Luke Clanton finally has his PGA Tour card, but he’s so much more than that

PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. – Luke Clanton could’ve picked anybody.

As the star freshman on American Heritage’s varsity boys golf team, Clanton had first dibs in selecting his junior-varsity partner for a big match against the Patriots’ South Florida rival, The Benjamin School. Only Clanton didn’t go with the best available player; he chose instead the smallest kid on the team, a seventh-grader named Aiden Arce.

Barely 5 feet tall, Arce tried carrying his own bag, wanting to impress Clanton. But midway through the back nine, the little guy dropped his bag, physically unable to lug it another step.

“You’re not quitting,” Clanton told Arce. “Give me your bag.”

“He put Aiden’s bag on one shoulder, his bag on the other, and off they went,” said Brandt Moser, Heritage’s coach. “And they won the match.”

Arce now plays for D-II Barry University.

And Clanton, a junior at Florida State, will soon be a card-carrying member on the PGA Tour.

When the PGA Tour University launched its Accelerated program just over two years ago, it had talents like the 21-year-old Clanton in mind, standout underclassmen who could fast-track their way to the show by achieving elite benchmarks. Clanton’s run to 20 points – just the second in history following Vanderbilt senior Gordon Sargent – was unprecedented; he began last June with zero points, and he earned every single point with his play – none via awards – with 14 of those coming from his PGA Tour performance, which has included five top-15s, two of those runners-up, in 11 starts.

Clanton’s final point came Friday afternoon at PGA National Resort and Spa, where he made the cut at the Cognizant Classic. A few weeks earlier, at the WM Phoenix Open, Clanton was just 20 feet away from his card, but he couldn’t get the birdie putt on the last to fall. He left TPC Scottsdale that day telling everyone, “It’s just not my time. My time will come.”

That it finally happened at PGA National’s Champion Course was storybook.

For one, it’s the only PGA Tour layout where Clanton had previous experience. He estimates he’s played the Champion Course some 40 times, including a few instances where he and his buddies snuck on the third hole to get in as many holes before sundown. And it’s located just 80 miles north from where Clanton grew up, meaning family, friends and anyone in South Florida hoping to catch a peek of potentially the next big thing in pro golf would be there to witness any coronation.

Clanton downplayed the narrative all week, but deep down, like everybody else close to him, he knew how perfect this would be.

It would just require a few more hours of patience following an opening, 4-under 67, which on a historically gettable Thursday was only good for T-28. Before the second round, needing at least something in red numbers, Clanton huddled with his inner circle, including his parents, and prayed.

Those prayers, under a clear, blue sky, were answered as Clanton shrugged off an early bogey at the par-4 second to birdie five of his next six holes. From there, it was only a matter of time before Clanton put the finishing touches on a cut-making, card-clinching 65 with a 10-foot birdie make at the par-5 finishing hole.

“To be on 18, walking up and seeing all the people there, it’s breathtaking,” Clanton said. “… We were focused in, man, from the start of the day to the end of the day, we were locked in, and then on 18 when I saw my mom and dad, I started to break down a little bit.”

The feeling was mutual.

“There are so many adjectives,” said Clanton’s mother, Rhonda. “It’s like a wild, exciting, crazy, happy, glorious, sometimes-hard-to-believe journey. That’s what it’s been – for a year. It’s like somebody pressed fast-forward.”

Now, to rewind…

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DAVID AND RHONDA CLANTON met at a gym 36 years ago. Four years later, they married. First came daughter Ray; then, two years later, another girl, Abby; then, six years after that, a boy, Luke, who Rhonda welcomed at age 40.

Luke, like his sisters, tried all the sports. He enjoyed football and basketball. Baseball? Not so much, as he quit in coach-pitch after getting smoked by a line drive. Golf, however, was the unrivaled love.

Starting when Luke was 3 years old, David would take his boy to Country Club of Miami, a modest, public facility that touts a rich history – the club claims Arnold Palmer as its first professional and that Jack Nicklaus played his first pro tournament on the West Course, one of two 18-hole layouts designed by Robert Trent Jones. It was the closest course to the family’s home in Hialeah, Florida, but more importantly, it was easy on the blue-collar Clantons’ budget. So, neither cared if it took some extra effort to find a flat spot on the practice green that still had grass on it.

