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 76th 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.”
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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.”
The 25-year-old Burns, the 2014 AJGA Rolex Player of the Year, always seemed destined to be a PGA Tour winner. Collin Morikawa has known him since he was 12 or 13 and was beating up on him at the junior level.
“He’s always been a stud,” he said. “He’s always been solid, always a game that I knew was going to be out here on Tour, went on Tour, and will be here for a long time.”
Justin Thomas raved about Burns’s putting stroke when they played a nine-hole practice round at TPC Sawgrass last year.
“He looks so natural and so comfortable and athletic over the ball, but also relaxed,” Thomas said. “His putter stays low to the ground. It’s very on plane. It rolls nice. And I like his ball flight. He likes to fade the ball like I do, and it’s just, I was very impressed when I played with him and I think he came out with no fear kind of thing and expected a lot of himself and probably felt like he could prove some people wrong and he’s clearly done that.”
The next step for Burns is to contend for majors and to represent his country in international competition. He was surprisingly left off the Walker Cup team in 2017 despite being the Jack Nicklaus Award winner as the nation’s top collegiate player. Last year, Burns was in the running for a captain’s pick for the U.S. Ryder Cup team, but Steve Stricker called him and broke the news that he was going with Scottie Scheffler instead.
“That was really tough,” Burns said. “Obviously desired to be on the team. It’s something that I’ve always dreamed of as a kid and a goal that I had in place for the year, and so not making it was definitely difficult.”
This week, Burns, who enters the week No. 17 in the Official World Golf Ranking, can continue to stake his claim to being on the U.S. Presidents Cup squad, which will try to retain the Cup at home at Quail Hollow in Charlotte later this year. Another good showing here at Innisbrook Resort only can enhance his chances of getting a congratulatory phone call from U.S. Captain Davis Love III.
“Presidents Cup is definitely a big goal of mine and something that I really hope that I’m on the team at the end of the year,” he said.
