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Tegan Andrews gets out of the rough, on and off the course

June 20, 2023

“The cup’s the same size. …”

Throughout his life, Tegan Andrews kept hearing those five words. Never mind the golfing element they obviously played into as a way for Andrews to center himself. Those five words would serve as a way for Andrews to handle obstacles on and off the golf course. They’d get him through obstacles, big, small, real or imagined.

Growing up playing on a grubby, goat track of a course because that’s all he could afford?

“The cup’s the same size.”

Playing a U.S. Open qualifier on the edge of an Alaskan glacier pass? On a course he had seen for the first time only two days earlier?

“The cup’s the same size.”

Playing in the toughest of 10 36-hole U.S. Open sectional qualifiers, one festooned with PGA Tour pros seeking the same rare ticket to the U.S. Open?

“The cup’s the same size.”

Coping with temper issues and seeking to harness his demons — on and off the course?

“The cup’s the same size.”

After a 2022-23 school year that, first, nearly got him kicked off the Cal State Fullerton golf team, then nearly killed him when he blacked out driving home one night on the 60 Freeway and came to sitting next to the center divider, Andrews’ cup currently runneth over.

His golf game is back to where his awe-inspiring length off the tee is dismantling courses again, his once atrocity-bordering-on-war-crime wedge game has never been better, and the rough edges of his temperament are sanded into an even rhythm through breathing techniques that allow him to keep a calm heart rate — even when he’s triple-bogeying holes.

It served Andrews well during his recent U.S. Open qualifying adventures — adventures that took him from winning an 18-hole local qualifier at an anything-but-local course in Palmer, Alaska, to diving into the deep end of the 36-hole sectional qualifying pool in Columbus, Ohio.

“I’ve never been happier,” he said.

To understand how Andrews’ cup runneth over, it’s important to understand what went into creating the once-volatile cocktail that is Andrews’ game and demeanor. And to understand that, we begin with an introduction to Gene Andrews — Tegan’s grandfather.

One of the top amateur golfers in the middle of the 20th century, the winner of the 1954 U.S. Amateur Public Links Championship and the 1970 U.S. Senior Amateur, Gene Andrews is a name largely known only to golf geeks. But Andrews revolutionized the game by inventing a device used by amateurs and pros alike — the yardage book.

“He died 27 days before I was born, in 2001. My dad always joked that as he was going to heaven, I was coming down and he tossed me the keys to his golf game and basically told me to carry on his legacy,” Andrews said.

This is where the cup comes in — and the legacy follows. Andrews’ dad, Geno, put a club in his son’s hand when he was 2. He didn’t start playing the game for keeps until he was 12 and hasn’t taken more than a week off from the game since. Not that it was financially easy.

“My parents were supportive of me, but not as financially as they wanted to be,” he said. “I used to take a bus to the course when (other guys) were driving up in Teslas. I’d be scraping balls off the side of the range at 9:30 at night when everyone else left for a pool party four hours earlier.”

Andrews would play nearby Westlake Golf Course and Rustic Canyon in Moorpark. But most of his teeth-cutting was done at Penmar Golf Course, a scruffy, executive course four blocks from the Pacific in Venice. The first time his dad took him there, Andrews wondered why it hadn’t been given back to the goats.

“My dad told me, ‘The cup’s the same size, kid. The greens are just greens,’ ” he said. “I do feel there is a huge sense of entitlement when it comes to golfers. When there’s something to complain about, that’s the first instinct for golfers: to sit there and whine. The cup’s the same size anywhere.”

Play courses like Penmar and you develop a well-rounded game that travels. This is one of the things that led him to Cal State Fullerton, which had the film program he craved, and — in head men’s coach Jason Drotter — a coach who would push Andrews and make him laugh at the same time. Seeing Andrews’ wedge game was holding the rest of his considerable game down, Drotter told Andrews, “You are probably the worst wedge player I have ever coached. No, you’re the worst wedge player in Division I.”

But Drotter’s dry sense of humor has its limits. And those limits ran up into Andrews’ volatile temper, which featured one of Drotter’s unforgivable sins: club tossing. At the beginning of the 2022-23 fall season, Andrews’ game was a mess. He was battling an arm injury and his awful wedge game was torpedoing his progress. He was at a team qualifier at Coto de Caza fighting his entire game when he airmailed a green with a wedge from 140 yards out. At that point, something snapped.

“I launched my club probably 70 yards. I could have gotten an NFL contract,” Andrews said. “I had forgotten that nine months earlier, Coach said if you throw another club, you’re done. Well, he found out two days later and came up to me on the second tee of qualifying at South Hills and said, ‘Tegan, you’re done. Go home.’

“I walked off the course knowing I did this to myself. Jason had given me so much grace over the years, but this was his last straw in terms of my temper. He told me, ‘I don’t want to hear anything about how you’ll stop this. I want you to show me.’ He told me I have the highest ceiling of anyone in this program, but when it comes to my temper, that has to be fixed.”

Andrews redshirted this season, which cleared his head and prepared him for his U.S. Open adventures, which started with 18-hole local qualifying in Palmer, Alaska, — an hour north of Anchorage. That’s where Andrews found himself after all the other local sites were full: a course that had tarps on it just three weeks earlier due to the frost, a course on the edge of a glacier pass that sent biting wind down the pass and onto the course. And a course where Andrews figured the competition, only 15 players for one spot, would be easy.

He was right. Andrews laughed as his competitors complained about the brutal conditions, thinking to himself “the cup’s the same size.” He bogeyed 16 and double-bogeyed 18, yet his 72 was good enough to win the qualifier. He was the last one into sectional qualifying.

“Growing up at Penmar prepares you for a course like Alaska,” he said. “How bad of a player do you have to be to have everything perfect for you to play good?”

Now, Andrews found himself in the most difficult of the 10 U.S. Open sectional qualifiers: the one in Columbus, Ohio. Andrews was competing with 102 others for 11 spots in this week’s U.S. Open at Los Angeles Country Club’s North Course. On what’s called “Golf’s Longest Day,” Andrews was in the deep end of the golfing pool, a minnow in a pond teeming with PGA Tour professional sharks — including three past major champions. Andrews shot 73-73 and — let down by his usually reliable putter — didn’t earn a spot in a field where 2009 U.S. Open champion Lucas Glover shot 8-under-par and was an alternate.

He did, however, beat 2006 U.S. Open champion Geoff Ogilvy and PGA Tour winners Nick Watney and Kyle Stanley.

“It felt like playing a Tour event. It was really cool,” he said. “(The Golf Channel’s) Todd Lewis came up to me on the putting green at 6 a.m. and said ‘You’re Tegan Andrews.’ He did a spot on me. Nobody else had a better experience than I did. I can tell you that.”

Andrews has a full summer of tournaments, starting with winning a Southern California Golf Association Amateur qualifier in Ojai last week. Then, there’s the Cal Amateur and U.S. Amateur qualifying. His wedge game is vastly improved, his head controlling his emotions.

His cup runneth over.

“I feel like I’m on tour: Alaska, Ohio, Rustic Canyon, Ojai. I’m enjoying every minute of it,” he said.

Of course, he is. After all …

“The cup’s the same size.”

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