David Duval

David Robert Duval (born November 9, 1971) is an American golfer who once topped the Official World Golf Ranking and now plays on the PGA Tour Champions. During a five-year stretch from 1997 to 2001, he won 13 PGA Tour events, including the 2001 Open Championship, his sole major title.

Duval grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, where his father, Bob Duval, worked as a club pro at Timuquana Country Club and taught him the game. When David was nine, his older brother Brent was diagnosed with aplastic anemia. David underwent bone marrow surgery to help, but the transplant failed, and Brent died from sepsis in 1981 at age 12. The loss caused Bob Duval to leave the family for a year; after counseling, he returned in 1982 and continued coaching David. In 1993, as David turned professional, his father left the family for good.

In high school, Duval won the U.S. Junior Amateur in 1989. He then played for Georgia Tech, earning first-team All-American honors four times, ACC Player of the Year twice, and National Player of the Year in 1993. While still in college, he held a two-stroke lead after 54 holes at the 1992 BellSouth Classic but shot a final-round 79 to tie for 13th.

After two seasons on the Nike Tour, where he won twice, Duval earned his PGA Tour card in 1995. He posted seven runner-up finishes from 1995 to 1997 and went 4–0–0 for the victorious U.S. team at the 1996 Presidents Cup. His first PGA Tour win came at the 1997 Michelob Championship, followed by victories in his next two starts, including the Tour Championship. In 1998, he won four tournaments, led the money list, and took the Vardon Trophy and Byron Nelson Award for lowest scoring average.

Early in 1999, Duval reached world number one. That year, he shot a 59 in the final round of the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic, making an eagle on the last hole to win by one—only the third sub-60 round in PGA Tour history and the first in a final round. He later won the 1999 Players Championship, becoming the first golfer to win on the same day as his father, who won a Champions Tour event that day. Duval also played on the 1999 Ryder Cup team and finished second on the money list behind Tiger Woods. In 2000, he won the Buick Challenge and placed in the top ten on the money list. The next year, he captured the 2001 Open Championship, delivering a speech praised by British commentators as modest and heartfelt, and later won the Dunlop Phoenix Tournament on the Japan Golf Tour on his 30th birthday.

After that Open win, Duval’s game collapsed. He dropped to 80th on the money list in 2002 and 211th in 2003, then took an extended break. Blamed factors include back, wrist, and shoulder problems, personal issues, and vertigo. He has not won a PGA Tour event since 2001. He returned at the 2004 U.S. Open but shot 25 over par and missed the cut. His best results over the next few years were a T-13 at the 2004 Deutsche Bank Championship and a T-16 at the 2006 U.S. Open, where his second-round 68 tied for the tournament’s best round. He made only one cut in 2005 but had a top-ten finish in Japan. In 2006, he made his first two cuts and posted that strong U.S. Open result, though he did not reach similar heights in the year’s other majors. He lost his tour card in 2011 and later became a golf analyst. Duval began competing on the Champions Tour in 2022.