Ryan Daly sighs and almost grimaces, sounding suddenly weary, as if some invisible force has balanced a rock on his shoulders. He shifts a little in his seat. “Wow,” he says.
The rock arrives as a question. A thorny question. Daly would rather not answer it. Would really, really, really rather not answer it. So the WHS head boys golf coach briefly equivocates.
“This is tough,” he tries. “I mean”—he exhales again, pained—“this is tough.”
It’s an afternoon in March, the golf season tickling the horizon. Daly is grappling with a question concerning a golfer named Barnes Blake. About Blake’s position in the WHS golf pantheon. Whether Blake is the best golfer Daly’s ever coached.
Daly tries again.
“You know, he’s definitely, I mean, I haven’t coached a player who’s accomplished more over four years than Barnes.”
This is interesting, because Daly has, at this point, coached Blake for just two years. COVID-19 erased the golfer’s freshman year. His senior year is loading. So Daly bases his vexing conclusion on an incomplete picture, more a stencil drawing than a finished painting.
Now the painting is complete. Sweeping brush strokes depict a stunning run, memorialize an epic career. Blake’s senior season is over. His high school career, too. Here’s how the final month went:
April 25, 2023: Blue Devil Invitational champion.
April 26, 2023: Union County Conference champion.
May 2, 2023: Union County Tournament champion.
May 9, 2023: North 1/2, Group 4 sectional champion.
May 15, 2023: Group 4 champion, Tournament of Champions fifth place.
That TOC fifth place? Drat. Blake triple-bogeyed the 14th hole, bad luck pooling to deliver a crippling blow. He finished 3 strokes off the lead. It’s frustrating, disappointing. But not debilitating. Blake did, after all, win the TOC as a junior.
So is he the greatest golfer to ever pass through WHS?
Presented with the question, Blake fiddles, smiles a stretched smile, fidgets. He also would rather not answer. In the end, he settles on this.
“That’s for other people to decide.”
An Overcast Friday
It’s a blustery day at Hyatt Hills Golf Course, jackets and quarter-zips rippling, the rough bristling, trees rustling. The threat of rain lingers all afternoon, droplets beginning before receding. The sky is a uniform slate color, forbidding, foreboding, promising rain. Later, the rain will pour.
But not now.
Now Blake is standing on the fifth tee, midway through a recreational round. Two playing partners watch him, preparing to begin another hole alongside Blake despite the yawning talent gulf between him and them. The first is a mediocre golfer and a high school sports journalist, Blake’s companion on this day.
The other is a middle-aged man with a rickety swing, paired randomly with the high schoolers. His name? That’s a giant question mark. The motley threesome exchanged names on the first tee, but the high schoolers forgot his, as he surely forgot theirs.
His name probably starts with a “C.” Charlie. That sounds kind of right.
Charlie, as he’ll be known, watches as Blake, driver in hand, stares down this leisurely par 4.
The fairway is wide, inviting. The hole waits out there, not too far in the distance. Blake steps over the ball, locks into position, whips his club in a glittering wheel of motion.
He pulls it. Hooks it. Pull-hooks it.
The ball veers into a copse of trees. Now a tangle of limbs impedes Blake’s path to the hole. He adjusts his aim, strikes the ball.
The ball travels a few yards. Hits a tree. Goes sideways. Crawls onto the next tee box.
So Blake is lying two over there, some 20 yards from the pin, above the hole, his ball scuffed. He lofts the ball into the air. It lands softly, releases. Settles a few feet from the hole.
Preposterous.
Blake barely blinks.
Neither does Charlie, though probably mostly because he’s contemplating his first birdie putt of the day. He’d nailed his drive. Then he’d pured his approach. Some six feet remain for birdie. He misses and makes par. Still a big win.
Blake had hooked his drive. Then he’d struck his approach into a tree. He pulls off that crazy up-and-down, tapping in for par. Routine.
Blake eventually sits at 1-under through seven holes and, as the cart bounces along a rocky dirt path, talks about how it’s an off day. He means it. He walks off the ninth green with a 1-over 37 and says he’s disappointed, and he means that, too.
Charlie, as if deriving something from Blake’s aura, starts striping the ball after the fifth hole. His sterling play lingers for a few holes, then vanishes, disappearing just as rapidly and confusingly as it materialized. On the last few holes, his shots spray left, spray right. Charlie doesn’t seem to mind.
