PONTE VEDRA BEACH — Kelsi McKee, Brian Campbell’s girlfriend of five years, had one of the most human reactions we’ve seen in golf when she watched Campbell earn his first PGA Tour victory at the Mexico Open last month. As he holed the winning putt on the second playoff hole with the silver molded Ping putter he nicknamed “Moneypenny,” McKee fell to her knees, sobbing, overcome by emotion. When she ran to the green to hug him, Campbell twirled her in the air. It was an obvious catharsis—as she said later, it represented the culmination of hours of hard work and low moments when it seemed like it could all go away.
So how did she react to her moment on TV?
"All I wanted to do was see him smile with the trophy and that was my dream." 🥹
Brian Campbell's girlfriend was emotional after his first win @MexicoOpenGolf. pic.twitter.com/I1uPZbnNY2
— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) February 24, 2025
“She’s mortified, embarrassed,” Campbell told me with a smile Tuesday at the Players. “But I’m like, no, that was a beautiful moment. We started dating and I had no status or conditional status, struggling with injuries, and fast forward a few years later, we’re here. I think for her it was just the shock of that happening. I know it hit me on the inside. I couldn’t feel my legs. So I don’t know how I spun her around.”
It’s long been accepted wisdom that the healthiest mental approach to a game like golf is divorcing yourself from results, but I wanted to know if Campbell felt different, here at the Players, as a 32-year-old journeyman who had finally broken through.
“I think it’s important, on and off the golf course, to be comfortable with you are,” he said. “But I think it’s only natural that some things change mentally.”
His self-confidence has grown, for starters. He’s one of the shorter hitters on tour—a fact he’ll readily admit—but one of the important lessons of Mexico is that his lack of distance isn’t a death sentence. Clearly, he can still win tournaments. And then there’s the obvious one: he never has to think about how he hasn’t won a PGA Tour event. In fact, it’s freed him to dream.
“You can’t help but start thinking about the bigger tournaments,” he said. “You’re like, OK, wow, we just won a PGA Tour event, which is special. And the rest of the season is in play, and it’s almost like you allow yourself to think about what else you can do.”
He’s brought himself squarely back to Earth, realizing he needs to focus on the task ahead rather than fantasizing, but some transformation is inevitable.
His victory was also a lesson in how fate can rest on a knife’s edge. On the second playoff hole against Aldrich Potgieter, he sliced his drive into the trees. There was every indication it was heading out of bounds, which would have ended his tournament, but instead it hit a bamboo tree and bounced back toward the fairway.
“The second that came off the face, I was like, oh gosh, we’re done, playoffs over,” he said. “I’ve had bad kicks in the past, I think all of us out here have had good and bad kicks, so it was funny.”
Hector Vivas
When he’s not playing golf and spending time with family, Campbell tends to favor activities that allow him to shut his brain off, from working out at the gym with his music in to video games (he’ll play anything, he told me—Rocket League, Overwatch, Fortnite—except Call of Duty, because he’s no good at it). All of it, though, tends to feed back into his golf game, from the gains he makes at the gym to the hand-eye coordination he hones gaming. And it’s that sense of golf never quite leaving the brain that seems to have sustained Campbell through his years in the wilderness, allowing him to reach the moment when he could spin his girlfriend around the green, barely feeling his legs, and count himself a PGA Tour champion.
In fact, he has less ball speed now than he did a few years ago, and the fact that he’s not chasing distance to the same degree speaks to his growing acceptance of who he is and what role he plays on tour.
“I’ve learned to embrace it, you know?” he said. “You gotta accept who you are and be comfortable with your own game. If you’re not, it’s just going to be that much harder to play out here.”
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
