After Zach Zaback struck his ball off the 11th tee, his mother sensed something was wrong with her son. So she did what any other mother would do—she went to him. But then, she thought better of it.
“I thought about just saying, ‘Keep your head up’ but I said ‘No, better not do that’,” Doreen Zaback said.
Doreen had just watched Zach struggle through his first nine holes of his first PGA Tour event—the Travelers Championship, which began Thursday in their hometown of Cromwell.
“It’s really hard, you know?” Doreen said. “Just because you know he probably feels so badly about not having the best game today with so many people here.”
Zach was six strokes over par on the front nine and said that nerves got the best of him, including a three-putt on the opening hole.
“’It was pretty surreal out there,” Zach said. “Sometimes I was just out of the moment for a second and was like, ‘Wow, I’m actually playing in the Travelers.’ I feel like I have the game to compete, but I still have a long way to go when it comes to dealing with pressure and all that.”
The Zabacks are members at TPC River Highlands and decided after selling their house in Farmington, that they should just move to Cromwell. They literally live just off of the 14th fairway where Zach’s brother John ran to grab a couple of cold beers and got back just in time to watch Zach make a birdie attempt.
“I didn’t expect it to be this soon quite honestly,” said Andy Zaback, Zach's father. “I thought it would be a couple of years before I’d be walking with him here at the Travelers.”
Zach hadn’t even qualified for the tournament until three days before. And his day did improve -- the former UConn golfer was one stroke over par on the back nine after his early problems.
