After Amen: Sam Bennett Has Learned in the Last Year That Life, and Golf, Are Never Simple

Sam Bennett became a star at the 2023 Masters while trying to overcome his father's death. His journey continues.

Sam Bennett is chasing a PGA Tour card this week at the Korn Ferry Tour Championship. / Darren Carroll/Sports Illustrated

This article originally ran in the March 2024 print issue of Sports Illustrated, and with Sam Bennett currently 30th in the Korn Ferry Tour standings entering this week's KFT Championship in French Lick, Ind., we wanted to share it here.

The house is quiet now. Sitting at the end of a dusty central Texas road, the air inside the stately brick ranch hangs still, no longer disturbed by the family of five careening through the halls en route to school or a dental office or golf courses. Echoes of those past lives are displayed on seemingly every wall, adorned by photos of a family smiling on ski trips, celebrating graduations or posing on the links. Slight of frame, eyes kind, the father in those photos stands proudly alongside his three young boys, his hands on their shoulders. Turn the corner into the living room, though, and he appears suddenly aged in a series of shots from his eldest son’s wedding: He hunches forward. His hair has whitened. His eyes have dimmed, unable to focus on the camera. Something’s changed. Something’s missing.

In the adjacent hallway, a vibrant contrast: a painting depicting Rae’s Creek, the Hogan Bridge and the famous 12th green at Augusta National, all of it enveloped by pine trees and azaleas in bloom. Eighth-grader Sam Bennett’s art assignment had been simple: “Paint your dream.” A decade after putting that dream on paper, Bennett lived it. Only 23, he walked across that fabled bridge. He curved fades and draws through crisper-than-usual Augusta air. He heard the patrons roar after a chip-in eagle. After two days and 36 holes, he saw his name in the third spot from the top of the course’s iconic green-and-white leaderboard. His story captivated the masses: The rail-thin kid from a hardscrabble Texas town, who’d two years earlier watched his father, Mark, wither and die from Alzheimer’s disease at 53, seemed poised to do the impossible.

Reality, though, can’t be so tidily packaged. For Bennett and his family, his Masters performance felt like a warm sunrise after a boundless night. The culmination of a dream, yes, but also the end of a nightmare. He walked off the 72nd hole fulfilled, albeit disappointed that he finished in 16th place and only two strokes shy of being invited back in 2024. Those steps off the world’s most famous golf course were the first in a new quest to become Sam Bennett, PGA Tour golfer. Not Sam Bennett, Masters phenom. Not Sam Bennett, son of an afflicted father. Not Sam Bennett, totem for trauma.

Sam has drawn strength from his father's words. / Darren Carroll/Sports Illustrated

But Bennett’s road in the year since Augusta hasn’t been as smooth as his made-for-TV Masters narrative might have suggested. One stellar weekend on the game’s grandest stage can’t simply wipe clean a decade of deep-rooted pain, nor does it guarantee future greatness. Though Bennett turned pro last year after five seasons at Texas A&M, he has not yet earned his PGA Tour card—no simple task, even for someone so preternaturally talented—and will not compete again this April at Augusta. Until recently, he still trained on his alma mater's range and chipping green and lived in an apartment nearby with friends from college, caught somewhere between the place and people who offered him comfort amid misery and the future he is striving for personally and professionally.

Though it’s only an hour away, he doesn’t venture to his family home as often as he thinks he should or his mother, Stacy, wishes he would. He doesn’t want the pictures on the walls—of a father gone too soon, of a child’s dream already realized—to define him. “That’s part of the story, but it’s not his whole story,” Stacy says. “He wants to write his own.”

***

A flimsy wire fence guards Oak Ridge Country Club. Shallow dirt patches masquerade as sand traps. Its fairways are scraggly and its greens patchy, but it’s only a few minutes from the Bennett home in Madisonville (pop. 4,500) so it’s where Stacy and Mark’s trio of boys spent most of their free time, often alongside Mark or his father, Butch. Sam never took a formal lesson, but hitting off those dusty, hard fairways demanded perfect contact. It was on that humble track that he learned to shape shots and spin the ball out of hard-packed bunkers, his crafty game born of the course’s quirks and his desire to beat brothers three and five years his senior. “The stuff around the greens, to me, was mind blowing,” says his eldest brother, Marcus.  

