Wyndham Clark and the Wild Year Leading to Augusta

With the weather howling on the Sunday of what should have been the final round of Pebble Beach, Clark and Kettler killed time by playing full-contact ping pong. “It was a typical ping pong battle – sweating, laugh- ing, talking smack….”

Kettler said through the weekend it was fascinating to watch his friend deal with all the elements. He couldn’t fully relax, but with the weather delay, there was nothing to prepare for. “It was hard to anticipate how it was going to develop,” he said. “As an athlete, it’s dangerous to think (it’s over) and then you may have to go out Monday with a one-stroke lead against the best players in the world. When we got the official news it was awesome; it was just one of those moments in life. It was a mountaintop moment.”

“We gave each other a big old hug and shared some tears,” Kettler said.

And if winning at Bing Crosby’s old clam bake wasn’t enough to keep Clark high on golf fans’ radar, the upcoming season of Full Swing Season 2 will.

The new season of the Vox Media documentary series is on Netflix and features all the chaos of last season – the LIV deal, the Ryder Cup massacre – as well as a deep dive into Clark’s U.S. Open victory. With Clark’s personal story of his mother’s passing and his openness about his mental health and emotions, Vox producers have called Clark’s episode ‘powerful.’

“It’s not easy to just have a bunch of strangers show up with movie cameras and come into your living room and film you doing a meditation,” Chad Mumm, Vox’s chief creative officer, said at a joint press conference he and Clark held before the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. “And it wasn’t just Wyndham, it was his entire team; Rob (Mougey), his agent/manager, John (Ellis) his caddie, and Julie (Elion), his sports psychologist. I think this episode is going to do a lot for de-stigmatizing the idea of therapy and how it can help professional athletes and anybody, honestly, be the best they can be.”

Clark said the process of having his ups and downs documented for the show was just an extension for him to share honestly what it’s taken to get to this point in his life.

“In these last probably I want to say really the last three to four years you’ve seen people openly be like, man, I’m struggling in life or mentally stuff isn’t right up in the head,” he said. “I think prior to that people were scared to say that and now people are acknowledging that everyone has those issues.

“So I think that’s more of why you’re seeing it. I don’t necessarily think there are more sports psychologists or people who are now buying into it. I think people are opening up more about it. And I think it’s good, I think it shows that we are humans. In tennis or in golf or football or whatever it is, we’re humans and we have — we have the same struggles that everyone else has.