Nashville it gave me a ton of confidence
and I made every cut after that and start-
ing making some top-10s and I got my
Tour Card.
“Then I go to the PGA Tour (in 2018)
and I struggled in the beginning missing
cuts—when I did make a cut I would fin-
ish in the bottom of the pack—and then I
made the last eight cuts of the PGA Tour
season last summer which gave me a lot
of confidence.
“Obviously, I lost my card. I wasn’t play-
ing bad but it just didn’t work out. I took
three months off and I might have hit balls
four or five days in those three months.
“I didn’t try to reinvent the wheel, I didn’t
try to change my golf swing. I knew what I
was doing was good enough and that I just
needed to be patient. Taking that time off
last fall and last winter kind of made me
hungry again and got me excited.”
When Griffin made his first appear-
ance on the PGA Tour’s developmental
circuit—then known as the Web.com
Tour—he said he was simply “hoping I
could make a cut to reshuffle up.”
“This year started with expectations
that I knew I could manage,” Griffin said.
“It wasn’t so much expectations, it was
more the belief that I won (previously)
and I knew I could record top 10s.”
Griffin struggled with his putting early
in the 2019 Korn Ferry Tour season, but a
now famous tip from Ponte Vedra neigh-
bor Vijay Singh and a borrowed flat stick
from Blacksburg High buddy Oliver Chap-
man helped him turn around that part of
his game at the Robert Trent Jones Golf
Trail Championship in April in Alabama.
He won that tournament in a playoff,
and continued that momentum with a
string of high finishes to secure his PGA
Tour card for 2019-20.
“The big thing for me was turning
those 50th or 60th place finishes into
top 25s,” Griffin said. “I had 11 top 25s
this year and had four or five really good
chances to win.”
SETTLING IN
The 6-foot-3 Griffin has stretched things
out so far on his second ride on the big
tour, and he’s come a long way since win-
ning the Delta Dental State Open of Vir-
ginia at Ballyhack Golf Club in Roanoke
in July 2015.
“It’s just getting comfortable ... getting
comfortable under pressure and get-
ting comfortable with more fans, more
exposure and more money,” he said. “If
you’ve never played golf for hundreds
and hundreds of thousands of dollars a
shot .... I mean that putt that I had on 18
in Houston, it’s a $700,000 putt on paper.
But, honestly, it was probably more like a
$4- to $5-million dollar putt.
“The difference between winning and
finishing second is astronomical. But I
felt totally comfortable. My hands weren’t
shaking. I was nervous but not to the
point where I couldn’t function.
“That just showed me that two years
ago that if I had that putt to win a PGA
Tour event—not that it would have hap-
pened two years ago—that I wasn’t ready.
I probably would have crapped in my
pants ... it would have been too much
for me!”
Instead, Griffin showed nerves of a
champion, leaving his immediate future
secure—a tremendous feeling for a play-
er who has spent the better part of a
decade grinding through professional
golf’s fringes.
After years of grinding on golf’s fringes in South America
and on the Korn Ferry Tour, Lanto Griffin’s PGA Tour future
is secure through the end of the 2021-22 season.
vsga.org
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