Niebrugge looks for a way back
Anyone who has played competitive golf for any length of time at any level has experienced a slump. Sometimes the driver gets crooked or the putter goes haywire or a finely tuned swing gets off-kilter. Slumps can last weeks or months or years.
Some golfers come back better than ever. Steve Stricker, for example. Some never come back. Tiger Woods? The point is, no one is immune. Jordan Niebrugge of Mequon experienced the first significant slump of his golfing life last summer. It couldn’t have come at a worse time.
Niebrugge had just finished a stellar run at Oklahoma State. He was an all-American and the Big 12 men’s scholar-athlete of the year. He was a two-time member of the U.S. Walker Cup team. He’d won the 2013 U.S. Amateur Public Links and played in the Masters. And in 2015, he’d tied for sixth at the British Open and won the silver medal awarded to the low amateur.
The ink was still drying on his diploma from OSU last spring when he signed a lucrative contract with TaylorMade. Eight days younger than Jordan Spieth, he was ready to make his own big splash as a professional.
And then … the “S” word reared its ugly head.
Niebrugge had five sponsor’s exemptions — golden tickets — into PGA Tour events. He missed the cut in all five, plus the British Open. He broke 70 once in 12 rounds. He developed a two-way miss, the kiss of death for golfers. When you don’t know if the ball is going right or left, you can’t play away from trouble.
His goal was to earn enough money in his handful of starts to get his PGA Tour card for 2016-’17. He earned exactly $0. Did he put too much pressure on himself?
“I don’t think so,” Niebrugge said. “People have asked me that. It wasn’t like a switch flipped and my game went away from me and I didn’t have as much confidence. If you look at my senior year, I didn’t really hit it well all year. I was averaging 11, 12 greens a round, which was uncharacteristic for me. I usually averaged 15 or 16.
“I shot a lot of rounds around par. And when I wasn’t able to make some putts, I shot 3- or 4-over, which is not what you want when you’re trying to make cuts on the PGA Tour.”
The more Niebrugge pressed, the poorer he played. He ended the year failing to make it through Web.com Tour qualifying.
“I think I got so obsessed with getting things back to where they used to be, I found myself almost getting worse and ingraining bad habits on the range,” he said. “It was pretty frustrating and I definitely got worse as the summer went on. My ball-striking was a big factor in it. I wasn’t very comfortable out on the golf course. I wasn’t comfortable over the ball.”
Niebrugge, 23, may have fallen off the radar a bit, but he hasn’t fallen off the grid. He’s working on his game in Jupiter, Fla., where he lives with close friend Charlie Danielson of Osceola, a four-time All-American at Illinois, and Jonathan Garrick, a former standout at UCLA.
In his only Web.com Tour start this year, Niebrugge shot 77-73 and missed the cut at The Bahamas Great Abaco Classic. But he has seen improvement in his ballstriking and a tightening of his shot dispersion. The misses aren’t as wild.
He is playing on something called the Minor League Golf Tour and hopes to qualify in April for the Mackenzie TourCanada, which is sanctioned by the PGA Tour. Niebrugge’s contract with TaylorMade gives him a measure of financial security as he works his way back.
Maybe this wouldn’t have happened had he skipped his senior year at OSU and turned pro after the 2015 British Open at St. Andrews, where he recorded the lowest 72hole score by an amateur in major championship history. Maybe his transition to the pro game would have been easier, his success immediate.
It’s a moot point. Niebrugge has zero regrets about staying four years at OSU and earning his degree in entrepreneurship and sports management.
“I definitely wanted to finish school,” he said. “I never really saw myself leaving early. I loved every second of my time at Oklahoma State.”
He has too much talent and has had too much success on big stages to write off. He’ll be back. Maybe better than ever.
“The goal is to get back sooner than later,” Niebrugge said. “I definitely will strive to make that happen.”