Blades Brown couldn’t turn off airplane mode on his phone fast enough.
Brown, the 17-year-old hotshot who is making his professional debut this week at The American Express, spotted plenty of golf courses on the flight into Palm Springs but also an appetizing amount of pickleball courts. Brown, who comes from a sporting family, guesses he’s about scratch on the hardcourt.
Upon landing, Brown fired up his phone and immediately texted his mother, Rhonda, who played in the WNBA and recorded the first 3-pointer in league history: Bring my pickleball stuff. We’re playing this week.
Brown was also welcoming all challengers inside the media center on the ping-pong table.
“I’m totally down to play,” Brown said. “Just let me know.”
(Wait until he discovers Larry Bohannan of the Desert Sun possesses a wicked serve.)
Brown is about to find out a lot of things as he embarks on this next chapter, where he’ll only need his golf clubs, some balls and copious amounts of guts. It’s a high dive that Nick Dunlap knows well. It was one year ago here at PGA West that Dunlap became the first amateur since Phil Mickelson in 1991 to win an official PGA Tour event. Days later, Dunlap was foregoing his final two and a half seasons at the University of Alabama and cannonballing right into the professional waters, where expectations somehow exceed the purses of the signature events for which Dunlap was suddenly qualified for.
Dunlap won again, in July at the Barracuda Championship, but he wasn’t spared the growing pains either – poor finishes, loneliness, and to top it all off, a legal dispute with his former agency, which was settled last October.
“I knew it was going to be a learning curve,” Dunlap said. “I wasn’t expecting to come out and dominate early. You go from college golf to playing against the best players in the world, that’s a huge jump.”
Brown remembers watching Dunlap make history – he even recalled Tuesday the length of Dunlap’s winning par save (6 feet).
“It just gave me so much inspiration to know that somebody else similar to my age is able to do that,” Brown said. “And then it raises the question, What if I can do that?”
Now, he could.
Brown, a homeschooled, high-school junior from Nashville, Tennessee, was courted by every elite college in the country before ending his recruiting process a couple months ago, and he bowed out of junior golf as the AJGA’s top-ranked player. He is still, for at least one more day, No. 74 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking, boosted by medalist honors at the 2023 U.S. Amateur and last year’s U.S. Junior Amateur – Brown, Tiger Woods and Bobby Clampett are the only players to accomplish that impressive USGA double – and T-26 at last season’s Myrtle Beach Classic, Brown’s only PGA Tour start to date.
At the same time, Brown did not dominate his peers, names such as Miles Russell and Luke Colton, in the same way that the likes of Akshay Bhatia and Joaquin Niemann – two players who bypassed college golf for the pros – did at the junior level. (Brown actually shares an agent with Bhatia, Sportfive’s Tommy Riehle.)
But there’s no denying Brown is special, an athletic kid with a jump shot nearly as good as his putting stroke. He’s charismatic, fearless and seems to realize that this isn’t a sprint – as much as he probably wishes it was.
“I feel like you’re put in a position out here where you have to get better,” said Brown, who will likely rely on sponsor exemptions for starts until Q-School this fall. “Playing against people such as Xander Schauffele, Scottie Scheffler, I mean, you learn from the best. I feel like that’s life, you learn each and every day. I’m probably not going to be going to school in college, but I am going to be going to school on the PGA Tour, so that sounds pretty good to me.”
There will be many who will expect Brown to follow in Dunlap’s footsteps this week in the desert.
Brown, however, is grateful for the opportunity – or as the kids say, “Pumped!” – knowing this will be a long process, whether he goes low these next few days or not. Like any teenager, he wants to have fun, hopefully make a ton of birdies and then build for the next tournament.
He just won’t tolerate losing to his mom in pickleball.