By 12, Sam could beat 17-year-old Marcus, a single handicapper, from the same tees. Sam played shortstop for Madisonville High School’s baseball team and averaged 18 points per game for its varsity basketball team despite standing only 5' 10" and being skinnier than a 9-iron. He thrived because he relied on the elite hand-eye coordination he’d inherited from his father, a standout golfer in high school. “I can just figure things out on my own,” Sam says. “If I get the club in the wrong spot, I can manipulate it on the downswing. I can save it coming down.”

The Bennett family including Sam (back middle), brothers Marcus (top left) and Jake (top right), mother Stacy and father Mark. / Courtesy of the Bennett family

Understanding Sam’s love of the game—and talent for it—Mark joined Texas A&M’s Traditions Club when Sam was in eighth grade. On weekends, Mark and the boys would make the hourlong drive to College Station through a landscape dotted with oil derricks bobbing endlessly under the Texas sun. Mark worked as a full-time dentist at his father’s practice but always attended his boys’ games and golf tournaments. Some mornings, before work, he’d write up restaurant-style breakfast menus and serve Jake and Sam, both picky eaters, making the routine feel special. On weekends, he relished grilling hamburgers in the backyard as the boys spent hours playing basketball in the driveway or hosting friends.

When Mark was in his early 40s, though, his dental hygienist had to begin subtly steering him to the correct tooth as he started procedures. Stacy began finding his keys in the freezer. When he drove, to her horror, he often straddled the center yellow line. Marcus once encountered him in the living room, attention fixed on a necktie tutorial on YouTube, as he fumbled with his collar. “It was one of those moments,” Marcus remembers, “that I thought, Man, this can’t be good.”

***

In 2013, the Bennetts, too stricken to summon the words—too shocked by Mark facing Alzheimer’s at the age of just 45—asked their boys to examine a piece of paper from his doctor. After digesting the diagnosis, Marcus, Jake and Sam turned to one another and asked, “What do you think this means?” Does he have two years to live? Does he have 20?

“I didn’t think it was gonna be as bad as it was,” says Sam, who was only 13 when his father was diagnosed. “When you hear the words, you don’t know when you’re young.”

Mark’s mistakes at work started to pile up: He once pulled the wrong tooth, Sam recalls. Another day, Mark got lost driving home. Frantic, he asked strangers where he was, and never drove again. About a year after receiving his diagnosis, Mark had to retire from the family business.

The disease robbed him, day by day, of abilities and freedoms he’d long taken for granted, as if he were rapidly reverting to childhood. With Stacy behind the wheel, Mark once opened the passenger door while he wasn’t wearing a seat belt. “It scared me,” she says, “very, very bad.”

A churchgoing man who’d admonish his sons if he heard them utter “damn,” Mark began making sexually explicit quips in front of family and friends. In their shock, Stacy and the boys could only laugh to stop from crying. Mark would still occasionally join Sam on the golf course but wouldn’t count strokes. Soon, he couldn’t swing a club. Once, as he and Sam were pulling into the driveway where Mark had spent so many hours watching his boys play, he started sobbing, unprovoked. “I don’t know what he was crying about,” Sam says. “I can’t get that out of my head.”

In 2018, Sam enrolled at A&M on a golf scholarship. He had met the coaches before with his father and liked them. “I didn’t want to be that far from home,” he says. “It was always probably going to be A&M.” By the time Sam left for school, Mark had slipped from mere forgetfulness to needing full-time supervision and help with basic necessities like dressing and preparing food. Sam made regular trips home, driving down the same lonely highway upon which Mark had ferried him so many times in pursuit of his dreams. Without fail, he returned to campus battered and depleted, battling burgeoning anxieties and guilt.

Sam found refuge in a pair of offices at A&M: Those of his coach, Brian Kortan, and Ryan Pittsinger, the Aggies’ director of counseling and sport psychology. Sam and Pittsinger spent hours discussing those troubling feelings and how to manage them—they’d been born, Sam came to learn, from the lack of control he felt as Mark’s condition deteriorated. Sam treated his often-overwhelming anxiety with Lexapro, while also relying on meaningful conversations with Kortan and weekly therapy sessions with Pittsinger. “There was a point in time that was really scary [for him],” the counselor says. “I don’t want to feel like this forever. I think sometimes when we’re in it, it feels like it’s never going to go away.”

