The top amateurs who decided to forgo the pro-golf life

This content was first published in Golf Journal, a quarterly print publication exclusively for USGA Members. To be among the first to receive Golf Journal and to learn how you can ensure a strong future for the game, become a USGA Member today!

There is no transcript of the conversation, but the 2023 Pan Am Games in Santiago, Chile, featured a freighted meeting of one of the most exclusive clubs in golf. It was between two Americans far from home: Stewart Hagestad, who a decade earlier had made the rare decision for an accomplished amateur golfer to forgo a life as a tour professional, and Rachel Heck, a can’t-miss prospect who was contemplating the same decision in real time.

What were the implications of earning a living outside of golf?

“I consulted her on it,” said Hagestad, a three-time U.S. Mid-Amateur champion and four-time USA Walker Cup player, “but she had pretty much made up her mind. To be clear, she’s so much better than anyone who’s made this decision recently, going back to Trip Kuehne.”

After talking with Hagestad in Chile in November, Heck penned an essay for “No Laying Up” on March 25, 2024. The three-time All-American at Stanford University, where she won one NCAA individual championship and two NCAA team titles, had decided to remain an amateur.

“Growing up, I looked at the LPGA and thought it was the most glamorous thing and couldn’t imagine wanting anything else,” Heck recently told Golf Journal. “It looks like everyone is having fun all the time and posting on social media about their travels.

“Playing in the U.S. Open, the Evian, LPGA events, I saw that it isn’t like that,” she added. “It’s a grind, 24/7. Loneliness is a real thing.”

Heck, 23, is now an analyst at private equity firm KKR in San Francisco. Hagestad, 34, is an associate at BDT & MSD Partners in Palm Beach, Fla. They are the most visible of a small group of elite players who have forsaken the potentially lucrative path of pro golf in favor of a life with greater stability, variety and balance. A century after celebrated amateur Bob Jones made a similar choice, they and others like them — including Wake Forest’s Emilia Doran (nee Migliaccio) and Evan Beck; Clemson product Stephen Behr Jr. — are carrying the banner for a new wave of career amateurs.

Trip Kuehne excelled at Arizona State and Oklahoma State and seemed destined for the PGA Tour even after Tiger Woods came back to beat him in the 1994 U.S. Amateur final. But that’s not how it worked out. Instead of turning pro, Kuehne, the founder and chief investment officer at Double Eagle Capital in Dallas, went into finance.

Although such consequential life decisions are always nuanced, Kuehne, 53, goes back not to his match against Woods but instead to a memorable car ride.

“When I was 16,” Kuehne said, “I was friendly with the son of a U.S. Open champion who shall remain nameless. We were driving, and I was asking him about his father and not getting great answers. He really didn’t know who his dad was, and said he thought that one day when his father passed away, they’d just get a call from a tournament somewhere.

“That didn’t make sense to me,” Kuehne continued. “I thought, why couldn’t you go into the working world and let golf give you opportunities to travel and meet people and play in tournaments while you can also be a dad, be a husband?”

And so, unlike contemporaries such as Phil Mickelson, Jim Furyk and David Duval, three-time All-American Kuehne did just that. He won the 2007 U.S. Mid-Amateur, played in the ’08 Masters, then began an extended break. With his son now grown, Kuehne is three years into a competitive return.

Saying thanks but no thanks to professional golf remains the exception to the rule for blue-chip prospects, so it was considered surprising when Doran, whose accolades at Wake Forest included the lowest-ever stroke average by a freshman, and whose 4-0 record at the 2018 Palmer Cup made her the only unbeaten player, went into broadcasting.

“The best players in the world are out there — it’s eight- to 10-hour days if you want to be the best at what you do,” Doran said at the 2023 U.S. Women’s Open. She married Charlie Doran in June 2023 and continues to work in golf broadcasting.

Behr, who helped Clemson win the 2016 ACC title as a senior, said no to professional golf in favor of corporate America, first with Ernst & Young and now SAP. Clemson’s website identifies him as “just the second Coaches Association All-American in 27 years to opt to remain an amateur, after Trip Kuehne.”

Why did Behr do it? Part of golf’s famed high school class of 2011, he doubted that he was as good as peers like Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas and Xander Schauffele.

“If PGA Tour University had been around then,” Behr said, “and it would have given me my Web.com Tour card, I probably would have tried it. The opportunity cost of going pro and not making it wasn’t a risk I was willing to take.”

As with Behr, being “good enough” to turn pro is always the background music in this life-changing decision. Still, other variables also loom large. Kuehne’s family took an annual trip to New York, and he speaks reverently of a tour of lower Manhattan when he was in the fourth grade. It was, in retrospect, life changing.

“We took a ferry to the Statue of Liberty,” Kuehne said. “My brother and sister and dad didn’t do it, but I was kind of infatuated. My mom and I walked all 52 stories or whatever, and I fell in love with all of it, the action, the creation of and destruction of wealth that took place on a daily basis on the stock exchange.”

