It’d be easy to sweat the top 75 bubble on the Korn Ferry Tour for J.T. Griffin. At No. 75 on the Korn Ferry Tour Points Standings, the final five events remaining in the Regular Season could mean the difference for Griffin between a Korn Ferry Tour Finals berth and potentially a PGA TOUR card in the Finals or returning to the final stage of Korn Ferry Tour’s Qualifying Tournament. The stakes are huge, but the brand-new dad has bigger things on his plate to worry about now than the bubble.
“I’m not thinking about golf as much as I am thinking about keeping a human alive, so that’s probably been a healthy distraction,” Griffin joked. “I think about it every now and then and then it’s back to being a dad.”
Griffin, 34, became a dad for the first time May 14 when his son, Graham, was born. He took two events off to be at home during his birth and was pleased to see that the double season caused his number to not bounce around much.
“I think we’ve got enough events right now to where I’m not thinking about it a ton. Once it gets crunch time it may be a little different,” Griffin said. “I’ve obviously thought about it, but I haven’t gotten in full panic mode or anything yet. I’ve definitely thought about it but just got to go do my job.”
The do-your-job focus for Griffin has been his mantra since changing swing instructors to Justin Parsons last October. Griffin’s a thinker and a perfectionist and the opposite of a feel player. In practice rounds, he’d have his phone out video-taping his swing, and he’d get fixated on the positions in his golf swing, losing focus on actually planning and executing golf shots and then adapting to the way he was hitting it.
“I just had a default of blaming bad shots on my golf swing,” Griffin said. “If I hit a bad one, it was always what’d I do wrong with my swing?”
In their first couple lessons, Parsons was so intent on not having Griffin think about his golf swing that he wouldn’t feed him any swing feedback or drills.
“He said I was an addict, addicted to the golf swing, and he said, ‘The last thing you need right now is another shot. You’ve gotta detox,’” Griffin said. “If I was going through the process and not hitting it well, then we can figure out what it is on the golf swing side of things, but it was kind of clearing of a system.”
