00:00How did you end up in Auburn? Because I know you weren't born in the Auburn area or Alabama for that matter. So how you ended up there? It was you walked on the team, right?
00:11I did. Yeah, I got a little bit of a late start in golf. I played a lot of other sports growing up as a kid. Sports were a big thing in my household. My grandfather actually played baseball for the White Sox for a little bit. The baseball was huge. My dad was a big basketball guy. He walked on, played for about a year at Kent State. So sports were always a part of our lives. They played golf casually.
00:35You know, I knew about golf. I would go to the driving range. We had an executive course, you know, like a little nine hole, mostly par threes, maybe a par four, par five in there. And I would do that just kind of in the summer times because that's what my grandfather and my dad did. Right. Yeah. But I never really got serious till we moved. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio.
00:57So you only really had this summertime months to play. But I really not didn't get serious till I moved to South Florida when I was 15. And just started, you know, I moved from Cleveland to South Florida, and it's hard to fit in. And, you know, in high school, like everybody's got there. Yeah. And kids already have their clicks when you're starting kind of in the ninth grade.
01:21So I kind of trended towards golf because I could do it alone. I could do it by myself. I didn't need friends to do it. We were members at a golf club, Weston Hills, which is where they had the Honda Classic for about four or five years.
01:36So I got to see these guys once a year up close and in person. And it just kind of developed from there. But, you know, I didn't play a lot of junior golf. I probably started playing junior golf right around the summer of my junior year. So in between junior and senior year, I think my first, honestly, my first AJGA event, national event was the summer of my senior year after I had already graduated.
02:03So that's kind of late on the radar for, you know, going to college and thinking that you can play in college and being recruited. I actually qualified for the Publinks that summer after. So, you know, I was starting to have some good success and felt like I could play division one golf and just pick some schools.
02:26I really wanted to go to Florida because I had friends that were going to Florida. But Coach Alexander at the time told me he doesn't take on walk-ons and I didn't have a qualifier.
02:36Which, of course, Buddy now is, of course, you know, volunteer assistant at Auburn. And it's a big part of the program for the men's and women's teams there.
02:45I've reminded him multiple times of that, that I would have loved to have been a Gator.
02:50He coached my parents at LSU.
02:52OK. Yeah. So, you know, I looked there. That wasn't going to work. I looked at FSU. I looked at Clemson and I looked at Auburn and, you know, I just kept on going north until you found a D1 program that would take you.
03:09And I need to find a school that I could get accepted to without the, you know, athletic department help.
03:14So, Auburn accepted me. We came and visited. The program was a good program.
03:20They actually had four guys leaving that year. That kind of was part of the reason why I felt like I could come in and compete as long as I had a good week of walking on, I guess you can call it in the qualifying.
03:33So, yeah, I got to campus and I was just a regular student. I lived in the dorms.
03:39There was an empty field, which is now like the nursing school building off of campus.
03:45And I would literally go to class in the morning sometimes. Sometimes I would miss class.
03:51But and I would literally hit balls in that field and shag my own balls.
03:54I didn't have a car when I first got to school. So I just kind of figured it out.
04:01And that's how it went and figured out when the qualifier was for walking on.
04:06And I think I borrowed like somebody's car in the dorm and gave them like 20 bucks or something ridiculous and said, hey, you know, can I borrow your car this afternoon?
04:16I need to go over to Indian Pines, which is where the qualifier was, which is over by the airport.
