These two golf instructors helped Patrick Cantlay

For some golfers, geography more than anything brought them into contact with golf.

The home of World Golf Hall of Fame member Lee Trevino, for instance, was situated roughly 100 yards from the seventh fairway at the Dallas Athletic Club and a young Trevino used to walk through the course to get to school and sell balls he found in the thick rough back to the slicers who hit them there. The rest is history.

Patrick Cantlay didn’t grow up next to a golf course in Long Beach, California, but rather benefited from a country club membership and the members and staff who nurtured his love for the game.

Cantlay benefited greatly from having not one, but two able teachers at his disposal. Jamie Mulligan, who has been at Virginia Country Club since 2000 and has the title of CEO, knew Cantlay’s grandfather, who was a good golfer with a putting green in his backyard that he mowed himself, and played golf with him back in the 1980s when he originally was an assistant at Virginia CC. Cantlay’s dad became club champion there. Patrick was no more than eight years old when he developed an insatiable love of the game.

“I can’t think of a time when I didn’t play golf,” Cantlay says.

Special from the start

At junior clinics, Mulligan, the 2021 PGA of America Teacher and Coach of the Year, would ask his students to aim and throw a ball at a tree, and whoever was the closest to it would win a candy bar. A hundred kids would try to whip it as hard as they could like Nolan Ryan. Only Cantlay took a different tact.

“Patrick rolled one that just followed the contours of the ground and kept going and rolled up right next to the root. What is that? You can’t coach that, right?” Mulligan says.

Cantlay played baseball and basketball, too, until high school when he realized his skills no longer were developing at the same pace as his teammates.

“I was short and skinny yet at the same time I was getting better compared to everyone else at golf,” he recalls. “It was an easy decision to focus on golf.”

Mulligan made sure Cantlay excelled at the core fundamentals while assistant pro Mike Miles, who played for a stint on the PGA Tour, introduced him to the importance of simply getting the golf ball in the hole. “He would put the ball in the trees and say, ‘What are…