CARLSBAD, Calif. – Alan Bratton still remembers rolling in the winning putt against Tiger Woods and Stanford in a sudden-death playoff at the 1995 NCAA Championship. That clutch moment secured his first team national title in his final season at Oklahoma State, exactly 30 years ago.
Bratton, now the Cowboys’ head coach, sat in the lounge at Omni La Costa Wednesday morning, just hours before his team would face Virginia in the championship match. He recalled how legendary Golfweek writer Ron Balicki had picked Oklahoma State to win back then – a prediction that worried Cowboy fans since Balicki, affectionately known as “Wrong Ron,” had never correctly picked an NCAA champion. The night before that final round in 1995, with the Cowboys trailing by three shots, someone left a sticky note on Tripp Kuehne’s hotel door that simply read, BELIEVE IN DESTINY.
“We didn’t know who put it there, but Tripp ended up writing it on his golf ball,” Bratton said. “Sure enough, we win, Tripp tells the story, and Balicki writes it. Good story, right? As the years went on, I kept thinking, I bet Balicki put the note on the door.”
At a championship in the early 2000s, Bratton, then working for Ping, finally got Balicki to admit to it.
“He wrote his own story,” Bratton added with a chuckle.
By Wednesday evening, Bratton’s team had written their own story by capturing the program’s 12th NCAA Championship and first in seven years.
When Bratton shared the tale of Balicki’s note Tuesday night after their thrilling semifinal win over Ole Miss, sophomore Ethan Fang, one of two Cal transfers in the Cowboys’ lineup, decided to write B.I.D. on his ball for his anchor match against Bryan Lee. With each putt, he caught a glimpse of that inspiration. The final time Fang lined up his ball on the 16th green with a 1-up lead, he never got to hit it. His teammate Eric Lee, the other Cal transfer, was already celebrating 300 yards away after being conceded a birdie to seal a 2-up victory and the clinching point in Oklahoma State’s 4-1 triumph.
The celebration erupted among roughly 200 Cowboy supporters who, in sophomore Gaven Lane’s words, “overpowered” the Virginia contingent all day.
How ’bout them Cowboys!
“It’s overwhelming,” Eric Lee said. “I haven’t heard a crowd that loud in a while, or ever, actually. It’s a cool feeling, and it’s great to be a national champion with all these guys.”
Bratton’s heroics in 1995 ensured that he and fellow senior Chris Tidland avoided becoming the first players to complete four years under then-coach Mike Holder without winning a national title. This year’s Cowboys, loaded with talent but fielding a young squad with no seniors or juniors in the postseason lineup, had endured the longest win drought in program history before snapping their 19-tournament skid at last fall’s Jackson T. Stephens Cup.
That victory was the turning point. The Cowboys carried that momentum into their spring opener in Hawaii and won that event too. They finished the season with six tournament titles, a No. 2 national ranking, and a pair of first-team All-Americans in Fang and sophomore Preston Stout, who had captured his second straight Big 12 medal a few weeks earlier despite battling flu-like symptoms in the final round.
Stout won his first two matches in the quarterfinals against Oklahoma and in the semis before falling to three-time first-teamer Ben James, 3 and 2, on Wednesday. That was the only point Virginia would get, though the matches were tighter than the final score suggests.
Playing in their first-ever final, the 10th-ranked Cavaliers quickly jumped ahead in four of the five matches against college golf’s modern-day dynasty. Oklahoma State now has the third-most national titles in NCAA history, earned across a record 76 championship appearances, plus a dozen Big 12 titles. Virginia, by contrast, had just notched its first ACC Championship in 72 years last month.
The exception was the leadoff match, where Filip Fahlberg Johnsson found himself in control from the start. Bratton wanted his most experienced match-play competitor out first, which turned out to be the Swedish freshman who has a relationship with countryman Leif Westerberg – the former Cowboy who famously left for the British Amateur after 72 holes of that 1995 championship, forcing Oklahoma State to play with just four players in the playoff against Stanford.
The confident Fahlberg Johnsson won the first hole against fellow freshman Maxi Puregger before closing out a 3-and-1 victory, capping a 3-0 week that included a scrappy 21st-hole win over Ole Miss’ Cameron Tankersley in a match that finished in darkness. That finish brought back memories of the Cowboys’ 2019 NCAA semifinal against Texas at The Blessings Golf Club, where Zach Bauchou lipped out a putt after sunset to end a dominant Oklahoma State team’s run at back-to-back titles.
A year before that, at the 2018 NCAA Championship, Bauchou opened his final match with a front-nine 29 to set the tone in the Cowboys’ 5-0 rout of Alabama in front of thousands at Karsten Creek. Bratton occasionally wears his orange polo from that victory for big events, and he did so Wednesday, though it remained hidden under a black jacket as the marine layer never burned off and temperatures stayed in the 50s.
Bratton had urged his players to “channel their inner Bauchou” on the eve of the final. His squad wasn’t short on inspiration. Rickie Fowler, perhaps the most recognizable Cowboy alum, texted with Bratton all week and even shared screenshots of a conversation with cycling legend Lance Armstrong, who was glued to Tuesday’s coverage. Viktor Hovland was also watching from the clubhouse at Muirfield Village.
Tripp Kuehne, one of the greatest career amateurs of all time, flew in Wednesday morning to potentially witness destiny fulfilled again. He wasn’t disappointed.
Gaven Lane trailed 2 down after seven holes before birdieing five of his final eight to post the day’s most convincing result, a 4-and-3 win over Paul Chang, who had spent three years on Virginia’s club team before earning his varsity spot two summers ago. Fang won four straight holes on the back nine to flip his match, while Eric Lee birdied three of his final four holes.
Fang, a Texas native, had strongly considered Oklahoma State during his recruiting process before his friend Lee convinced him to join him at Cal. But a week into school, Fang’s car was broken into. “I quickly found out that I wasn’t a big city guy,” said Fang, who entered the transfer portal following Cal’s NCAA exit last year at La Costa. He returned the favor by bringing Lee with him to Stillwater. “We call it even now,” Lee quipped.
Fang remembers Bratton’s pitch last summer: “If you want to win a national championship, you got to come to Oklahoma State.”
“And he was right,” Fang added.
Stratton Nolen can confirm. The current Cowboys assistant was a reserve on that 2018 Oklahoma State team that has sent five players to the PGA Tour, including Hovland and fellow Tour winners Matt Wolff and Austin Eckroat. It was Nolen who reminded Eric Lee, tied with Duangmanee on the 15th tee, to “believe in your destiny.”
About an hour later, that destiny was realized.
The only difference was Balicki wasn’t around to write about it.
Balicki died from cancer in 2014 at age 65. When it came to covering college golf, he was a pioneer. Players adored and trusted him; Fowler made just one phone call to announce he was turning pro – to Balicki. One summer, when told he couldn’t travel to the Northeast Amateur, Balicki informed his boss he’d be taking vacation to cover it anyway. His last NCAA Championship came in 2013, where he picked undefeated Cal, which lost in the semifinals to Alabama.
Bratton gives Balicki tremendous credit for where college golf is today – the million-dollar facilities, private jets, six-figure NIL deals, and televised tournaments on Golf Channel. He shed a rare tear talking about Balicki Wednesday morning, and about 12 hours later, closed his winning interview by remembering Wrong Ron.
“I’ve been thinking about him all week, and what a special guy,” Bratton said. “We don’t have all this without somebody telling the story of college golf, and Ron Balicki did it like nobody else.”
Even long after his death, Balicki is still inspiring national champions.
