When Tyler McKeever captured the inaugural National Links Trust Championship in Washington last fall, he won more than a trophy and a title. The Sunshine State native who earned his high school and college degrees in Alabama and now lives in the Ansley Park section of Atlanta with his consultant wife, Natalie, suddenly started to receive invitations to the most prestigious mid-amateur competitions in the country. Such as the George L. Coleman Invitational at Seminole Golf Club. And the Walter Travis Invitational, which is being contested this week at Garden City Golf Club on Long Island. And that is allowing this 41-year-old, who serves as a research analyst for a private-equity fund that his family manages, to enjoy his best possible golf life this year as he tees it up in roughly a dozen elite events.
“In the past, if I was able to play in five or six tournaments, that was great,” said McKeever, who has qualified for five USGA events, including the 2016 U.S. Mid-Amateur, and captured the 2023 Georgia State Golf Association Public Links Championship. “But winning the NLT opened so many other doors.”
It is a righteous reward for a man who played Division I college golf at Georgia Southern and Auburn and eventually began competing exclusively in mid-am events after a one-year stint on the Hooters Tour reaped a mere $1,300 in prize money and all but killed any notion of playing the game for a living.
“What I am now doing is not a schedule I could keep year after year,” said McKeever, a public golfer who plays out of the Bobby Jones Golf Course in Atlanta and carries a handicap index of plus-1.8. “But I wanted to take advantage of the opportunities that have presented themselves.”
Born in Tallahassee, Florida, McKeever grew up in Live Oak, a city of 7,000 on the Suwannee River that is located about equidistant between the state capital and Jacksonville.
“My dad, Dan, was an attorney,” he said. “He worked for the state prosecutor’s office during the trials of serial killer Ted Bundy in the late 1970s and early ’80s. My mom was a hardworking homemaker who raised four boys, each of us 18 months apart in age. I was number three.”
McKeever was 13 years old when his family moved to Auburn, Alabama.
“My parents believed there were better academic opportunities for us in Auburn,” he said. “We had spent some summers as kids in Alabama, on Lake Martin, and felt familiar and comfortable in the state.”
In Auburn, McKeever took up golf.
“I was playing sports of every kind in school,” he said. “But once summer came along, teenage boredom kicked in. So, I started playing golf. Within six months or so, I was breaking 80. I became crazy about the game and wanted to play as much as I could. And the next spring, I started competing on the high school golf team. I did that for three years and was probably our second-best player, after a guy named Matthew Myers. Matthew was famous for taking money from Auburn University players in games on the putting green at Saugahatchee Country Club, where we competed in high school. He’d come home with an entire tube sock filled with quarters he had taken from those guys.”
McKeever had designs on attending Auburn University once he graduated from high school. But then the golf coach at Georgia Southern offered him a scholarship.
“I liked that it was a D-1 school and that going there took me out of my comfort zone,” he said. “I played on the golf team at Georgia Southern for two years and in 2001 won the Alabama Amateur. Then I transferred to Auburn.”
McKeever describes himself as “a good but not great” college player.
“I was a solid No. 2 or 3 man at Auburn, and most of the scores I turned in were around par or just under,” he said. “My roommate was Lee Williams, who was a member of a couple of Walker Cup teams before turning pro. And I had some good pairings in the college tournaments I played, like Brandt Snedeker, Camilo Villegas and Bill Haas. I could sort of nip at their heels when we competed, but they were clearly better.”
That realization – and McKeever’s time on the Hooters Tour – convinced him that the best course of action after graduating from Auburn in 2005 with a finance degree was to continue his education. That led him to earn MBA and JD degrees from the School of Business and the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama.
“I am in a very fortunate place, working out of a family office and with a family, including my wife, that heartily supports what I do in golf."
Tyler McKeever
During that three-year stretch, McKeever hit upon an idea that would serve him well years later as a mid-amateur competitor.
“I was spending a lot of time in the library and almost none on the course or practice range,” he said. “But I still thought about golf a lot and the mechanics of the swing. And I started to take a more analytical approach to the game.
“One of my closest friends in school was a non-golfer who wanted to learn how to play the game,” McKeever said. “He, too, had a very mechanical mind and was keen to understand the golf swing. So, I started to help him do that, which forced me to think more deeply about how I swung a club. We created a kind of program on how to build and maintain an efficient and effective swing even though we could only practice or play one day a week due to our studies. That turned out to be a model for me on how to succeed as a mid-amateur while also holding a full-time job.”
McKeever became engaged to his future wife, Natalie, in 2010, and they married on New Year’s Eve that year, in Auburn.
“We had both gone to high school and college in Auburn but did not start dating until some years after we had received our undergraduate degrees, when I was in law school, and she was living and working in Manhattan for Accenture,” he said. “We moved to London in 2013 for two years, when her job took her there. Her client was Disney Europe. Basically, I was supporting Natalie, as I was not on a visa program that would have allowed me to be employed in England. I think I took my clubs to London but certainly did not play a lot of golf there.”
Upon his return to the States, McKeever began working for the family business. “My role is to find new equity opportunities for us in the U.S.,” he said. “It keeps me quite busy but also allows me to pursue a mid-amateur golf life and build a game that enables me to be competitive on that stage.
“I am in a very fortunate place, working out of a family office and with a family, including my wife, that heartily supports what I do in golf,” McKeever said.
And this year, he is doing a lot more of it.
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Top: Tyler McKeever, shown here in 2022, won the 2023 Georgia State Golf Association Public Links Championship.
Tyler McKeever photo