From LA to Houston, Theegala finds two families through golf

Sahith Theegala eyed the target, shook his head, and frowned.

He was working on his 15-footers, and it was going poorly.

“This is bad,” he said. “It is not acceptable.”

In khaki shorts, a salmon-colored T-shirt (Make par, not war it read) and Nike low-tops, Theegala was at a public basketball court in Houston for a photo shoot that was over. It was dusk, and his car, a BMW M5 Competition in arctic frozen grey, sat in the parking lot.

Theegala, a Kobe Bryant acolyte, is not one to accept mediocrity, and so, with his shot having disappointed him while the cameras were rolling, he vowed to make 10 straight free throws.

“Now you know what my friends put up with,” Theegala said.

His friends, who were already waiting for him at dinner.

Uncompromising hard work has yielded seven top-10 finishes in Theegala’s sophomore season on the PGA TOUR. At last week’s FedEx St. Jude Championship, he shot a final-round 66 to finish T13. Up to 31st in the FedExCup going into the BMW Championship outside Chicago, he’s oh so close to making the 30-man TOUR Championship for the second year in a row.

If you know much about Theegala, it’s probably for his stellar play and agonizing finish at the last year’s WM Phoenix Open, which announced him as a force. After he bogeyed the drivable 17th hole and missed a playoff by one, he melted into the arms of his mom, Karuna, and dad, Muralidhar. The Netflix docuseries “Full Swing” was there to capture it all. Even his little brother, Sahan, who goes to Seton Hall, was there; Theegala estimates friends and family numbered 60-65.

“I hardly get emotional,” he said, “but that week was a lot. I was like 90th in FedExCup, just happy to be on TOUR, and all the sudden to be thrown into that was pretty crazy.”

Another free throw clanged off the rim; his friends would have to wait a little longer.

‘Entourage’ in golf spikes

Theegala was living at home in Chino Hills, California, to start his rookie season in the fall of 2021, but in March he moved in with a friend of a friend in Houston. The city was more centrally located for an itinerant PGA TOUR pro. More recently, he bought a townhouse and moved in with Roy Cootes, his old roommate and teammate at Pepperdine who now competes on the mini tours.

“Roy is a great player, too,” Theegala said. “He played the U.S. Open in ’21. (Cootes missed the cut.) He played up in Canada. He’s just finding his way.”

Their merry gang also includes fellow Pepperdine golf products Clay Feagler and Fred Wedel, each of them also professionals who have teed it up on the Korn Ferry Tour.

The foursome, three of whom aspire to find a foothold on the PGA TOUR like Theegala, are a little like a golf version of the TV show “Entourage.” (Yes, Theegala is Vincent Chase in this scenario.) They provide Theegala with a sort of second family while he is far from home.

“Clay and Fred have been playing really well,” Theegala said. “They’ve taken a lot of money.”

On this day, Feagler couldn’t make it and was replaced by PGA TOUR Latinoamérica pro José Toledo. Wedel had won big, and afterward they all had lunch at Olive Oil, a Mediterranean restaurant that at night features plate-breaking and belly-dancing. Sometimes, they head to Chick-fil-A or Chipotle. Theegala, 25, lives less like a guy whose career earnings have already reached nearly $8.5 million and more like his mini-tour pals.

The townhouse he shares with Cootes is nothing fancy. His BMW, the one material possession he cares about? Theegala bought it used from a caddie. The one time he’s flown privately, he said, was unplanned. It was after a U.S. Open qualifier in Columbus, Ohio, when Theegala had to get to Canada for an RBC outing. Pressed for time, he accepted a ride from Brandt Snedeker.

“I’ve got to play better to fly private,” Theegala said. “I’m almost 1K Premier on United now. I get upgraded to first class probably half my flights. I splurged a little bit to premium economy to go to Scotland. I can fully stretch my legs out, and I sleep like a baby on planes.”

He missed cuts at the Genesis Scottish Open, The Open Championship and 3M Open, but felt an uptick going into Memphis last week. His T13 confirmed it. He admits he’s fought a two-way miss this season – he’s 163rd on TOUR in Driving Accuracy, hitting 53% of his fairways – and says he will hit “some of the worst shots you’ll see a pro hit, but also some super-cool recovery shots.”

At the Wells Fargo Championship in May, Theegala was star-struck playing with Rory McIlroy in the third round, but still hit a stunner. Stymied up against a tree about 125 yards from the green, Theegala flipped his 9-iron over and swung left-handed. The contact was crisp, and his ball shot through a gap in the trees and bounded almost to the green.

“I crushed that,” Theegala said. As for McIlroy, he added, “He just kept looking at me and laughing. He was like, ‘What did you just do?’”

