At the halfway stage of the US Open, the Major has made a mockery of the pre-tournament favorites, with the likes of World No.1 Scottie Scheffler, defending champion Bryson DeChambeau and Rory McIlroy all struggling to get to grips with the brutal Oakmont layout.
However, further up the leaderboard is a player who has been making the rigors of tournament golf look decidedly straightforward in recent weeks.
Ben Griffin went into the tournament off the back of a T8 at the PGA Championship, victory at the Charles Schwab Challenge and runner-up to Scheffler at the Memorial Tournament. Before that run, he also teamed up with Andrew Novak for his maiden PGA Tour win at the Zurich Classic of New Orleans.
That’s a dramatic contrast to his fortunes just four years earlier, when he walked away from the professional scene entirely.
Griffin turned pro in 2018 following a successful amateur career and joined the PGA Tour Canada. It didn’t take him long to make an impact, with his first victory since leaving the amateur game behind coming that July at the Staal Foundation Open.
However, rather than that becoming a springboard to more success, instead, it was the high water mark of his initial spell in the professional game, with Griffin not breaching the top 10 again and racking up a string of missed cuts on the PGA Tour Canada, the PGA Tour Latinoamerica and the Korn Ferry Tour.
Finally, in 2021 and struggling to earn sufficient money, Griffin stepped away from the game in search of a regular paycheck, landing a job as a mortgage loan officer.
He told Global Golf Post: “When I was working I never had any intention of going back. I was done. Mentally, I was out of it completely. I wanted to live a normal life."
Earlier that year, he’d played nine holes that arguably turned out to be more significant than any professional event he’d competed in to that point.
That came at Sea Island weeks before he left the game behind, where he played with businessman Doug Sieg, who was looking to sponsor a pro, and pitched the idea to Griffin.
The player declined, but, per Golf.com, Sieg persisted with the idea that summer, while a wrong turn on the way to work that led him to the course rather than the office helped persuade him to go back to the game too.
Other factors inspired his change of heart, including a strong performance in a member-guest event, with the upshot being that Griffin resumed his career on the Korn Ferry Tour in 2022.
The turnaround in his fortunes from just a year earlier was spectacular, with seven top-10 finishes that year, including three as runner-up.
By August 2022, he had earned his PGA Tour card, and he has not looked back, breaking into the world’s top 100 for the first time in January 2023, while he was ranked 15th heading into the Oakmont Major.
Suddenly, a world of possibilities is opening up for Griffin. Of immediate concern is remaining in contention for the US Open title, but given his form, he now has to be in the conversation for a US Ryder Cup place too, possibly even as an automatic selection if his form holds up.
Regardless of what happens in the coming months, Griffin’s career resurgence just four years after he turned his back on the game is nothing short of remarkable.
And as for the financial concerns that led to him quitting in the first place, ahead of the US Open, Griffin’s PGA Tour earnings stood at just short of $14m.