(Oh, and the other high schooler? The mediocre golfer and high school sports journalist? We won’t talk about how he played. Let’s just say he was too busy typing notes about Blake to tend to his ailing golf game.)
The round, for Blake, should mean nothing. His score will appear nowhere but on a blocky scorecard. Only two people will watch his every swing. Only one of them will care.
Some divots, perhaps a scuff on a tree. That’s all this round will leave behind.
But it’s still golf. That, for Blake, is enough.
More than enough.
To Fall in Love
Blake’s father, Dexter Barnes Blake III, and his grandfather Jerry Orlando have always loved golf. Their love for the sport trickled down into Dexter Barnes Blake IV. Well, more than trickled. It kind of gushed. Poured. Flooded the kid from a young age.
The Blakes owned a house in Florida, a house near a golf course. Orlando and Blake III frequently exited that house toting golf bags. That inspired in Blake IV a natural interest, an intrigue. He begged to play. They said no. Finally they relented. He fell in love with the game.
He was 2 years old. Maybe 3. Nobody’s quite certain.
“He just always loved it,” his mother says. “He was watching and always wanted to play.”
An uncle, Dennis Blake, played golf at the University of Maryland and on assorted mini-tours before briefly becoming a club professional. Blake III, the father, played at the University of Vermont. “So the competitive golf gene is definitely present in my family,” the son says, “and that sort of just spurred an interest in me.”
He started, as do many kids from golf-crazed families, with a set of plastic clubs. Basement walls see those little sticks and cower. But Blake also had a set of real clubs. His dad and grandpa would take the eager child out to the range and, eventually, the course on weekends.
“I kinda fell in love with it,” Blake says.
Blake started playing tournaments at the ripe age of 5 years old. Old enough to walk around a golf course. Not old enough to attend first grade.
He played competitively before kids were supposed to play competitively, playing, by necessity, against older kids. They hopped, untethered, out of the back seats of cars. He still used a car seat.
So every Monday he would hop in his car seat and go to a tournament, accompanied by his loyal caddie: mom. Some day, if everything works out, Blake might operate alongside an actual looper, a pro who measures yardages, reads greens, provides counseling, the works. Back then, he had mom. That was plenty.
Her husband would provide her with a cheat sheet. What club she should pull for Blake from what distance. She would hand him the club. He would swing it. Simple. Beautiful.
“It just seemed to be what he always wanted to do,” she says. “He was always happy on the golf course, hitting balls, watching golf.”
Blake was happy playing other sports, too. Soccer and lacrosse. He liked them. Had fun playing them. Just not as much fun. They intruded into his golf time. Golf always beckoned, and around sixth grade Blake dropped his other sports, though he continued playing recreational soccer for a couple years after quitting travel.
“I had a lot of fun playing them,” Blake says, “but I felt like I had a lot more fun on the golf course.”
Golf’s addictive appeal had already ensnared Blake, but not in the way it lures a regular hacker to the course every weekend to lose five balls and throw three clubs. Something extra drove Blake.
“I felt like I could get a lot better,” he says, “by spending more time on the golf course rather than on the soccer field.”
He got plenty better.
A Cold Day, and A Squashed Season
It was a cold day. A freezing cold day. The type where most golfers hibernate, cocooned in warm homes, dreaming of sunshine.
Blake is not most golfers.
This was about six years ago. Blake was in seventh grade. He was at Echo Lake Country Club on this frigid day, practicing.
Daly spotted him. Blake immediately blinked onto Daly’s radar.
“I just said, this kid is dedicated to golf,” Daly recounts.
A couple years later, the kid Daly spotted practicing entered high school. Spring rolled in, and Blake stood poised to commence his high school career. Tryouts passed without a hitch. The team received its gear, its clothes. But Echo Lake CC witnessed no competitive high school golf that spring.
An intractable virus swept in and whisked away the season, shuttering courses, halting golf.
Blake, like everyone, improvised. He needed an alternative practice area. Cue the basement.
The Blakes already possessed a golf net, so they simply relocated it to their home’s sunroom. Blake hit balls into it a couple times a day, often alongside his brother, Henry, now 13, who “seems to certainly have the same golf bug,” their mom says (they also have a sister, Emma, 16, who plays field hockey and lacrosse). But the makeshift driving range quickly folded.
One day—like all the other days—Blake stepped up to the net, hit a ball. Oops. Hole in the net. Ball in the wall.
“My mom was not too happy about that,” he says.
“That wasn’t a fun night,” his mom says, laughing.
