Jack Buchanan’s mother was once called in for a meeting with his first-grade teacher. Not over anything he’d done, but over an assignment he refused to do. When asked to read aloud in class, he told his teacher he didn’t need to. He was going to be a professional golfer.
Buchanan, now a USC junior, has spent every year since chipping away at that goal. Spending a week at Royal Birkdale this summer, where he made his Open Championship debut, he got about as close as an amateur can get.
“I know I’m going to be [on tour] in a few years’ time,” Buchanan said. “It’s now, how do I get back as soon as I can?”
Buchanan first walked the grounds of Royal Birkdale in 2017 as a teenager, collecting a fist bump from Bryson DeChambeau, a hole-in-one ball from Kevin Na and a signed glove from Rickie Fowler. Nearly a decade later, Buchanan returned to the English links as a competitor, making his official Open Championship appearance this summer.
“Even right now I’m staring at the Open flag in my room,” Buchanan said. “It means so much.”
Buchanan earned his spot at Birkdale by winning the 2026 Africa Amateur Championship at Royal Johannesburg’s East Course, finishing at 21-under-par 267, a victory that came with exemptions into four professional events. He built the lead steadily across four rounds, reaching six shots ahead by the ninth hole of the final round before closing it out with a conservative back nine.
“All I was trying to tell myself was, OK, the job’s nowhere close to being done,” Buchanan said about protecting the lead. He said he barely looked at his phone over the closing two days, replying only to his parents and his coach, “just try to zone in completely, lock in.”
The stakes didn’t fully sink in until right before his round, when he passed The Claret Jug displayed next to the Africa Amateur trophy on the first tee.
“This could be a reality in five hours’ time if you play well enough,” Buchanan recalled thinking.
The Open has long meant so much to him. His father is English, and Buchanan grew up proud of his heritage. His mother, Nadya, walked all 72 holes of the championship with him in Johannesburg and was waiting behind the 18th green when it ended. A video of the hug after the hole drew far more attention online than the winning putt itself, a memory the two have both joked about since.
That win put Buchanan on a plane to England a few months later, and he didn’t make the trip alone.
USC Assistant Coach Kolton Lapa, who recruited Buchanan while at Mississippi State and has coached him since both later arrived at USC the same year, caddied for him throughout Open week, a decision Buchanan called an easy one.
“He’s like an older brother to me and everyone on the team, so it just felt normal,” Buchanan said.
Lapa stayed with Buchanan’s family for the week, which the two said made communicating easier and helped smooth over a much bigger operation than either was used to navigating at a college event.
“In college, you go to the driving range and then it’s a five-minute walk to the tee box,” Buchanan said. “At the Open, you have to go through so many security checkpoints and show credentials. Everything just takes longer.”
Lapa said having a caddying role at a major was new territory for him too.
“I’ve had a couple of friends get into other majors and guys I’ve obviously played against, but no one that I was actively coaching or recruiting,” Lapa said. “So it was a really cool experience.”
Winning the Africa Amateur Championship positioned Buchanan in a unique spot inside the Open’s clubhouse hierarchy.
“All of the amateurs got put in a special section in the clubhouse, and Jack was with all the past champions,” Lapa said. “Next to him was Scottie [Scheffler], a couple lockers down was Rory [McIlroy], so all week we were hanging out with the best players in the world.”
That access led to an unplanned encounter with Rory McIlroy, Buchanan’s favorite golfer growing up, who sat down next to him in the locker room one afternoon.
“I mustered up the courage. I was like, ‘Hey, Rory, just want to say I’ve been a massive fan,’” Buchanan said. “He took literally half an hour to talk to me.” McIlroy, Buchanan said, mentioned he’d already seen that Buchanan had qualified through the Africa Amateur.
Buchanan had a similar full-circle moment on the course. As a kid at that first Open in 2017, he’d been struck by the sight of Justin Thomas playing a practice round in a cardigan and tie.
“I’ve never seen a golfer wear a tie on the golf course,” he said.
This summer, paired with Thomas for a practice round of his own, he finally got to ask him about it, a memory he will “never forget.”
