Posted On: Tuesday, May 28, 2019
Drew Nesbitt has been in the limelight several times during his five years as a professional golfer.
The 24-year-old from Shanty Bay Golf Club near Barrie won a regional qualifier and played in the Canadian Open in 2017, narrowly missing the cut.
And last season he became the only golfer in history to shoot 59 on the PGA Tour Latinoamerica.
This season he got some serious TV and social media exposure (no pun intended) when he took off his shirt and rolled up his pants then hit a great shot out of the water at the PGA Tour’s Honda Classic.
The shot set him up for a par and the stroke he saved by hitting out of the water was the difference as he made the cut right on the number.
But his greatest accomplishment came last weekend in Tijuana, Mexico when he shot 62 in the final round to win the Abierto Mexicano de Golf event on the PGA Tour Latinoamerica.
The win, his first on the tour, was a two-shot victory over Norway’s Andreas Halvorsen and Chile’s Gustavo Silva.
His previous best on the tour was a tie for 21st.
The win catapulted Nesbitt from 85th on the Order of Merit when the week began to No. 9. Besides the $31,500 payday, Nesbitt also qualified for this week’s Bupa Match Play, open to the top-60 money-winners through this week’s tournament.
Nesbitt, completing his round about an hour before the final group finished, closed the tournament in style, banging home a 45-foot birdie putt on No. 18 to post at 17-under, a total no one could match. He then waited around the clubhouse to see if his number would hold up.
“Those are the moments as a kid you dream of. You watch on TV and those Tiger (Woods) moments when he makes those long putts. You hope one day that can be you, and today was that day,” he said about both his win and his final stroke of the tournament. “It just turned out that I hit a great putt, and it went in.
“It was the cap off to a perfect week,” Nesbitt states in the story posted on Golf Canada’s website.
His previous best on the tour came in Argentina earlier this season, at the Molino Cañuelas Championship where he tied for 21st. He tied for 49th at the JHSF Brazil Open last September, the week of his second-round 59.
Sunday, Nesbitt did most of his damage on the front nine, opening his day with a birdie and adding three more birdies plus an eagle, at No. 9, to turn in 29. He had one bogey on the back, at the par-4 12th, but he more than made up for that miscue with birdies at Nos. 10 and 15 and the dramatic putt at the 18th.
Matt Ryan and Silva, the co-54-hole leaders, couldn’t seem to get too far out of neutral Sunday. After making eight consecutive pars midway through his round, Ryan moved to within one shot of Nesbitt when he birdied the 15th. He gave that stroke right back with a bogey on the par-3 16th and added another bogey at No. 17 to end his chances with an even-par 70.
Silva, meanwhile, started slowly, with bogeys on two of his first three holes but was back to even-par when he made the back-nine turn. He managed only one birdie the rest of the way, with eight pars.