Destined for Superst
Collin Morikawa has made a scintillating start to life as a professional golfer, and given his blend of on- and off-course attributes, the sky really is the limit
The first time Collin Morikawa played in a professional tournament was in 2016. He was 19 years old and had just finished his first year at the University of California-berkeley, where he was the Golden Bears’ top finisher in seven of 14 tournaments. That summer, he teed it up in the Korn Ferry Tour’s Capital Classic in Kansas, earning an exemption into the event by
winning the Trans-mississippi Amateur the year before. Morikawa didn’t win, but, after making the cut on the number, he shot a pair of 63s on the weekend and sank a 27-footer on the 72nd hole to get into a three-man play-off.
Ollie Schniederjans prevailed, but Morikawa’s performance was eye opening. A few months later, still an amateur and now in his second year of college, he played in his first PGA Tour event, the Safeway Open. Morikawa – the top-ranked amateur in the world for a few weeks in the spring of 2018 – missed the cut, but he wasn’t dissuaded.
“Of course there’s going to be that wow factor, but did I believe I belonged? Of course,” Morikawa says. “I didn’t go there just to enjoy the experience. I still wanted to play really well and have a good finish. But that week I missed the cut and you learn what you did wrong and what you need to do better.”
Morikawa, who boasted sterling academic marks throughout his formative years, proved a quick learner once school was out, too.
In his first tournament as a professional in the summer of 2019, he tied for 14th at the RBC Canadian Open. Five starts later, he won, making birdie on his last three holes to capture the Barracuda Championship. The victory came at the end of a run of three straight top-five finishes, but was really only the beginning. Morikawa proceeded to make the cut in each of his first 22 starts on the PGA Tour, a mark that has been bettered by only Tiger Woods and his streak of 25 in a row.
A year to remember
When Morikawa’s run came to an end at the 2020 Travelers Championship, he again proved a good student. “It was bound to happen at some point,” he said at the time. “I’m going to learn a lot from this week. I missed the cut as an amateur at the Safeway Open in 2016, and I learned more in those two days than I did in a lot of my events so far as a pro.”
Indeed. The next time Morikawa teed it up, two weeks later at the
Workday Charity Open at Jack Nicklaus’ Muirfield Village Golf Club, he won again, this time in spectacular fashion, rallying from three down with three to play to force a play-off with Justin Thomas. Then he beat Thomas on the third extra hole for the second title of his career.
A month later, he won the USPGA Championship at TPC Harding Park, where, in the final round, he chipped in for birdie on the 14th hole then hit the shot of his life on the 294-yard par-4 16th – a driver to seven feet to set up an eagle. Morikawa’s six-under 64 was the best closing score by a champion in the event in a quarter of a century and enabled him to hold off Paul Casey and Dustin Johnson.
Just over a year earlier, Morikawa was still a college student, finishing up his degree and career as an All-american. “Instant maturity was probably the
one thing that stood out,” Casey said in the wake of Morikawa’s triumph. “I mean, you know yourself – you’ve heard him talk. He’s very mature in the words he chooses, the way he speaks, the way he plays golf.”
Early promise
Much of that can be traced to his roots. Morikawa, who is part Japanese and whose fraternal grandparents were born in Hawaii and still live there, grew up in the leafy and upscale suburb La Cañada, 20 minutes north of downtown Los Angeles. He enjoyed a comfortable childhood and never had to want for anything. His parents, Debbie and Blaine, co-own a nearby commercial laundry business, which provides plenty for the family, while his 17-year-old brother, Garrett, plays football. In other words, it’s a proverbial American dream.
Though the family had a membership to a private nine-hole club nearby, it was a public track, Scholl Canyon, a 3,000-yard, par-60, where a five-year-old Morikawa first began to show promise when his parents enrolled him in a junior camp that he was technically too young to participate in.
That’s where he was introduced to Rick Sessinghaus, who, in addition to having received his doctorate in applied sports psychology, authored the book Golf: The Ultimate Mind Game. Within a few years, it became apparent to Sessinghaus that Morikawa stood out among his other pupils. He went home one day and told his wife that the kid was going to be a future tour player.
Morikawa was just 12 at the time. The two have remained together since and Morikawa is Sessinghaus’ only player on tour.
But despite his obvious talent, enjoyment for the game and proximity to tournaments like the Genesis Invitational at nearby Riviera and Tiger Woods’ Hero World Challenge at Sherwood Country Club, Morikawa didn’t spend his youth idolising tour pros and seeking them out whenever he got the opportunity.
“It was never my interest when I was a kid to go and watch golf,” he says. “That was just never my thing. I went a couple times to Sherwood, but other than that I never went to [Riviera].
“I just never watched a ton of golf growing up. As a 10-year-old, 12-year-old, 13-year-old, I wasn’t on my computer, I wasn’t trying to get out to any tournament just to watch. Not saying that they weren’t motivating factors and I still wanted to play at them... I wanted to create my own path and I didn’t need motivation in that sense to come out here and be like, wow, those guys are really good.
“I knew how good those guys were, you see them on TV, you know they’re good and that’s what I wanted to go work on myself. I didn’t want to come out here and just be jaw dropping and awestruck like, you know, wow, I hope to be one of these guys. I wanted to make that happen, I wanted to make that dream a reality.”
