Launch pad to stardom: Wells Fargo Championship’s first-time winners club includes Rory McIlroy, Rickie Fowler, Max Homa
Simply earning a PGA Tour card is an achievement in itself, but for a player to feel as if they belong, as if they’ve really made it to the big time, eventually a player needs to hoist a trophy. Not just for the paycheck and the two-year exemption that comes with it, but for the confidence it produces. Winning is validation. It’s what every pro lives for, but unless your name is Tiger Woods a win once a year can be the makings of a Hall of Fame career.
Since its debut in 2003, the Wells Fargo Championship has been a happy hunting ground for several first-time winners. As a measure of the quality of Quail Hollow Golf Club, once a quail-hunting preserving, the list of players to claim the trophy in the Queen City includes the likes of major winners Woods, Jim Furyk, Vijay Singh, David Toms, Jason Day and Rory McIlroy, who has won the title three times. (The 2022 edition is being played at TPC Potomac at Avenel Farms, just 20 miles north of the nation’s capital because Quail Hollow will host the Presidents Cup later this year.)
McIlroy, who won here in 2010, 2015 and 2021, leads a stout foursome of Rickie Fowler, Anthony Kim, and Max Homa who made their debut Tour victory at Quail Hollow. And let’s not forget the Cinderella story that was Derek Ernst.
In 2008, Anthony Kim became the tournament’s original first-time winner after enjoying a near flawless performance in the final round. The 22-year-old Kim became not only the youngest champion of the Wells Fargo Championship, but he became the youngest first-time champion on the Tour since 2001. Kim built a four-stroke lead through 54 holes with a 66 on Saturday and never looked back. His playing partner Jason Bohn called the round, “almost Tigeresque.”
“I’m a little bit numb right now, but that walk up 18 was the best feeling of my entire life,” Kim said after finishing five strokes ahead of former British Open champion Ben Curtis and shattering Woods’s tournament scoring record with a 16-under 272 total. “I’ll never forget that feeling. I had chills going up and down my spine. I want to recreate that as many times as possible now, so I’m really going to work hard.”
Kim would go on to win two more times on Tour and play on the U.S. Ryder Cup team in 2008 before injuries derailed his career. He made his final start at Quail Hollow in 2012, withdrawing after an opening-round 74 and hasn’t competed in a Tour event since.
Anthony Kim throws his ball to the crowd after winning the 2008 Wachovia Championship in Charlotte. (Photo: Associated Press)
Two years after Kim’s debut victory, another boy wonder – this one with staying power – earned an impressive breakthrough win. Two days before his 21st birthday, the baby-faced McIlroy became the youngest winner on Tour since Woods in 1996. The Northern Irishman also became the third straight player in his 20s to win the Wells Fargo Championship and the youngest winner in tournament history.
His final-round 62 included six consecutive threes on his scorecard over the final six holes as he shattered the course record by two strokes and won by four over reigning Masters champion Phil Mickelson.
“To win this tournament as my first is something quite special,” McIlroy said.
Remarkably, McIlroy needed to hole a 6-foot eagle on the par-five 7th (his 16th hole of the day) to make the 36-hole cut on the number with a 1-over total. He was nine strokes out of the lead before climbing within striking range with a third-round 66.
Of McIlroy’s final-round exploits, Kim, who was his playing partner on Sunday, said, “He was in a total zone.”
McIlroy has gone on to win four majors, reach World No. 1 and win 20 PGA Tour titles, including twice more at Quail Hollow – in 2015 when he broke his own course record with a third-round 61 and again in 2021.
“This place has been good to me,” McIlroy said of Quail Hollow following his win in 2021. “Ever since I first set eyes on this golf course, I loved it from the first time I played it, and that love has sort of been reciprocated back. I’ve played so well here over the years. … this is the first time I’ve ever won an event for the third time, so that’s pretty cool to do it here.”
Rory McIlroy reacts after winning the 2021 Wells Fargo Championship at Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte. (Photo: Jim Dedmon/USA TODAY Sports)
Two years after McIlroy established himself as a winner on Tour and used it as a launching pad toward stardom, Rickie Fowler faced off with McIlroy and D.A. Points in a three-way playoff. The 23-year-old Fowler gambled with a 51-degree wedge that had to be perfect on an 18th hole that had yielded only four birdies all day.
Having already overcome a three-shot deficit on the final day by firing a 3-under 69 to join a playoff when Points bogeyed the final hole of regulation, Fowler returned to No. 18 and attacked a dicey pin with a creek hugging the green’s left side. Fowler’s gamble paid off as he stuffed the shot to 4 feet and made the birdie putt to claim his first of what has grown to five Tour wins. Fowler had finished second four times previously in 67 starts as a pro.
“There’s a lot of people that have doubted or said, ‘You’ll never win,’ ” Fowler said at the time. “It’s nice to kind of shut them up a little bit.”
Rickie Fowler holds the trophy after winning the 2012 Wells Fargo Championship at Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte. (Photo: Gerry Broome/Associated Press)
If Fowler continued a trend of first-time Tour winners in their early 20s at Quail Hollow, a year later in 2013 an even younger first-time champion confirmed a pattern. Ernst, in only his ninth Tour start and 11 days shy of turning 23, emerged late Sunday from a leaderboard full of proven winners to give himself an early birthday present.
Ranked 1,207th in the Official World Golf Ranking at the time, Ernst won in a playoff over England’s David Lynn. Adding to Ernst’s rags-to-riches story was the fact that he began the week as the fourth alternate for the Wells Fargo field, and so drove to Athens, Georgia, planning to play in a Korn Ferry Tour event before getting a phone call that there was a tee time with his name on it in Charlotte.
“This feeling is unbelievable right now,” Ernst said after he won his lone title on Tour.
Derek Ernst won the 2013 Wells Fargo Championship at the Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte. (Photo: Getty Images)
When Homa found the winner’s circle in 2019, his victory fell into the category with Ernst of unlikely champions. Homa, winner of the 2013 NCAA individual title, had dipped to No. 829 in the world when he got his third crack at the PGA Tour for the 2018-19 season. In his previous stint two years earlier, he made only two cuts in 17 tournaments, missing the 54-hole cut in one of them and finishing last at an opposite-field event in the other, and earning the grand total of $18,008. But he made six of seven cuts coming into the Wells Fargo Championship and had climbed to 417th in the world.
At Quail Hollow, he carded three rounds in the 60’s including a second-round 63 which tied for the low round of the week, and closed with a 4-under 67 to top Joel Dahmen by three strokes.
Max Homa celebrates on the 18th green after making his par putt to win the 2019 Wells Fargo Championship at Quail Hollow Club n Charlotte. (Photo: Sam Greenwood/Getty Images)
“When I hit rock bottom I found a shovel and kept digging,” Homa said. “I’m very proud I finally found a ladder and started climbing upwards because it was getting dark down there.”
In his 68th start as a pro, Homa won for the first time and it proved to be only the beginning as he’s climbed inside the top 50 in the world. Homa has tasted victory twice more – at the Genesis Invitational and Fortinet Championship.
But like Kim, McIlroy, Fowler, and Ernst before him, Homa will never forget his first win. With nine first-time winners already this season through the WGC Dell Technologies Match Play in late March, it would come as no surprise if the Wells Fargo Championship’s first-time winner’s club were to add a new member during its one-year hiatus at TPC Potomac Farms in Potomac, Maryland.
Any contenders may want to remember these words from Homa after his arduous journey to being a Tour winner: “I felt like I was going to throw up, but my hands felt unbelievable on the club.”
Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in the 2022 Well Fargo Championship official tournament program.
