing T24 at the Chitimacha Louisiana Open in March, Shelton went home for two weeks. And since coming back, he’s been on a tear: top-five finishes in four of five weeks with two wins, including on Sunday at the Knoxville Open. Shelton now leads the Web Tour’s The 25 list by more than 180 points over his nearest competitor and is one Web Tour win away from a battlefield promotion to the PGA Tour.
Shelton’s future for 2020 is clear at this point — he’ll be on the PGA Tour. But winning the season-long points race would earn Shelton full PGA Tour status for the season, plus an appearance in the Players. Neither of those prizes is anything to sneeze at.
Shelton hasn’t exactly come out of nowhere — he was a three-time Ping All-American at Alabama — but his meteoric rise from struggling Web Tour player to PGA Tour certainty is a reminder of how quickly fortunes can change on the Web Tour. Shelton finished 2016 in 194th place on the Web Tour money list (194th!); even as recently as March, he wasn’t exactly lighting the world on fire. Now he’s won twice in three weeks, has a chokehold on the points race, and has a chance at full status in 2020 on the PGA Tour.
The depth of the Web Tour makes it no easy task, but Shelton is proof that getting hot even for just a few weeks can change everything.
. . .
Photo: credit PGA Tour