When you’ve played 186 tournaments in your career without a win, perhaps you’re due a lucky break. That’s precisely what happened to American golfer Brian Campbell at the Mexico Open on Sunday, leading to what he calls a “completely life-altering” victory.
Going up against South Africa’s Aldrich Potgieter in a sudden death playoff to win the tournament, Campbell skewed his tee shot on the par-five 18th into the trees, instantly causing his heart to sink.
But then fate intervened. Rather than landing out of bounds, his ball miraculously bounced off the trees and back onto the rough – an astonishing lifeline for his hopes of winning of the tournament.
If that was a stroke of luck, then the rest was pure skill from Campbell. After safely returning to the fairway, his approach shot nestled just a few feet from the hole, allowing the American to land his birdie putt and close out a nerve-wracking victory.
“Even my caddie, Cooper, said that that ball should not have bounced back in,” Campbell tells CNN Sport, reliving what could have been the costliest error of his career. “I’m pretty sure it hit off bamboo, so I think I need to plant some bamboo sticks in my backyard and pay homage to that.”
Having never before tasted victory on the PGA and Korn Ferry Tours – the latter a developmental tour for golfers – Campbell took home $1,260,000 with the win in Mexico. Prior to that, he had earned $1,487,830 in prize money across his 10 years as a pro.
It also gains the 31-year-old entry to some of golf’s most prestigious tournaments, including the Masters, The Players Championship and the PGA Championship.
With that in mind, you can hardly blame him for his newfound love for bamboo, or even for raising a toast to the kindly area of woodland once the tournament was over.
“It was an atrocious swing,” says Campbell. “Actually, something I was battling all day was just the sweat and your hands getting a little bit slippery, and so the club actually moved in my grip there, and that’s what caused the massive fade. I do not recommend doing that on the last hole of the tournament.”
Having played college golf at Illinois, Campbell earned his first PGA Tour card in 2017 before a battle with form and injuries left him struggling to keep his career alive. Indeed, he says that he was “about a week away” from quitting golf not that long ago, but narrowly managed to hold onto his Korn Ferry Tour card in 2023.
A successful year last year saw him regain a place on the PGA Tour, and now, remarkably, he’s taken a first step into the winner’s circle.
“(With) a lot of your close friends out on tour dominating, that was really hard to see, and it was difficult to stay patient,” Campbell says about his challenging decade as a professional golfer.
Among his friends to taste success in the sport is two-time major winner and Olympic gold medalist Xander Schauffele, who was one of the 590 people to message Campbell after the victory in Mexico.
The response to Sunday’s playoff victory over Potgieter has been overwhelming, like nothing that Campbell has experienced before. His girlfriend, Kelsi, perhaps best captured the emotions of the occasion when she broke down in tears, then headed onto the green to share a long and heartfelt embrace with her partner.
“The second that putt dropped, everything changed,” says Campbell. “The media, people reaching out, even just talking to the players, walking around here this week in Palm Beach (for the Cognizant Classic), everybody’s telling me congrats, and just how proud they are of me.
“I think that’s the biggest shock. It’s just the second that putt dropped, things change, and you just don’t really expect it to happen. You can never prepare for that.”
Now, Campbell says that he’s having to be “a lot more strategic” with his schedule, which even involves taking some tournaments off. That’s the sort of once-unthinkable concession you have to make when you’re preparing to make an unexpected first appearance at Augusta National, the world’s most famous golf course, to play the Masters for the first time in a few weeks.
“In a way, this is kind of what we train for our whole lives,” says Campbell. “We’re out here grinding, and we expect to win. And so I think when these things happen, we just need to embrace them and move forward.”
Praise be, then, to the thicket of bamboo lining the 18th hole of Mexico’s Vidanta Vallarta golf course. Brian Campbell salutes you.
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