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BROOKLINE, Mass. — For at least 16 hours, the time between his last putt on Friday night and his first tee shot on Saturday afternoon, Joel Dahmen sat atop the professional golf universe. A boy from Clarkston, Washington, a small town near the Idaho border, shared the lead midway through the US Open after shooting 67-68. He is a truly unlikely contender considering he hardly even tried to qualify. Dahmen, one of the most self-deprecating guys on the PGA Tour, told the Athletic on Sunday about the Memorial that “if I qualify, I’m just signing up to get my ass kicked.” He has said numerous times that he doesn’t think he can win a major. That just paints him as the classic underdog. But there is much more to this story.
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Dahmen dropped out of the University of Washington in 2006 after a year and began working at a local golf course. These were what the 34-year-old calls his “young and dumb” days. Any money he earned on the golf course would go straight into the beer. His future was a great unknown, but man, could he play? A year after leaving the UW, Dahmen was playing a practice round for the Washington State Amateur when he and fellow Washington Husky turned PGA Tour player Nick Taylor were paired in a practice round with Brad Yosaitis, whose father, Bob, was his son’s caddy that week. (Dahmen went on to win the tournament by six strokes.) Joel and Bob Yosaitis became fast friends, seeing each other at the hotel that week and keeping in touch when their paths parted. Two years later, when Dahmen decided to turn pro with no money and no idea where to start, Yosaitis agreed to sponsor him.
“There’s probably a great word that’s perfect to describe it,” he says of the chance encounter that changed his life, “but all I had was luck. Super, super lucky. I change my life.”
For Yosaitis, it was about helping someone he cared about. A former Hawaii-based jet fuel trader, he sold his business to Ross Aviation for a lucrative sum in 2008. “I’ve been lucky in life and have a good amount of money,” says Yosaitis. “I never looked [the deal with Dahmen] how to earn money The deal was, I’ll give you the money you need, and I hope you can do well enough to pay me. And if you don’t do well enough to pay me, I will have helped you.
That was it. No documents No strings attached. Yosaitis wired Dahmen $15,000 to boost his career. “A chimera at the time,” says Dahmen.
The relationship became almost family-like. Dahmen played 10 PGA Tour Canada events in 2010 and earned $11,742. But then he noticed a lump on his scrotum. Scans showed testicular cancer, and Dahmen, at 23, found himself facing the fight of a lifetime without health insurance. So he called Uncle Bob.
When Uncle Bob answered, Joel was crying. “He was in shock,” says Yosaitis. “I told the doctor, I want you to operate on Joel right away. The doctor said there was no insurance to cover it. So I said, ‘Here’s my credit card number. Operate it’”.
Dahmen recovered and returned to his tortuous journey on the PGA Tour. In six Canadian Tour events in 2011, he earned $11,225. He failed to break the $12,000 barrier again in 2012. Then something clicked in 2013 ($22,528), and the real breakthrough came the following year when he won the Tour Order of Merit for his Web.com card. Tour.
During those lean years, between golf expenses and chemotherapy treatment, Yosaitis estimates he spent more than $250,000 to help Dahmen. “Eventually,” Yosaitis says with a laugh, “I just said, ‘Look, Joel, take my credit card.’ I’m too busy to care every time you call asking me to write a check. I said load what you want.
Dahmen earned his PGA Tour card for the 2016-’17 season by a slim margin, finishing 25th on the Web.com Tour money list and beating the unlucky No. 26 Xander Schauffele by $975. Five years later, Dahmen is a PGA Tour winner and has earned more than $8.6 million. And Uncle Bob watches happily from afar without having made a penny of profit.
“A lot of people say, ‘Oh, if you’re good enough, you’ll always make it,’” says Dahmen. “I don’t know if, without Bob, I would have tried it.”