In candid response, pro reveals he skipped shot to keep card due to struggles
Brandon Stone hits a shot on Saturday on the 16th hole at the Belfry.
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Brandon Stone calls it weird, and the description seems apt. Friday, at the Belfry, during the British Masters second round, he felt like every hole offered birdie looks, which is, by every measure, a blissful position to be in.
But yeah, a little weird.
“It was so weird,” he said. “It just felt like every hole I was putting inside 15 [feet] for birdie. And you kind of get onto the next tee box and then you kind of wake up and you’re on the green again from 8 feet putting for birdie.
“It was just real surreal.”
Stone was talking in the DP World Tour’s “Green Room,” a simple platform where a pro plops onto a yellow chair and answers questions from a computerized-sounding voice, and the back and forth understandably started with the weird and surreal feeling that comes with a nine-birdie blitzing. Stone birdied hole 1. And 2. And 3 and 5. He bogeyed 11. But then he birdied 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 on his way to a 64, and, after a third-round 74, he’ll start Sunday’s final round in fifth, nine shots behind leader Niklas Norgaard.
The voice then asked another question, and it’s here the oddness maybe makes even more sense.
This year, behind five top 25s, Stone’s been solid. He’s 87th in the season standings. All of that has followed a season on the Challenge Tour, the circuit below the DP World Tour, where he finished the year 19th and earned back a card the 31-year-old South African lost after 2022. You’d figure that run has been trying — two years ago, Stone also missed the cut in seven of his last nine events — and the Green Room moderator was curious, too.
“You’ve had a difficult few years. How hard was it to return to the Challenge Tour?”
For the next minute and 47 seconds, Stone answered. Below is the video. Below that are the words. It’s emotional. It’s sincere. At one point, Stone revealed he was so lost and so unsure, he skipped an event.
It’s a reminder golf isn’t linear.
“Um, it was f***ing awful, if I’m honest,” Stone started.
“I remember so vividly in 2022, I looked at myself in the mirror and didn’t recognize the person. Didn’t recognize the golfer. Had no confidence, didn’t have an identity to my game and I didn’t even go to the last event of the season to try and save my card. I just didn’t feel like I could shoot under par. I didn’t even go to Q-School. I remember so vividly knowing that if I went to Q-School, there was no way I was getting my card back. And it’s probably the lowest I’ve been in my golf career, where you feel like you can’t shoot a number. I felt like I lost the route. I felt like I lost the privilege to play on the DP World Tour because I did. I wasn’t good enough. And I needed to earn, not only earn my card back, but I needed to earn my respect back, my self-respect more than anything because I lost it along the way.
“And it’s very difficult to kind of pinpoint when that happened. But in saying that, you fast-forward through it, a really stellar season for me on the Challenge Tour. Got to Mallorca [the Challenge Tour’s season-ending event] with an opportunity to get my card back and I remember so vividly getting my card back.
“When I got back to my hotel room, I don’t know why, I just looked up and I was sitting on the edge of my bed and there was a mirror and it was the first time in over a year that I recognized myself. I recognized the player that I was. I was happy. I was just kind of validated in that decision to go back to the Challenge Tour and earn my right to play out here again.”
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