By Brendan Steele’s own admission, his 2021-22 season on the PGA Tour was a good one. Not a great season, but a good season for the native of Idyllwild, California.
“Obviously every year you want to win. Every year you want to get to the Tour Championship. I didn’t do either of those, so I didn’t quite do everything I wanted,” said Steele, who counts The American Express tournament in La Quinta as his hometown event. “But that being said, I played a lot of really good golf.”
As The American Express is played for the 64th time this week, Steele hopes to improve on his 2022 season, adding more consistency to a year that saw some strong finishes.
“Second at the Zozo, played back-to-back really good finishes at the PGA and Memorial, two top 10s there at big events,” Steele said of last season. “So I felt really good about those. So in general, it was a really solid year, and something I can build on for sure.”
Steele, 39 and a three-time winner on the PGA Tour, would like to start building on last year at The American Express, a tournament he has played each year since his first full season of 2011. In that time he has two top-10 finishes in the desert, including a tie for second in 2015. It seems that even in the years he’s out of contention, Steele works his way onto the leaderboard at The American Express for at least one day. For Steele, who went to high school in Hemet and played college golf at UC Riverside, the desert is like an old friend.
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“I would drive around for matches (as a junior player). I played desert junior golf,” Steele recalled. “For those of you who don’t know, in the summertime, teeing off around 11 o clock, it was pretty fun. We would carry our own bag and carry our own water and looking back, I don’t know how we did it. But at the time, you love the game and you want to get out there, so it didn’t bother me as a kid. I did a bunch of that. I came to the tournament as a kid a few times. Just a really special place. So it is something I always look forward to and circle on my schedule for sure.”
Brendan Steele (Aaron Doster-USA TODAY Sports)
Playing where there is no course
Those early days were all part of a story that saw Steele somehow build a professional career growing up in a town without a golf course.
“Growing up in Idyllwild, not a golf course up there, but just kind of played mostly baseball and soccer when I was young,” Steele said. “And then starting about 13, I decided I wanted to play golf, which obviously is a little late for PGA Tour players. My dad was kind of like, well, how are we going to do this? So he would drive me all around to places. But he also ultimately put a net and a little putting green in our backyard. He kind of dug out a bunker and put some sand from the hardware store in there and I would hit balls out against the house and into the net and chip to the green and putt out there.”
Those unusual beginnings started Steele’s career which has grown into more than $20 million in earnings while winning three times on tour, including twice in California at the Fortinet Championship in Napa in 2016 and 2017. While Steele has never been off the PGA Tour in that time, he says the tour life is not one of consistency as much as it is handling the highs and lows.
“There are a lot of stretches where you don’t play well over three months or six months or maybe even longer,” Steele said. “And then you feel like you are never going to come out of it. And there are other times when you feel like you are on to something and you are going to play great every week. And that is a lot of fun. It just doesn’t come along as often as you would like.
“I think for me it is mostly just trying to stay true to how I play but also try to get better,” Steele added. “Which is a hard balance to strike.”
For now, Steele hopes he’s in an improving mode as he plays some of his favorite events on tour.
“I always like to get off to a big start on the West Coast and play a lot, and being from out here it is a little easier to travel and get home after the events, so I can feel like I can recharge a bit and then get to the next one,” Steele said. “So I will look pretty hard to start this year and try to pick up a win and get in the Masters and get to the Tour Championship this year.”