Jul. 27—Chase Nevins had gotten sick of the way he was playing golf this week at the 49th Palmetto Amateur.
Nevins, a rising sophomore at Vanderbilt who was making his first appearance at Palmetto Golf Club, couldn’t get comfortable with the golf course through his first 44 holes and wasn’t playing his typical kind of game.
He decided enough was enough midway through Friday’s third round, playing with aggression that has burned many an overzealous player over the last century and change at Palmetto.
Yet there he stood Saturday afternoon, exactly in the position he practices to put himself in.
On the 72nd green, with a putt to win the championship.
Jar.
Nevins picked out a line he liked, and the roll held true. He raised his putter with the ball a few feet away from the hole, then pumped his fist after it tumbled into the cup.
His birdie-birdie finish clipped Sam Jackson by one shot at 5-under par 275, and it capped a frenzied final couple of hours at Palmetto during which four other players had a shot at taking the title.
“It was awesome,” he said, moments after clutching the Berry Crain, Jr. Memorial Trophy. “That’s just what you practice for, to be able to get up there and bury that putt. Yeah, it was awesome.”
Jackson (68) finished alone in second at 4 under, with the trio of Miles Eubanks (69), Daniel Boone (68) and Matthew Doyle (70) tied for third at 3 under.
Nevins (68) took his first peek at the leaderboard after making a birdie on the par-5 10th hole to move to 4 under for the championship. He saw that he was still very much in the hunt, though he had trouble gauging exactly where he was at because his partners in the final group, Elon teammates Doyle and Jack Wieler (79), were off to rough starts.
It was the penultimate group Nevins had to keep an eye on. Jackson, Eubanks and Boone were all making big moves from the group ahead, with Jackson leading Nevins by one and Eubanks by three as they prepared to make the turn.
Jackson, the two-time defending South Carolina Golf Association Player of the Year who surged ahead with birdies on holes 6-8, played the back nine in even-par, narrowly missing a birdie putt on 18, to get into the clubhouse at 4 under. His birdie putt at the last looked like it had a chance, and he raised his right arm as it neared the cup before just stopping short.
Eubanks, a South Aiken grad who’s a rising junior at the College of Charleston, recovered after playing his first three holes in 3 over to play the rest of the way in 4 under. Knowing he was one behind Jackson and needing a birdie to tie, he elected to hit driver on the short par-4 18th. A deft pitch from short of the green left him a reasonable tying try, but it just slid past the hole, leaving him with a similar reaction to Jackson’s.
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Boone, a rising sophomore at Charlotte, jumped into contention with four birdies in an eight-hole stretch to reach 3 under, but he couldn’t get a tying chip to drop on the last.
Doyle, the 18-hole leader who spent the next two days steadily playing himself out of and then back into the final group, was 4 over for the day before finally making is first birdie on the par-4 12th. He approached the tee box on the drivable par-4 15th four shots off the lead, pulled driver out of his bag and said, “Let’s make some magic happen.”
Did he ever.
He made birdie after driving just short of the green on 14, parred 15 and then re-entered the fray on the par-3 16th with a hole-in-one that brought him right back into play at 3 under.
Nevins bogeyed the same hole moments later, leaving them tied at 3 under along with Eubanks and Boone, one behind Jackson, with only two holes remaining.
“That was probably my sloppiest putt of the day,” Nevins explained. “I had been putting really well the last couple of days. That was the one that I kind of wish that I had back, but I was able to re-center myself and re-focus.”
Nevins hit a good iron shot into the par-4 17th to make a birdie, then refreshed the live scoring on his phone as he stood on the 18th tee. He decided to hit iron off the tee to give himself the best chance to make birdie, as he felt driver brought bunker into play, and that play aligned more with his usual line of thinking, anyway. He likes to wait for his opponents to make mistakes, and even though he was behind he didn’t want to force anything.
He liked his odds of at least getting to a playoff at 4 under, then hit what he felt was a “decent” wedge shot below the hole. He refreshed the leaderboard again, at which point the scores from the group ahead had been posted.
“So I knew, ‘You’ve got a putt to win the Palmetto Am,'” he said. “And I just buried it. Pretty thankful that it went down. I felt like I was due to make one of those big putts. That’s what I practice for.”
There was still a birdie chip from Doyle he’d have to wait for before he could putt, and it was inches away from getting Doyle back…
