Dreaming in darkness: Luke Clanton's journey to becoming the PGA Tour's next big star

New York Times

2 days ago

Luke Clanton woke up and his left pointer finger was double its size. Not exactly what you want to see before your tee time in the middle of a historic run as an amateur on the PGA Tour.
Ointment. Painkillers. Anti-inflammatory steroids. Give me all of it, Clanton told the medics prior to his round at TPC Deere Run last July. Clanton was going to make this round happen. Even if it meant devising a new grip. Even if he had to change his pre-shot routine. Even though the medication made him so lightheaded that he nearly passed out on the first fairway.
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No one needed to know about this because Clanton doesn't make excuses, even when dealing with a swollen cyst on the hand — the only point of contact between the golfer and his tools.
But Clanton never needed an excuse. He shot 63 that day at the 2024 John Deere Classic. A round he eventually parlayed into a second-place finish. A result that is just one bullet point on one of the greatest amateur resumes the PGA Tour has ever seen. Since Jack Nicklaus in 1961, no other amateur has finished in the top 10 three or more times in a single tour season.
Clanton went from being a promising Florida State freshman to a sophomore who won three consecutive college tournaments to a betting favorite at a full-field PGA Tour event as a junior. Tied for 10th at Rocket Mortgage, solo fifth at the Wyndham Championship, and another runner-up at the RSM Classic. By January 2025, Clanton was ranked No. 87 on the Official World Golf Ranking. You'd have to scroll down that list for quite a while to find the next name with an amateur designation next to it.
In March, at the Cognizant Classic in Palm Beach, Fla., a tournament Clanton grew up attending, he made one more weekend on tour, totalling 10 of 13 made cuts on tour as an amateur. Finally, Clanton earned his PGA Tour card via the PGA Tour University's Accelerated program, which awards membership to players who earn enough points based on their accomplishments in college, amateur and professional golf by the end of their third year of NCAA eligibility. He had earned his membership in unprecedented fashion by beating the pros, week after week — and it could be put to use as soon as he finished his junior season at FSU, per the program's guidelines.
'My life has totally changed in five months. My personal life. My golf life. Everything,' Clanton said, in one of several interviews with The Athletic over the last few months as he sought to end his collegiate career the right way and also begin his professional career. 'It's been a lot to really understand what's happening, because half the time I don't even understand, and I'm the one trying to do it.'
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All of this might be confusing to the now 21-year-old, but it isn't to anybody else. Clanton is the future. And that future starts on the first tee at this week's RBC Canadian Open, where he will play for the first time as a professional golfer, with an exemption on the PGA Tour through 2026.
Clanton's next phase is here. It was only a matter of time.
A 10-year-old Luke and his father stood engulfed in darkness, a construction-grade flashlight doing its best to illuminate the hole in front of them at the Country Club of Miami, which isn't a country club at all. It's a municipal facility with two 18-hole courses. But more importantly, the property also includes a neglected chipping course with 40-60 yard holes and artificial greens. As far as public golf facilities go in their neighborhood, the Clantons did not discriminate.
The artificial putting surface was a short wedge-distance away but it was surrounded by scraggly rough. Luke and David could barely see anything, so they relied on the audio. Luke had to hear his ball hit the fake green — the coveted 'click' — for 10 consecutive shots. If not, he might be there for a while. The lights at the course shut off at 9 p.m., but Luke didn't need them anyway. He had impeccable distance control for a junior who still used the color-coded U.S. Kids clubs you can buy off the shelf.
Click, click, click, click, click, click. Thud — a missed green. Start from the top, his dad would say.
'My husband always thought that he was going to be something,' says Luke's mother, Rhonda. 'David gave him his swing.'
The owner of a small landscaping company and a self-taught golf instructor on the side, David Clanton knew he and his wife had a line to walk raising a golfer. While Luke's peers walked around national junior events with custom-fit clubs, launch monitors and a nutrition plan, David and Rhonda had to make sure that Luke knew how to work with what he had.
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While David worked on his landscaping business, Rhonda had 12-hour shifts as a Delta flight attendant based out of Fort Lauderdale. Luke's older sisters, Ray and Abby, had to sacrifice their own after-school activities for Luke to be able to pursue junior golf. The sport, between equipment, tee times, tournament entry fees and travel, isn't exactly affordable.
It didn't take long for Clanton's name to be known in the junior golf community. He cruised through the Florida junior circuits, making him eligible for national and global competition. He won the 2015 U.S. Kids World Championship at age 11, and throughout his teens he lived at the top of the leaderboard in elite amateur events.
At a certain point, all of the magazine articles and coaching tutorials that David obsessively consumed could no longer help a kid who recorded a 64.8 scoring average his junior year of high school. So Luke went coachless for a while, potentially stalling his development. Then COVID-19 hit. Rhonda had a tradition for her kids' 16th birthdays: They'd pick a destination of their choice and use Rhonda's airline credits to travel. When the world shut down, Rhonda had already been saving for Luke's birthday trip. The stimulus checks started to hit, and she had an idea.
