The story of Ben Griffin is a new chapter in the endless tale of the American dream. It seems like a cliché, it sounds like a cliché, but deep down it holds a lot of truth. This Sunday, he won for the third time this year on the PGA Tour and broke into the world’s top 10. Five years ago, he was forced to take a break from golf to pay off a $17,000 debt. A break that ended not by his own conviction, but by the push and determination of others. If it hadn’t been for that, he wouldn’t be where he is today.
Spanish speaker, retired DJ, former loan officer, creatine overdose survivor, etc.@BenGriffinGolf can do it all 📝 pic.twitter.com/QnWDEjAu4I
— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) November 10, 2025
This story begins in 2020, when the world came to a halt due to Covid. We all focused on the PGA Tour, DP World Tour, LPGA Tour, or Asian Tour. The major circuits around the world paused their schedules. The impact was significant, but the players in those major leagues were not the most affected. They were better covered, had more earnings, and, above all, their circuits resumed sooner than anyone else. Those on the smaller Tours suffered much more. Overnight, they were left without a source of income and with enormous uncertainty. One of them was Griffin. The blackout caught him playing on the PGA Tour Latinoamérica and other minor circuits in the United States. He had not yet turned 24.
“My credit card had a $17,000 debt, and my parents were helping me pay the rent and other things. I couldn’t continue like that. It was a complicated situation, so I decided to put golf aside and try to make use of my Economics studies from the University of North Carolina. I looked for a job and found one as a loan officer at a financial institution. I had really left golf behind. Until that moment, it hadn’t given me much, and I had little intention of returning,” he explains.
In 2021, he only played two tournaments, one on the Korn Ferry Tour and another on the PGA Tour Latinoamérica. He missed both cuts. That only reinforced the decision he had made. He was better off in an office surrounded by paperwork. He was happy to have left golf behind. However, a group of people close to Ben insisted on convincing him otherwise. If it weren’t for them, Griffin wouldn’t have swapped the tie for the glove. “When I was in debt, I couldn’t even afford to train with a physical trainer. You try to make ends meet, earn money as quickly as possible, and I wasn’t doing that. I felt renewed because I had an incredible amount of support and many people who wanted me to achieve great things in golf. That’s why I decided to return. It wasn’t really that I wanted to return to golf, but I had so much support and so many signs telling me I needed to play… They were the signs. The world is a crazy place. You have to have a lot of faith and seize those unique opportunities. I’m very grateful to have had the chance to return and play golf.”
And he gives credit to all of them: “I had incredible people on my side, one of whom is here right now, Jesse Ahearn, from Missouri. He helped relaunch my career with funding, as did Doug Sieg from Lord Abbett, Mike Swan; there are several partners from the Highland Springs Country Club in Missouri who helped me thanks to casual connections. I left the loan officer job I had and returned to golf. It gave me a lot of confidence to have all that support to return to professionalism, keep my head down, work hard, and see how far I could go. That started in 2022. I got to the Korn Ferry Tour through the School and earned access to the PGA TOUR quite quickly. Since then, it’s been a steady climb. Trying to work hard, do the right things on and off the course, and enjoy and savour the good moments,” explains the only player alongside Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy who has won three or more times this season on the American circuit.
Griffin doesn’t need to be told that life is tough and what seems like abundance today can turn into drought tomorrow. That’s why he is very clear that his journey has only just begun. He is not about to stop here, nor will he spend a single minute on self-complacency. “Everything that has happened to me has been incredible. My only goal now is not to get comfortable and keep seeing how far I can go because it’s an incredible story. And I’m so grateful… I can’t believe all this is happening. But I’m not going to just stand here admiring it. I’m going to keep using each tournament as fuel for the next and continue working very hard. That’s what Tiger Woods always did, what Scottie Scheffler is doing. I have to keep doing the right things to be great.”
Griffin won’t play again until 2026. He has mainly made this decision because he is getting married in December and wants to focus on the preparations. Also, because he wants to make a couple of changes to his game, small details, nothing major. “I want to present myself next season ready to start, and I’m not going to get comfortable just because I’ve won three times here. I’m going to try to keep working very hard and, hopefully, play even better. And yes, I won this week, but I feel there are still a couple of things I want to work on. Not necessarily change much, just improve a little. So it will be fun this pre-season to work hard and keep putting my name alongside those guys,” he explains.
One of the changes he made for this week, which resulted in the victory at the World Wide Technology, was with the putter. He did it after noticing something very curious in the statistics. “I think I’ve had a very good year on the greens, I can’t complain. I’ve finished 19th in the strokes gained with the putt statistic. I didn’t have much to complain about. However, I realised that the 18 ahead of me in this ranking use a mallet-type putter (more square), while I’m the best with a blade (the classic). Why not try it? This week I didn’t have much to lose, luckily I wasn’t risking much. I practised with it at home, had a couple of very good rounds, and decided to put it into practice. It hasn’t gone badly. For now, it stays in the bag,” he says. He was the second-best in the tournament in the putting statistic.
Finally, as an anecdote, Griffin revealed that he was very happy to have finally won a trophy. “I’m not complaining, but I haven’t had much luck with these things. In Zurich, they gave me a belt buckle, in the Charles Schwab, the same. And the car I won at Colonial burned in the trailer bringing it home. I haven’t had much luck until now, so I’m looking forward to placing this trophy in my house.”