Losing his freshman season, Blake says, was “a disappointment,” especially with the team’s expected potency.
It sucked. For everyone. Especially for the seniors. But Blake, at least, had more years.
Three more years.
Hard Work, Sometimes ‘Crazy’
Blake practices incessantly. In the summer, all day, nearly every day. School eventually interferes with those blissful days on the course, but Blake still practices nearly every day. Not a chore. Not a duty. A choice. The sheer volume of Blake’s practice time forces the dial in his direction. He’s intense. It radiates off him.
“He has this uncanny ability to push himself well past the point where most people would stop,” says Matt Wilson, Baltusrol Golf Club’s director of instruction and Blake’s coach. (Wilson coaches about a dozen people in a similar manner, including seven Division I golfers and two professionals.)
Work ethic? “It’s exceptional,” Wilson says. “He’s not afraid to put in the time. He’s not afraid to put in the effort. And he’s also very, very structured in terms of how he goes about it.”
Blake estimates that, during the school year, he spends eight hours playing on Saturdays. Eight more on Sundays. About 12-20 hours during the week. But “I really enjoy practicing,” he says.
He also employs another component in his training. Gym work. Part of the new breed of golfer. The John Daly model is dwindling, the Rory McIlroy model burgeoning. Blake adheres to the new school.
He started gym training in seventh grade, first doing mostly mobility and rotational exercises. Not too much strength training or heavy weights. But from September to March this year, he performed a ton of strength training, working on stabilizing the swing. Now it’s all about speed training, the pursuit of a faster swing and increased distance.
“That’s helped a lot,” Wilson says.
Blake spends four days a week in the gym. His sessions last about an hour and a half. Add to that the legion of hours he spends on the course, on the range. That’s a lot of time.
“I really don’t have much time for hobbies and stuff,” Blake says matter-of-factly. “Pretty much all my free time is taken up by golf.”
That does not, always, necessarily mean actually playing golf. It means working out in the gym. It means scrolling through courses on Google Earth before tournaments. It means flipping through yardage books.
The motion and the skills are so practiced, so ingrained, studied and memorized through infinite hours of work, that Blake can do it easily. He can step up to the first tee after no warmup on a cold day and make a par, as he did on that Friday alongside Charlie.
“He’s extremely serious,” his mom says. “But he’s pretty laid back at the same time, which is interesting, because he’s a competitor and he always wants to win.”
“He’s always trying to get to the next level,” she adds.
That requires sacrifice. The avenue to improvement may loop through Grueling Work Village and Discipline Town, but it barely grazes Teenage Fun City.
Blake is fine with that, understands that. He loves what he’s doing. Even if it sometimes seems insane to those in his orbit.
“There are plenty of days when I think it’s crazy,” his mom says. “But I know that it makes him really happy. And this is what he loves to do.”
On Philosophy and Mentality
Golf, like everything, is innovating. New club technology. New ball technology. New technology technology. Blake has access to much of it. It helps.
His family belongs both to Echo Lake Country Club and to the stately Baltusrol Golf Club, a playground for major champions whose premier course lounges safely within the cloistered confines of Golf Digest’s world rankings. Baltusrol’s Lower Course is, says Golf Digest, the 45th best golf course in the world.
“Having access to great practice facilities makes everything a lot easier as well,” Blake acknowledges.
Blake’s practice philosophy, though, is simple, useful. Go play golf. Lurking at the range’s fringes and flushing beautiful shots all day means nothing when the pressure mounts, when the vagaries of golf arrest a round.
“You gotta learn to go hit the ball on the golf course,” Blake says, “because that’s where the game’s played. It’s not played off a flat lie.”
The work never stops.
“It’s just the nature of the game,” Blake says. “There’s always something to work on. There’s always something to improve. But eventually it gets to the point where what you have is good enough to go play well, and what you need to do is go play.”
Blake sounds overwhelmingly mature in these moments, an older man trapped in a teenage body. Perhaps that comes with the territory. Golf is a solitary sport, a trying one. It breeds mental toughness, incubates wisdom.
And that mental side? Blake has harnessed it.
He never curses, never reacts, never throws tantrums. Unflappable. Smooth sailing. Facial expressions and body language yield little, the brutal grinding days nearly indistinguishable from the flowing unconscious ones.
He also can unplug, if only briefly, from golf’s endless grasp on the mind. “He’s a really good family member,” his mom says. “I enjoy the time with him. I enjoy my one-on-one time with him, especially. He’s a quieter kid.”
