MITO PEREIRA
AGE 26 • SANTIAGO, CHILE
Scroll the Korn Ferry Tour results from any given week, and it’s a track meet of scores in the mid- and low 60s. You have to go low, a lot, to survive. The line between survival and eventually making it to the PGA Tour? As thin as you can imagine.
Just ask Mito Pereira.
Pereira missed earning full status on the Korn Ferry
Tour for 2020-’21 by one shot. Conditionally exempt, he would have to make enough money in his spot starts to move up in the reshuffle to have any hope of playing a full season.
As the early schedule swung into familiar Central American turf, Pereira got his shot—and he didn’t miss. After a thirdplace finish in Panama earned him a spot the next week in Bogota, Pereira won to lock up full privileges for the Korn Ferry season. In June, he won back-to-back events—shooting a career-low 62 in Raleigh to win the REX Hospital Open and shooting 66-64 on the weekend to win the BMW Charity ProAm by four—which gave him an instant battlefield promotion to the PGA Tour and a fully exempt season for 2021-’22.
For now, he’s sleeping in countryman Joaquín Niemann’s Florida guest room while he plots an American relocation strategy, and the two are preparing to represent their country in the Olympics. “Chile is a small country, and not everybody even knows what the PGA Tour is,” says Pereira, who won a bronze medal for Chile at the 2019 Pan American Games in Peru. “It was a way bigger deal that I got into the Olympics than it was that I won a tournament. If we can win a medal, Chile is going to blow up.”
Pereira’s qualification odyssey wasn’t even his first potential diversion from tour golf as a career. He was an elementaryschool golf prodigy in Pirque, a suburb of Santiago, and traveled the international junior circuit recording two World Championship wins. “I went to an academy in the States, and I just got tired of the game,” Pereira says. “I wanted to go to a regular school and do the normal things a kid needs to do.”
After two golf-free years— and a broken collarbone from a foray into dirt bikes and motocross—Pereira got an invitation from a friend to come back and play a recreational round. “I thought, Why not? and I went out and shot five under,” he says. “I got back into it, and there was still time to get some interest from colleges.”
Pereira played one season at Texas Tech, where he rose to fifth in the world-amateur rankings, then turned professional and started on the PGA Tour Latinoamérica. Seeing players like Niemann and fellow All-Big 12 players Scottie Scheffler and Beau Hossler up close verified for Pereira that he had the game to make it to the PGA Tour. “You realise it’s not impossible. They’re great, but they make mistakes, too. They just play smart,” he says. “Working with a mental coach [Eugenio Lisana] has really helped. You have to feel like you always want to keep getting better. I’m ready to play with the best players in the world.”
‘YOU REALISE IT’S NOT IMPOSSIBLE. THEY’RE GREAT, BUT [PROS] MAKE MISTAKES, TOO . . . . I’M READY TO PLAY WITH THE BEST.’