'I said to him, 'Hey, we've got money to hire a coach,'' Rhonda says. ''You want to find one?'' Enter Jeff Leishman: The coach she stumbled upon when she googled top-100 golf instructors in Florida. Time to level up. During their first session together, Luke did not hit a single golf ball in front of Leishman. They just talked shop.
'Luke did all the talking,' Leishman says, 'It was a sign of independence.'
By the next summer, a 17-year-old Clanton was committed to Florida State and was invited to a prestigious junior invitational at Streamsong, a top-rated resort. Two rounds in and 40th place wasn't cutting it. By Luke's standards, he was playing terribly enough to not only want to pull out of the tournament and drive home, but to quit the game of golf.
'That's not how we work,' Rhonda told her son. 'You finish the tournament, and then we can talk about quitting. You haven't earned the right to quit.'
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So that's what Luke did. He finished the tournament. He shot a 10-under par 62 to break the course record at Streamsong Blue in the final round. And after rocketing up the leaderboard from 40th to fourth place, he took the passenger seat next to his mom, who gave him that look, the implicit I-told-you-so one that any child knows well.
'I was like, damn, mom. That makes a lot more sense now,' Luke says. 'I get it.'
Whether he knew it or not, Clanton was bred to be relentless. That same kid who hit dozens of wedge shots to plastic greens now practices Deep Dark Meditation for 40 minutes before every competitive round, something he implemented after discovering it on TikTok. In a dark bathroom, under the shower, Clanton puts on his headphones, listens to meditation music, and opens his eyes so he can visualize his intentions for the day.
'I try to keep my eyes open as much as I can, so my eyes start to hallucinate,' he says. 'It's definitely a little bit crazy, but for me, it gets me in such a headspace where I'm blocking everything I need to block out.'
Clanton is known to go off the grid after tough losses, and his inner circle speaks of his ability to transform setbacks into fuel. Clanton finds something to motivate him, and he uses it. Attempting to make the cut at the 2025 WM Phoenix Open to secure his PGA Tour membership, Clanton needed five birdies in his final nine holes to do it. He made four and lipped out on No. 18 for the fifth.
'It was rough. It was not easy to accept that, especially with the media putting it out a ton,' Clanton says. 'You go on your phone once and it's all about the missed cut. It lit a fire under me.'
Clanton's mental fortitude holds up statistically: One of Clanton's strongest stats thus far on the PGA Tour has been his bounceback percentage, which refers to the percentage of time a golfer makes a bogey or worse, but follows it up with a birdie or better. At the Wyndham, he ranked fourth, and at the RSM Classic, he ranked ninth.
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The mental intensity mirrors his physical power. Clanton is pound-for-pound one of the longest hitters on tour. At 155 pounds, Clanton averaged 312 yards off the tee in 2025 on the PGA Tour. That skill puts him at No. 13 in driving distance and No. 7 in strokes gained off the tee this year. In between tour starts, Clanton played in seven college tournaments this spring for FSU. He won four of them.
'One of his greatest strengths is the switch that he has inside of him,' says Clanton's caddie Jason Wiertel, who just left his full-time teaching job at Lisle Junior High School. 'You don't even realize how many levels he can take that switch. Guys can turn it on and off, but he can turn it on, off and up.'
Clanton has been honing that ability since David put a club in his hand.
The switch is real. It works. Now Clanton is taking it to the big leagues.
With one hand holding a beer that's spilling all over the place and the other clutching a pimento cheese sandwich, Clanton walks between the seventh and 17th fairways at Augusta National. He's multitasking, attempting to savor his last bite. But his agent, Ben Walters, is fast. Walters snatches the sandwich remains out of his hand and pops it into his mouth, prompting a genuine moment of dejection for Clanton.
He's at the Tuesday practice round of the 2025 Masters not as a player, but as a patron. That fact is made abundantly clear by the casual hoodie he's wearing and the hat on his head, custom-embroidered at a Nike event the night before.
On its side, the hat features a phrase, in red stitched letters: 'I'll be back.'
When Walters told Clanton he wanted to take him to the Masters, Clanton's initial reaction was simple: 'Absolutely not.' It took some convincing for Clanton to willingly step foot on the property, knowing he would not be walking inside the ropes. There was a legitimate discussion about whether the Masters would extend a special invitation to Clanton for the 2025 tournament, like they did for Joaquin Niemann and Nicolai Hojgaard. It never came.
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'I'm really excited to be here, but this is pretty bittersweet,' Clanton says. 'I want to play.'
Clanton settled for schmoozing with sponsors at hospitality suites and a pair of practice round tickets. But walking up to the 16th green, he had a moment: 'Aren't we standing like, right where Tiger chipped in?' Clanton craned his neck to see the players skipping their shots across the world-renowned pond: 'I think this is one of the coolest traditions.'
Every 15 minutes or so, a fan approaches, hesitantly. 'Hey, are you Luke Clanton?' He nods, smiles, shakes some hands, says some hellos. Some people recognize Clanton from his run on the PGA Tour, others from YouTube. Before Clanton excelled on tour, he participated in several videos with GoodGood, a popular channel with 1.8 million subscribers. He's mulled starting his own channel.
The handshakes, the smiles — this has taken some time to get used to. But Clanton is getting there.
