St. Louis, Missouri …
What is the odds of Zach Johnson finding himself grouped with Zach Johnson on any of the two weekend rounds in this week’s 100th PGA Championship.
Let me explain as it’s quite simple.
There is two Zach Johnson’s competing this week at Bellerive in suburban St. Louis.
One is the 42-year old double Major winning Johnson born in Iowa City, Iowa and now residing at St. Simons Island in Georgia.
Zach J Johnson, and not to be confused with the double Major winning Zach Johnson, working on his putting this week at Bellerive
The other is the 35-year old born in Salt Lake City, Utah who found his way into a first PGA Championship by finishing T12th in the 2018 Professional Championship.
The Salt Lake City-born Johnson appears in the Bellerive field this week at Zach J. Johnson and is known by his friends and colleagues as ‘Local Zach Johson’.
He works as the assistant pro at Davis Park Golf Course in the suburbs of Salt Lake City. He’s one of 20 club pros who qualified into the 156-man field, and will be, for at least two days, on the same playing field with Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson and, yes, Zach Johnson.
The ‘real’ Zach Johnson lifts the Claret in 2015 at St. Andews.
According to AP, PGA organizers called the club pro recently and asked him if it was OK for him to go by “Zach J. Johnson” for the week to eliminate confusion.
“I don’t think they called and asked him first,” Zach J. said of his namesake. “It was more like: ‘Here’s what you’re going by. Hopefully you’ll like it.'”
So what does the ‘J’ stand for? Well, it seems when Johnson was born, his parents wanted to pick out a J name for his middle name. Unable to decide, they put J on the birth certificate and left the choice for later. Turns out, “J” sounded pretty good, so they stuck with that.
And the thing is neither Johnson have met each other before this week.
The Masters and Open winning Zach Johnson is no stranger to the PGA Championship and is contesting the tournament for a 14th occasion and with his best finish being T3rd in 2010 at Whistling Straits.
He was watching the PGA pro qualifying tournament back in June, pulling for a buddy, fellow Iowan Sean McCarty, who finished second and will also be at Bellerive.
Suddenly, Johnson saw his own name pop up on the leaderboard.
And that’s how this tale of Johnson & Johnson began.
“I tweeted something about Sean, and then I plugged Zach Johnson, as well,” Iowa’s Zach Johnson said, before pausing for a second to consider what had just come out of his mouth. “‘Zach Johnson.’ It’s weird to say that.”
