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 Patrick Cantlay won the state high school title at Santa Maria Country Club last month (PHOTO: Phil Vitek/SCGA). Our coaching relationship with Patrick Cantlay reached an exciting high point last month when he won the CIF State Boys High School Championship at Santa Maria Country Club. In the early 1980s when I was an assistant professional at Virginia Country Club, I played a lot of golf with Pat Neylan. We spent many enjoyable hours on the golf course and formed a friendship. I left Virginia to pursue other professional opportunities, but returned in 2000 and met Cantlay — who is Neylan’s grandson — at a junior golf camp. Patrick was just 6 years old, but he had a strong pedigree. His father was a very good player who had won the club championship at Virginia. It wasn’t long after that clinic that we entered into a one-on-one coaching relationship with Patrick, who graduated from Anaheim’s Servite High School last month. In 30 years of teaching this game, we have found that golf is a completely independent game. The player that really gets the game is the one that can be independent and not have to be interactive. That ability to be independent allows the player to focus on the task at hand. Patrick has had this innate ability virtually from the start. Golf is a lonely game — you have to figure it out for yourself. You can’t ask for help during a round. You can’t call a timeout to seek a coach’s advice. Most of your practice is done on your own, and it takes a special talent to spend numerous hours on the practice tee by yourself. There also is a scoring gene that great players possess. It allows them to take an average round and squeeze every ounce out of it. It’s not that he can’t play beautiful golf, but Patrick has this ability to economize a hole whether he is playing from the middle of the fairway or scrambling. There are a lot of very talented young players out there, but most don’t know how to score. Patrick does this as well as any young golfer I’ve seen, and that includes the many players we work with that now play professionally. Our role as coaches of young players is to first and foremost teach them to be good people while educating them on what the game is all about. In an era where parents burn out young players with excessive tournaments and unrealistic expectations, we want to let a kid be a kid. That player also must learn his instruction time is a time to focus and work. Patrick has bought into our process. With an incredibly successful high school and junior golf career behind him, Patrick heads off to UCLA where he will begin the college phase of his life. The hours spent in training and competition will serve him well, but it is his adherence to the process as a whole that will give him the opportunity to continue to compete at the highest level. He’s also a pretty solid young man. Jamie Mulligan is chief operating officer and an award-winning PGA professional at Long Beach’s Virginia Country Club. |
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