SAVANNAH, Ga. – The scene in player dining Wednesday afternoon at The Landings Club, site of this week’s final stage of Korn Ferry Tour Q-School, offered quite the microcosm of professional golf’s most recognized developmental circuit.
At one table sat three recent college graduates – two products of the inaugural PGA Tour University system, the other an All-American. Another included a player with triple-digit starts on each of the Korn Ferry and PGA tours. There were a few pros who appeared to be on dates with their TrackMans, one of the expensive launch monitors warranting a seat all its own.
Scattered about the room were fresh faces and journeymen, young guns and grinders, former prodigies and unknowns.
And, in the middle of it all, sat Matt Picanso.
“It’s intimidating when you see some of the pedigrees out here,” said the grizzled 38-year-old from Southern California, who is teeing it up for the first time at final stage this week, as he worked his way through a plate of pork, rice and beans. “But then again, there are more stories popping up like me, which is awesome.”
Picanso’s hard-scrabbled journey, though, is one of a kind. There are late bloomers – and then there’s Picanso, the baseball player turned rebel turned mini-tour stalwart, who didn’t even pick up the game until his senior year of high school, took five years off in his 20s and waited until age 30 to turn pro.
“I’ve just kind of battled my way to get here,” he said.
A gifted athlete at Stockdale High, Picanso graduated in 2000 and headed to Cal Poly to play baseball. That didn’t last long, however, as Picanso dropped out and enrolled at Bakersfield College, a community college that competes in the California Community College Athletic Association, where he had some buddies on the golf team. Convinced he could walk on the roster, he tried out – and made it – and in one year he went from freshman sixth man to conference player of the year and an individual regional qualifier. Picanso had prospects to transfer to Division-I Cal State-Bakersfield, too, but with poor grades, there was no shot of him qualifying academically.
Having reached an impasse, Picanso’s life soon turned upside down. When Picanso was 21, his godfather committed suicide, and stricken by grief, the promising player quit golf. He started to party more, and for nearly five years he didn’t pick up a club while working odd jobs around town: roofing, bar tending, pool boy, even a sixth-month stint working in an oil field.
“Fourteen days on, seven off,” Picanso described. “You’re out there, sitting in a trailer in the middle of nowhere by yourself monitoring gauges on a well.”
Talk about loneliness. Unsurprisingly, Picanso had gravitated back to golf by age 26. Wanting to get better, he attended the Golf Academy of America in San Diego, thinking it was a school for aspiring players. But the teaching experience did land him an assistant job at The Crossings at Carlsbad, which helped fund his entry fees on the local Golden State Tour. He competed initially as an amateur before turning pro in 2013 as a 30-year-old rookie.
Full-field scores from the Korn Ferry Tour Qualifying Tournament
“I had people always asking me, ‘Why don’t you play golf? You’re so good,’” Picanso recalled. “I had just never thought it was a possibility. … Finally, I was like, ‘Screw it,’ and I quit my job.”
He hasn’t looked back. For nearly a decade, Picanso has cut his teeth on the developmental circuits. He’s earned status on the Mackenzie Tour and PGA Tour Latinoamerica, but the majority of his work has come on the lower levels, where he’s become somewhat of a legend. In the past two years, he has 20-plus victories in multi-day events.
“At this point, I’ve stopped counting,” said Picanso’s instructor, Aaron Dexheimer, a former mini-tour pro himself who now serves as the director of instruction at Del Mar Country Club in Rancho Santa Fe.
Dexheimer, who coincidentally played golf at Cal Poly and overlapped with Picanso (though they didn’t know each other), first met Picanso during a GST match-play event shortly after Picanso turned pro. Dexheimer beat Picanso in the quarterfinals, but a friendship was quickly forged. Dexheimer helped get his buddy playing privileges at Carlton Oaks Country Club in Santee and later at Del Mar, where Dexheimer started in 2017, right around the time Picanso signed him on as his new swing coach.
Dexheimer also introduced Picanso to world-champion boxer Canelo Alvarez, a San Diego-area resident who takes golf lessons from Dexheimer.
“My job is to tell him the truth, even when it hurts,” Dexheimer said.
Though he has already clawed himself back from darkness as a young 20-something, Picanso certainly hasn’t been immune to facing adversity. The pressure of making a living putting a little, white ball in a small hole can take its toll at times, especially when it’s not PGA Tour checks being cashed, and there were times when Picanso wanted to give up again – none more than during last year’s pandemic shutdown.
Picanso missed in each of his first five trips to second stage of Q-School, the fifth failure coming in 2019, but he bounced back with a prolific run of five wins and a playoff loss in an eight-event span in early 2020. He had also made headway in securing some KFT sponsor exemptions and had some starts in Canada planned for that summer.
“Then COVID happened, and the world shut down,” said Picanso, who quickly lost motivation, which for the tireless worker hadn’t been an issue. His now-fiancée would often nudge him to get him out of the house to practice. When he wouldn’t budge, Dexheimer would text him until he did. Alvarez even offered his support.
“This is a guy who didn’t know when he was going to fight again, yet he was in the gym every single day,” Dexheimer said of Alvarez. “It’s one thing if I say it, but it sounds different coming from someone of his level.”
It all helped re-motivate Picanso. When some mini-tour events resumed in May, Picanso headed to Arizona and won his first tournament back in a playoff, shooting 18 under and beating several KFT members in the process. Picanso continued to build confidence this past summer, making his KFT debut alongside Alvarez at the BMW Charity Pro-Am and then winning the points race – and a $5,000 bonus – on the Dakotas Tour, which helped offset some of the costs for his sixth Q-School run. Armed with a new mindset to treat Q-School like a regular tournament, trying not to just advance but win, Picanso made it through first stage, and then two weeks ago shot 17 under to medal by three shots at his second stage site, Bear Creek Golf Club in Murrieta, California.
“I was so focused the whole week, I wasn’t even paying attention to what the cut was or what anybody else was doing, I was just trying to win,” Picanso said. “All my energy was staying in the present, hitting the shots and trying to get to 18 with a putt to win.”
Dexheimer barely checked live scoring that day; he knew his pal was going to win. But when Picanso called him afterwards, fresh off earning his first-ever ticket to final stage, it still was emotional.
“I know how much time and effort he’s put in to get to this point, and sometimes the self-doubt of it – clearly he’s good enough to make it happen, but is it going to happen?” Dexheimer said. “After we hung up, I put my phone down and sat there for a couple of minutes, just processing it. … You go to mini-tour events and you win, or you get sponsor exemptions, and it doesn’t feel quite like this.
“To sit here at final stage, nobody gave him anything. He had to hit every single golf shot to get to this point, so it’s like, now you should feel super proud of yourself.”
Picanso’s job, admittedly, isn’t finished. A poor week in Savannah and he’ll receive only conditional status on the KFT. Top 40 and ties will exempt him into the first eight events, the top 10 and ties into the first 12. A win? That will make him fully exempt – and that’s the goal.
Picanso used to struggle with his inner-belief. He knew he was good enough to win on the mini-tours, but a level or two up? In recent years, though, he’s matured – the grays in his hair and beard are further proof. He’s learned that his aggressive, power game can hang with these former All-Americans and tour vets, and that his passion for getting better burns stronger than ever.
“And as long as that part is still there,” Picanso says, “I feel like there’s nothing I can’t do.”
