LA QUINTA, CALIFORNIA | There is a natural sparkle to this piece of southern California desert on winter days when the sky is brilliantly blue, the craggy mountains are literally close enough to touch and emerald green fairways slither through the sandy scruff that is natural to these parts.
At PGA West, low-slung, tile-topped homes border the nine golf courses and with the summer’s smothering heat gone, flowers in a Crayola collection of colors decorate the neighborhoods where fat oranges hang from branches in backyards.
This is where Will Zalatoris, who has his own natural sparkle, found himself last week, playing the American Express in his second start of the new calendar year. Like the setting and the tour season, Zalatoris is fresh.
It has been five months since Zalatoris hit the ground in the BMW Championship with piercing back pain, just days after he had picked up his first PGA Tour win at the FedEx St. Jude Championship, positioning the 26-year-old to win the FedEx Cup with two more good weeks.
Instead, Zalatoris went home, encouraged that his back issue wasn’t diagnosed as a chronic condition, but a potential one-off alleviated by rest, therapy and some minor modifications to his setup. Back issues can haunt golfers, but Zalatoris has been told that he has no structural issues to cloud his blazing bright future.
To offset stress on his back that led to his injury, Zalatoris now sets up with a more rounded back and his left hip higher than his right hip. It is not a radical swing change and, by switching to a slightly shorter driver, Zalatoris can take his rips and trust his fade.
“I kind of feel like I hit it a little better,” said Zalatoris, who is on the short list of best ball-strikers in the game.
Lean and angular with a golf swing that is a whir of extraordinary power, Zalatoris is also blessed with an old head. He adopted the proven adage that no one regrets taking extra time to recover from an injury.
“I was told (to take off) 12 weeks and I was cleared to hit balls in nine, but I took the full 16 weeks just to be sure. There was no rush to come back. I don’t want to ever have to deal with this again,” Zalatoris said last week after a long practice session.
It was one more example of how Zalatoris is different. He has rocketed to No. 7 in the world ranking in two full seasons on the PGA Tour (he jumped two spots without playing an event for 4½ months), not just by how he plays but by how he operates.
In his last nine major-championship starts, Zalatoris has six top-10s, including the trio of second-place finishes. In his mind, Zalatoris is 3 inches from being a three-time major champion.
“He’s very disciplined,” said Cameron Young, who was a teammate of Zalatoris’ at Wake Forest. “I saw that in school. He was miles ahead of us. It has served him well this far.”
Young is on a similar career path to Zalatoris. After following him to Wake Forest, Young followed Zalatoris’ route to the PGA Tour. Zalatoris was rookie of the year in 2020-21 and Young won the honor last year, keeping an award named after the late Arnold Palmer, another Wake alumnus, in the Demon Deacons family.
“Since I got to college, even before, he was the guy that I was chasing. When we turned pro, he was on Korn Ferry a year before me and he was out here a year before me, so I’ve been chasing him a large part of my career,” Young said.
“He’s a guy I’ve been around enough to know that if he can do it, I can do it too, or at least I will be able to at some point.”
It was two Aprils ago that Zalatoris finished second in the Masters, one stroke behind Hideki Matsuyama. It validated Zalatoris’ T6 the previous fall at the U.S. Open, the first hint at his major-championship chops.
Last year, Zalatoris lost the PGA Championship in a playoff to Justin Thomas, and he saw a 15-foot birdie putt that would have put him in a U.S. Open playoff with Matthew Fitzpatrick burn the edge of the 72nd hole.
“It's one of those deals where you keep knocking on the door and keep putting yourself in position, and he'll come through. I'm sure he'll win one of these when it's all said and done,” Scottie Scheffler said last June at the U.S. Open after sharing second place with Zalatoris.
At home in Dallas with his new wife and their dogs last fall, Zalatoris “got to the end of Netflix” and took the time to let what he has done marinate.
“Just being at home as long as I was – I probably haven’t taken that much time off from golf since I picked up a club. Being able to process the wins, the major runs, all the seconds, you can almost say my win was sort of my arrival to be one of the elite guys on tour. With that comes new responsibilities, and things change,” Zalatoris said.
“I went on a nice run leading up to my first Masters, but then this past year was validation. Playing as well as I did but then doing it over and over again in the majors, it gave me a lot of confidence and it led to the win.
“My career goal – and I’ve been pretty vocal about – is I want to win a major. I don’t really want to chase anything else; it’s just those four tournaments. That will be the goal until I accomplish it.”
Paired with Zalatoris the first three sun-splashed days of the American Express, Young found himself watching his friend again.
“He looks great,” Young said. “He looks like himself.”
Back in bloom in the desert.
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Top: Will Zalatoris returns after taking 16 full weeks off to let his back recover.
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