Brandon Stone hits the 16th hole Saturday at Bell Tower.
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Brandon Stone calls it weird, and the description seems apt. On Friday at Belltower during the second round of the British Masters, he felt like every hole offered birdie views, which is, by any measure, a happy position to be in.
But yeah, a little weird.
“It was so weird,” he said. “It felt like every hole I was putting within 15 (feet) for birdie. And you walk into the next tee box and then you wake up and you’re back on the green from 8 feet putting up for birdie.
“It was just real surreal.”
The stone was speaking in DP World Tour’s “Green Room”, a simple platform where a professional sits on a yellow chair and answers the questions from a computer-sounding voice, and the back and forth, of course, began with the strange and surreal feeling that comes with a nine-bird noise. The stone birdie hole 1. And 2. And 3 and 5. He made 11. But then he birdied 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 en route to a 64, and, after a third round of 74, he would start Sunday’s final round in fifth place, nine shots behind leader Niklas Norgaard.
The voice then asked another question, and here the strangeness might make even more sense.
This year, after five top 25s, Stone has been solid. He is 87th in the season standings. All of this followed a season on the Challenge Tour, the circuit below the DP World Tour, where he finished 19th and earned a card that the 31-year-old South African lost after 2022. You’ll know the run has been tried – two years ago, Stone also missed the cut in seven of his last nine events – and the Green Room moderator was also curious.
“You have had a difficult few years. How hard was it to go back to the challenge tournament?”
For the next minute and 47 seconds, Stone responded. Below is the video. Below are the words. It’s emotional. It’s honest. At one point, Stone found that he was so lost and so unsure that he skipped an event.
It’s a reminder that golf is not linear.
“Um, it was terrible, if I’m being honest,” Stone began.
“I remember so well in 2022 that I looked at myself in the mirror and didn’t recognize the person. He didn’t recognize the golfer. I didn’t have confidence, I didn’t have an identity for my game and I didn’t even go to the last event of the season to try and keep my card. I just didn’t feel like I could shoot below par. I didn’t even go to Q-School. I remember very clearly knowing that if I went to Q-School, there was no way I was going to get my card back. And it’s probably the lowest I’ve been in my golf career where you feel like you can’t shoot a number. I felt like I lost my way. I felt like I missed out on the privilege of playing on the DP World Tour because I did. I wasn’t good enough. And I had to earn, not only get my card back, but I had to earn back my respect, my self-respect more than anything, because I lost it along the way.
“And it’s very difficult to determine when that happened. But having said that, you move on, a really stellar season for me on the challenge tour. I arrived in Mallorca (the final event of the Challenge Tour season) with an opportunity to reclaim my card and I remember very clearly returning the card.
“When I got back to my hotel room, I don’t know why, I just looked up and I was sitting on the edge of my bed and there was a mirror and it was the first time in over a year that I recognized myself. I recognized the player I was. i was happy I just vindicated myself in that decision to come back to the Challenge Tour and earn my right to play here again.”