In February 2021, in the middle of Sam’s junior year, an atypically freezing winter descended upon central Texas. One day, Stacy wore a dark hoodie and gloves on a visit to family, which made Mark think she was a burglar upon their return. “I’m not going in that damn house,” he shouted. “You’re not who you say you are.” She had to recruit neighbors to help coax him out of the truck.

By then, Marcus lived on his own nearby with his wife and young son, finding a measure of stability after years of personal issues spurred, in part, by his father’s condition. Stacy moved into his old room across the hall—and they reversed the lock of the primary bedroom so Mark couldn’t wander during his increasingly frantic and sleepless nights. 

As Mark’s condition worsened, Sam’s play sharpened. After middling freshman and sophomore seasons, Sam won three tournaments as a junior. (By the time he finished at A&M, he’d earn first-team All-American honors twice, win five tournaments and be named 2022 SEC Player of the Year.) The anxieties that roiled off the course stilled when he stepped inside the ropes, thanks, in part, to Kortan’s steady hand. 

When he was in his 20s, Kortan lost his father to cancer and spent several years after college trying to carve out a pro golf career. He’d grown up in a small town in South Dakota, not unlike Madisonville. Given those parallel paths, the two would talk for hours. They would spend early mornings in that office—Sam on a couch, Kortan behind his desk—discussing everything but golf. “This was his safe spot,” says Kortan, now 52. “When he went home or when he had to go deal with that stuff, that hurt him.”

With Marcus working and Sam away at school, in early 2021, Jake, only 23 at the time and dealing with mental health issues (both related and unrelated to Mark’s illness), after a few years at Texas A&M, agreed to return home to become Mark’s primary caregiver. Stacy pressed on with her job as a middle school teacher, which afforded a brief daily escape from the shroud that had fallen over their home. Marcus was often summoned home by harried calls from family and caregivers when an extra pair of hands were needed. Pursuing his dream in College Station, Sam’s guilt grew by the day. A pair of paid caretakers worked shifts, too, as Mark required round-the-clock attention. In the months before he died, he lost control of his bladder and bowels, often necessitating middle-of-the-night baths from his wife or sons. “One of the worst parts for me is him losing his dignity,” Stacy says. “I don’t know how we did it.”

In Alzheimer’s final stage, basic brain functions start to fail. Mark could no longer talk, eat or swallow. Substantial  weight loss is common and many who aren’t felled by comorbidities succumb to dehydration when they won’t accept food or water, leaving families to decide whether to enlist hospice care or to keep a relative husk alive via intravenous fluids. The Bennetts opted for the former: On June 7, 2021, they moved Mark to a nearby facility. Stacy set her alarm for 6 a.m. the next morning and planned to head out early to go sit at her husband’s bedside. The nurses called at 6:15.

Through the final year of Mark’s life and after his death, the Bennetts were stricken by afflictions common among Alzheimer’s caregivers. Stacy gained weight and wrestled with depression. Jake suffered severe mental health episodes. Marcus, usually gregarious, found himself removed and angry. Both brothers struggled to cope, making choices they would regret. Sam sought continuing treatment for anxiety. He worried about having the same setbacks as his brothers. “He had to watch us make a lot of wrong decisions,” Jake says.

Each member of the family found a measure of relief when Mark died, glad his struggle was finally over. “To me, at the end, it was torture,” Marcus says. “It was torment.”

Despite the relief, Sam’s guilt remained sharp, for having lost himself in his sport and his obligations and his dreams as his brothers cared for their father. “I wish I would have went home and spent more time,” he says, sitting in Kortan’s office. He shuffles papers on his old coach’s desk, eyes pointed down. “I was mostly doing golf or school or something important. I had to prioritize, but I wish I would have spent a little more time.”

***

Sam awoke at 6 a.m. on April 6, 2023, nearly two years after his father’s death, and spent the morning pacing and fidgeting in the house he’d rented with his agent, Matt Bollero, and Kortan. At 1:36 p.m., he was due to tee off in the first round of the Masters alongside Max Homa, ranked sixth in the world, and defending champion Scottie Scheffler. “I was thinking, What could possibly go wrong? … for seven hours,” Sam says. He had qualified by winning the U.S. Amateur Championship the year prior, a grueling match play event. With the tee time nearing, Bennett, Bollero and Kortan piled into a car and Kortan, who’d serve as Sam’s caddie, quipped, “Let’s go play some golf, boys,” in hopes of untangling the bundle of nerves in the passenger seat.

