Sahith Theegala is putting on his living room carpet.
He’d like to hit golf balls somewhere, but then he might run into a virus carrier and bring germs back to his Chino Hills home, where his grandmother lives.
He knows the world in which we’re trying to live. He is not a pandemic denier. That does not prevent him from questioning why he and Pepperdine, contenders for NCAA individual and team men’s golf championships, got thrown off the schedule without a parachute, why their quest was canceled instead of postponed.
It also complicates Theegala’s career plans, but then we all had a plan until we got hit.
“I thought it was a rash decision to cancel the tournament,” Theegala said Monday. “It doesn’t begin until the middle of May. They could have confined it to essential personnel and taken all the precautions.”
“It’s not like anybody shows up at our tournaments anyway,” said Michael Beard, Pepperdine’s coach.
As a redshirt senior, Theegala was already turning pro. But where does he go? He aimed for some special exemptions, or Monday qualifiers, to PGA Tour events that suddenly won’t be played.
He also had an eye on Canadian Tour qualifying. It isn’t just him, of course. Ricky Castillo, of Florida via Yorba Linda, is the second-ranked amateur in the world, just ahead of Theegala. His clubs are under quarantine, too.
So Theegala has months, perhaps, to live on his memories. Fortunately for him, they’re pretty good.
Theegala played 24 rounds in this academic year and was under par 17 times, for a 69.01 average. He had two wins in eight tournaments and six top-10 finishes. Pepperdine had three wins and ended the season ranked No. 1, although the Waves don’t fly on private jets or play on their own luxurious, on-campus course as some rivals do. They do use Sherwood Country Club, which isn’t a bad lure, and occasionally they venture into Los Angeles Country Club.
“We’ve just been able to develop team chemistry,” Theegala said, “even though everybody says that. With us, our No. 10 players can beat our No. 1 on any given day. When we go to a tournament, we all trust each other.”
Mostly they lean on Theegala, who wore Kobe Bryant’s No. 8 jersey over his shirt when he won the Southwestern Invitational at North Ranch, two days after his idol and eight others died in a helicopter crash near Calabasas.
When he was 6, 8 and 10 years old, Theegala won Junior World championships. In 2014 he shot 18-under to win the L.A. city title. This year he won Australia’s Master of the Amateurs title, which led to his high world ranking.
But the real kick was at Riviera in 2017, when he won the Collegiate Challenge on Monday and thus made the Genesis Open. He shot 2-under 69 the first day, made the cut, and played with Phil Mickelson on the weekend.
“That was just insane,” Theegala said. “On Sunday he chipped in three times on the front nine. J.B. Holmes was giving him some grief about it, and Phil said, ‘You know, most people try to chip to a three- or four-foot circle around the hole, but I try to get it inside a two-foot circle.’ Like you can really do that, of course. It was so funny.”
It resonated because Theegala has the same greenside radar. “We all talk about what was the best and-down he ever had,” Beard said. “It’s tough to narrow them down.”
“When I was a kid, that was always the best part of the game,” Theegala said. “Inside my head, I tried to think of chipping and putting games around the green. I didn’t really get upset about bad shots that often because I knew if I could just get it around the green I had a chance.
“I’d challenge guys to games around the green. I’d much rather do that than just hit balls. It wasn’t until I got to college that I really practiced that much, because I was only doing it a couple of times a week.”
Still, Beard knew that Theegala couldn’t sustain a career with a loose long game. Last year Theegala missed Pepperdine’s season with wrist surgery. Limber at 6-foot-3, Theegala never fretted about length, but now he’s familiarizing himself with fairways.
“Now, when he’s off a little bit, he doesn’t shoot high scores anymore,” Beard said.
“The wrist was a blessing for me,” Theegala said. “I learned how to rotate more and take the pressure off the rest of my body, and I got some consistency with it.”
El Prado, the 36-hole public facility where he calls home, is closed until April. Who fills up the first bucket that morning? You get one guess.
