In professional golf, there is nothing more nerve-wracking or pressure-packed than Q-School. Careers and livelihoods are in the balance over three stages, all for the chance to earn a handful of starts on the Web.com Tour.
For Cody Blick, a third-year pro out of San Jose State University, the final day of the Final Stage of the qualifying tournament was even more stressful than he expected. Preparing breakfast on Sunday morning, his coach’s fiancée asked him an innocent, yet ominous question — “Where are you clubs?”
Cody Blick (@codyblick) woke up this morning and realized his clubs had been stolen.
He proceeded to fire 63 with the Superintendent’s driver, pro shop’s wedges, random irons and a heavier than usual putter to earn guaranteed @WebDotComTour starts #Tourjectory pic.twitter.com/nhFOAveCs6
— Mackenzie Tour (@PGATOURCanada) December 9, 2018
The garage of the AirBnB that Blick’s team was renting for the week had been left open overnight and the aspiring Tour pro’s clubs were stolen. With only a few hours to spare between the time his clubs were found to have been stolen and his tee time, Blick went into crisis management mode.
“I went through a rollercoaster of emotions for about five minutes,” Blick told GolfChannel.com. “I was kinda freaking out, but I had to get it together.”
He started on social media, posting to Instagram a $5,000 reward for his clubs safe return, no questions asked.
View this post on Instagram
Without getting any leads on his clubs, he began attempting to throw together a set that he would use for the biggest round of his professional life. With the Titleist Tour truck out of town, club reps wrangled up a TS3 driver and 3-wood.
Blick then borrowed the Whirlwind Golf Club superintendent’s 5- through 9-irons, picked up a few wedges from the pro shop as well as a putter that was heavier and an inch longer than the one he had been using since 2010 and got to warming up for his round.
Entering the final day in a tie for 74th place and needing to get inside the top-40 for Web.com Tour status, the makeshift set came through in the clutch. Blick made 9 birdies and no bogeys, including three straight to finish his round en route to a 63 to get to 19-under par for the week and into a tie for 25th place.
“It was an attack mentality all day,” he said. “Hitting bad shots was OK, almost, like, Dude, I have a mismatched set. It’s not expected of me to hit good shots. In a weird way, that was comforting.”
Blick’s finish guarantees him at least eight starts on the Web.com Tour in 2019, a welcomed change from the stop-and-start schedule he had been playing on the PGA Tour Canada the past three years.
“It was one of those things where I never thought that I wasn’t going to get starts,” he said. “I don’t mean that in a cocky way; I just kinda believed the entire time that it was going to be fine. We took so many punches to the gut this week, and it was pretty cool to brush it off the way we did.
“This was the weirdest week of my life, hands down… but the best week, yeah. This is awesome. I’m so happy.”
