Bart Bryant: Hard-Luck Golfer With One Glory Year
Bart Bryant was a hard-luck golfer for most of his pro tour career, fighting through numerous injuries, struggling for paychecks on mini-tours, and making half a dozen trips to Q-School. But for one, glorious, 18-month period in the early 2000s, he was rewarded for his perseverance with multiple big wins.
Full name: Barton Holan Bryant
Date of birth: November 18, 1962
Place of birth: Gatesville, Texas
Date and place of birth: May 31, 2022, in Polk City, Florida
His Biggest Wins
Bart Bryant had three wins on the PGA Tour:- 2004 Texas Open
- 2005 Memorial Tournament
- 2005 Tour Championship
- 2013 Dick's Sporting Goods Open
- 2018 Dick's Sporting Goods Open
In the Majors
The first major Bart Bryant played was the 1987 U.S. Open, and the last was the 2008 PGA Championship. But over that long span, Bryant played in a total of only 14 majors, all but two of them in the 2005-2008 period. He had no Top 10 finishes. His best showing was a tie for 23rd in the 2005 Open Championship.
More About Bart Bryant
Bart Bryant was a golfer who persevered through more than a decade of injuries, lean years, and repeated visits to Q-School to finally experience a short period of great golf on the PGA Tour.Born in Texas, his family moved to New Mexico when he was young. Bart and his older brother Brad Bryant, also a future PGA Tour winner, were stars in junior and high school golf there. Brad played college golf at the University of New Mexico, Bart went to New Mexico State.
At New Mexico State in the early to mid-1980s, Bart Bryant's teammates included Tom Byrum, also a future PGA Tour winner. Bryant won several college tournaments and was named the conference player of the year in 1985. He was later inducted into the New Mexico State Athletics Hall of Fame.
Bryant turned pro in 1986, and he first made it through the PGA Tour's qualifying tournament (Q-School) in 1990. His rookie year on tour was 1991, and he finished 124th on the money list.
But in 1992 Bryant suffered a shoulder injury. It was the first of many injuries and aches and pains that mostly derailed Byrant's pursuit of a tour career over the following decade.
Bryant had rotator cuff surgery in 1992, and in following years he played on mini-tours when he was healthy enough and had no status on the PGA Tour. He wound up going through Q-School half a dozen times (1990, 1994, 1995, 1999, 2000, 2002), sometimes making it through but then failing to earn enough money on tour (often due to injuries) that he lost that status.
He continued having shoulder injuries and also suffered elbow problems. More surgeries followed, including elbow surgery in 2000. There were times, Bryant later said, when he considered quitting.
But he didn't quit. And when Bryant posted a ninth-place finish in the 2002 Kemper Open, it was his first Top 10 finish on the PGA Tour since 1992. He still didn't have tour status, though, and went back to Q-School for the sixth time at the end of 2002.
His status regained, Bryant was a PGA Tour member again for the 2003 season. But injuries limited him to just six starts. He received a Major Medical Extension from the tour, though, allowing him to play in 2004.
By the time Bryant showed up for the 2004 Texas Open, he was 41 years old, had finished inside the Top 125 on the money list just once in his injury-riddled career, and was on the 18th week of that 23-week medical extension.
Then something remarkable happened: He won. The 2004 Texas Open was Bryant's first PGA Tour win. He earned it with a score of 60 in the third round, and a final-round 67. His older brother Brad had won the 1995 Walt Disney World/Oldsmobile Classic. So when Bart won, the Bryants became the 12th set of brothers to record victories on the PGA Tour. Bart finished the 2004 season 80th on the money list, easily the best of his career to that point.
If it felt like a reward for so many years in the wilderness, Bart wasn't satisfied. He had one glory year to come, the 2005 season in which he posted two big wins by beating two of the tour's biggest stars.
Bryant's first win in 2005 was at Jack Nicklaus' tournament, The Memorial. Bryant birdied the next-to-last hole to take a lead over season-place Fred Couples. He drove into a hazard on the last hole, but recovered to make a 15-foot birdie putt for the win. Tiger Woods finished third.
In the season-ending Tour Championship in 2005, Woods finished second — six strokes behind Bryant, the wire-to-wire winner. Bryant started that Tour Championship with a first-round 62 never let up. In all the tournaments in which Woods finished second on the PGA Tour, nobody else ever beat him by six strokes.
Bryant had two other Top 10 finishes that year, finished ninth on the money list, and cracked the Top 25 in the world rankings.
It wasn't a level he could sustain. In 2006, Bryant had a second-place finish, but only one other Top 10, and fell to 70th on the money list. Unfortunately, the old injury problems crept back in after that, and after that 2005 season Bryant had only seven more Top 10 finishes in PGA Tour events. But he did finish second in the 2006 Canadian Open (to Jim Furyk), and in the 2008 Arnold Palmer Invitational (to Woods).
Bryant's last appearance in a PGA Tour tournament was in 2020, seven years after he turned 50 and joined the Champions Tour. For his PGA Tour career, Bryant finished with 317 starts, three wins, two seconds, one third-place finish, eight Top 5s and 16 Top 10 finishes.
On the Champions Tour Bryant was a two-time winner, including in his very first senior-circuit start in 2013. That was in the Dick's Sporting Goods Open, and that win generated a lot of fanfare because it was the 1,000th tournament played in Champions Tour history.
Bryant got into playoffs, but lost, at both the 2015 Ace Group Classic and the 2016 Toshiba Classic, but won the Dick's Sporting Goods Open again in 2018. For his senior tour career, Bryant played 142 tournaments with two wins, five seconds, 13 Top 5s, and 29 Top 10 finishes. (The Bryants are also on the list of brothers who both won on the Champions Tour.)
In May of 2022, Bryant and his second wife (his first wife died of brain cancer in 2017) were stuck in a line of cars waiting on a construction crew up ahead when their vehicle was rear-ended by a truck at high speed. His wife survived, but Bart Bryant was killed at age 59.
Sources:
Associated Press. "Pro golfer Bart Bryant killed in vehicle accident in Florida," June 2, 2022, https://apnews.com/article/sports-florida-golf-accidents-56253ce537e5064325f8947c50c8c7cc.
NBCSports.com. "Bart Bryant, three-time PGA Tour winner, killed in car accident at age 59," Golf Channel Digital, June 1, 2022, https://www.nbcsports.com/golf/news/bart-bryant-three-time-pga-tour-winner-killed-car-accident-age-59.
Martin, Sean. "Bart Bryant, who won Memorial and TOUR Championship after turning 40, killed in car accident," PGATour.com, June 1, 2022, https://www.pgatour.com/article/news/latest/2022/06/01/bart-bryant-passes-away-age-59-memorial-winner-pga-tour-championship-winner.
New Mexico State Athletics Hall of Fame. Members, Bart Bryant, https://nmstatesports.com/honors/us-bank-nm-state-athletics-hall-of-fame/bart-bryant/54.
PGA Tour. Official 2007 Guide, Player Biographies, Bart Bryant.
PGATour.com. Players, Bart Bryant, https://www.pgatour.com/player/01142/bart-bryant.
Smits, Gary. "Who was Bart Bryant? He beat Tiger Woods twice on a Sunday and was a dogged PGA Tour player," Florida Times-Union, June 2, 2022, https://www.jacksonville.com/story/sports/golf/2022/06/02/bart-bryant-beat-tiger-woods-twice-carved-out-respectable-pga-tour-career/7482773001/.