If you watch enough live golf, you’ll inevitably hear tales about certain tour pros who have a knack for taking their fellow pros’ money in their home games in Jupiter, Scottsdale, Ponte Vedra, or one of the many other hotbeds players flock to. One of those hotbeds is Sea Island in Georgia, which is a who’s who of former SEC golfers who have gone on to do great things at the next level.
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Patton Kizzire, a former Auburn who has won three times on the PGA Tour, is a member of the “Sea Island Mafia,” and rumor has it that he is the ringleader for money games down there. Rumor also has it that Kizzire often comes out on top in the matches he sets up. Kizzire was coy about that when we brought it up on this week’s episode of The Loop podcast.Â
“Everybody likes my money,” he said. “They can tell I don’t like to lose and that I really enjoy winning. I enjoy setting up games and getting competitive and getting out there and — I kind of want somebody to be mad and somebody to be happy. I don’t want us all to just go through the motions and everybody says ‘yeah, I enjoyed that, that was fun.’ I want to get somebody fired up and get somebody to press. Nobody’s going to get hurt too bad.”Â
Sounds like serious business. Kizzire says that post-COVID, the golf courses have gotten so busy down there that he has to set up the games in advance, picking teams out of a hat and filming the process so nobody calls him out for any tomfoolery. Most importantly, though, the financials are already discussed beforehand so everyone knows what they are getting into.Â
Oddly enough, Kizzire also mentioned that it’s not the PGA Tour pros of Sea Island who are super high stakes.Â
“It seems like the mini tour guys would rather gamble for more than the PGA Tour pros, I don’t know why,” he said. “I don’t understand it, but that’s how I was. I had a couple thousand dollars in the bank and it was all borrowed from backers and supporters and I’d be playing for more money than we do now.”
That might be a slight exaggeration consider T-40 paid $78,000 at Bay Hill this past week, but we don’t doubt that some serious money exchanges hands on Sea Island. What’s that old Lee Trevino saying? “Pressure is when you play for five dollars a hole with only two in your pocket.” Sounds like these mini tour pros are adding more than a few extra zeroes to that.Â
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To hear our full chat with Kizzire, where he also breaks down his “grounding” practice that helped him win the Procore Championship this past fall, please have a listen below, and like and subscribe to The Loop wherever you get your podcasts.Â
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
