Why this 34-year-old Walker Cup giant resisted lure of pro game

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — If you’ve been following amateur golf for the past decade or so, you know the name Stewart Hagestad, tall and slender amateur golfer from Southern California and finance executive by trade. He was the oldest player, by far, playing in the Walker Cup, here at Cypress Point. He’s 34.

And when Hagestad won his singles match on Sunday over Eliot Baker of the Great Britain and Ireland team, 4 and 3, he secured point number 13.5 for the U.S., which meant that the Americans, winners of the 2023 Walker Cup, would, at the very least, secure the Cup. The final tally was U.S. 17, GB&I 9.

This win made Hagestad a five-time winner. He has played on five Walker Cup teams — 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023 and this year — and the Americans won all those events.

Fred Couples plays a lot of golf with Hagestad, and Couples was around Cypress for part of the week, chatting up players here and there, in his inimitable way. “But I’m leaving Stewart alone,” Couples said. “He doesn’t need anything from me.”

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Hagestad has played in eight major championships, three Masters and five U.S. Opens. He looks like a polished Tour player. He often is asked why he has never tried to play as a professional. His standard response tells all.

“At the 2017 Masters, my golf was about as good as it could be, and I finished T-36,” Hagestad said the other day. He was the low amateur that year. Sergio Garcia won, at 279. Hagestad shot 294. “So where am I gonna finish when I’m not playing my best?”

Matt Kuchar was at Cypress with his son, Cameron, a freshman on the Texas Christian golf team. The senior Kuchar was on his way to the Tour event being played in Napa this week, the Procore Championship. He played a limited PGA Tour schedule in 2025 after the unexpected death of his father, Peter, earlier this year. Watching the play from outside the ropes, he was asked if he had a sense, among the 20 Walker Cup players, who would have a chance to make it in professional golf — and who would not. Elsewhere on the course, Fred Ridley and his wife, Betsy, were also at the Walker Cup. Ridley won the U.S. Amateur in 1975 and is the last winner to never turn pro. Kuchar won the U.S. Amateur in 1997.

“You can’t tell watching a shot here or a shot there,” Kuchar said. “If you see them on the range, you might have more of a sense. But if you can play with a guy over 36 or 72 holes, then you really know.”

And what’s the difference? Some guys have it. Some guys have the ability to grind it out, play every kind of shot from 60 yards to the bottom of the hole, have enough of an obsessive gene to want to make it, willing to sacrifice other things in their effort to get there. Between the elite lifer amateurs and the Joel Dahmens of the world lies a chasm.

Roger Maltbie, the veteran NBC Sports golf broadcaster who played the PGA Tour for years, considered what Hagestad said about his 2017 Masters experience and said, “That sums up the whole thing.”

In his seven majors after the 2017 Masters, where he was the low amateur, Hagestad missed six cuts and made one. But he’s very likely to be a Walker Cup captain someday. He’s very likely to play on next year’s Walker Cup team (the Walker Cup is going to even years) at Lahinch in Ireland. He’s doing just fine.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com.