Stacy, Marcus and a group of roughly 50 family members and friends made the trip to see Sam realize the dream he had painted nearly a decade before. (Jake, struggling with his mental health after the trauma of caring for his father, did not attend.) Nobody in that contingent expressed any surprise over what transpired that afternoon: They’d seen it time and again on that forlorn track in Madisonville and in pressure-packed college tournaments. Sam’s nerves evaporated after his first tee shot found the fairway, and Augusta quickly became his latest refuge: He sunk a 19-footer on No. 1 for a birdie and then chipped in from 23 yards for an eagle on the par-5 2nd hole. When he returned to the clubhouse a few hours later, he’d carded a bogey-free round of 68, good for sixth place. After matching that mark the next day, he moved into third, earning his way into a third-round group with tournament leaders Brooks Koepka and Jon Rahm, two of the game’s most imposing—and talented—figures. Even so, Sam found Marcus as he walked off the 18th green and told his brother, “I can win this thing.”

Spending his youth in Texas meant Sam was accustomed to playing in warm and sunny conditions, so he was ill-prepared when a squall and temperatures in the 50s hit Augusta over the weekend. The night before, Bollero had to whisk his client to a local Dick’s Sporting Goods to cobble together some rain gear. The cashier gawked at Sam, the overnight sensation, before turning to Bollero: “Is this for real?”

Despite the conditions and intimidating playing partners—who Sam says were supportive throughout the round—Sam shot a 76 in the third round. Playing with Collin Morikawa on Sunday, he shot a 74 to finish at two under, good enough for a tie for 16th. Sam finished the tournament as the lowest of the seven amateurs who competed, earning a spot alongside Rahm, who won the tournament, for a postround interview with Jim Nantz in Butler Cabin. He was only five shots off Charles Coe’s amateur record, which has stood since 1961, and two strokes shy of finishing in the top 12 and earning an automatic trip back to Augusta. “It was kind of disappointing,” he says. “I could have done it with good conditions.”

Sam Bennett finished in a tie for 16th at the 2023 Masters. / Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

Bennett's low amateur honors at the 2023 Masters led to more opportunities on the PGA Tour that season. / Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

For a moment, though, that disappointment yielded to emotions far more meaningful. After Sam sank his final putt on the 72nd hole, the patrons offered an ovation on par with ones they typically reserve for the green jacket winner. After embracing Kortan, Sam strode off the green, found Stacy and she squeezed him like a vice as they sobbed together. Mother and son couldn’t summon any words through the tears, so they let the silence speak for them. Flanking them, crying, Marcus says those few minutes were more meaningful than any in his life aside from the birth of his son. “In the weirdest way, it was closure,” Marcus says. 

The rain, mercifully, had stopped after a 30-hour deluge: Stacy remembers a rainbow overhead, of feeling Mark’s presence and a weight lifted. “I think Sam’s golf really helped them get through that tough time,” Kortan says. “That was the vehicle for them to come out on the other side.”

What, though, awaits on the other side? What’s the aftermath of unexpected glory? For Masters viewers, Sam’s story was a self-contained narrative. For Sam, what’s come next has been messier. It’s involved sharing a cluttered apartment in College Station. It’s entailed waking up at 8 a.m., grabbing coffee, answering emails, hitting the gym to add bulk to his lithe frame—he hopes to reach 160 pounds—hitting balls, working on his short game, then playing tennis in the evening for conditioning.

Thanks to his U.S. Amateur title and the sponsor exemptions he earned after the Masters, Sam played in 10 Tour events in 2023—including the Memorial, one of a handful of “elevated” events with $20 million purses—and the U.S. Open. He made the cut in half of those tournaments and stood five under through two rounds in the U.S. Open, tied once again with Scheffler. Though he scuffled over the weekend, finishing tied for 43rd at five over.

