Matteo Manassero has lived a long, winding life in golf.
In 2009, at the age of 16, Manassero became the youngest ever to win the British Amateur. One month later, he was the top amateur at the 2009 Open Championship, where he finished T13 at Turnberry. That was just four shots outside of the playoff between Stewart Cink and Tom Watson. He was the No. 1 ranked amateur in the world by year’s end and became the youngest to ever make the cut at the Masters the following April. He turned pro and won four times on the European Tour, including the 2013 BMW PGA, where he outplayed Sergio Garcia, Ernie Els, Lee Westwood, Francesco Molinari and others. He rose to No. 25 in the Official World Golf Rankings.
Then, the young Italian’s game fell off and fast. He registered just one top-10 finish in 2014, made just six cuts in 2015 and was no longer a card-carrying European Tour member by 2018. The smooth-swinging Manassero cobwebbed his sticks briefly after losing his joy for the game. He took time to reflect, not just on golf and his career, but on life — about what he wanted out of it. He looked for happiness outside of golf. He met his wife, Francesca Apollonio, and eventually found himself rebuilding his golf game from the ground up.
In 2020, Manassero could only play on the Alps Tour, European Golf’s third division. That’s where his great golf revival began.
In September of 2020, Manassero won the Toscano Alps Open, which moved him up a run to the Challenge Tour. The work continued. Two years later, in 2023, Manassero won the Copenhagen Challenge and Italian Challenge Open to get back to the DP World Tour. Last March, Manassero fully reemerged, winning the DP World Tour’s Jonsson Workwear Open in South Africa. That win helped him earn his PGA Tour card for the 2025 season through the DP World Tour’s Eligibility Pathway.
Manassero, the golfing prodigy blessed with deft touch and picturesque swing who once cratered out of pro golf, made it all the way back to the top of the pro golf ladder.
But the 32-year-old’s great golf revival story isn’t done being written. And after he fired a third-round 64 on Saturday at the RBC Canadian Open, Manassero, who is tied for the 54-hole lead with Ryan Fox, will have a chance to pen arguably the best chapter of his resurrection on Sunday at TPC Toronto at Osprey Valley.
Manassero’s best PGA Tour finish came at the 2014 Valspar Championship, where he finished tied for eighth. His best finish this season came at the team event, Zurich Classic of New Orleans, where he finished in a tie for 12th with his partner Cristobal Del Solar.
Sunday will be a big round for Manassero. Of that, there’s no question. A PGA Tour win means an invite to the Masters, the PGA Championship, and the Players, as well as a two-year exemption on the PGA Tour.
But Manassero’s journey into the golfing abyss taught him not to focus on the prize at the end. Being hyper-focused on the results is what started his spiral. Through his journey back, a new mentality has emerged — one he will lean on Sunday as he looks to best a leaderboard filled with journeymen who have not accomplished what he has or stared down the demons he did.
“It’s definitely made me more mature and much better perspective towards golf, which at one point was everything,” Manassero said Saturday of his journey. “The results-oriented, which I discover being not a very good thing for my game and for me. So I switched away from that, and I try to get a good attitude, a good thought process, talk well to myself. Very basic things, but that’s what I learned alongside a lot of other things that I long to get into the details.
“But I’ve matured a lot, and I have a better perspective towards, for example, a day like tomorrow.”
And so, Matteo Manassero, once golf’s great prodigy who was destined to live in the stars, will go to sleep Saturday holding a share of the lead at a PGA Tour event. He’ll rest knowing a lot is on the line Sunday at TPC Toronto.
Job security, Coveted major invites. But more importantly, a sign that Matteo Manassero, who has been to the golf abyss and back, can still write his own ending to a remarkable golf story that now seems far from over.