On-course mental mastery is the next progression in Blake’s evolution.
“There’s only so much you can do technically to advance your skill set,” Wilson says. “It’s really about improving the output of your skill set. And a lot of that is psychological.”
Emotions influence decisions. The inclination after making a bogey is to fire at the next pin hoping to make a birdie. Bad idea. The reward for that is typically another bogey.
“I like to stay very even-tempered,” Blake says, “but everyone starts to feel that emotion at some point. Everyone will get frustrated every once in a while.”
It’s a matter of resetting, refocusing, recalibrating. “When you start making emotional decisions, it’s typically not the right decision,” Blake says.
Emotion and logic war within golfers’ brains. Logic typically triumphs in the brain of a champion. It triumphs, almost always these days, in Blake’s brain.
Not until recently, though.
“When he was younger, it was something that he had to learn to control,” his mom says.
Now the control comes naturally.
A Pretty Smart Cookie
Daly has some nouns.
“Consistency, dedication, effort, discipline,” the coach says. “Just kind of how he’s wired.
Blake is, as Daly and Wilson both point out, a rather intelligent fellow. He maintains pretty decent grades. Like, pretty decent. Like, probably top-of-the-class decent. Like, WHS 2023 NJSIAA Scholar-Athlete of the Year decent.
“It’s definitely a challenge,” Blake says, to simultaneously receive ridiculous grades and commit fully to golf. “But I enjoy the challenge. I really don’t want to have to sacrifice either.”
The cost is sleep.
Blake rarely leaves the course before dusk. Then he still has to tackle his homework. Then he sleeps. Then he does it all over again.
Parallels form between school and golf. Blake adopts the same pensive face deciphering a particularly convoluted physics problem as he does examining a dreadful lie. Eyes intent, gears turning, cogs spinning, mouth sometimes moving wordlessly.
He studies golf like he studies for school.
At the 2022 U.S. Junior Amateur (Blake’s second straight year qualifying for the prestigious tournament), he scrutinized the field’s most highly ranked players. “A unique thing,” Wilson says. Blake carried new knowledge away from that day.
“He came back with a little report on his findings,” Wilson says, “and he just noticed they just hit the ball with a lot less curve.”
That was the way the best did it. That’s the way Blake now does it.
“So we’ve been trying to help him remove curve,” Wilson says. Soften Blake’s trademark draw. Strike shots with a neutral ball flight. Long-term goals.
Blake meticulously tracks every round. He’s not quite Matt Fitzpatrick, filling reams of notebooks with records of every shot. But he’s rather scrupulous.
Blake feeds every round into a stats analysis program. He and Wilson discuss recent rounds, recent trends, technical or tactical shifts. They’re in contact essentially every day. They text or call or talk in person, meeting a couple times a week to talk or practice or play casually.
“What’s unique about Barnes is he always comes with questions,” Wilson says.
Most recreational golfers possess a firmly rooted image of a golf pro as a teacher, accessible only through booked lessons. Not here. Wilson is Blake’s coach.
Blake has learned quite a bit from Wilson. Wilson has learned quite a bit about Blake.
“When you combine that drive, that love of competition, and that ability to think critically and that intelligence,” Wilson says, “I think you get a really cool person to work with.”
Superlatives, Superlatives
A communication barrier, frustrating and seemingly unresolvable, lingered. So Blake tried to dissolve it.
This was during Blake’s senior season. The boys golf team volunteers at the Elizabeth Coalition to House the Homeless, spending time with homeless children. Blake meets with Daly to plan these volunteer trips. During one such visit, Blake was working easily with a student. But he noticed another golfer struggling to communicate with a child who spoke only Spanish.
So he switched with his teammate.
“And Barnes was able to communicate in Spanish with some of the students,” Daly says. “And that was super impressive. So it just shows you that he’s got his heart in the right place.”
Blake’s grasp of Spanish is excellent for a WHS student. It’s rudimentary for the real world. Language students bumble through memorized phrases in upstairs classrooms, supposedly conversing exclusively in Spanish but really interspersing sentences with English. It works in school, because everyone else speaks English.
Not here. This was the real world. A lot different.
Blake knew that. He tried anyway.
And, says Daly, succeeded.
“Barnes is a person of very, very high character,” Wilson says. “And that’s a credit to his parents and his family, his extended family, and just the environment that he’s grown up in. Barnes is a wonderfully grounded and wonderful person.”
