PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. – Having grown up in the Golden State down Highway 101 in San Jose, caddie John Ellis always dreamed of winning at famed Pebble Beach Golf Links, home of six U.S. Opens. He had his chances, playing in the PGA Tour’s AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am four times as a player and considers it to be his favorite golf course. Ever since he became a caddie for Wyndham Clark, he told him that if there’s one thing he achieved in his career — he didn’t care if Clark won a hundred times or just once —he just hoped one of them would be at Pebble.
“I always told him I’m going to make it happen,” Clark said on Sunday.
Clark, 30, probably never imagined winning at Pebble Beach in this fashion – shooting a course-record 12-under 60 on Saturday to erase a six-shot deficit and surge one-stroke ahead of Ludvig Aberg with a 54-hole total of 17-under 199. Then he had to wait almost all of Sunday for the final round to be canceled due to inclement weather and to be declared the champion.
“For us to pull it off and in the fashion that we did was pretty awesome,” Clark said.
Due to moderate rain, preferred lies were in effect during all three rounds of the tournament. All week long, the weather forecast called for high winds on Sunday that threatened to push the tournament to a Monday finish and so Clark approached Saturday’s third round as if it could be the final round and with a sense of now-or-never to make a move.
Clark made two eagles on the front nine and shot 8-under 28 to climb to the top of the leaderboard. He needed oven mitts for his putter, holing a career-high 189 feet, 9 inches of putts. He missed a 26-foot eagle putt at 18 to shoot 59 but tapped in for the lowest round ever shot on the famed links. He walked off the 18th green with a sheepish grin on his face and a round of applause from fans who appreciate seeing history made at one of golf’s great cathedrals.
“I feel like I won the tournament with how much media I was doing, yet I had another round to play,” he mused. “That was a little unique and weird.”
Sleeping on the lead proved to be difficult too. It was warm in the house where Clark was staying and he woke up at about 2:00 a.m., poked his head out the door and determined the weather wasn’t too bad. It took him about 45 minutes to fall back to sleep. His 5:15 alarm, which he set to coincide with the Tour’s first scheduled update on the final round, woke him to news that the earliest play would begin would be at noon. He went back to sleep yet again, and when he finally rose he made some breakfast, watched a movie and played gin with friends. Around 9:30 a.m., the Tour announced that the final round was postponed until Monday.
As the day dragged on, he walked around the neighborhood where he was staying just to assess some of the damage until he realized that wasn’t the safest place to be with trees downed and the wind howling. He tried his best to get his mind ready for playing the final round but he conceded that it was hard to stay focused.
“Because there was that small ounce of thinking that hey, there’s a chance this might be called, my mind started wandering and it was so hard for me to not think about it, that there’s a chance that it could be canceled.”
The Tour pulled the plug on a Monday finish, sending an official statement at 6:17 p.m. PT. Clark had been playing ping-pong for more than an hour with Brian Kettler, his former high school English teacher who was visiting, when their match paused for a phone call with the news that due to dangerous weather conditions, the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-am had been reduced to 54 holes and the trophy and winner’s check for $3.6 million belonged to him. The decision to call it handed Clark his third win and first since the 2023 U.S. Open in June.
“We both kind of broke out in tears a little bit and hugged each other and embraced each other,” Clark said. “It kind of caught us off guard.”
The signature event, which consisted of an 80-man field with no cut, guaranteed money and a $20 million purse, is the first 54-hole tournament on Tour since the 2016 Zurich Classic of New Orleans; the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am was also shortened to 54 holes in 2009.
Clark shared the good news with Ellis.
“We were kind of crying and laughing and celebrating on the phone. Then he quickly rushed over to where I’m staying to see me and we’ve just been hugging and talking about all the great things and the shots and how amazing the last, you know, 36 hours have been,” he said.
Clark described it as a whirlwind and despite not getting the chance to earn the title over 72 holes, he still felt like a deserving winner.
“When I shook hands and waved to the crowd, it really felt like I’d just won the tournament, so I don’t feel like I got cheated at all,” he said.