Ben Griffin’s time away from golf set him up for the greatest summer of his life
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- Griffin ranks 7th in FedEx Cup and 9th in Ryder Cup standings after two wins.
- A 10-month mortgage job hiatus in 2021 helped reset and revitalize his game.
- A strong showing at Wyndham may secure Griffin an automatic Ryder Cup berth.
Ben Griffin came to Greensboro once on a sponsor exemption. He showed up once on the FedEx Cup playoffs bubble. This year, he’s within grasping distance of the U.S. Ryder Cup team after the best summer of his life.
The Wyndham Championship has so often been a turning point for the Chapel Hill native and North Carolina product, on a course so familiar, one he has played so many times — as a kid, as a college student, even as a civilian during the sabbatical from pro golf that changed the direction of his entire life.
In a career that’s veered from golf to anything else and back to golf, this has been a touchstone, close to home without being home, Greensboro is always a milepost, and yet he arrives here again in uncharted territory.
Seventh in the FedEx Cup standings, highest of anyone in the field this week. Ninth in the Ryder Cup point standings, still within reach of an automatic berth. Top-10 finishes in the PGA Championship — at Quail Hollow in Charlotte — and the U.S. Open, among eight in 24 starts on the year. (Only Scottie Scheffler and Russell Henley have more.) And his first two tour wins at the Zurich Classic in April and the Charles Schwab in May.
“The last couple years I was playing really good golf, but I hadn’t quite broken through the way I have this year,” Griffin said. “I just continued to work hard, made some changes both physically with my body and and with my swing, which is in a really good spot. And so a lot of that hard work has paid off this year.”
And he’s rested for this week, for a change: After playing 13 weeks in a row to start the season and 10 of 11 weeks in May and June, he has played only the British Open over the past three weeks.
His breakthrough season on the PGA Tour comes four years after he broke away entirely, giving up on the minitour grind to go to work for a mortgage brokerage in Chapel Hill. That 10-month hiatus — and the series of serendipitous events that followed — set the stage for the best summer of his career, one that has vaulted him into the golf world’s elite.
“He was very focused and very dialed in at work,” said Robby Oakes, Griffin’s boss at Corporate Investors Mortgage Group. “I can only imagine what he’s like on the golf course.”
Griffin’s mother, Erika, had been working at CIMG in Chapel Hill for almost 20 years when Griffin decided he’d had enough of golf. The office, just off Highway 54, overlooks UNC’s Finley Golf Course, where Griffin set the pre-renovation course record as a senior at North Carolina, but the gap between the two vocations is unbridgeable.
Griffin went to work for Robby Oakes, CIMG’s managing director, poring through data looking for potential mortgages to refinance. He had an aptitude for it, and with rates at historic lows in 2021, there were plenty of opportunities to spot.
Golf was barely even a hobby. Griffin played with a few Realtors, put on an unexpected show at TopGolf for a group of clients, and mostly immersed himself in this new career. Then he joined a friend for a member-guest at a club in Missouri, played incredibly well, and it all came flooding back at once.
“Back when I was working, I really wasn’t touching a golf club at all, unless it was with a Realtor or a member-guest or something,” Griffin said. “When I did play, I was playing really well. It’s not like I lost my natural talents or my game. So I kind of learned from that the importance of rest and not having to go to the range and grind for three or four hours a day, which playing on the minitours or Korn Ferry Tour, you kind of feel like you have to.
“You feel like you have to work really hard and change a lot of things to make your game ready for the PGA Tour. But in reality, if you’re a really good golfer, things are going to take care of itself. You’ve just got to trust the process and make sure you feel good when you tee it up.”
A businessman who had once offered to sponsor him agreed to fund another run at the tour. And Griffin met Oakes for breakfast at Sutton’s on Franklin Street in October to break the news.
“He was planning on staying on part-time and that lasted about two weeks,” Oakes said. “His golf game made quite the comeback. He was really focused on golf once he decided to get back into it.”
Griffin never looked back. He won enough on the Korn Ferry Tour in 2022 to get his tour card — thanks in part to a fourth-place finish in the Wyndham after getting that sponsor exemption — and spent the next two years building toward this summer.
“When you get into a spot where golf is really difficult, it’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel sometimes,” said Raleigh’s Ryan Gerard, a few years behind Griffin at North Carolina. “I think anyone who’s played this game at a competitive level has gone through rough patches. Just knowing that it means something to you when you walk away, and you want it, and when you’re given a second opportunity you take advantage of it? That’s truly the measure of how badly he wanted it, and how hard he worked to get here. Because it wasn’t just handed to him.”
That success has allowed him to entertain dreams that not all that long ago would have seemed impossible, and the Ryder Cup is now within reach. He came into the interview room at Sedgefield on Tuesday wearing a red and blue shirt. “No Carolina blue?” he was asked. “America,” he replied.
Griffin is no lock for the U.S. team despite being ninth in the points standings, with six automatic qualifiers and six picks for captain Keegan Bradley, who is also playing the Wyndham this week. As things stand now, it would be easy to see Bradley taking Justin Thomas, Collin Morikawa, Patrick Cantlay and Jordan Speith in addition to himself.
That would leave one opening for Griffin … or Brian Harman or Sam Burns or Chris Gotterup. All of which means his best chance of making it to Bethpage is to play his way from ninth to sixth and into Bradley’s lineup, which is probably going to take a win in the next three weeks.
“I feel like it’s mentioned every single day, so it’s on my mind whether I want it to be or not,” Griffin said. “If I just do the right things each week, and this week in particular, if I play really well and just focus on winning, the byproduct of that is going to be making the Ryder Cup team.”
Greensboro, then, once again looms large in his future, a potential turning point in a career that has taken some unexpected turns to end up where he always thought it could, or might.
There’s no CIMG branding among Griffin’s endorsements — “We can’t afford him anymore,” Oakes said, “although I’m surprised Rocket hasn’t picked him up” — but a group of his clients asked for hats with his logo to wear at Sedgefield while following Griffin this week.
In the many interviews he’s done about Griffin since Oakmont, Oakes has also been careful to point out Griffin once promised him Masters badges, and Griffin long ago secured his spot at Augusta next April. And if Griffin had some what-ifs about leaving golf behind way back when, there are none about leaving the mortgage business behind now, with $8.1 million in winnings this summer alone.
“Ben had the opportunity to make it, but he wouldn’t be making what he’s making this year, I’ll put it that way,” Oakes said. “Maybe a fraction of that — 1 percent maybe.”
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This story was originally published July 30, 2025 at 5:30 AM with the headline "Ben Griffin’s time away from golf set him up for the greatest summer of his life."
