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It wasn’t mean’t to be like this for Andy Ogletree.
“Growing up you think you’re going to turn pro and play on the PGA Tour,” he says. “It’s not exactly what I thought my career would look like.”
A big understatement from an understated, yet underrated player who has taken an untrodden path to one of the most lucrative tickets in golf.
The winner of the 2019 US Amateur and a member of a winning Walker Cup team, Ogletree planned to turn pro after the 2020 Masters, which was delayed due to the pandemic.
After finishing as the lowest amateur at Augusta National, reality hit. The Georgia Tech talent was battling away for a PGA Tour card in 2021 when he tore his labrum, meaning he required hip surgery and a six-month break.
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A tortuous period of soul-searching followed as Ogletree’s clubs gathered dust and his hip slowly recovered. But it was when he returned that Ogletree truly hit rock bottom with his game.
Still unable to swing freely with hip discomfort, he managed to win a mini-tour event, but failed to gain full status on the Korn Ferry Tour after finishing 100th at Q School. Long road trips to Monday qualifiers were yielding little joy.
Suddenly, Ogletree was a professional golfer with no way of paying the bills.
“It’s a time where I had to reflect and think – ‘do I really want to do this full time?’” he admits on a call with bunkered.co.uk. “I had a great (engineering) degree and I was seriously thinking about an alternate route.
“I didn’t have status anywhere, wasn’t getting any sponsor invites into PGA Tour or Korn Ferry events so was driving round playing Monday qualifiers. I wasn’t making any money and I really didn’t enjoy the lifestyle.
“There’s not anything wrong with that but I just felt like I wasn’t getting any better at golf. I wasn’t going to keep playing one Monday round where I needed to shoot 63 on a course that was not going to develop my game.
“I was just very frustrated. From Covid to turning pro and having sponsors invites and having to turn those down to have hip surgery to then turn those down and not getting the invites that I thought I would get and not playing well in the Monday qualifiers. It was all a culmination.
“I was very frustrated in general – not just in golf but in life. I probably wasn’t very pleasant to be around. It was a low point in my life.”
At the height of that disillusionment came an unexpected lifeline.
Desperate to just play golf, Ogletree was granted a conflicting-event release by the Korn Ferry Tour to play the International Series event in London in 2022. A week later, he was invited to LIV Golf’s inaugural event at Centurion, but this time was not given a release, despite not being in the field for the corresponding Korn Ferry tournament.
Just like Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson, he was suspended by the PGA Tour, also meaning he couldn’t even tee it up in any future Korn Ferry events.
Ogletree finished dead last at Centurion, posting 24-over-par, and was not invited back by LIV commissioner Greg Norman.
But as that door closed, Ogletree’s fleeting involvement with LIV did at least offer exemptions into the Asian Tour’s International Series – and that’s where his career truly kickstarted.
It’s an opportunity that Ogletree is eternally grateful for. Not only has his confidence returned in the past 18 months after finally finding a home to play golf in Asia, but he also found a route back to LIV for the 2024 season.
Ogletree won tournaments in Newcastle, Egypt and Qatar as he travelled the world and topped the Order of Merit on the International Series to claim a permanent spot on LIV’s roster.
“Good golf takes care of itself,” he says. I know I’ve been playing great golf over the last year-and-a half and I would like to think wherever I was playing I would have had success. But thankfully for me it’s on LIV Golf and it’s going great.”
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In a surreal turn of events for the 25-year-old American, Ogletree has now been chosen by Mickelson, one of his childhood heroes, to represent the six-time major champion’s HyFlyers team in 2024.
“To be in the same locker room and travel with him – I pinch myself every day and think ‘this is wild.'” he grins. ” I grew up watching him, trying to get his autograph at tournaments when I was a kid.
“It can only make me better competing with one of the greatest of all time every single day.”
Now as hopeful and optimistic as ever, Ogletree laughs as he looks back on a “rollercoaster” four years, with things hardly likely to settle down just yet.
But as he prepares to tee it up in LIV’s first event of the season in Mexico, he is keen to impart one piece of wisdom from such a tumultuous ride.
“Life can change so fast in this game and one year of golf can take you to the lowest of lows to playing LIV Golf and the highest of highs,” he says.
“I hope anyone out there sees the path I took and goes out of the social norm of playing the Monday qualifiers. There are so many tours in the world to go play and get better. Don’t take no for an answer.”
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