PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — Isaiah Salinda looks comfortable. That alone draws you in. But what he leads with really makes you lean forward.
“Can I be honest?” he starts. “Are you recording this or anything?”
“We don’t have to be,” reporter clarifies.
“No, no, no — you can. F–k it,” he says. “Too many guys out here are just kind of cookie-cutter, vanilla shortbread cookies, you know what I mean? I’m trying to be different.”
It’s Wednesday morning and Salinda is one of 12 Players Championship debutants sitting in director’s chairs, spread out in a massive circle for their first-timer’s press conferences. He’s wearing a Bad Birdie polo with a desert sunset pictured on it, which partly explains what he means by different. His mountain-man thighs are testing the limits of his hiked-up golf shorts. He’s the proud owner of what the Tour calls “a robust selection of fun socks” — which included the cookie monster pair he wore early in the week — but he’s elected for clean white ones today, as to not distract from his shirt. He’s different. In many ways, that is exactly what the PGA Tour is in search of.
In recent months, the Tour has launched Fan Forward, a catch-all name for initiatives driven by survey responses from more than 50,000 golf fans. Among the four takeaways being putting into action is a simple one on paper — Make players more relatable — that isn’t so easy in reality. Because pros prefer to keep their public opinions as straight as their tee shots. It might maintain the brand pillars of the sponsors ironed on their shirts, but that safe approach doesn’t attract the eyes and ears the Tour seeks most in this time of TV ratings and popularity contests.
With Salinda, the work is easy. He’s trending, too: He has less than 5,000 Instagram followers, but Reels the Tour’s content team have made featuring him regularly outperform those of better-known stars. Like the one he posted after our convo Wednesday, which has earned him an extra couple hundred followers since. Later that afternoon, when Collin Morikawa’s caddie made an ace on the island green 17th hole Wednesday, it was Salinda centering himself in front of the camera with a Gladiator impression.
“Are you not entertained!”
Salinda is considering joining Twitter, looking to get in the mix on the Tour discourse a bit, definitely interested in establishing a personal brand. But mostly, he just wants his fellow Tour pros to lighten up a bit. Go off script. Play practice rounds with Tour rookies. Talk a little s—. He graduated from Stanford in 2019 and slowly rose through the Tour ranks, from PGA Tour Canada to a couple years on the Korn Ferry Tour. He turned 28 Thursday, but the youthful streak in him very much misses the team golf days of college. He moved to Vegas, he says, just so he could compete with the crew of Tour players who live there, like Morikawa and Min Woo Lee.
“I just love the juice,” Salinda says, so I ask him very plainly, “Do you talk s—?”
“Buddy, I talk too much s—,” he replies. “To the point where I think not too many people like me out here.”
To play a practice round with Salinda — at least according to him (sorry, I have no experience) — is to be chided and ridiculed constantly. It’s just “raw confidence,” he says, regularly unleashing vicious club-twirls regardless of where the ball goes.
The ongoing absence of Tiger Woods plus LIV Golf snatching stars means the Tour has been eager to develop more fan favorites. The best golfers will gain popularity as a result of their play, but the Tour hopes more players could gain fans from their personalities, too, and then launch to greater heights from their best on-course weeks. The best way to get noticed is to win, of course, something Salinda came damn close to a couple weeks ago, finishing one shot back of a playoff at the Mexico Open. While waiting for the leaders to finish, he said he was “clowning” off-camera, but the instant the broadcast producers turned the red light in his direction, he buttoned himself up.
“I hate myself,” he said this week, laughing. “I hate that I did that. But my agent was standing next to me. He didn’t tell me anything, but I knew I can’t say anything absurd. Next time, whenever that is, I’ll be more unique, I guess. I’ll stand out.”
Next time may be the next broadcast window. Salinda’s opening round at TPC Sawgrass was clean and efficient, comprised of 15 pars and three birdies, leaving him three shots back of the leaders. He walked to scoring with just a fraction of the fanfare that the Xanders, Jordans and JTs, who all also get requested for interviews by the media. Despite outplaying them all Thursday, Salinda wasn’t requested by anyone. His relative anonymity continues, if only for another 18 holes.