David and Luke would spend hours on that green, sometimes staying so late that David would set an industrial-sized flashlight on the ground so Luke could keep rolling putts until an employee finally shooed them home. The father-son duo also wore out the club’s nine-hole short course, where a young Luke hit thousands of shots onto artificial greens. Even as the synthetic turf got so neglected that it became rock hard like cement, Luke had no trouble spinning and stopping balls.

“It was nothing special,” David said, “but that’s where he became No. 1 in the world at.”

Years ago, Ray Clanton coined the family as the “Country Club Outlaws.” (The Clantons now wear hats emblazoned with that moniker to Luke’s tournaments, including the Cognizant.) They weren’t poor, but they were the “poor people in golf,” Rhonda asserts – and they certainly couldn’t afford a membership at some fancy, private club. David founded two businesses, in landscaping and glass treatment, while also teaching Luke and a handful of other juniors on the side. Rhonda works as a flight attendant for Delta and home-schooled all three kids through the eighth grade. Luke shared a bunk bed with Abby, a star soccer player who played at West Alabama and now works as a veterinarian, and only got his own room when Ray moved to New York City to model at age 18.

Luke waited a little longer for his first real set of golf clubs. He started out with a hodgepodge of used junior sticks, then graduated to a U.S. Kids Golf set when he started playing tournaments. David was always reluctant to purchase the next size, labeled by color, considering how well Luke was hitting his current clubs – and because it seemed silly to spend through nearly a dozen different tiers. Before competing in the 2015 U.S. Kids World Championship in Pinehurst, North Carolina, an 11-year-old Clanton received a massive delivery from TaylorMade – all new clubs, balls, shoes, gloves.

“I was hitting a 7-iron like 20 yards farther,” Luke remembered. “I wanted to use them, but my dad didn’t let me.”

Luke, who did talk Pops into allowing him to game his new driver and putter, won his age division.

Ironically, Luke still uses TaylorMade’s P760 irons, which debuted in 2018 and are no longer produced. He was down to his final set, too, before his caddie, Jason Wiertel, whom he met on the range at Pinehurst a few years back, found an unused set at a golf shop in Illinois.

Truth is, Clanton, who admits he doesn’t know many of his specs, could probably figure out how to break par with a few tire irons.

“It felt like the kid never missed a green,” remembers James Hobales, who would often compete with the Clantons in Country Club of Miami’s twilight scrambles. “He was a machine.”

Hobales, 31, is now the club’s assistant manager, though sadly, he’s one of few employees left with any recollection of Luke. In fact, one walk around the clubhouse, or stroll down the crabgrass-ridden fairways, or scroll through the club’s website, produces zero visual evidence that a future PGA Tour player was raised there.

Larry Levow, the former director of instruction at Country Club of Miami, doesn’t need to be reminded. He spent years watching David’s love for the sport rub off on Luke, and listening to the friendly banter between the two. Asked when he first realized Luke had the potential to be a world-beater, Levow recalls a moment from when a 9-year-old Clanton played in the Nicklaus Junior.

“He hits a bad shot, and I ask him, ‘What are you going to do?’” Levow said. “And he goes, ‘I’m not getting mad, but I am going to get better.’”

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IF IT WEREN’T FOR Bill Laurie, the founder of American Heritage School in Plantation, Luke Clanton would’ve never had the opportunity to attend one of the most prestigious private schools in the state.

Rhonda recalls sitting down in Laurie’s office as he explained how Luke’s $35,000 tuition would be covered. First, the family would apply for financial aid. Secondly, Laurie offered a job to David redesigning the landscaping for the entire campus. With David now working for the school, Luke benefitted from David’s employee rate.

At his first tryout for the Patriots’ storied golf program, which produced the likes of T.J. Vogel, Ty Strafaci and Jorge Garcia, a freshman Clanton asked head coach Brandt Moser what he needed to do to make the varsity squad. When Moser replied, “Shoot 75 from 7,000 yards,” Luke, flabbergasted, responded, “That’s it?”

Moser would always joke that Luke’s back hurt from carrying the team, and he’d often cede practices for Luke to lead. Luke tied a state record with three individual state championships and finished second his junior year. As a senior, he led American Heritage to the state team title, too. And in his four-year prep career, Luke shot over par just four times.

But Moser’s favorite memory of Luke had nothing to do with his achievements on the golf course.

“Luke, that’s a good kid,” said Moser, getting a little choked up as he recalled one time when the team was having breakfast before a tournament in Fort Lauderdale. Luke got up to go to the bathroom, and when he didn’t return for a while, Moser went to check on him.