'It's only weird when it's 6:00 in the morning and I'm half asleep, just trying to get a Celsius at the gas station,' he says.
A representative from the U.S. Walker Cup team coincidentally winds up in the same spot behind the 16th green. It's strange — one of the best amateurs to compete on the PGA Tour has never played in some of the amateur game's greatest team events. It's because his rise to world No. 1 was fast. Two years ago, Clanton was snubbed from the 2023 Walker Cup team. Now he'll be a pro by the time the next one happens this fall.
'So…why not make the Ryder Cup team?' Clanton and Walters look at each other with raised eyebrows. They're not kidding. Two years ago, Ludvig Åberg, Clanton's friend, went from the first PGA Tour U graduate to the European Ryder Cup team in one summer, establishing a precedent. There's been some communication between Clanton's team and U.S. Ryder Cup officials.
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For all the downplaying and gratitude Clanton has expressed in public interviews, it isn't difficult to tell that he's immensely confident in his talent. Like world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler, Clanton has a strong relationship with his faith, which has only grown stronger in recent years. It feels a lot easier for Clanton to enjoy golf and excel knowing that winning tournaments doesn't define him.
'My faith is the number one priority. I used to let my happiness depend on golf, and I struggled in my friendships, relationships, everything. When spring of sophomore year came around to win those events was a great feeling, but I knew it wasn't my identity. It was just a cool thing for me to do,' Clanton says.
As we've seen with Scheffler, that compartmentalization can be an edge.
Clanton's teammates tease him about how his confidence spills out from time to time. It's something he's working on. So, less than five days away from his first start as a professional, here's a curveball: How does your mental game stack up against the best in the world? Clanton pauses. He laughs, nervously.
'This is the type of question that you can answer truthfully, and then you can come off very brash and very cocky. Or you can say the nice answer,' he says. 'That's definitely one of the strongest parts of my game. I can handle bigger moments, which I'm very glad about, because I've been put in those moments these last couple of months. Obviously I've failed in the past, and I will fail in the future, but it's how many times you don't fail that matters.
'It's very weird, just because you sometimes meet some people, or people on the internet, and they'll think you're cocky. But if you're not confident in yourself, then you will never make it in any career. I think that's truthful.'
In golf, it never hurts to be feeling yourself a little. Clanton knows this. Sometimes that can come back to bite you, though. Clanton made one goal of his extremely public over the past 10 months: He wanted to win the national championship with Florida State. They didn't make it to the match play finals.
Other times, though, that swagger — that unwavering inner fire — is exactly what you need.
Making it comes with change. Big change.
Clanton's NIL earnings helped Rhonda take her last flight after a 40-year career at Delta. She'll serve as her son's manager on the road going forward. David sold the majority of his company, so he can attend more tournaments than ever.
Walters and his agency scooped Clanton up pre-college, and stuck with him through it all. Wiertel has never been a professional caddie, but he's retiring from his teaching job and moving his family from Illinois to Florida to loop for Clanton full time. The caddie's 11-year-old daughter, Lucy, is the reason Clanton and Wiertel linked up — she struck up a conversation with Clanton on the range at Pinehurst No. 2, before the North and South amateur. Clanton needed a caddie, offered the job to Wiertel, and the pair went on to win the tournament. Now he cannot imagine anyone else on his bag.
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'You cannot do it on your own. It's just impossible,' Clanton says. 'The amount of struggles you're going to go through. I can name 40 different times where I did not want to play golf again. You're going to go through times like that, and the people that you can lean on and be there with, that's the people that'll help you make it.'
Making it also comes with expectations, ones that Clanton is still working on processing.
'I was so hard on myself after we lost (NCAAs) that I just couldn't get my head wrapped around it. Then I have everyone else texting me to play well next week, we're so excited for you to start your career. It's amazing, but it's also hard,' Clanton says. 'I just ended my career with FSU, which was the best three years of my life, and now I'm pursuing what I've always wanted to pursue.'
To properly chase those PGA Tour dreams, Clanton's time is going to be more precious than ever. His playing schedule is madness, sponsors want a piece of him, and he knows he needs to prioritize his game over it all. Aside from playing in his first professional event this week in a featured group with Rory McIlroy and Åberg, Clanton's biggest concern right now is where he'll live. When his college apartment lease is up at the end of the summer, he has two choices among Florida pro golfer meccas: Jacksonville or Jupiter.
Clanton likes to say he had a rookie year before his rookie year, and if that taught him anything, it's to keep things light. Mindlessly scroll on social media after a long day. Get the In-N-Out meal when he's craving it. Bring the Xbox on the road. Be a kid.
As Clanton tees off at TPC Toronto, the uncertainty of pro golf lies ahead. He didn't qualify for the U.S. Open on Monday, and he's not sure about the Open Championship either. He's played in more than a dozen PGA Tour events but never with a check on the line.
But Clanton figured out how to get his foot in the door, with the same tenacity honed on plastic greens and tested through failure. He made it. Now he's in a fight to stay.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photos: Mike Mulholland, Ben Jared / PGA Tour, Joe Scarnici / Getty Images; additional photos courtesy of the Clanton family)