When Joseph Bramlett shot a final-round 68 on Monday, finishing in the top 25 at the PGA Tour qualifying school and securing a spot on the tour for the 2011 season, some predictable headlines popped up around the country. That Bramlett is a California native, that he went to Stanford, that he wears the Nike swoosh and celebrates the holing of crucial putts with a fist pump were all-too-irresistible similarities to a certain other golfer.
“The Next Tiger?” asked The Philadelphia Inquirer, a query repeated by other prominent newspapers and Web sites. And even though the 22-year-old Bramlett also comes from a racially mixed family and will join Woods as the only other player of color on the largely monochromatic tour, is such a comparison fair?
After all, Bramlett graduated from Stanford, with a degree in communications, in three and a half years, a number that Woods — who left after two years — will never match. And Woods has won 71 tournaments, including 14 major championships, in 13 years on tour. It will be a long time before anyone matches that. golfclubs365
Bramlett is a big-time talent with a lot of promise, a long-hitting, 6-foot-4 birdie machine who has overcome serious obstacles and worked his way through the three stages of Q-School to get his card on his first try. He managed this despite missing 20 months of golf in a two-year period after his sophomore year with injuries to his right wrist caused by two falls.
Bramlett does not shrink from associations with Woods, with whom he played two practice rounds at Pebble Beach before the United States Open in June and whose home he has visited during Woods’s annual dinners for the Stanford golf team. And, as the first golfer of African-American heritage to graduate from Q-School since Adrian Stills did so 25 years ago, Bramlett, whose father is black and mother is white, recognizes that his heritage brings added visibility and responsibility.
“It’s been too long,” Bramlett told reporters Monday after tying for 16th in the marathon six-round survival test at Orange County National near Orlando. “To finally end that 25-year drought means the world to me, my family and everyone who has helped me along the way. It’s an honor. It truly is an honor.”
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Bright, inquisitive and self-assured, Bramlett has all the bona fides to make some history of his own on the tour. He learned the game early from his father, Marlo, an executive with a sheet-metal company in Palo Alto, Calif. When he was 13, he began to work with Bill Johnson, the director of instruction at the San Jose Country Club, where his father and his mother, Debbie, are members.
By 14, he had qualified for the United States Amateur field. As a freshman at Stanford, he earned all-American honors as part of an N.C.A.A. championship squad. And Monday in the Q-School finals, he completed his childhood dream of earning a tour card by rallying from 33rd place with a strong finish after starting with two bogeys on his first three holes. He ended the week tied for first in birdies with 33, an average of five and a half per round; tied for first in putts; and tied for second in driving accuracy and greens in regulation for the six rounds.
Heady stuff for a player who had once wondered if the wrist injuries would ever heal and if was even going to play at a high level again.
“Twenty months out of 24 is a very long time to be kept from doing something you’ve always loved to do and that you’ve identified with,” said Bramlett, who first had a bone bruise that cost him seven months and then sat out 13 months with tendon and ligament damage from a fall off his bike. “It’s a long time. I couldn’t even putt. I really couldn’t do anything. I could go to class, work out my legs, but just couldn’t do anything golf-related.
“There were times when I wasn’t sure when it was going to end or why it was taking so long to heal. Rehab, cortisone shots and waiting.” golfclubs365
Bramlett said he believed something he picked up from Woods while rehabilitating actually helped him become a better player when he returned.
“He told me that just because you can’t play golf doesn’t mean you can’t think about golf,” Bramlett said.
“He was right. It’s interesting. When you can’t play, you kind of look at your game from a different perspective. You pick up things that you wouldn’t see when you were doing it every day.”
Bramlett knows where he is headed now. He hopes to begin his tour career at the Sony Open in Hawaii and then will see what happens.
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