As he got his first taste of Tour life this summer, Sam spent nearly two months on the road, the days laden with idle time beset with anxiety. Because of his obligations to Texas A&M’s program, Kortan couldn’t travel with him, no longer serving both as caddie and a source of comfort. “I don’t really like being alone,” Sam says. Pittsinger still fields regular after-hours calls from Sam, who seeks connection and counsel from lonely hotel rooms. “Oftentimes, it’s like, Holy s---, was this worth it?” Pittsinger says of young golfers trying to make the Tour. “I’m so lonely. I’m maybe not making any money. I’m away from everybody. … There’s certainly an acclimation period.”

While Sam yearns to escape his Augusta narrative, his successes at the U.S. Amateur and Masters have proved profitable: He was among the first wave of college golfers able to ink NIL deals. Partnerships with the likes of apparel brand Johnnie-O, Suncast and Ping that he forged in college endured once he turned pro. Last year, he boasted the most lucrative NIL portfolio of any college golfer—around $100,000 annually according to On3. Add that to his winnings in Tour events—more than $300,000 in 2023—and Sam’s financial runway is longer than that of most college stars trying to qualify for the PGA Tour, who have to prove themselves on the Korn Ferry Tour or in qualifying school before making the leap all while shouldering travel costs.

Sam’s college success earned him an automatic bid into the final round of Q school this past December. A top-five finish would have earned him a PGA Tour card for the 2024 season. But golf is merciless and exacting: Bennett finished tied for 81st in the Q school final and spent ’24 on the Korn Ferry Tour, where events are rarely televised and sparsely attended. The top 30 finishers from this year’s Korn Ferry season, though, will earn spots on the PGA Tour in ’25. Bennett sits 30th heading into the Korn Ferry Tour Championship, the season's final event, needing one final strong showing to secure a coveted PGA Tour card.

Stacy has never asked Sam what he might do if he never makes it. Jake says they’ll love him no matter what. Marcus is certain, having seen his brother rise to the moment so often before, that his success at Augusta was no aberration.

***

Sam has moved away from College Station—and the Traditions Club where he spent so many hours with his father and Kortan—to the high-end Woodlands enclave north of Houston, about an hour and a half from family in Madisonville, but where other pros like Patrick Reed and Mark Hubbard live and play. He was ready leave the past behind. “I’m just ready for this to kind of blow over,” he says. “I know it’s a cool story, but let me just play golf.”

The people he loves, though, hold it tight. Framed photos from that Augusta weekend adorn Kortan’s office walls, as well as the clubhouse at the ramshackle Madisonville course where Sam first learned how to clip the ball off well-worn turf. Stacy keeps the speech Sam made at Mark’s funeral—typed on two sheets of paper—close at hand. “He has not been able to physically be there on every course these past several tournaments, but I feel his guidance and encouragement 24/7,” Sam said of his father. “I know that he is with me.” 

Ask Sam to recall a fond memory of his father and they can’t quite come into focus, still obfuscated by images of what he encountered when he made those solemn drives back to Madisonville. One story, though, remains clear.  

In June 2020, a year before his father died but when so much of him was already gone, Sam and Stacy were working in the backyard as Sam complained about his current relationship troubles. Mark had been napping on the couch and hadn’t uttered coherent thought in some time, but sensed his son’s angst through the open window. He approached Sam, punched him gently on the shoulder and told him, simply, “Don’t wait to do something.”

Darren Carroll/Sports Illustrated

Taken aback by the rare lucid moment, they ushered Mark to the home’s small kitchen table and asked him to write down what he’d said on a scrap of paper. Over 20 painstaking minutes, they coached him on how to scribble out the letters and the date. The note looked like the work of a kindergartner, but Sam treasured it and tucked it away in his truck. A week later, he had it tattooed on his left wrist. That symbol of love and grief drew attention, and he told that story again and again as his star grew at the U.S. Amateur and the Masters.

Even a slight variation in a golf swing can cost strokes and sanity. Given the intricacies, a golfer’s preshot routine is sacred, as it quiets the mind and prepares the body to execute precisely as it has so many times before. After getting the tattoo, Sam changed his preshot routine to add a quick glance at his left wrist before pulling the club back and firing. 

Today, he rarely gazes at his father’s words before he swings. Sometimes he’ll permit a peek before a big putt, but after years of finding himself at the mercy of those memories, he’s finally learning, swing by swing, how to write a story of his own.