For Bhatia, 17, Valspar a great taste of bigger days to come

PALM HARBOR, Fla. – Suffice to say, there was only one player at the Valspar Championship this week whose driver sported a Junior Ryder Cup head cover.

That would belong to 17-year-old amateur Akshay Bhatia, a spindly left-hander from Wake Forest, N.C., who was making his first PGA TOUR start at Innisbrook’s Copperhead Course.

He found the Valspar to be a vastly different experience than the AGJA events that he had played here previously, wrestling nerves as he stood on the first tee on Thursday and fighting them for six or seven holes. But at 17, Bhatia is mature enough to know that there is a learning curve to negotiate, and any new knowledge gained only builds confidence inside him as he plots a path into a seemingly bright future.

“Walking to that tee,” he said, “I knew my heart was going to be pumping and I was super-excited to hit it. My coach just told me to hit it as hard as you can, because that’s the only thing I could do on that tee.”

Starting on the 10th hole, Bhatia belted a drive 332 yards, just catching the primary rough left of the fairway, hit a 58-degree wedge from 106 yards to 4 feet and drained the putt. Very first hole he played on the PGA TOUR. Birdie. He followed with a double on the par-5 11th, fought his driver much of the day and still managed to shoot 3-over 74 despite making bogeys on three of his final four holes as darkness closed in.

Friday was better. He appeared sharper. Bhatia jumped out to a terrific start – 3 under through six – before a sloppy double-bogey at the par-4 ninth robbed him of all momentum. As was the case on Day 1, he bogeyed his final two holes, failing to get up and down, this time shooting 72 to finish outside the cut line at 4-over 146.

“We lost a little momentum (at 9, where Bhatia bogeyed from 145 yards out) and we just didn’t get it back,” said his caddie, Eric Bajas, who has been working as a caddie for 34 years, or twice as long as Bhatia has been on this Earth. “But this was a good stepping stone for him.”

Adds coach Allen Terrell, who has worked with Bhatia for three years and worked with a young Dustin Johnson, “I think he learned the value of one shot out here. Doing what he did yesterday (74 when he wasn’t driving it well) shows he’s not scared. He sticks with his plan and moves forward. He had a couple of ‘forced’ errors, and without those, he’s playing on the weekend on the PGA TOUR at 17. It's all positive.”

Bhatia, who won’t turn 18 until January and is the world’s top-ranked junior, will turn professional in the coming months, bypassing the college route. He took a couple of college visits, and said he had a slight interest in Oklahoma State and Stanford, but the college route is not the one he’ll take. Instead he’ll play top amateur events while he attempts to Monday qualify for more PGA TOUR events. He knows his next start against the varsity will be different.

“A hundred percent,” he said, flashing a bright white smile. “The first day is always going to be so hard because I'm never going to … I’ve never been in a situation like this and when you come out here, especially as a teenager, it's not easy to just overcome right away. So definitely the next time I feel like I'll tee it up a little better – and I'll hit more fairways.”

Over two days, Bhatia hit only 13 of 26 fairways, trying to play from rough overseeded with rye that has been difficult to judge. He made two double-bogeys, but also made seven birdies on a difficult Copperhead layout.

His decision to forego college actually was cemented several years ago, when Bhatia was in the eighth grade. He says candidly that he has a short attention span and doesn’t care much for being in a classroom, but he enjoys being outside and loves playing golf and competing. So his father offered him a solution: “Let’s not do college.”

Bhatia was last year’s AJGA Rolex Player of the Year and won the Jones Cup earlier this year, securing a spot into the PGA TOUR's RSM Classic early next season. Bhatia hopes to compete for the U.S. in this summer’s Walker Cup at England’s Royal Liverpool – he’d be the youngest U.S. player in the cup’s rich history (Ollie Fisher played for Great Britain and Ireland when he was 16) – and then will join the pay-for-play ranks.

“I’m stepping up and I'm performing at the level I need to perform,” he said. “So I just, I feel like I have a really good plan and I'm ready to do it."

“I mean everything's just learning, a learning process in this game. I've played so many events and I've just got mentally stronger playing against some really good fields, golf courses, and just learning how to get around courses is big for me, because I'm a type of player to that loves just hitting it as far as I can and trying to get as close as possible. But I've definitely learned how to dissect a golf course and play it as smart as I can.”

Bhatia, who is 6 feet tall and weighs only 130 pounds, has considerable power for his size. On the downhill 10th on Friday, he smashed a driver 343 yards. (“I use the ground well,” he said.) He received a sponsor exemption into the Valspar from tournament director Tracy West, and to this point never had played on a stage so big. The atmosphere was terrific. When he missed a putt for par at 12 on Friday, fans in the nearby Hooters pavilion, singing to the Ryder Cup tune of "Ole, ole, ole," chimed out, "Ak-Shay, Ak-Shay, Ak-Shay, Ak-Shay ..."

"That was sick," he said.

There was a few awestruck moments for him over the week, such as running into Jason Day in the locker room, visiting with Dustin Johnson and playing a practice round with Jon Rahm. But he knows this is where he wants to play.

“He's good. He's a great player. Great attitude,” Rahm said of Bhatia. “You can tell he was very excited to be here, it reminded me, too, when I was playing in Phoenix (as an amateur). He was all over the place. I mean he was just walking fast, hitting a lot of putts, a lot of chips, everything which just really quick. Which it was cool to see, because I mean, he is 17 years old.

“But man, he is talented for 17 years old. I did not hit it anywhere close to that at his age. As a junior in high school? Yeah, not even close.”