CASTLE ROCK, Colo. – Wyndham Clark turned off Interstate 25 and onto Bellevue Road to work out with his trainer the other day, passing the land that used to be Mountain View Range, where he hit his first golf shots at age 3.
“It’s five skyrises. It’s kind of crazy to see that,” he said.
Some 27 years ago, his father, Randall, was away on business and so his mother, Lise, a non-golfer, strapped Clark and his siblings in the car and drove them to Mountain View with the sole purpose of getting the kids out of the house.
“She knew nothing about golf,” Clark told Golf Magazine. “She said, ‘My son wants to hit some golf balls,’ and got me a bucket. Had no clubs. They got me some. I hit one bucket and said, ‘Mom, can I hit another one?’ And it turned into, like, an hour and a half, two hours where I just sat there. It was a great reprieve for my mom. And, for me, that’s kind of when I fell in love with the game.”
Wyndham’s winding road returns to the Mile High City this week for the BMW Championship at Castle Pines Golf Club, the 30-year-old’s first start in his home state as a professional. The last time he played a tournament here? At the 2017 Pac-12 Championship in Boulder. He returns as the 2023 U.S. Open champion, a member of last year’s U.S. Ryder Cup team, represented the U.S. in the Paris Olympics, and ranked fifth in the world.
“You dream about those things, but you never really thought it could be this great,” he said. “I kind of exceeded my expectations in my own career, which is pretty amazing.”
Clark blossomed from those first buckets at Mountain View to learning the game at Family Sports Center, where he and his dad would hit balls for four and five hours at a time.
“Then I’d go do short game and play those nine holes. It’s amazing to see where I started at a kind of local muni and then go into the college ranks and being here, it’s pretty awesome,” he said.
Wyndham Clark of Team United States prepares to tee off on the 16th hole during the first round of men’s stroke play during the Paris 2024 Olympic Summer Games at Le Golf National. (Michael Madrid-USA TODAY Sports)
Growing up in Greenwood Village, the pride of Valor Christian High School skipped over a pretty significant development in his progression into one of the biggest stars in the game. When their son was 11, Clark’s parents scraped together the money to pay for a membership at Cherry Hills.
“To move to a country club where I could hit unlimited golf balls, that was my candy store,” he said. “I no longer had to put money in a ball machine. I would say, ‘Dad, we have free balls!’ He would sigh and say, ‘Yeah, isn’t that great?’”
Cherry Hills is one of golf’s great cathedrals, where Arnold Palmer drove the first green and made birdie en route to shooting 65 and erasing a six-shot deficit to win the 1960 U.S. Open. Clark, who often rode his bicycle to the course with his bag on his back, recalls being 15 when he first drove the par-4, 340-yard downhill opener, although he concedes it might have landed short and bounced to the fringe. Now, when he goes back he hits a soft, cut 3-wood to reach the green.
“Without Cherry Hills, I don’t know if I’d be here,” Clark said. “It is surreal that I spent my childhood walking past that display in the clubhouse about 1960, hoping that I could win the U.S. Open one day, and that I eventually did it.”
Along the way, he gained additional inspiration by attending The International, the first PGA Tour tournament he ever attended, when he was seven or eight years old. Clark recalls sitting at the ninth green and watching the likes of David Duval, Retief Goosen and Ernie Els marching down the fairway.
“That’s when I knew I wanted to do what they did,” he said. “Just visualizing and imagining myself being here one day, and it’s kind of crazy, fast forward 20-some years and I’m here.”
Before notching three Tour titles, he won the 2010 Colorado State Amateur, becoming the tournament’s youngest winner in nearly 40 years, and two high school championships, including shooting 64-64 in his senior year to win by eight. Sadly, the International closed up shop in 2006 and the BMW Championship last visited the Rocky Mountains in 2014 at Cherry Hills. Clark, a college student at the time at Oklahoma State, attended as a fan and watched his buddy, former Cowboy Morgan Hoffmann shoot 62-63 on the weekend. But it has been a decade since the Tour last played in Denver.
“When they stopped playing here, it was kind of a stab to the heart for me because it was so fun coming out and watching it,” he said of the International’s demise at the dawn of the FedEx Cup era. “So for me this is so special.”
No one had to twist Clark’s arm to shoot a commercial to promote the Tour’s return to his hometown alongside Denver Broncos greats John Elway and Peyton Manning. He’s been waiting for this week to play in front of family and friends that don’t usually get the chance to see him play on a course he said he loves. Plus, there’s no telling how long it will be until the Tour returns to his backyard. Clark won earlier this year at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and enters the week at No. 6 in the FedEx Cup after a T-7 last week at the first leg of the playoffs. Asked what it would mean to win the second leg in his hometown, he didn’t hesitate.
“It would be a dream come true,” he said, “been praying a lot about it and manifesting that maybe I would be the champion.”