Mark Hubbard isn’t who you think he is

It was probably a stupid idea to begin with. Lazy. Easy.

You had pegged Mark Hubbard as a backcountry skier who accidentally wound up on the PGA TOUR. A bearded, Colorado-bred countercultural outlier. The kind of guy you could see winning “Survivor” for his prowess with plant medicine and edible bugs.

You saw him as such, in part, because at the PGA Championship, when you asked him if he’d ever been in jail, he replied, “Not in the U.S.” (A misunderstanding on a class trip to Cancun.) And because he played a TOUR-record 39 times last season despite playing through pinkeye and multiple toenail removals. (A gonzo-golf benchmark that likely will never be matched.)

And because his high school coach, Beth Folsom, tells a story about Hubbard finding a pink ball in a lake and playing the rest of the round under par with it. And because Hubbard asked his wife Meghan to marry him on a video board at Pebble Beach. And because at the Rocket Mortgage Classic, he made an ace off a tee shot he hated, calling the whole thing embarrassing.

Oh, and the tiny putter and “Snail” putting grip – also funny.

But wait, hang on, here comes the first crack in your Mark Hubbard is a Wildman story.

“I have a long torso and short arms,” Hubbard told PGATOUR.COM in a lengthy, recent phone interview. “I have to hunch over more than most players do. That putter was 33 inches, only a few under standard, and I don’t even use it anymore.”

OK, fine. So, we have a slight fissure in the snow. But look closer and one fissure becomes two, then three, and when it all breaks loose and the full avalanche comes tumbling down and wrecks your ridiculous supposition, you nod and think, Well, of course.

Mark Hubbard isn’t who you thought he was. No one ever is.

Mark Hubbard: Yoga rebel

Hubbard was doing an ad for True Linkswear, one of his sponsors, when he and his friend Joel Dahmen took off their shirts. This was at TPC Scottsdale, at the end of last year.

“Everyone was like, ‘Whoa, Mark! You’re ripped under there!’” said Derek Bohlen, Hubbard’s manager. “He was like, ‘I know, I know. I don’t tell many people.’ He’s gotten into a yoga and stretching routine as he’s gotten older.”

And eating well. Well into his career, Hubbard was rooming on the road with TOUR pro Jonathan Randolph, now a financial advisor, when Randolph came home one day to a surprise.

“I got back to the house and there were brussels sprouts in the oven,” Randolph said. “The way he cooked them, they were pretty good, too. In our 20s, he didn’t care about that stuff, but he got dedicated. I think Meghan might have had something to do with that.”

Hubbard and his wife have two girls. He is 35, a Taylor Swift fan (bracelets and all), and relentlessly dedicated to his craft (those 39 starts last season weren’t just for laughs).

Mindful of his day job, Hubbard has toned it down so much on the ski slopes that he is animated not by untracked powder but by the fact that Sadie, his and Meghan’s youngest, will be 2 and old enough to get on the boards next winter.

If these things don’t square with your off-piste oddball image of him, well, so be it. At No. 64 in the FedExCup going into this week’s FedEx St. Jude Championship, and still winless on TOUR despite rarely missing a cut, Hubbard is as under-the-radar as ever and fine with it.

Working in the shadows just means getting more done.

“I don’t know anybody like Mark,” said instructor Corey Lundberg, who teaches out of Trinity Forest in Dallas and has worked with Houston-based Hubbard for two seasons. “He’s not just one thing. He’s a lot of fun to be around, but his dedication, drive and fire are fierce.”

If anything, said Nathan Hubbard, a music industry executive and Mark’s older brother, Hubbard could benefit from being more of a slacker, not less of one.

“I think in some ways he can care too much about golf at times,” Nathan, the CEO and co-founder of Firebird, which manages musical artists, said via email. “His family is always first, no question. But he is extraordinarily hard on himself, and I think more than any swing thought or pressure moment on the course, that's what he grapples with.”

(Mark Hubbard responds: “I can get down in the dumps mentally. We’ve been doing a thing where I try to have one positive thought before every shot I hit.”)

Talent? Hubbard has plenty. One of six siblings raised in Denver, he was an all-state performer in basketball as well as golf for Colorado Academy, with offers to play hoops in college. He is most likely one of the top three skiers on TOUR, if not No. 1, and is so good at pool and other leisure pursuits that it has become something of a running joke.

“He might be the best Pop-A-Shot player I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Matt Picanso, a former pro and Hubbard’s caddie. “We stayed in a house at Wyndham last year and there was a Pop-A-Shot machine in the house, and the rest of us were trying to get to 80 and he put up like a 130.

“Anything obscure, badminton, weird sports that nobody would be good at, he’s good at them,” he added. “I’ve never seen somebody have such good awareness of their hands and their feel.”

(Mark Hubbard responds, via text: “I’m good at all bar/misc/useless games.”)

