Last year when the Pepperdine men’s golf team won the NCAA Championship, R.J. Manke experienced a wide array of conflicting emotions.
On one hand, his team climbed the mountaintop in epic fashion. Manke committed to play for the Waves when the program was miles outside of college golf’s elite, and he became a critical part of their resurrection along with key contributors Sahith Theegala, William Mouw, Joe Highsmith, Dylan Menante and a host of other top players. He won twice as a sophomore and posted a formidable 71.48 stroke average a season ago, his senior campaign, while registering four top-10s. On most teams, that would qualify Manke as an indispensable leader with a guaranteed spot in the starting lineup as the national championship run commenced.
That’s not what happened. Despite a top-10 finish late in the spring semester, Manke found himself on the outside looking in as he couldn’t qualify for the top five on what was arguably the deepest squad in the country. That healthy competition is part of what pushed Pepperdine forward in the first place, and it meant that Manke would have to mostly watch through the West Coast Conference Championship, the NCAA Cle Elum Regional and the NCAA Championship.
His team would go on it to win it all, but it wasn’t what he envisioned.
“It’s the biggest bittersweet moment, really,” Manke told Global Golf Post. “That’s just a fact of college golf where you have an individual portion to a team game. I’m sitting at home and I want some of my best friends to play well, but then I’m trying to figure out, ‘Where am I going to be able to play? Where are my parents going to be able to watch me? When is my opportunity going to come?’ ”
His questions were returned with painfully disappointing answers last spring, but Manke has since flourished into one of the top stories in college golf.
Because the COVID-19 pandemic cut his junior season short, Manke had the option of playing another year of college golf for the 2021-2022 season. He took that option and decided to return to his home state to play for coach Alan Murray at the University of Washington.
It’s been nothing short of a stellar homecoming. Carrying a ridiculous stroke average of 68.0 for the season, Manke has two wins and five additional top-three finishes in nine starts. That has pushed him to No. 2 in the Golfstat D-I rankings and No. 9 in the World Amateur Golf Rankings, up from No. 103 in the WAGR at this time last year. Manke is also No. 5 in the PGA Tour University Standings, which is far more important than any other ranking at the moment. If he finishes in the top five, he will earn Korn Ferry Tour starts this summer and would be exempt into the final stage of the Korn Ferry Tour Qualifying Tournament later this year.
The jump has come with more playing time and less stress around his spot on the team.
Carrying a ridiculous stroke average of 68.0 for the season, Manke has two wins and five additional top-three finishes in nine starts.
“At Pepperdine, there were four players on the bench who could have been in the lineup any week, and having to compete against them to fight my way into the lineup made me into the player I am now,” Manke said. “Coming to U-Dub, we have a great team ranked eighth in the country now with a lot of good players, but I was confident enough in my game to know I was going to play in every tournament up here.”
Growing up in Lakewood, Washington, near Tacoma, Manke had his heart set on playing for the Huskies from a young age. His parents, Mike and Claire, both went to school there, and his family ties run deep with the purple and gold. He wanted to attend Washington coming out of high school, but it didn’t work out for a variety of reasons. Murray came in as head coach when Manke was late in his career at Bellarmine Preparatory School, and Manke was also a raw, unpolished talent. In his words, he “just wasn’t good enough” to play for the Huskies at the time. Washington had established itself as a strong presence in the college game with Nick Taylor (2010 Ben Hogan Award winner) and later C.T. Pan (2015 Hogan Award finalist) putting together stellar careers on teams that were vying for national championships.
Manke didn’t have many options, as Pepperdine, in Malibu, Calif., was the only school outside the Pacific Northwest that came calling. Brothers Andrew and Michael Putnam had traveled from the Tacoma area down to Pepperdine in years prior – Manke plays at Tacoma Country and Golf Club where the Putnams honed their craft – and spoke highly of their experience in Malibu, so Manke took a chance on a mid-tier school selling him on dreams of a dramatic turnaround. Highsmith, from the same course and town as Manke, would follow him to Southern California a year later and is now the No. 13 amateur in the world.
