CHARLOTTE — The car doors had no handles—that is a standout memory to John Fields. So was knowing that the vehicle in which he was riding with PGA Tour player Jhonattan Vegas was bulletproof, and that the motorcycles zooming alongside weren’t ridden by tourists but hired protectors. To Fields, the men’s golf coach at the University of Texas, this was Secret Service-style treatment—for a golfer.
The circumstance was Fields and Vegas, his former Longhorns player-turned-tour winner, riding through the busy streets of Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, on their way to a junior clinic at a country club. Anywhere else and that would be a breeze, but Vegas is the country’s most famous golfer as the first Venezuelan to reach the PGA Tour, and there is a price to pay for that stature: fear of those who would kill or kidnap someone to trade for your riches. Thus, no handles on the car doors.
“It was unbelievable,” Fields recalls now. “The whole time we had people protecting us.”
Fields, at home in Texas, shared that story and many others on the phone Friday evening after Vegas put together rounds of 64 and 70 at Quail Hollow Club to take a two-stroke lead into the weekend of the PGA Championship. It is unexplored territory for Vegas, a four-time tour winner who has never come close to contending in a major. But at 40, he also has wisdom through hardship, success and good fortune that few of his peers could match.
Said another of his mentors, instructor Kevin Kirk, on Friday, “It’s a monster story, to be fair. You could make a movie out of it.”
If Vegas wins this PGA after starting the week as a 500-to-1 long shot, that may happen.
Vegas’ story has been about perseverance from the very beginning. He grew up in Maturin, Venezuela, where his father catered food to the workers at an oil field there. The entire Vegas family learned to play golf on a nine-hole course built by the oil company, but things went sour when the oil business was nationalized by dictator Hugo Chavez and Vegas’ father lost his job.
Chavez hated golf and moved to bulldoze courses, and without the means to support Jhonattan as a budding junior golf star, Carlos Vegas pled for help. He got it from the country’s junior golf leader, Franci Betancourt, and one of his former students, Kirk, who had lived for a time as a kid at another oil field before going back to the U.S. and becoming an instructor.
“There was a lot of pressure on him,” Kirk said. “If Jhonattan doesn’t get out of the country, the whole thing falls apart.”
Together, Betancourt and Kirk arranged for Jhonattan to come to America to get schooling, practice and play in tournaments. “He didn’t know more than 10 words of English, and most of them were cuss words, yes, no, and thank you,” Kirk recalled.
They eventually got Vegas into some big events, including the Junior World Championships in San Diego, where college coaches in attendance immediately salivated over his size, power and soft touch with such enormous hands. Fields said he eventually won the recruiting battle over Washington and Oklahoma, and even before Vegas started in Austin, he Monday qualified for the Houston Open.
“I felt like I was a baseball scout,” Fields said. “I thought he was an unbelievable talent. It was like seeing somebody throw 100 miles an hour. You can’t teach that.”
Jhonattan Vegas holds up the trophy after winning the 2011 Bob Hope Classic.
Jeff Gross
Getting Vegas into school would be another issue. He needed satisfactory scores for the entrance requirements and still barely spoke English. He eventually passed the tests, but Fields got a tearful call from Vegas while the youngster was home in Venezuela, saying he couldn’t get a visa.
Fields relishes telling the rest of the story. His wife, Pearl, suggested that Masters winner and Texan Ben Crenshaw might be of assistance because he was close to then-President George W. Bush. Fields reached out to Crenshaw, who said a better conduit than Bush might be another Texan, Don Evans, then the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. Fields called Evans on a Sunday morning and eventually got word that Vegas was to show up the next morning in Caracas. Fields said the boy traveled by bus through the mountains overnight and was there at 9 sharp to get his visa. “He’s got courage,” Fields said. “You don’t come from his kind of life without it. It’s courage, period.”
Kirk, the instructor, helped polish the rough edges in Vegas’ golf, and in an early career highlight, Vegas reached the match-play semifinals of the U.S. Amateur at the Olympic Club, where he lost to future tour player and broadcaster Colt Knost.
Kirk has worked with numerous tour players over the years, most notably Masters champion Patrick Reed, and he said few showed the determination that Vegas did.
“He was hyper-intentional,” Kirk said. “Like, ‘I don’t how I’m going to get this done, but I’m going to graduate from college and be a tour player.’ That was his mantra. It didn’t matter how bad the day was or how many noes he got, it was the story he told himself.
“The kids that I see at this level, they have one or two exaggerated traits. Jhonattan’s were his physicality and his intentionally. There was no Plan B. It was, ‘I’ve got to do this.’ He wasn’t going back to Venezuela. He needed to change his life and his family’s life.”
Completing 21 units in the last portion of his senior year—a task advisors told Fields was nearly impossible—Vegas got his kinesiology degree in 2008, won his first Nationwide Tour (now Korn Ferry) title in 2010 and got his PGA Tour card for the 2011 campaign. And in only the second start of his rookie season, Vegas shot 27 under for five rounds in the Bob Hope Classic and beat Bill Haas and Gary Woodland in a playoff.
Now 14 years into his tour career that has earned him $19.7 million, Vegas has experienced numerous challenges. He’s had three surgeries on his arms and shoulders and, as a strong ball striker and balky putter, lived numerous seasons on the bubble of retaining his tour card for the next campaign. Yet Vegas also has notched more victories (four) than many of his contemporaries, and his most recent win in 2024 at the 3M Open came after Vegas missed most of ’23 with surgeries.
Jhonattan Vegas walks with his daughter Sharlene Marie and wife Hildegard during the Masters Par 3 Contest in 2018.
Augusta National
Outside of golf, Vegas has accomplished what he dreamed. He got most of his closest family members, including mom and dad, out of Venezuela and they live near Jhonattan and his wife, Hildegard, and their two children at The Woodlands in Texas. His younger brother, Julio, who was an All-American golfer at Texas, is an instructor now at Doral.
“He is without a doubt the most appreciative player I have ever coached,” Fields said.
Sadly, Vegas, who’s represented Venezuela in two Olympics, hasn’t returned to his home country in a decade because of the continued political strife there. “It finally got to the point where it became too risky for him and his family,” said Kirk, who also experienced riding in bulletproof Hummers in Caracas.
Kirk maintains that Vegas is at his best when his back is to the wall, and even though he leads the PGA Championship by two shots with 36 holes to play, the fact that still few expect him to win might just be the motivation Vegas needs.
Fields sees the potential for an incredible chapter to be added to Vegas’ already remarkable life.
“If this happens to be the week,” he said, “where the sun and moon and the stars come together, as they do for a lot of tour players … if that happens to be in a major week, he’s fully capable of that.”
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This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
