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When Quade Cummins and his former teammates, Brad Dalke and Blaine Hale, joined forces for the Oklahoma Sooners, they inspired their own brand of golf.
The Burly Boy way.
“It started freshman year going to the bookstore, checking in for lunch where everybody always thought we were either on the football team or the baseball team,” Cummins said. “It’s in our DNA that we’re not golfers. We’re athletes who could have played other sports if we wanted to.”
Dalke and Haile have graduated, but Cummins, the 24-year-old sixth-year senior charged with leading the No. 2 Sooners on another national championship run, still embodies the concept. It’s about clubhead speed and muscling your way past any and all obstacles, but there are other intangibles that explain why Cummins has catapulted to No. 14 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking with a strong case for making the U.S. Walker Cup squad this May.
Belief. Swagger. An inky-black mustache. A golf shirt that often finds a way to be more untucked as each round progresses. And, on occasion, a gigantic gold belt buckle that reads “The Oklahoman Outlaw Est. 1996,” referencing the year he was born and his humble upbringing in Weatherford, Okla. – an 11,000-person town in the middle of nowhere, about an hour’s drive west of Oklahoma City.
He’s basically Brooks Koepka with a cowboy hat.
“I would say our games are pretty similar,” Cummins said of comparison to one of his favorite PGA Tour players. “Neither of us are short off the tee, but we aren’t the longest either. We just get the ball in the hole. It doesn’t matter what it looks like.”
The grittiness Cummins exudes is a product of who he wasn’t as a junior golfer. His hometown had one golf course and he learned how to play on an assortment of short, hardscrabble municipal layouts in the surrounding area. He never competed in an AJGA event and played almost exclusively within the state, learning how to win smaller tournaments while staying under the radar on the recruiting trail. He freely admits there were kids he went up against in junior golf who were more polished than he was – the 6-foot-3 Cummins played with an unorthodox, sweeping hook at the time – but many of them settled with Division II schools rather than one of the most dominant college golf programs in the country.
“We saw that he had an innate ability to compete. ... I saw that this guy was a player. You could feel it."
RYAN HYBL
Sooners coach Ryan Hybl saw a magnetism in Cummins that others couldn’t, even if it wasn’t immediately validated once he arrived in Norman for his freshman year.
“We saw that he had an innate ability to compete,” Hybl explained. “Once he got to school, I’ll never forget this, our very first qualifier he goes out and shoots 66. But I think deep down he knew his game wasn’t ready, and we had a good team that year. I saw that this guy was a player. You could feel it.
“About a month into school, I brought him into my office and I told him, ‘Here’s the deal. You’ve got a chance of being a big-time player, but you don’t know anything about what you are doing yet. You don’t know who you are. We need to think about a redshirt year.’ Thankfully that really worked out in his favor, because that whole year we started messing around with his golf swing.”
It was at that point where Cummins and Hybl agreed that he needed to rely on a cut rather than an unpredictable hook. With each passing year, Cummins made Hybl look more and more brilliant, lowering his scoring average from 73.43 to 71.63 to 70.67 to 69.50.
Critical to the progress was Ryan Rody, the director of instruction at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa who started to work with Cummins during his sophomore year. Cummins is effusive in his praise of Rody, who continues to challenge his protégé to swing faster so he can take advantage of his power.
“We want him to be strong, we want him to be athletic and that’s a big part of his development,” Rody said. “He came in the other day and said, ‘I’ve been working out, let’s see what I can do.’ And it’s very understated like a lot of what he does. There have been times where he wins a golf tournament and he’s up later that night sending me swing videos asking me how he can get better.
“We’ve worked a lot on him trying to use the ground a little more and I was telling him that I want him to lift up his leg and plant. He tried it and swung about 125 mph that way. Now he is consistently around 119, 120 mph.”
While his game improved in the collegiate arena, Cummins started to break through on the national amateur scene. John Yerger, the co-chairman of the Sunnehanna Amateur, invited Cummins to play his event in 2018 and he responded with a runner-up finish that opened the door for bigger amateur events. He won the 2019 Pacific Coast Amateur and then registered eight top-10s in 2020, making noise at the Jones Cup, Southern Amateur and Sunnehanna.
In December he made the cut in the PGA Tour’s Mayakoba Golf Classic, offering a taste of what he hopes is in his near future. Cummins had wanted to turn pro last year prior to the pandemic, qualifying for the Mackenzie Tour alongside his highly ranked Sooner teammate Garrett Reband, but plans were forced to shift and he is now looking to the PGA Tour University program as his path to professional golf. Cummins is ranked No. 6 at the moment; the top five players at the end of the college season get automatic membership on the Korn Ferry Tour.
Before he gets there, Cummins has a couple of lofty goals – making the Walker Cup team and winning a NCAA Championship.
On both subjects, the emotion in his voice is palpable.
“Never in my dreams would I envision being on the Walker Cup team,” Cummins said. “Coming into college, I didn’t know anything about amateur golf. I didn’t even know what the Walker Cup was or what the major tournaments were. Now being able to put myself in a situation where I have a chance to make the team is very special to me. It would mean a lot to my family and the University of Oklahoma. We haven’t had a Sooner make the Walker Cup since Anthony Kim (in 2005) and now we have a chance for two guys (Cummins and Reband) to make it.
“We’ve made it to match play in the national championship the past four years and we’ve only made it past the first round one time. Some people may be satisfied with that, but we won the national championship in 2017 and once you’ve tasted that, it’s hard to not want to do that again.”
Hybl, who said “it is not even a question” whether Cummins should make the Walker Cup team, is of the belief that Cummins will develop into a marketable PGA Tour player because of his charismatic personality and willingness to stand out.
“His freshman year, the guy barely said five words the entire year,” Hybl joked. “That was kind of before he really understood who he was. Once he popped open that shell, he started sharing his emotions and really became an unbelievable leader for us.
“If he can showcase his game and get on the PGA Tour, people are going to love this guy. He’s going to be really fun to root for … he dresses differently and he carries himself differently, but it’s not for attention. It’s genuinely just who he is.”
It will take some brawn to get there, but don’t bet against Cummins making that a reality.
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