This YouTube Golfer Just Earned a PGA Tour Start
The winner of the Q at Myrtle Beach was revealed today, with the second of two episodes dropping on the Bryan Bros channel. The event, of course, pitted eight of the most talented YouTube Golfers against one another for a spot at the PGA Tour’s Myrtle Beach Classic, which kicks off next week.
Grant Horvat, Luke Kwon, Micah Morris and Ryan Ruffels won their way through to the second episode after respectively beating Peter Finch, Sam Heung Min, George Bryan IV and Chance Taylor, with all but the latter of those winners having never before teed it up at a PGA Tour event. A quick note: spoilers are incoming.
And the winner is…
It looked for all money like Grant Horvat’s day, but the professionalism of Ryan Ruffels shone through late and ultimately saw the Aussie clinch the spot at Myrtle Beach. Horvat led throughout the day, incredibly birdieing the first four holes and at one point holding a four-shot lead. But a bogey – double-bogey finish contrasted against Ruffels’ pars on 17 and 18, and saw a one-shot lead with two to play flip into a two-shot loss for the man with YouTube’s biggest smile.
As for Luke Kwon and Micah Morris? Kwon was steady all day, save for a grim three-putt from just a few feet midway through the round, and though a quadruple bogey on the hazard-surrounded Par 3 17th blew out his score, he was in the game until very late on. Morris, meanwhile, spent much of the day at the bottom of the leaderboard, but he too was still in the hunt until light was fading and was only truly out of it after an unlucky double-bogey at 16.
And so Ruffels returns to the PGA Tour, having recently made a name for himself as part of The Lads channel alongside Jason Day. The 28-year-old has played 20 tournaments at the top level, but the bulk of those were close to ten years ago. His last PGA Tour start was during the 2022-23 season, but prior to that he hadn’t made an appearance on the tour since 2018-19.
He’ll now be head to the Dunes Golf and Beach Club for next week’s event, which tees off on Thursday, May 7, following in the footsteps of previous winners of The Q, Matt Atkins and Nathan Franks. For reference, Atkins performed well to finish in a tie for 46th at -6, while Franks snuck a few spots even higher to finish in T37th at -5 the following year.
Expectations would have been a little lower had any of the other three finalists of The Q saluted, but having played 20 top-level events and made the cut in ten of them, Ruffels will be hopeful that he can follow in the footsteps of Atkins and Franks before him and make it through to the weekend.
The Q at Myrtle Beach – A Sign of Things to Come?
This two-episode qualification series, aside from being a revolutionary way to qualify for a PGA Tour event, also made for some extremely high-quality YouTube Golf. As George Bryan said mid-round, ‘The dream of combining competitive and YouTube golf is it gives the fun of YouTube Golf and the pressure and the weirdness of competitive golf all blended into one’.
This might as well be the tagline for Your Golf Tour, which will be kicking off in the coming months. Based on what we know, the tour will involve a similar combination of traditional, competitive golf, and the more laidback YouTube format which we’ve come to know and love, and if these two videos are anything to go by it should make for some quality content.
Hole-in-One Mystery Remains Unsolved
One other point of interest heading into this Q at Myrtle Beach event surrounded whether it would solve the mystery of Grant Horvat’s hole-in-one. Well, it didn’t. Given Grant’s spoken on numerous times about having had a hole-in-one on camera that he can’t yet talk about, it would have made sense for it to have come in a pre-filmed video like this for which results need to remain on the downlow. Alas, he did not, and the mystery remains exactly that.
