Golfer Michael Letzig – The rest of the story

Profile | May 10, 2010

To the armchair golfer, playing 18 on a favorite golf course is a lot of fun; a chance to bond with the buddies; a chance to beat the system; a chance to swill a few beverages.

To professional golfer Michael Letzig, a Missouri native and property owner in Porto Cima, it’s strictly business.

“It’s my passion and my job, so I take it very seriously,” he said recently in the Porto Cima Clubhouse a few days before a tournament in Tampa, FL. “Everyone thinks it must be so cool to travel to all those destinations and to all those neat places, but really it’s just another warm spot to go work.”

Golf is a game of numbers, and so is business.

“It sounds funny to say, but golf is very mentally and physically demanding, especially when you’re on the road three or four weeks at a time,” he said. “We don’t get paid on speculation like in other sports. We have to go earn it.”

A matter-of-fact demeanor reflects his personality, and his approach to a golf game that has kept him in the money for about seven years. At 6-2, the lanky 30-year-old Richmond, MO, native is relaxed as he chats about his golfing start, his young career and the push from his family that led him to his first tee box.

Letzig credits his Grandmother Betty (Letzig) for his talent and his early interest in golf. Michael’s mother, who was a nurse at the time, would drop Michael off at his grandparents for them to babysit, and he and his grandmother would go golfing.

“I have so many wonderful memories of her. PGA tour scoreboards flash bullet points about your life when you play through a hole. It always says ‘Grandmother got him started playing golf.’ I see that quite a bit and it’s hard because she recently passed away. I want to make her proud,” Letzig said.

Originally, Letzig said he favored baseball more than golf. “In high school during my freshman year, I remember my dad sitting me down and having a talk about baseball and golf because they were played at the same time,” Letzig recalled. “We talked about college baseball and pro golf, and how I had to make a choice. So I chose golf, obviously, and then got really serious about it and started playing in a lot of tournaments.” In his first high school match as a freshman, he shot a 3-under-par 33 and set a school record.

“It was my very first event,” he laughed. Success followed him into college, though it wasn’t an easy road getting into the top golf school.

He tells this story:
Letzig loved coming to the Lake as a child and young adult so much he never played junior golf during the summer despite his dominance during high school. When it came time to go to college, nobody had heard of him. He never played any national tournaments because he spent so much time with his family at the Lake. When he sent letters to the top 10 golf schools in the country and said he wanted to play for them, “Coaches had never even heard of me,” he explained. They encouraged him to walk on, but there was no scholarship.

He did, however, play a national tournament in Colorado.

That’s where fate stepped in.

During one round, he was paired with fellow competitor Wil Collins. Collins, who was going to play at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, told the New Mexico coach that Letzig was better than the new recruits. The school paid for his books the first year, which he red-shirted.

“The second year, I was All-American,” Letzig recalled. “The coach from Georgia Tech, the No. 1-ranked golf school at the time, asked the New Mexico coach where he got me, because he said that I was the best player to come out of high school that year.” The Georgia coach hadn’t realized they turned down Letzig’s request to play there.

After turning pro, he won his first tournament as a pro and pocketed $10,000.

“I thought this was going to be easy,” he laughed. “However, I didn’t win again for three years. It was such a relief to finally win again because I had played so well in the weeks leading up to that tournament.

It was so weird — but it was a good lesson. You can’t ever pat yourself on the back and think this game is easy.”

No doubt, the loving hand of Grandma Betty and her undying perseverance laid the groundwork for Letzig’s success today. The scoreboard connecting Letzig to his grandma runs far deeper than his fans will ever know.

And like a business, Letzig strives to keep manufacturing wins and Top-10 finishes.

Tags: Golf, Lake of the Ozark's, Michael Letzig, PGA, Porto Cima