Drawn as much to Wall Street as Magnolia Lane, Kuehne, whose brother, Hank, and sister, Kelli, played professionally, suffered a left-shoulder injury during his sophomore year at Arizona State. This, too, prompted reevaluation. Wouldn’t pro golf be putting all his eggs in one basket? Throw in his troubling conversation with the son of the U.S. Open champ, and his decision was less shocking.

Add and subtract a few details, carry the one, and this is the story of Heck, who as a high school freshman won her Tennessee state division title by 15 shots. Just as impactful was the back injury she suffered in the fall of her senior year of high school. For the first time since she went all-in on golf at age 3, she considered the question of who and what exactly she was, if not a golfer. Her answer: She joined the Air Force ROTC.

Heck liked being part of something bigger than herself and stuck with it during her four years at Stanford, even as she won nine times. Six of those came in her freshman year, when she won in her first start as a collegian and swept conference, regional and national titles. Another injury, thoracic outlet syndrome (hand and arm numbness and pain), would pop up in 2022; additionally, she had a rib removed the following March.

Like Kuehne before her, Heck had a lot of other interests, and like him, her all-too-human frailty had given her ample time to consider them.

“It was a few different things,” Heck said. “Injuries or mental health, I would take a step back and reevaluate everything. In high school I’d lost my identity without golf while dealing with an injury, and that’s what spurred me to start Air Force ROTC.

“College was a lot of ups and downs,” she continued, “which forced me to take a step back and look at life outside of golf. It’s opened a lot of doors, but I knew what friends and family mean to me, and that being alone and living the tour life wasn’t for me.”

By the fall of her senior year, Heck was talking to her parents about her decision. Her older sister, Abby, who had been one of the best golfers in program history at Notre Dame before entering medical school, was also a sounding board.

And then there was Hagestad at the Pan-Am Games down in Chile. Heck told him that while at Stanford she had made a connection with a program donor named George Roberts, the “R” in investment firm KKR. Hagestad’s eyes lit up.

“She was like, ‘Do you think it would make sense to stay in touch with them?’” Hagestad said. “I said, ‘Yeah! People would kill to work there.’”

Bobby Wyatt once shot 57 in the Alabama Boys State Junior Championship. He was so good that Alabama teammate Justin Thomas used to watch him hit balls, and after winning two NCAA team titles with the Crimson Tide, Wyatt turned pro and finished a career-best fourth at the 2016 Zurich Classic of New Orleans.

Mostly, though, Wyatt would be the first to admit, he found frustration, and after four years, he regained his amateur status. He now works for Goldman Sachs and lives with his wife, Jean, and their 5-year-old daughter in Atlanta.

“My wife would be the first to tell you I’m a much happier person than I was when I was playing professional golf,” said Wyatt, 32, who went undefeated, earning 3.5 points, at the 2013 Walker Cup. “I didn’t handle the expectations well, and it eroded my joy.”

He’s grateful for his time playing professionally, for it taught him some hard lessons about perspective. These days Wyatt plays three or four events a year.

“I’m grossly unprepared,” he said with a laugh, “but for the most part it’s way more enjoyable playing for the love of the game and without so many expectations.”

Hagestad suspects that he, too, would have struggled as a pro. He keeps on his phone a photograph of the day he beat Spieth in a one-hole playoff for fourth place at a long-ago Texas Junior Golf Tour event. Hagestad was 16, Spieth 14.

“I’ll never let him forget it. I don’t know why we had a playoff for fourth place, but I made a sick up-and-down for par and that’s all I have over him,” said Hagestad with a laugh. “He kicked my butt in junior golf, college golf (Hagestad went to USC, Spieth to Texas), amateur golf.”

More than just uncertain about his pro prospects, Hagestad was never consumed by golf. He wanted to get an education, and wanted a life beyond just beating balls.

Heck can relate.

“I remember talking to some LPGA friends and telling them I didn’t want to turn pro,” she said. “I expected some pushback, but they said good for you. Not a single person tried to talk me out of my decision. I’m lucky that I have great people who want the best for me not just as a golfer but holistically.”

One of those is Stanford women’s golf coach Anne Walker.

“She said, ‘I know you, and you wouldn’t have been happy on tour,’” Heck said. “She knew that golf is one of many things that I do, and that on tour things were going to get really narrow. I wasn’t going to satisfy my intellectual curiosity and my desire to serve.”

Air Force 2nd Lt. Heck is now a public affairs officer along with her regular job at KKR, and this fall she’ll do a three-month stint with the public affairs team at Travis Air Force Base, northeast of San Francisco. Sometimes she practices at Harding Park or one of the Bay Area’s other storied courses.

Heck is not done with golf.

“After ANWA” — the Augusta National Women’s Amateur, where she missed the cut — “I realized I missed competing and being out there,” she said. She plans to continue competing in the U.S. Women’s Amateur and other top events.

“Next year I’ll try to qualify for the U.S. Women’s Open,” she added, “and U.S. Mid-Am for sure when I turn 25. But I don’t regret my decision not to turn pro for a second.”