Michigan Golf Journal January 2018

really didn’t recover. But now I feel like it’s coming around a little bit, but a disappointing finish (to the ’17 season) for sure.” One upward trending sign early in the new 2018 season was Stuard’s T4 finish in the Sanderson Farms Championship in late October and another top 10 in November in Mexico with a final round 65. He is scheduled to play the Sony Open in Hawaii. “It was a nice start to the (new) season for sure,” Stuard said in December. “I’m very happy with how things went. It’s nice to have those good feelings going into January. “It might sound funny, but I was just trying to get back to basics. Just make sure I hit a lot of fairways and a lot of greens. I hit a higher percentage of greens this fall, somewhere around 70 percent and last season I think I was in the low 60s. It makes it easier on yourself to not work too hard to save that par. I’m back to playing solid golf.” LOOKING BACK: Stuard didn’t begin the game with a lot of lofty goals or assumptions – he just got the “itch” as he called it, as a teenager. He stuck with it, was patient and eventually earned some very nice rewards. Not many golfers from Michigan can say they earned PGA Tour status consistently – for six consecutive seasons now to be precise – quite an accomplishment for a kid that didn’t start playing golf until 9th grade and attended tiny Napoleon High where he eventually won the Division 3 state title in 2000. “It’s funny; it’s hard for me to put into words. I don’t really know how it happened,” Stuard said about his rise from a rural school to the biggest stage in golf. “It just seemed like every year I got a little better at the game, I improved something. At the end of high school I just wanted a scholarship to go to college, and I did that (at Oakland University, where he earned Horizon League Player of the Year and set most of the school records). “And when I got a little bit better my first few years of college I was thinking about trying to play the mini tours and everything. So I did that. And I kept getting a little better.” Jim Beltz is a retired dentist who also served as PGA Tour