The superlatives gush in from all corners. From this coach. From that coach. From anyone who knows Blake.
Here’s Daly again: “It’s not just golf with Barnes, but it’s this amazing ability to just be calm, and focused, and just completely committed to whatever it is that he wants to achieve.”
He wants to achieve plenty.
But foremost, of course, is golf.
A Meteoric Ascent
The yellow bus crept forward, mired in awful traffic. An accident had paralyzed travelers, commuters and golfers alike, lengthening a long ride home from the 2021 Tournament of Champions.
Sweltering heat afflicted the bus’s interior.
“We were all dying,” Blake says.
They didn’t mind much.
“We were all right with it,” Blake continues, “because we had just won.”
A picture, one of Daly’s favorites, memorializes the win. He mentions it quite frequently in conversation about the TOC, high school golf’s elite year-end tournament. In the picture, then-seniors Colin Summers and David Givand pose with three trophies. The Group 4 trophy. The team TOC trophy. Summers’s individual TOC trophy.
Blake, then a sophomore, “played solid that year,” he says. “I felt like I could have played a little bit better that year, though.”
The next year, he did.
He won the whole thing.
He won the TOC, won Group 4, won the KGolf Classic, won the Union County Conference, won the Union County Tournament. Was named nj.com Player of the Year.
“A good year,” he says. Ha.
“What last year showed me,” Daly says, speaking before this season, “was that he is in complete control of his game, and, in particular, his short game.”
It was incredible. But it turned out to be an appetizer.
Turn the Boat Around
A virus visited Blake one night this February, clamped its icy fingers around him, squeezed hard. Quite hard. It left him bedridden for days, severely weakened.
The night of the Super Bowl, Blake developed a headache. He took some Advil, went to bed. Woke up in the morning feeling lightheaded, but went to school. “That day just kind of dragged by,” he recounts.
It felt like the flu. He thought it was a bug. There was a bad one zipping around.
“And then my stomach just got all screwed up. I just couldn’t eat anything for a couple days, and I couldn’t drink anything, couldn’t hold anything in.”
He could barely walk, could barely stand without falling. A trip to the emergency room followed. A test revealed the culprit. Salmonella. How Blake contracted it still is a mystery.
The doctors proclaimed it would depart within a couple days. Two days, maybe three. It took 10.
The damage: 23 pounds lost, a couple weeks wasted. A week passed before Blake recuperated enough to walk, enough to play golf.
Finally he managed to step onto the course alongside a friend. His friend piped his drive off the first tee, no problem, like always. Then Blake stepped up. He swung. Air. Whiffed it. So he reset and swung again. Air. Whiffed it. So he reset and swung again. Air. Whiffed it. “He was just dying laughing,” Blake says.
The bout with salmonella sliced about 30 yards off his drives. It wasn’t really a bout, though. More like a socking, a knockout that left Blake essentially bedridden, unable to walk, unable to eat.
The remnants of the crippling weight loss lingered. Almost like a stain in a white shirt. Wash the shirt once, the stain remains. Wash the shirt twice, it fades a little. Keep washing, keep working, and eventually it will disappear.
Eventually.
It took a while.
“I had some pretty low lows in the beginning,” Blake says.
He contended at the season-opening Wall Invitational and at the ensuing Red Devil Invitational. But only kind of. He finished 5 strokes behind at the former, 3 strokes at the latter.
Then came the Garden State Cup. The lowest of those pretty low lows. A 12-over 84. Firmly middle of the pack. Middle of the pack?
The train skipped off the rails on the back nine. Blake was only 4-over at that point. But he blundered on a par 5, made a triple bogey. On the next hole, he yanked a 3-wood into the water. Then chunked his drop into the water. Back-to-back triples.
Ouch.
So what was going on?
Blake is asked the question about a week after the tournament.
He launches into an esoteric explanation. “Technically it all correlates to swing radius, but, like…” he trails off, thinking better of dizzying his interviewer with an abstruse dissertation.
Later in the season, he resumes talking about the same subject, except this time in layman’s terms.
“I was just kind of overthinking everything,” he says, “trying to micromanage every part of the swing.”
Perfectionism. Blake exhibits it. So does nearly every successful golfer. It’s a golfer’s greatest asset. It’s also a golfer’s greatest curse.
It’s the motor propelling Blake. “I believe I practice harder than most people,” he says, and the pursuit of improvement, of perfection, is probably why.