“There is this homeless guy who is trying to run out and not pay his bill, and they’re calling the cops,” Moser recalls. “And what did Luke do? He went and got money to pay for it.

“The things that the kid has done when nobody’s watching is what makes him special.”

Adds Rhonda: “I always tell people, we taught him manners, but he was born with a good soul.”

As the interviews piled up last summer, Clanton’s agent, Ben Walter, asked the Clantons if he should’ve put Luke through some media training. “Too late now,” Rhonda quipped. But Rhonda knows if her son speaks from the heart, he usually speaks well.

Earlier this week at PGA National, an old video surfaced on social media of a 12-year-old Luke receiving the U.S. Kids Golf Player of the Year award ahead of the 2016 Honda Classic (now the Cognizant), where Luke also played in the pro-am alongside Kevin Kisner. Confidently and clearly, Luke nailed his acceptance speech.

I’d love to give a big thanks to my dad for being a great caddie, a great coach and especially, a great father.

“I was sitting there crying with the biggest grin,” David said. “It was unbelievable how he pulled that off.”

David and Luke were an inseparable team – well, until Luke turned 17. David had been warned by his fellow fathers, that eventually he’d have to find someone else to coach his son. He’d always assumed, however, that he and Luke would be different.

“But dagnammit if it didn’t happen just like they said,” David says now with a laugh. “So, I stepped back a little bit.”

Luke went about a year without an instructor before Rhonda used the family’s stimulus checks during the pandemic to pay for one. She began her search by typing in “Top 100 teachers,” then narrowed down the query to coaches in Florida. It wasn’t long before Jeff Leishman’s name popped up.

The Clantons were surprised when Leishman, who had coached Daniel Berger and now works with Ben Silverman and several Korn Ferry Tour pros, invited them up to Jupiter for an interview. Leishman was equally amazed.

“Luke did all the talking,” Leishman said. “Usually, the parents will lead the conversation, but Luke was definitely leading that conversation – this is what he was looking for, these were what his goals were. From there, it was just about him getting better.”

Leishman cut the Clantons a break financially until Luke got to college and started earning some name, image and likeness money. (Luke just signed an endorsement deal with Nike, a partnership that was announced in conjunction with a video featuring several home videos of Luke hitting shots at Country Club of Miami and C.B. Smith Park’s driving range.) Leishman tries to put Luke in practice situations where his athleticism can shine; to improve Luke’s ball-striking, Leishman will often plop his student in a fairway bunker and have him empty buckets.

Leishman’s biggest influence on Luke, though, has been uncluttering Luke’s mind.

“He has been a blessing in Luke’s life,” Rhonda said. “It’s what Luke needed. Jeff is a touchstone for him, a calming ointment.

“David gave him his swing, but Jeff gave him his mental game.”

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THE IMAGE IS INGRAINED in Florida State head coach Trey Jones’ memory. Luke was 12 years old, playing the Florida Junior Tour Championship, and decked out in red, white and blue. Upon seeing Luke’s American-flag getup, Jones immediately thought to himself, “This kid is confident.”

“He wasn’t trying to be a follower, and that’s a trait that all the great players have,” Jones added. “He’s not asking for permission to play well.”

For as well as Clanton has driven it at the PGA Tour level (he ranks 11th in strokes gained: off-the-tee this season and would’ve slotted second in that category last year if qualified), it may shock many that when he first arrived in Tallahassee, he struggled finding fairways.

“Oh gosh, it was going a lot of different places,” Jones said. “And sometimes with players that age, when the driver starts going bad, it can get to other parts of the game, and then it can become the driver yips and send a player to shoot some really obscure numbers. … He never let it get to that point.”

Once he got the driver sorted, Clanton took off. His first college win came as a freshman, at the 2023 NCAA Morgan Hill Regional. That summer, he captured the North and South Amateur at Pinehurst and came oh-so close to making the U.S. Walker Cup team. Not punching his ticket to St. Andrews stung, as did surrendering the 36-hole lead at last year’s Jones Cup. But those moments all contributed to Clanton’s breakout last spring. He won three straight tournaments, including the star-studded Valspar Collegiate, where he blew away the field by five shots despite bogeying two of his last three holes.

