Mississippi’s crop of elite young golfers has become so accomplished in recent years it takes something especially special to raise this longtime observer’s eyebrows.
And then someone comes along and does what 18-year-old Jake Moffitt of Ripley did recently in the State Amateur Championship played at Grand Bear Golf Club in Saucier. Hold on to your visors, folks: Playing on the difficult Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course measuring over 7,100 yards, Moffitt, a Southern Miss signee, shot 21-under par for 72 holes and won by a whopping 10 shots over runner-up Jackson Cook of West Point. Cook, a two-time Mississippi junior champion, has signed to play at Mississippi State.
Rick ClevelandBoth Moffitt’s 72-hole score and his victory margin set State Am records. Moffitt’s final round of nine-under-par 63 – 10 pars, 7 birdies and an eagle – was just one off the Grand Bear course record of 62, shot by 10-time PGA TOUR champion Steve Elkington in a Champions Tour tournament in 2022.
When the PGA TOUR held its first round of tour qualifying at Grand Bear two years ago, the winning 72-hole score was 280 – 13 shots worse than what young Moffitt just shot.
Says accomplished, 42-year-old Belden amateur Joe Deraney, who shot 3-under at Grand Bear and finished in a tie for eighth place, “Twenty-one under par on that golf course is an amazing score. He lapped the field. And I can’t tell you how good that final round 63 was. To shoot that score under fire when he held the lead and all the pressure was on him is really, really something.”
Yes, it is, and it qualifies Moffitt to play in the U.S. Amateur Championship at the famed Olympic Club’s Lake Course in San Francisco. That’s a far cry from his hometown course, a nine hole track called Pine Hill Country Club where Moffitt says he plays “95 percent of my golf.” And it’s not bad for a country kid, with a decided Hill Country accent, who took up the game of golf five years ago at age 13 when he was looking for something he could do for fun during the Covid pandemic.
Jake Moffitt tees off.Before that, Moffitt played all the team sports, especially baseball where his usual position was third baseman. Once he began to play golf, he was hooked. And he got better fast, breaking 80 within a few months of beginning to practice and play regularly.
“What I love most about golf is that it’s an individual sport,” he said. “It’s all on you and you are depending on you, yourself, the whole time. It’s a game where you are always trying to reach perfection but you never can. Every shot, every practice shot, the goal is to get better. I like that.”
Moffitt led Ripley to three Class 4A state championships and won the individual championship himself all three times. Earlier this year, he won the Oxford Country Club Invitational, making birdies on the last three holes to come from behind and beat Deraney.
In April, he qualified for a PGA Korn Ferry Tour event, the Club Car Championship in Savannah, Ga. So of course, he shot 66 and made the field and missed a week of school.
He shot 78 and 76 and missed the cut but says, “It was about as much fun as I have ever had on a golf course.”
Southern Miss golf coach Eddie Brescher, who has finished as runner-up in the State Am three times himself, began recruiting Moffitt three years ago, and Moffitt committed over a year ago.
“We could see his potential three years ago, and he’s gotten a lot better since then,” Brescher said. “We are trying to do in golf what Southern Miss has done in baseball and that’s compete on a national basis. We’re headed in the right direction and signing Jake is a big step. His game has no weaknesses and he’s only going to get better. He’s a humble country boy who doesn’t mind hard work and can really, really play this game.”
The U.S. Amateur will be played August 11-17 at Olympic, which has hosted so much golf history, including the 1966 U.S. Open when Arnold Palmer lost a seven-shot lead and then the a playoff to Billy Casper. Moffitt says he knows little about Olympic but does know the rough will be high and the greens will be lightning fast, as is the case for all USGA events.
Says the 18-year-old from rural northeast Mississippi, “I can’t wait.”
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