From beating up on Collin Morikawa as a teen to winning the Valspar Championship, Sam Burns always seemed destined for the PGA Tour

16 March، 2022

14 1 minute read

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PALM HARBOR, Fla. – Sam Burns doesn’t have to go far to see his trophy from winning the Valspar Championship. It resides in his living room at home.

“Always puts a smile on my face just to look back on this week last year,” he said.

That’s when he raced into the lead with a second-round 63, and delivered in the clutch on Sunday, including knocking a 7-iron close at 16 for one last birdie en route to claiming his maiden victory on the PGA Tour.

“I think you go from hoping that you can win or thinking that you can win to believing it when it actually happens,” said Burns, who won the Valspar in his 76^th Tour start but grabbed his second title just 11 starts later at the Sanderson Farms Championship. “For a while there I thought I kind of needed to play perfect, but really just needed to kind of play steady and hit the correct shots and I was able to do that here last year and it worked out. So I think that was a big learning lesson for me.”

Valspar: Thursday tee times | PGA Tour Live on ESPN+

The birdie at 16 held greater significance besides being the knockout punch of the final round. Burns previously had bad memories of the first hole in the three-hole closing stretch known as the Copperhead Course’s Snake Pit. Burns made triple there in 2018 when he was battling for special temporary membership and finished T-12.

“That was tough, but I think it was also a good thing to have a year on the Korn Ferry and just kind of get my feet under me out there,” he said. “And then to be able to come back and birdie that hole in the final round just gave me a, you know, a four-shot lead going into 18 was, it was a good feeling of just kind of one of those things where you know you have had past memories that weren’t great on that hole and then to kind of rewrite the story there last year was really cool.”