Jim Knous: The Civil Engineer And New Tour Rookie Is A Good Story

Jim Knous is the subject of one of those occasional “come-from-nowhere” sagas that are a joy to read.  A civil engineer by trade, Knous wanted to give the pro tour a shot. And he earned his card as the 50th (and last) player to do so.

GolfWorld’s John Strege has the details that’ll make you smile and dream to reach your own goals.

Home, growing up, was Basalt, Colo., in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, 18 miles northwest of Aspen and a million miles, any direction, from a professional golf career. NCAA Division I coaches couldn’t find it with GPS, a tour guide and a St. Bernard, not that they were inclined to look there.

Yet there he was on Sunday, birdieing the 18th hole in the Safeway Open in Napa, Calif., to tie for 10th in his debut as a PGA Tour member, only a few weeks after securing the 50th and last available PGA Tour card via the Web.com Tour.

How to explain this? Well, Knous, 28, is an expert skier—“probably a plus-two handicap if I compared it to golf,” he said—and as such is not intimidated by unfamiliar terrain, whatever its degree of difficulty.

The Colorado School of Mines is a Division II school that had hired a full-time golf coach for the first time, Tyler Kimble. “We were his first recruiting class, eight freshmen coming in,” Knous’ teammate Cory Bacon, now a Ping Golf engineer, said. “Jim was by far the best golfer from our class. He was the best golfer on the team the entire four years. Jim was a stud.”

“We got to the national championship my senior year, and I tied for first, though I lost in a playoff. It was a good sign for me after winning the conference and the regionals. I thought, ‘let’s give this pro golf thing a shot.’”

A long shot, Bacon reckoned at the time. “In my wildest dreams I never envisioned Jim on the PGA Tour.”

But here’s the thing with engineers: They figure out a way to make things work. As the author James Michener wrote, “Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.”

Knous earned a Web.com Tour card for the first time in 2017 and returned in 2018. He had not played well enough to qualify for the Web.com Tour playoffs until he tied for fourth in the final regular-season event, the WinCo Foods Portland Classic in August.

“I knew I was playing well,” he said, “though it hadn’t crossed my mind that I was playing well enough to get my PGA Tour card. I was thinking at worst I would be playing the Web.com Tour [in 2019].”

Then he made the cut in each of the four playoff events, finishing in the top 25 in three of them and gamely hanging on in the Tour Championship to secure the last available PGA Tour card.