Playful Patton Kizzire cruises at Procore Championship

NAPA, Calif. – From the outside, it looked as if Patton Kizzire shot a 2-under 70 to secure a five-shot victory at the Procore Championship at Silverado Resort. And he did. That happened.

In the record books, it will go down as his third PGA TOUR win and first in over six years. Also true.

Look deeper, though, and this was the first PGA TOUR event that turned into some version of “What About Bob?” – the 1991 Billy Murray/Richard Dreyfuss comedy of unconventional therapy.

Kizzire is about a month into working with a new mental coach, Amiee Smith-Schuster, who lives near his hometown of Sea Island, Georgia, and whose methods are, ahem, quirky. He picked the driving range in bare feet (Thursday), hugged a tree (Friday), sang a Disney ditty (Saturday), and belted out a rap (Sunday).

And he would happily do it all again.

“I was a little skeptical,” said Kizzire, whose lead was twice cut to two shots, “but it’s just bringing light to life, not taking yourself so seriously, doing silly stuff and just breaking the ice, you know?”

Oh, sure, the physical side was important, too. Kizzire led the field in Strokes Gained: Putting. He was spot-on with his irons, as usual. Justin Parsons, his coach, was on site earlier in the week, and they came up with a driving range game in which Kizzire’s caddie, Dean Emerson, would have to do 10 pushups every time the boss hit his exact number on the launch monitor.

Emerson wound up doing 150 pushups.

“Distance control is his superpower; Silverado is a great course for him,” Parsons said. “I said, ‘You look like one of the best players in the world.’”

But even Parsons knew the biggest reason why Kizzire lapped the field at the Procore, where he looked nothing like the player who missed six straight cuts early this year and whose season ended short of the FedExCup Playoffs with two more missed cuts.

“Amiee has given him some clarity in how he’s approaching his professional life,” Parsons said. “We’d done some good work on his swing, and he hadn’t gotten the most out of it, but he had his second child a year and a half ago, and it can be hard as a dad and a husband to juggle everything.”

Ask his peers, many of whom stood behind the 18th green at Silverado as Kizzire finished, and they will tell you that one of his abiding traits, in addition to great iron play, has been to burn a little too hot for his own good.

Enter Smith-Schuster.

At her behest, Kizzire recorded a rap song before Sunday’s final round, which was highlighted by his eagle chip-in at the fifth hole after David Lipsky (71, solo second) had cut the lead to two. Kizzire and caddie Emerson belted out lyrics written and texted to them by the mental coach, taking video of the performance to send her as proof. This was on the balcony of the clubhouse, around 12:30 p.m. Sunday.

“She just stayed in communication with us where his mind was right and had me reinforce it while we were out there,” Emerson said. “Just things like, ‘You’re unflappable.’ Confidence builders. She was great.

“She’s a little nuts,” he added. “She has us doing some weird stuff.”

Their task before Round 3 was to sing, “Heigh, ho, heigh, ho, it’s off to work we go” from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” and send her the video. Kizzire hugged a tree for Round 2, and his job for Round 1 was to go barefoot in the grass.

“I was like, What is she going to have us do today?” Emerson said. “She said, ‘Is there any water on the course?’ I was like, Is she going to have us go swimming nude?

“I’d meet him around 12:30,” Emerson continued, “and we’d do the videos and send them to her, and that was our preparation for the day.”

It’s hard to argue with the result, a hard-won, long-awaited victory that moved Kizzire from 132nd to 70th in the FedExCup. And you’d have to look hard to find someone savoring the moment more than him. When three kids asked him for a ball coming off the 17th green, he was so far ahead he complied, balls spilling out and bounding on the cart path before he scooped them up and underhanded them to the young fans.

The scene was a far cry from The RSM Classic last year, when Kizzire finished just out of the top 125, leaving him with only conditional status for this season.

“This is what I’ve always wanted to do,” he said that day, tearing up.

Not even a year later, he found his way to the trophy ceremony in Napa.

He also helped pick the range without his shoes on, did Disney karaoke, rapped, made friends with a tree, and laughed at himself while laughing all the way to the bank.

“I knew that it would be difficult not to get ahead of myself with a four‑shot lead heading into today,” he said. “I wrote down in my yardage book, ‘I am here, I am now.’ I kept going back to that, and that helped me be disciplined and stay present.”

Like the mental coaches always say: Be where your bare feet are.