Near the end of Palmer Jackson’s college recruitment when he really started to develop into the player he is today, big schools came flocking to the scene like birds fighting over a piece of bread.
Stanford and Duke wanted him. Oklahoma State, too. Most of the top programs you could name were suddenly intrigued by the 6-foot-1 Murrysville, Pennsylvania, native whose raw athletic talent came through as both a baseball pitcher and a ballstriking machine of a golfer.
They weren’t going to get him. John Handrigan, the head coach of Notre Dame who has dramatically turned around a once-dormant program, had been developing a relationship with Jackson (above) long before the scorecard matched his physical gifts. By his junior year at Franklin Regional Senior High, Jackson had made up his mind.
He didn’t just want to be another great player in a golf powerhouse full of them. He wanted to transform a school desperate for success.
“I knew the program had the assets to be great, but they didn’t show it at the time I was getting recruited,” Jackson told Global Golf Post last week. “I told my parents I wanted to go to a place where I could have a lasting impact and change the trajectory of a program. I could impact future national championships.
“It was definitely tempting (to attend another school), because you see what kind of players Oklahoma State and Stanford have produced. It’s hard not to think, ‘Wow, I could be the next Rickie Fowler.’ But my thought process was that I could be the first Palmer Jackson. … It didn’t matter to me what schools looked at me later because I think deep down my mind was already set.”
“When I first started, we were ranked over 100th in the country and Notre Dame wasn’t really viewed as a strong golf school. And then to build it up to be a top-10, top-15 program in the country over the last couple of years, that has been pretty special."
John Handrigan
There’s been nothing to indicate Jackson made the wrong choice. Now up to No. 47 and quickly rising in the World Amateur Golf Ranking after a dominating victory in last week’s Jones Cup Invitational, a shared victory in the Stephens Cup and a runner-up in the stacked Patriot All-America Invitational this past fall, Jackson’s junior season is shaping up to be a game-changer, both individually and for the Fighting Irish program. He has eight consecutive top-15 finishes, has been named to the Ben Hogan Award watch list and had a fall semester where 17 of his 18 rounds were under par.
His outstanding play has paid dividends for the Irish. The 2019-20 squad broke the program record for wins in a season with four, and then last season the team reached NCAA Regionals for the first time since 2012. The U.S. Amateur has been a harbinger of success as Jackson made a run to the quarterfinals in the 2019 edition, two Golden Domers reached match play in the 2020 event and then graduate student Davis Chatfield made the quarterfinals at Oakmont this past summer. Notre Dame won twice as a team this fall and is now up to No. 12 in the country, challenging for the best season in school history.
Jackson winning the Jones Cup is a legitimate feather in the cap for the program. Of the tournament’s 18 winners, six have won PGA Tour events. The only other player from a Midwest school to win the elite amateur event held annually in Sea Island, Georgia, was future tour winner Corey Conners of Kent State back in 2013.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to compare Jackson to Sahith Theegala, the PGA Tour rookie who announced his presence this weekend at the WM Phoenix Open. Theegala decided to go to Pepperdine when the school was ranked No. 150 in Division I golf. When the COVID-19 pandemic cut the 2020 college season short in Theegala’s final season, Pepperdine was ranked No. 1. He left for pro golf, but the Waves won the national title without him last year.
Jackson’s influence has some of the same threads.
“When I first started, we were ranked over 100th in the country and Notre Dame wasn’t really viewed as a strong golf school,” Handrigan said. “And then to build it up to be a top-10, top-15 program in the country over the last couple of years, that has been pretty special. … Recruiting is never easy, but now we’ve had a lot of guys reaching out who are interested in our program because of what some of our players like Palmer have been doing.”
Jackson, as you have already guessed, was named after Arnold Palmer and grew up no more than a 30-minute drive from where the King did in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. Murrysville is 17 miles due east of the city with Latrobe being another 30 minutes further east into the Pennsylvania hillside.
His dad, Doug, a golf lover of moderate skill who would play with his son nearly every day, suggested the name to his wife who loved it. Jackson never met Arnie, but he did read as much as he could about his career and is not at all bothered by the most-asked question he gets. When Jackson was just a year old, Doug got to be a standard bearer at Laurel Valley and had the chance to get a few Arnie autographs to put up around the house, a nice reminder of the bond they share despite never meeting each other.
“I get it a lot, but I’m starting to get it more,” Jackson said of his namesake. “I am perfectly fine with that. I embrace it. Just to share a connection with someone like that who was such a good person and impacted so many people, it’s strongly impacted me in such positive ways.”
Jackson has played the game from before he could remember. He would race the sun at Murrysville Golf Course where he took a bucket of balls and pitched them onto the practice green while his dad threw the balls back and fixed the pitch marks. His father played baseball at Pitt, influencing Jackson’s decision to also play baseball where he was a key component of the Franklin Regional Panthers pitching staff.
“It got me in a really good state of mind for golf, to be honest,” Jackson said. “As a pitcher, you have the ball in your hand and you have control. Pitching and golf, they take a strong mind. They both require a lot of thinking and you have to be very accurate with your motions. … You can go out to the mound and say, ‘I hope we win today’ or you can go out and say, ‘I’m going to figure out a way for us to win today.’”
You can sense that attitude when Jackson plays golf, which he has done exclusively the last few years. He cites Patrick Cantlay as a role model for the type of confident composure he wants to emulate.
When asked where his patience and even-keeled nature comes from, Jackson credits his dad.
“When I was younger, every time our baseball team was about to win a tournament he would say, ‘Act like you’ve been here before, control your emotions,’” Jackson said. “I’ve taken that to an extreme on the golf course.”
The scouting report on Jackson as a high school recruit is that he had raw ability, especially off the tee, but struggled mightily inside of 100 yards. Even now at Notre Dame, Jackson says his greatest challenge is to master flighted wedges and control his approach shots. He started to put some of those pieces together late in high school, culminating in the summer of 2019 – his last before starting at Notre Dame that fall – when he made deep runs in both the U.S. Amateur and U.S. Junior Amateur.
It didn’t take him too long to bring that type of impact to South Bend, Indiana. During the pandemic-shortened season, Jackson had the second-lowest stroke average in school history, set a new 54-hole program scoring record in winning the Quail Valley Intercollegiate and led the team with six top-25 finishes.
A smart kid with an analytical mind, Jackson has only gotten better in time. The season he is putting together now could legitimately end up being the best Notre Dame has ever seen.
“His mindset is extremely mature, and that is what enticed me in the beginning with Palmer,” Handrigan said. “He thinks very advanced for a player of his age. He does things that even I haven’t thought of as a coach in order for him to play at the highest level.
“I’ve been coaching for 20 years now, and guys like him don’t come around too often.”
He’s a kid committed to what he wants to achieve. After the Jones Cup, he got back to Indiana at 3:30 a.m. on Monday morning and had an 8 a.m. class starting in less than five hours. How many college kids would skip that class, even without having just won the biggest golf tournament of their career?
Not Jackson. He was back in class and fighting hard to catch up on the homework he had missed. You don’t go to Notre Dame and pretend to go to class. He came to school with a mission, both on the course and in the classroom. You don’t get there by cutting corners.
“It was pretty difficult to catch up, but well worth it, obviously,” Jackson said.
It’s a microcosm of Jackson’s career, one that has the power to turn around a program.
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