IVINS — Austin Smotherman's long road to the PGA Tour winner's circle ended among the red rocks and black lava of Black Desert Resort, where the 32-year-old shot 3-under 68 on Sunday to win the Bank of Utah Championship for his first PGA Tour victory. Smotherman won by two strokes over Doug Ghim and by three over David Ford and Trace Crowe in Ivins, Utah.
Smotherman entered the final round with a one-stroke lead and a 54-hole tournament record, then birdied three of his first five holes on a sun-soaked day to stretch the advantage to three. Momentum shifted at the 13th, where he made double bogey, and when Trace Crowe canned an eagle putt at the 14th, the lead was trimmed to one. Smotherman answered immediately, stepping up and ripping 3-wood to steady the closing stretch and secure the two-shot margin.
The win traces back to Loomis, California, and the municipal courses of Sacramento. Smotherman cut his teeth at Haggin Oaks and Ancil Hoffman, playing junior golf against Cameron Champ and Bryson DeChambeau. His first clubs were plastic Snoopy irons, later replaced by a Sam Snead 7-iron blade and persimmon 5-wood cut down by his grandfather and wrapped with duct tape and electrical tape for grips, treasured possessions still at his mom's house. "That was my first real consistent go and practice and be with a junior group activity," Smotherman recalled of joining Little Linkers at Haggin Oaks. Mostly self-taught with fewer than 10 lessons by his junior year of high school, he worked as a cart boy at Twelve Bridges, now Catta Verdera Country Club in Lincoln, to earn practice privileges.
He beat DeChambeau by one stroke with an 18th-hole birdie to win the 2011 Cal Junior Amateur, a round watched by SMU men's golf coach Josh Gregory. "Two weeks later, I was having an official visit and six months later, I was starting college golf at SMU and Bryson and I had become teammates," Smotherman said. The bond continued after graduation when Smotherman and his wife Jessica rented a Dallas townhouse to DeChambeau. "It was just a glorified storage unit for him where he knew everything was going to be safe because he was hardly ever there, and it was a way for him to help us out with paying some rent," Smotherman said. "He knew I wasn't necessarily rolling in the dough." DeChambeau also wrote a $5,200 check for Smotherman's PGA Tour Q-School entry that first summer on the Adams mini tour. Smotherman shot a bogey-free 5-under 67 to sit T-8, but fell to T-21 as the top 19 and ties advanced, sending him to two seasons on PGA Tour Latinoamerica. "Going to South America was an incredible experience," he said. "If you have the opportunity and that's where your journey takes you, I always tell guys to lean into it."
Smotherman earned his PGA Tour card by finishing 25th on the 2020-21 Korn Ferry Tour money list to claim the final card, then endured a near-miss at the 2022 Wyndham Championship where he needed to make the cut to reach the FedEx Cup playoffs, slept on a darkness suspension overnight, then missed a birdie putt and made double bogey. "I took it as, Hey, there's, there's a bigger plan here. We're going to come back. We're not playing seasons to just keep our card. We're going to build up to where these things are just an afterthought," he said. After conditional status and a return to the Korn Ferry Tour last season where he won twice, he posted a T-8 at The American Express in January and held the 54-hole lead at the Cognizant Classic in late February before finishing runner-up. "Comparison is kind of a thief of joy. I got to marry my high school sweetheart. We got to travel. We got to support each other. We got to do all these things. And now we're raising a family," said the father of daughters Adeline, Penelope and Grace, born in April. At Haggin Oaks, his signed caddie bib from The American Express now hangs in the pro shop where he tells Sacramento juniors that hard work can make dreams come true.