All of which is to remind that Theegala is must-see TV.

“I know my good is good enough,” he said. “It’s just taking the bad out of play.”

The goal, he said, is to start contending again. The ideal scenario would be another situation like the 2022 WM Phoenix Open, but with a twist. In that scenario, Theegala’s drive on 17 flies true, as before, but takes a less leftward path up the fairway – a better first or second bounce, perhaps – before rolling onto the green and, this time, staying there.

His parents will be there, and cousins, aunts and uncles, tears in their eyes, while his Houston family, involved in their own careers, catch the finish on TV and light him up with texts. He might even splurge for premium economy on the way home.

The ties that bind

“Both my parents came from India with nothing,” Theegala said.

Muralidhar Theegala has an academic background. He studied hard and attended “the MIT of India,” Sahith said, adding that he considers his father a genius.

“I came to this country, did my master's in Kansas State,” said Muralidhar, who goes by Murli. “I played every sport there and ice hockey for that matter.”

Every sport, that is, except golf. Oh, there were Indian forerunners, and Theegala knows them all, rattling off names like Jeev Milkha-Singh and Jyoti Randhawa.

His father, though, had little first-hand experience with the sport.

“When I came to L.A.,” Murli said, “and one of my buddies at my first job, he was playing golf and he said, ‘Hey, you want to come over?’ I went one day, and I said, ‘This is a slick sport, you know?’ We made it a habit of going every Saturday morning, 5 o’clock.”

Sahith was born in Fullerton, but the family would move when he was 2, settling in Chino Hills, a half hour outside Los Angeles. Murli commuted to the city for work, and his newfound love of sports by now included not just golf but also tennis, basketball and marathon running.

He also loved watching sports on TV – the Lakers with Kobe, the PGA TOUR with Tiger Woods. Sahith watched intently, too. Soon after he began playing golf, he was matched with a driving range pro named Rick Hunter; an early lesson, at the student’s request, covered how to curve a shot around a tree. Theegala loved to work the ball, inventing wild new ways to paint the sky with golf shots, and won the IMG Academy Junior World Golf Championships three times before turning 11.

“He was a prodigy,” said Hunter, who remains Theegala’s coach.

Murli loved to watch golf, except for the dainty applause. “We tried to change that,” he said. That meant making his presence felt at as many tournaments as he could attend; suffice it to say when Sahith made birdie, his parents didn’t mute themselves. “His group often gets the cheering,” Murli said, merriment in his eyes, and it’s hard not to smile with him.

Only once did Sahith have to talk about his father about being overly involved.

“He did a 180,” Sahith said.

From then on, Murli, whose parents were hard on him when it came to academics, gave out mostly hugs and knuckle-bumps, saving the tough love for only when absolutely necessary. He also brought his wife and sons back to India every few years to remind the kids of their heritage.

“My dad just has this awesome trait where he makes everyone feel like they're his best friend and he just makes people feel good without being fake,” Sahith said. “He'll tell it to you straight when you need to. It's not about the B.S., but he's just such a positive guy.”

Theegala didn’t go far for college. At Pepperdine he thrived despite a wrist injury that cost him a year and the COVID pandemic ending his senior season prematurely. He brought the school to a No. 1 ranking for the first time; won the Waves’ home tournament by a record 16 shots and was a three-time All-American. He also developed a reputation as a driving-range prankster, once hitting an intentional shank that flew across the bow of Arizona State’s Jon Rahm.

His choice of schools also kept him close to his mom’s spiced turkey meatballs, his favorite, for Karuna is a PGA TOUR-level chef. And like her husband, she’s not just thinking of her eldest son but everyone in the group. On a visit to Sahith’s boyhood home in Chino Hills, PGA TOUR videographers were plied with curries and sent home with leftovers.

Theegala loves his parents, of course, but he also likes them. Their presence at all those tournaments – there they were again at the FedEx St. Jude in Memphis last week – reminds him of the bigger picture.

“I’m pretty hard on myself,” he said. “It helps me kind of ease up a little bit.”

So does his San Francisco-based girlfriend Julianna Chan, who works for a tech start-up. They were friends at Pepperdine but fell out of touch until Theegala saw a “Juju” license plate in Houston and texted her a picture. They reconnected at the 2022 Fortinet Championship in Napa.

He will sometimes play at Olympic Club when he’s visiting her, and it was there that he ran into Lydia Ko. As with McIlroy, he felt star-struck all over again. “You’ve been killing it,” she said, according to Theegala, to which he replied, “Not as much as you.”

With Theegala smack in the middle of his second FedExCup Playoffs run in his second TOUR season, that’s open for debate.