“It was never my interest when I was a kid to go and watch golf. I wanted to create my own path”
Support network
Even when it was obvious that it would become reality following his runner-up finish in the Korn Ferry Tour event as an amateur, Morikawa was in no hurry to turn pro. Instead, he opted to stay in college, where he earned his degree and ended up winning five times, plus a slew of notable amateur titles, along the way.
Once he did turn pro, it wasn’t long before another decision would end up paying dividends in Morikawa’s development – the hiring of veteran caddie JJ Jakovac. A terrific player in his own right, Jakovac had spent the previous seven-plus years on the bag of Ryan Moore, the former US Amateur champion who he helped guide to four victories on the PGA Tour, plus a spot on the 2016 US Ryder Cup team.
After having parted ways with Moore following the 2019 USPGA, Jakovac tapped an agent friend to connect him with Morikawa’s camp. The two met at a US Open sectional qualifier in Columbus, Ohio, that year. Morikawa qualified and later tied for 35th at the US Open at Pebble Beach.
The laid-back personality and equally impressive golf IQ of Jakovac matched perfectly with Morikawa’s beautiful mind and game. Just over a month later, Morikawa won for the first time and so began the meteoric rise. By the end of 2020, Morikawa had reached seventh in the world and was soon inside the top five.
Off the course, meanwhile, Morikawa has found his girlfriend, Katherine Zhu, a member of the Pepperdine University women’s golf team, to be a steadying influence. Set up by a mutual friend on the University of California women’s golf team, the two connected via Instagram, began texting one another and met during spring break of his sophomore year. They have been together ever since.
A learning curve
Still, it hasn’t been all smooth sailing for the 24-year-old, who is
somewhat pedestrian in length off the tee but an exquisite ball-striker with exceptional distance control. He admits he found himself struggling following his seminal victory at the USPGA.
Morikawa missed the cut in his next start, in the first round of the PGA Tour’s Fedexcup Play-offs at the Northern Trust, but more alarming were weekends off at the
US Open that autumn and again at the Shriners Hospitals for Children Open in Las Vegas, where he currently resides.
“I just had to reset,” he says. “That was the biggest thing. For me, when I’m setting goals and trying to figure out what I need to get better at, I have to really tell myself, ‘OK, I need to focus on this’. I need to give myself a few days to really grind and practise. I sat down with my coach for a couple of days and we had a really good talk about what I needed to do and what we needed to do better. “Okay, I won the USPGA Championship, but the year wasn’t over. The season wasn’t over. For me, it was just about figuring out what I wanted to do for the rest of the season. Obviously winning a Major Championship last year was a huge tick off the checklist. It put a smile on my face, but I still wanted more,” he adds.
“I thought that good play would just kind of lead over, and that’s never the case. I think any golfer will tell you that. That’s just never the case given how golf works. Every week is a new challenge and you have to be prepared. That’s what I didn’t do towards the tail end of last year.
“It wasn’t like, oh, man, I should be winning every single week, but in that autumn portion, it was
almost like, oh, I should be playing good golf, or on my bad days I should still be contending,” Morikawa says.
“It’s not the case. These guys are way too good. And I know that. When I sat down after my last event on the tour last season with my coach, Rick, I told him the honest truth – that, you know, I got complacent. I was getting lazy. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t practising right or anything like that. It was just a mental state of needing to come out and be ready to play great golf Thursday through Sunday.”
Back in the winners’ circle
“I kind of reset before The Masters and I was able to work on that throughout December. I played a couple of times on the European Tour, too, at the DP World Tour Championship and the Dubai Desert Classic this January. By the time I went back to the PGA Tour, my game felt really, really good, I just needed to put four good rounds together,” he says.
It didn’t take him long. At the World Golf Championshipsworkday Championship in February, Morikawa leaned on a few short-game tips from Major winners Mark O’meara on putting and Paul Azinger (a member at The Concession, where the tournament was played) on chipping. Then he went out and shot a final-round three-under 69 to win by three from Brooks Koepka, Viktor Hovland and Billy Horschel in the star-studded event. After a brief period of complacency, the rising young star now had his fourth career win in just under two years.
It would be wrong to call his late 2020 a slump – he’s still only missed four cuts as a professional – but it just goes to show how high Morikawa sets his standards. It’s one of the reasons why many feel he’s destined for the very top.
“I don’t want to miss cuts. It’s just not fun. We like to play weekends, no matter what. You can still backdoor a top-ten barely making it on the number. I like playing four days, not two.
“My standards obviously went up and that’s going to happen with anyone, I think. But I thought it was going to come easy and that on the off days things were going to be slightly better than what they actually were,” he admits.
“That doesn’t mean I was getting lazy with my practice or getting lazy prepping for events, but just thinking through shots the way I was thinking through them, it wasn’t as clear as it was at Harding Park. I wasn’t as creative with my shots. It’s a learning experience. Sure, it was a few months of not great play, but I learned a lot from it.”
Which is why Morikawa will undoubtedly be one of the favourites when he defends his USPGA Championship title this May at Kiawah Island when the event returns to its regular date on the calendar. Though he’s never played the course and says he couldn’t tell you what a single hole looks like, he’s looking forward to the challenge the Pete Dye masterpiece will present.
It will also provide another opportunity for Morikawa to learn, something he’s already proved to be pretty good at.
“Obviously winning a Major Championship last year was huge, but I still wanted more”