Farmington • The ball left the face of his wedge and Patrick Fishburn told himself, “Man, that’s perfect.”
Close enough, anyway. Fishburn’s shot to within 2 feet of the hole on Oakridge Country Club’s No. 18 green Friday led to a birdie that enabled him to play the weekend rounds of the Utah Championship. Coming through in that moment in front of a few dozen friends and relatives created a memorable checkpoint for the Korn Ferry Tour rookie, near the end of a long 2020-21 season that was super-sized due to the pandemic.
“It definitely builds some confidence,” said Fishburn, a graduate of Fremont High School and BYU. “Sometimes there’s more pressure around the cut line than there is around the lead, so to hit that shot when I needed it feels awesome.”
As of Sunday afternoon, Fishburn wished only that he could have done more with his last two rounds at Oakridge. His 68-65 finish moved him into a tie for 35th place at 14 under par, while boosting him only one spot to No. 81 in the season standings. To move into the top 75 and qualify for the Korn Ferry Tour Finals, he’ll need a spectacular performance this week in Omaha, Neb.
Otherwise, he would have conditional KFT status in 2022, with the opportunity to gain more access via this fall’s qualifying tournament. “Hopefully, it doesn’t end up that way,” he said.
Fishburn’s home-state appearance turned into a snapshot of his extended rookie season. He delivered some epic drives that made Oakridge play extremely short for him, but he couldn’t capitalize often enough and “left a lot of shots out there,” he said.
Even his bogey-free final round could have been better. His search for an answer on the greens led him to carry two putters in his bag Sunday, instead of a 3-wood. He needed that club on the par-4 No. 16 (No. 7 for Oakridge members), where his drive went all the way into the pond that frames the green. Fishburn salvaged a par, even with a penalty stroke. He also just missed a birdie putt on No. 17 and never made an eagle all week, among 12 opportunities on the par-5s.
Yet he had to like the way he performed Sunday, with a mentality of “just trying to birdie every hole,” he said. “That’s when I play my best golf.”
Rhett Rasmussen (71-69), Fishburn’s former BYU teammate, and Oakridge member Daniel Summerhays (68-72) each missed the 36-hole cut by three strokes. Rasmussen had made the field by shooting a 64 at Talons Cove Golf Course in Monday qualifying.
Summerhays was making only his fifth start since losing in a playoff in the 2020 Utah Championship. He spent the past school year as a Davis High School teacher and golf coach and is now “just dabbling in a bunch of things,” he said. “I might do some coaching, I might do some playing, I might do some [golf course] design, I might write a book, I might do all of those things. And that might be my path. It might be a little bit of everything.”
Summerhays plans to play in Omaha this week and then enter the Siegfried & Jensen Utah Open, Aug. 20-22 at Riverside Country Club in Provo. Having undergone foot surgery in January, he could use a medical extension to play some Korn Ferry Tour events in 2022.
