Taylor Funk seems to play his best golf with his back to the wall.
The Ponte Vedra High graduate is as close as he’s ever been to getting a PGA Tour card as he tees it up with 167 other players this week at the TPC Sawgrass Dye’s Valley and the Sawgrass Country Club in the PGA Tour Q-School, presented by Korn Ferry, beginning on Thursday.
The top five players, plus ties, will get Tour cards for the 2024 season. Players behind them will earn status on the Korn Ferry Tour or PGA Tour Americas.
PGA Tour Q-School: What to know, how to get tickets, how to watch the chase for five Tour cards
Here’s some free advice for competitors watching the leaderboard: don’t count Funk out until he’s holed his last putt at the 72nd hole.
“I don’t know what it is, but I’ve always had a knack for playing well under pressure when I’m nervous,” he said. “I’ve been able to elevate my game in those situations.”
Taylor Funk staged a dramatic rally in Valdosta
The latest example was at the Kinderlou Forest Golf Club in Valdosta, Ga., in a second-stage qualifier on Dec. 1.
Funk was 2-over for the tournament through seven holes of his final round. He didn’t know it at the time, but he was seven shots off the cut to make the final stage in Ponte Vedra.
“We were just trying to post a decent score,” Funk said of a conversation he had with his caddie and former high school teammate Cory Howard.
Well, there’s “decent.” And there’s what Funk did.
He birdied Nos. 17 and 18 (Funk began his round at No. 10), the latter on a 20-foot putt.
Funk turned and birdied Nos. 1 and 2. Encouraging but it wouldn’t have been enough had he stopped there.
He birdied No. 5 (with lip-outs at Nos. 4 and 6 wrapped around that) and stood on the par-3 eighth tee needing to go birdie-birdie to advance.
Funk promptly hooked his tee shot at the 191-yard hole 20 yards to the left. But while walking to his ball he recalled an off-hand comment by Howard the day before that he hadn’t had a chip in this season on PGA Tour Canada (where Funk earned status for the new PGA Tour Amercias, his fallback position).
Funk then did just that and went to the last hole needing one more birdie.
His drive found the left rough but he lofted an 8-iron onto the green, 6 feet from the hole, and birdied it for a 66 and a four-round total of 5-under 283.
That tied for 11th was exactly on the number Funk needed to advance. And it was his seventh birdie in 11 holes.
Taylor Funk gets into ‘that mode’
“He was totally out of it with 11 holes to go,” his father, 2005 Players champion Fred Funk said. “Then he got in that mode.”
That mode has also surfaced in other tournaments:
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Earlier this fall, Funk shot a final-round 60 at the Cragun’s Dutch Legacy Course in Brainerd, Minn., to tie for in the PGA Tour Canada CRMC Championship. That got him into the top-60 on the Fortinet Cup points list, which gives him status on the PGA Tour Americas. In the second round at the Legacy Course, Funk shot 69 to make the cut on the number.
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Last year he birdied two of his last three holes in a PGA Tour Canada qualifier to earn his card for 2023.
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During the 2015 Southern Amateur, Funk made four birdies on the back nine of Old Waverly in Mississippi — two of them in a row after a double-bogey at No. 14 — and won by one shot.
“There’s something in there … I don’t know what it is but it doesn’t change how I strategize,” Funk said. “Some people have it, some don’t.”
Funk’s father joked that quicker starts would alleviate anxiety within the family.
“Maybe he could get in that mode earlier,” he said. “Maybe birdie seven of the first 11. It’s making me a little too nervous. But he knows what he has to do and all that matters is what the score is at the end.”
Swing changes for Taylor Funk taking hold
Funk, 28, is riding a wave of confidence based on his last two seasons on the Canadian Tour. He has made 13 of 20 cuts and finished the 2023 season making four of his last five. Prior to the last two seasons, he made only two of 16 cuts on the Canadian Tour.
Funk praised his swing coach, Jeff Smith of the Spring Creek Ranch in Memphis, for correcting some issues that were producing too many double-crosses off the tee. Funk has improved his driving accuracy overall and has been and mitigating his misses.
Give social media the credit for hooking the two up.
“After college [the University of Texas] I was really struggling and went to every coach I could find,” he said. “Nothing was working. Then I saw a podcast on social media where someone was giving Jeff a lot of credit for helping him, and that every golfer he works with gets better.”
Once Funk began working with Smith, it took about 18 months for the changes to set in. Smith said Funk was standing too much upright and not getting his hips and lower body in synch enough.
“Jeff told me that it I wanted to make it work, we’d have to blow up my swing,” Funk said. “It took a while but I’m driving it a lot straighter, and my dispersion rate is pretty significant.”
Will Tayor Funk have a home-course edge?
Funk never lost a putting touch that served him well through junior golf, high school golf (he led Ponte Vedra to the first of its nine state golf championships in 2013 and is one of three individual state champions for the Sharks) and college golf.
Everything is pretty solid,” he said. “The putting stuck with me even when I wasn’t playing well.”
Funk is also on familiar ground this week. He grew up in a house just off the first tee of the Valley Course and played there and at Sawgrass frequently with his father and through high school.
His First Coast loyalties run deep and he wears a Jaguars hat in every competitive round.
“I think I’ve played the Valley over 1,000 times,” Funk said. “Sawgrass, maybe 60 to 100 times. I’d like to think I have an edge but if you’re not careful, you can almost get too comfortable. But I’ve played every hole on those courses in every type of wind, from every possible tee and pin position. I think more than anything, I can save my energy and play nine-hole practice rounds each day. I don’t need to play each course the full 18 holes.”
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Taylor Funk hoping for a home-course advantage in PGA Tour Q-School