Akshay Bhatia finally a PGA Tour winner, only to find some wins more equal than others
It wasn’t all that long ago that Akshay Bhatia was grinding it out at Sedgefield, his career all but hanging in the balance as he tried desperately to make the cut. He returns to the Wyndham Championship this week not as a teenager still trying to prove the doubters wrong, or trying to find a back door onto the PGA Tour, but as a fully anointed winner on tour, with all the rights and privileges attending thereto.
Or most of them, anyway. Not quite all of them.
The sense of both relief and validation is palpable as Bhatia, now 21, mingles with the tour pros who are now fully and completely his peers. His decision to skip college and turn pro didn’t come without its hurdles, but with his win two weeks ago at the Barracuda Championship in Nevada, it worked. There’s no doubting it now.
“I think I’m a very different player than I was when I was 18, 19,” Bhatia said Tuesday. “It’s a different feeling. I don’t think my mindset changes. Obviously, I want to go out and play good golf and have a good week and earn my spot into the playoffs next week. But I think it’s a little more freeing. I know how to do it, I have done it, I know the emotions that go into it, I know the stories I can tell myself and it doesn’t matter the day before.”
Thing is, Bhatia still has some work left to do. He played his way into that “special temporary membership,” earlier this summer, which allows entry into tournaments but not the season-ending FedEx Cup playoffs, even if he accumulated enough points to qualify. The only way special temporary members can qualify is if they win, at which point their points suddenly count. Now Bhatia’s do.
But because he won an off-week event against a major with European players from the DP World Tour in the field, those points didn’t count with the rest of his. Nor does he get into the Masters. And because two of his best finishes came in those kinds of events — a top-10 at the Barbasol Championship was the other — neither was added to his point total. If they were, he’d be comfortably in the top 50 and closing in on a spot in the Tour Championship. Top 50 gets you into the PGA Tour’s elite restricted-field events, like the Memorial. Top 30 gets you into everything.
Instead, he’s 99th and needs a tie for third or better in Greensboro, at the least, to clinch a spot in next week’s opening playoff event in Memphis, where there’s three times as much money on offer as the Wyndham. And that’s not all. Because qualifying for next season extends through December as the PGA Tour switches back to a calendar-year schedule, Bhatia still has some work to do just to hold his position and secure a spot in the top 150.
Once again, the idiosyncrasies of the tour’s rulebook have put Bhatia in a difficult position. When he turned pro at 17 in the fall of 2019, he planned to go through Q School and earn status that way, but the pandemic intervened and left him stuck at home in Wake Forest. He had to scrounge for sponsor exemptions and fight through Monday qualifying just to get a chance to play until the fall of 2021. He broke through on the Korn Ferry Tour by winning in Bermuda last spring, but that came just after he dislocated his shoulder playing pickleball, an injury that prevented him from fully capitalizing on the win.
Only now is Bhatia gathering any real momentum, and even that might be short-circuited by a quirk of the scoring.
“I think it was only a matter of time before he was going to be out here for a number of years,” said Alex Smalley, who grew up with Bhatia in Wake Forest and followed a more traditional route to the tour, via Duke. “Obviously, he got his special temporary membership earlier on this year and ended up winning a couple of weeks back. It’s very cool to see someone that I grew up with who’s not only succeeding, but is winning as well. Very, very happy for him. Hopefully, you know, we get to see him out here for a long time.”
To stay out here for longer this summer, he’s going to have to keep playing his way into opportunities. A tie for second this week in Greensboro would take care of everything, and Bhatia has shown he’s every bit capable of not only competing but winning at this level, especially in a tournament like this one (Barracuda, Barbasol and Puerto Rico, where he finished second) where many of the very best golfers are taking the week off.
Justin Thomas, Shane Lowry, Webb Simpson and Adam Scott are the biggest names here, and with defending champion Tom Kim out injured, only six of the top 30 in the FedEx points standings are playing, with all of the top 17 resting up for the playoffs. Those conditions have led to Bhatia’s best results. The fact that it’s a course he knows well, close to home — his two Goldendoodles are staying with him this week — can’t hurt either.
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This story was originally published August 2, 2023 at 6:00 AM.