But sometimes it goes too far. Sometimes golfers set sail for the island of perfection but instead swerve into the deep sea, buffeted off course by the heavy winds of overthinking, until water starts leaking through the boards. This was Blake.
But he escaped, bailed out his boat, steered to calmer waters.
Then sailed closer to that island than perhaps ever before.
The Blazing Run, and its End
They chortle, glance at each other incredulously, gaze down at the golfer in amazement. Some jaws actually drop. The news flits around the clubhouse.
Blake is over there. On the 18th green at Echo Lake CC. Signing for a 5-under-par 66 in Westfield’s own Blue Devil Invitational. A bogey-free 5-under-par 66. He wins the tournament by 3 strokes.
Barnes Blake is doing Barnes Blake things again.
“The past couple of weeks,” he says afterward, “I’ve just been trying to just let myself trust that I’ve done the work and just let my mind take control of everything. And just kind of let go, visualize the shot and hit it.”
Dusk hurtles in as Blake, sitting at an outside table, says this. But dusk’s approach is troublesome. Blake must rise before dawn the next morning. He and his teammates will drive to Galloping Hills Golf Course for the Union County Conference Tournament.
Blake wins that.
Then he wins the Union County Tournament.
Then he wins the North 1/2, Group 4 sectional tournament.
Quite a turnaround from those pretty low lows.
“He honestly didn’t say much” about the early struggles, his mom says. “I feel like he took the rocky start well. And I just kept saying, just be patient, be patient. And knock on wood the last few weeks have been much better for him.”
Salmonella’s lingering effects, she says, contributed to the rough patch. A recovered Blake is a fully powerful Blake, not the underweight shadow of a month before.
“I just think he’s physically in a much better place, which then kind of helps the mental piece fall into place as well,” she says.
Blake enters the Tournament of Champions riding a championship streak four tournaments long, stretching back three weeks, to that sunny spring day when he shot 66 to win the Blue Devil. It’s a historic run, one that somehow stamps Blake deeper into Westfield athletic history.
So forgive the public for predicting another Tournament of Champions title.
Tournament of Champions, though, is not a misnomer. The name is appropriate. It’s a tournament, its tee sheet riddled with champions.
“It’s always hard,” Daly says, before the season, “because it’s one day. And golf is a humbling game.”
Professional tournaments afford golfers four rounds to prove their mettle, a format designed to separate the great from the very good. These 72-hole marathons absorb mistakes, meaning one miscue fades against the larger body of work.
High schoolers don’t get that luxury.
“You never know how things are gonna go one day,” Daly says, speaking golf’s unavoidable, irritating truth.
Things, for Blake, go decently on this one day. He wins Group 4. But he finishes 3 strokes behind the overall leaders, in a tie for fifth place.
That’s fine. Tiger Woods is still Tiger Woods even though he finished in a tie for 22nd at the 2004 Masters.
But Blake is disappointed. That much is clear. He greets acquaintances with small smiles during the post-round schmoozing, not crushed but probably engaged in a mental rehashing of the round. He gazes slightly into the distance during an interview, seeing the holes in his mind, the fairways’ contours, the greens’ undulations, the blades of grass in the rough.
A legendary career stops one rung short of mythical.
Perspective and Possibility
Blake fields a question about the allure of Georgetown University, the school to which he committed as a junior.
He talks about the campus. “I really love the campus.”
He talks about the town. “I love the little town there, Georgetown itself.”
He talks about the location. “I like the proximity to Washington, D.C.”
He talks about the business school, the alumni network. “That’s exactly what Georgetown provides.”
Nowhere, not until prompted, does he talk about golf. He’s a college athlete talking about business school. Heresy.
This is because Blake has perspective. No saucer eyes. He wants to make a career of golf. He knows it’s extremely difficult. For now he’s focused on the next round, the next tournament, the next chapter. He just qualified for his third straight U.S. Junior Amateur. Eventually, if the ball bounces the right way enough times, he might play professionally.
“That’s what I would love to do,” he says. “But I do also understand how hard it is. For all the great players out there, only a few make it all the way to the PGA Tour.”
He might flunk out of golf entirely, might chug around the mini tours, might make it all the way. No one knows. The intrigue is in the uncertainty.
One thing, though, is certain.
The middle-aged man will still be there. Rickety swing and all. Strolling around Hyatt Hills on an overcast Friday. He might stripe some drives. He might flush some approaches. He might make a couple pars, maybe even a birdie.
Heck, his name might even be Charlie.