Then there’s golf, where Hubbard’s work with Lundberg has helped him turn his driver from a liability to an asset, and a recent putter switch has him hopeful for the future.

“His iron play has been his super-power,” said Lundberg, who also counts Harry Higgs and Kelly Kraft among his students. “He was one of the best on TOUR in Strokes Gained: Approach last year and didn’t put the driving and putting stats with it in that one week you need to get a win.

“This year the driver has been better,” Lundberg continued, “and the putter for the second half of the year, and he’s prioritized his mental performance more, but the irons haven’t been as good. Also, his Saturday performances have been a strange outlier for reasons we haven’t figured out.”

(Hubbard is fifth in Round 2 scoring average, 101st in Round 3 scoring average.)

His brother points out that Hubbard tends to play up to the level of his competition.

“He's been paired with a lot of the best players,” Nathan Hubbard said, “and he's routinely stepped up his play; he outplayed Rory in Canada two years ago, he outplayed Phil Mickelson in Palm Springs, he hung around with Scottie at the PGA (Championship), and more.”

At that PGA at Valhalla in May, Hubbard (T26) was asked what it was like to play the third round with Scheffler, who was fresh out of jail, without his usual caddie, and 4 over through four holes. Hubbard said he told the world No. 1 in player scoring, “That’s how real golf is played.” Scheffler’s response? Hubbard chuckled. “He said, ‘I know; I don’t like it.’”

That’s another Hubbard surprise: He is funny and disarmingly smart. His father, Bruce, went to Harvard Law School, and his brother Nathan went to Princeton. Hubbard had Ivy League grades but chose San Jose State, where he was twice Academic All-American, to play Division I golf.

Oh, and his mom, Melissa, won “Wheel of Fortune.”

Mark Hubbard: ‘Boringly efficient’

“I used to tell people I was a better skier than I was a golfer, until around 2019,” Hubbard said. “I started to turn the corner. My floor has obviously gotten a lot higher, with better consistency, some more length off the tee and improved overall driving and mid-range putting.”

(Hubbard made his first 19 cuts this season.)

“Making the cut is nice,” he added of his run, which included a T4 at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and a solo third, with partner Ryan Brehm, at the Zurich Classic of New Orleans. “The goal now is to get that ceiling higher. It’s hard as s--- to win a golf tournament.”

When he nearly broke through in New Orleans in April, his partner Brehm was a ball-striking machine, but Hubbard admits he faltered on the greens.

“My partner played as good as he ever has,” he said. “If I had had my C-plus or B-minus putting game we would have won by three.” It was the death knell for his old toe-hang putter, with which he had used his comedic “Snail” grip when things weren’t going well. He would trade for a TaylorMade Spider a la Scheffler and McIlroy; Picanso says he should’ve done so sooner.

Hubbard also rues his Sunday 74 and T5 at the Sanderson Farms Championship in the fall of 2022.

“I wouldn’t say I gave it away,” he said. “I’d say I didn’t know where I was. I thought the lead would be a lot higher.” (Hubbard finished four shots out of a playoff.)

Whether or not he’s a casualty of over-trying, Hubbard is well outside the top 50 who will advance to the BMW Championship at Castle Pines in his beloved Colorado, but there’s still time. There also may be time to mature into the player many believe he could still become.

“He has the potential to be a top-25 player in the world,” manager Bohlen said.

Said Arron Oberholser, another San Jose State golf product who played the TOUR before turning to broadcasting, “He reminds me of me: boringly efficient. He’s not going to wow you, but he finishes a round, and it’s like, ‘How the hell did he shoot 67?’”

Picanso is optimistic: “His short game is consistently amazing. He’s sneakily been gaining speed over the last eight months and it’s starting to show. He’s gaining strokes off the tee which I don’t think he’s ever done in his career, so that’ll be big going forward.”

Added Hubbard, “It’s very evident that I belong out here.”

Well, yes. Making so many cuts, and those 39 starts last season, would suggest he’s at home on TOUR. He and his brother have put this down to their parents’ divorce when Hubbard was not yet 5, shuttling between houses and developing an outsized adaptability.

“He can put his head down and push through just about anything,” Nathan Hubbard said. “And my wish for him is that he can pick his head up from time to time and appreciate just how much he's accomplished because of that grit, and to feel the joy in it.”

Not to worry, it might just be in his DNA. Nathan tells a story about the brothers and their families renting a house for New Year’s Eve in Palm Springs when they got obsessed with trying to hit a flop shot off the couch and onto a catwalk some 25 feet in the air. Mark was the only one who could do it – not that that dampened anyone else’s enthusiasm.

“The rest of us whittled away our security deposit by drilling the walls,” Nathan said.

Mark Hubbard – dad, Swiftie, Pop-A-Shot legend – keeps plugging away at it.