Prior to that tournament, Clanton had spent time with five-time major champion Brooks Koepka, a Seminole alum. Clanton’s biggest takeaway from practicing with Koepka was Koepka explaining that the secret to his success was playing golf like he was “braindead.” As Clanton and his teammates flew back to Tallahassee – Koepka has also lent them his private jet – Koepka texted Luke:

You’re going to have to keep the pedal down, man, if you’re going to win at a higher level.

Challenge accepted.

Clanton hasn’t won yet on the PGA Tour, but that hasn’t stopped him from making history. Following Florida State’s runner-up finish at the NCAA Championship, where Clanton lipped out a chip to extend the deciding match against Auburn’s J.M. Butler, Clanton qualified for the U.S. Open at Pinehurst, hitting a hero shot from the native area on his 72nd hole before three-putting to just miss out on low-amateur honors. He hasn’t missed much since, notching three summer top-10s on the PGA Tour, the first since Jack Nicklaus in 1961 to accomplish that feat. He then added his second runner-up finish, at the fall-ending RSM Classic, where he was a Maverick McNealy birdie away from getting into a playoff.

Had amateurs been allowed to earn non-member FedExCup points, Clanton would’ve finished No. 90 in points last season. The top-ranked amateur in the world by a mile, he also has reached as high as 87th in the Official World Golf Ranking. He’s a virtual lock to win the Ben Hogan Award as college golf’s best amateur of the past 12 months, an honor that will come with three Accelerated points – excess now.

As the spotlight has brightened on her son, Rhonda is most proud that Luke has stayed the same person, level-headed, kind and faithful. In almost every interview, Luke shares his Christian beliefs, much like world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler. In many ways, those two are cut from the same cloth.

“He’s very close to God,” Rhonda said. “And that has kept his priorities straight, that has held him in check. He knows what’s important. He knows who he belongs to and his identity, and as long as he holds fast to that, there’s going to be no stopping him.”

When Luke returns to campus these days, he reacclimates himself to his Florida State team with ease. There’s no entitlement, no big-timing people.

“He almost gets embarrassed when his teammates start picking on him about PGA Tour,” Jones said.

Luke loves being on a team, which is why it will be so difficult to say goodbye this summer when he can start the clock on his two-year PGA Tour exemption. When he won the Watersound Invitational just days after his WMPO missed cut, closing in 66-67 while leading the Seminoles to their first team victory of the season, Clanton shared that his No. 1 goal this year was still to win a national team championship. Clanton will make one more PGA Tour start, at the Valspar Championship in March, and then the day after that final round, he’ll defend his title at the Valspar Collegiate before Florida State begins its NCAA stretch run to Omni La Costa.

“He’s been so adamant that we need to get back in that position,” said Florida State senior Gray Albright.

And this time bring it home.

“I’m just excited to kind of get this journey started,” Clanton said Friday evening before segueing, “Go back and win a national championship with the college team first, and then get it started.”

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WHEN THE CLANTONS FIRST brought Luke home, he’d make this funny face that would have the entire family in stitches. Luke had such a large noggin, too, that he quickly received the nickname, “Big Head Luke.”

“He’s just always been a really happy kid and has always wanted everybody to be happy around him, a great compromiser between his two sisters,” Rhonda said. “But I had Luke at 40, he had to be good. God knew that if he was going to give me this one – and Luke was a gift, not a mistake, not an oops; he was a gift.”

And on Friday afternoon, that gift brought the family together once more, with another prayer, this time off the 18th green. Luke’s life-changing achievement wasn’t just him; it took all of them – David, Rhonda, Ray, Abby; the Country Club Outlaws.

“No one really will ever know how much they did for me,” Luke said afterward, on the verge of tears.

But this wild, exciting, crazy, happy, glorious, sometimes-hard-to-believe journey isn’t over. Rhonda plans to retire and join David, who just sold his landscaping business, in touring alongside their favorite soon-to-be rookie, who certainly will arrive at his likely PGA Tour debut at the RBC Canadian Open with some sky-high goals. Ryder Cup, anyone? Most imminent are two more rounds this weekend at the Cognizant, where Luke is just four shots off the lead and, in typical Luke fashion, hungry for more.

And so, Luke will slip his PGA Tour card into his back pocket and with a clearer mind, push forward.

“It feels good to get it done now,” he said. “I got that question asked about 19 points a ton, and it was kind of nerve-racking, everyone saying to get your Tour card…

“Now that I’m done, it’s definitely a lot off the shoulders for sure.”