Pepperdine was taking a chance, too. Manke emerged as a rising recruit during his freshman year of high school but found his game cratering by his junior year to the point where he shot in the high 80s and low 90s on occasion. He slowly worked himself out of that slump, impressing Pepperdine coach Michael Beard.
“Physically and technically, it wasn’t pretty,” Beard said. “But he had something on the inside. When he came here, he was pretty wild with ballstriking, but he was homemade. He was using a 10-finger grip and, at least in my opinion, he wasn’t going to respond well to a lot of technique changes. My only chance I had with him was to let him be him. I wanted him to feel like his way was good enough so we didn’t change anything technically. We did a little course management, but that was it. He came into school hitting a sweeping hook and I’m like, ‘R.J., when I recruited you, you were hitting a fade, man. Let’s get back to the fade.’ He didn’t need a lot more than that.
“I had some guys I would get right in there and be more hands-on. Not R.J. I had to keep his belief in himself. He was always going to do what it took to make it in his own way. You could just tell he was up for the challenge.”
A self-described feel player who hasn’t taken a lesson since high school and hates watching his swing on video – “I don’t completely hate it” is the backhanded compliment that he gives himself – Manke credits much of his development to learning from Theegala, now a PGA Tour rookie who nearly won the WM Phoenix Open a month ago. Manke is effusive in his praise of the affable Californian, calling him the driving force behind Pepperdine’s turnaround and a player after whom everyone on the team modeled themselves.
Manke figured out a couple of swing tweaks in the past year or so that has enabled him to become more consistent in his ballstriking, but what he learned from Theegala goes deeper. Manke laughs as he recalls a memory from early in his career at Pepperdine. Beard pulled him aside on the range and gave Manke a long talk about the importance of shadowing Theegala to pick up on the nuances of the game. “Follow him around at practice and see what he is doing to get better” were Beard’s marching orders.
“I immediately turned around, and Sahith had just stolen clubs from a player on our team and he’s hitting lefty,” Manke said. “Like, you gotta be freaking kidding me? This guy is one of the best players in college golf, and he’s just whacking balls lefty on the range. But it’s stuff like that where Sahith plays his best because he enjoys it so much. And that’s what I like to do, too.”
It has taken time for that enjoyment to align with swing adjustments and belief. During the fall of his sophomore year, Manke played with Collin Morikawa in the final round of the Alister Mackenzie Invitational and shot a blistering 61 to beat the future two-time major champion by four strokes. His college ranking rose, but Manke was uncertain of his status in the college game.
“I was definitely not comfortable having my name up there in the top 100,” Manke said. “I felt like people were always looking at me.”
His time at Pepperdine changed that. Manke has played enough with the top players to gain a sense of where his game is in comparison. He played the Genesis Invitational Collegiate Showcase last month at Riviera and was an alternate for last year’s U.S. Open at Torrey Pines, giving him a chance to be around professionals.
“I’ve been able to see what the best in the world can do, and I don’t think it is too far off from what I can do,” Manke said.
He is clearly a bright kid, a former class valedictorian in high school who is working toward his real estate masters at Washington. He talks with a Jordan Spieth-like self-awareness, the kind rarely found among college players.
Murray only has him for a few more months until the college season ends, but it’s clear that Manke’s impact on the Husky program matches his meteoric rise.
“He’s a first-class human being, and he comes from a hard-working, considerate family,” Murray said. “Obviously he’s a hell of a player and he’s having a hell of a season, but as good as he is on the course, he brings so much great stuff off it as well. He’s massively popular with his teammates, with donors, with the staff … the fact he is a Washington kid as well, it couldn’t have worked out better for us.
“I wish we had him for more than a year.”
And it’s a year nobody is going to forget if R.J. Manke continues his current form.
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