Rather than adding pressure, Buchanan said being surrounded by major champions had the opposite effect: “OK, I’m up close to them. This is normal now. Now let’s go beat their asses.”
Buchanan’s original pairing for round one, South African Louis Oosthuizen, withdrew before the tournament. His replacement turned out to be a childhood friend from South Africa, Aldrich Potgieter, alongside Englishman Justice Sansom — a pairing Buchanan called a stroke of luck given the size of the crowd and stage. A large South African crowd including friends, sponsors and family, traveled to support him, which he said “made it a bit less intimidating.”
He opened with a par on the first hole after an unlucky lie in the rough forced a layup, a moment USC head coach Mark Hankins, who also made the trip, said set the tone for the round.
“He kind of chunked it out of the weeds about 50 yards away from the hole,” Hankins said. “And then he hit a wedge shot that skipped and checked up to about two feet, tapped that in for par and went to the next hole. I felt like, wow, already saved a shot, right? And it kind of calmed him down a little bit.”
Buchanan shot 73 in the first round and 72 in the second to miss the cut. He was still in position to make the weekend as late as the 15th hole of his second round. Hankins, assessing the week afterward, pointed to the margins.
“He really played tough the first day, just not enough birdies with wedge and short irons in his hands, but he chipped great, putted great, hit the ball great, managed himself great,” Hankins said. “He was always kind of two-putting from 25, 30 feet instead of maybe getting better birdie opportunities.”
Hankins said the conditions at Birkdale showed an area of Buchanan’s game that still needs work, even as his short game has improved significantly since his freshman year.
“He was exposed a little bit at The Open because he’s playing against the best in the world, and the conditions were firm and fast,” Hankins said. “That’s kind of what you see on the PGA Tour, too. One week’s at The Masters, and it’s very manicured and fast, and the next week’s at the British Open, where it’s all dirt and firm and rolling and windy.”
That kind of exposure, Hankins said, is exactly what builds the mental toughness he’s seen take hold in Buchanan over the past year.
“He really doesn’t let go of any round,” Hankins said. “He kind of hangs in there, no matter if he’s playing good or bad.”
Buchanan credited Lapa’s advice on the 18th hole of his opening round as one of the week’s defining moments between them. After a wayward approach left him in a difficult lie in the rough, Buchanan’s cut hopes were riding on the up-and-down.
“He said, ‘Dude, you’re an amateur. No one expects you to be playing this out here,’” Buchanan recalled. “‘Go play as freely as you can. Hit this chip shot just like you do in practice.’”
Buchanan got up and down for par.
“I feel like we both just connected on a deeper level, because he knew how much it meant, having been a player himself at a high level,” Buchanan said.
Buchanan made sure to give thanks to Hankins, who shared week-long duties with Lapa, Hankins coaching from outside the ropes, Lapa on the bag.
“[Hankins] took a risk on me,” Buchanan said. “It’s really cool to be going through these experiences with someone like that.”
Even as a 21-year-old, Buchanan was on top of everything across the week, not just on the golf course. Hankins said he was struck by how much of the week’s logistics — travel, lodging, family tickets — Buchanan arranged himself, work typically handled by a touring pro’s team.
“He was the ringleader, right? No one was running his program. He was running his program,” Hankins said.
Buchanan kept his focus narrow despite the attention that came with the week, from practice rounds with golfers he’d idolized to interest from agents.
“It wasn’t to get as much free equipment as you can get, or as much notoriety as you can get on all the Instagram stuff,” Hankins said. “It was simply, ‘I want to make the cut here and set myself up for future tournaments.’”
Buchanan said one unplanned benefit of the week came from a conversation with a family friend who works as a statistician for tour pros, walking him through how top players break down a course before it’s played, down to which side of a fairway is statistically safer to miss on a given hole. Buchanan has already begun applying that approach to his own preparation at USC.
“To be good, you’ve got to really put in a lot more time than 99.9% of people are willing to do,” Buchanan said. “You’ve got to do it and be more than happy and willing to do it.”
Looking back on his week at Birkdale, Buchanan said it confirmed his confidence about his competition level.
“I can compete with these guys, and I can be in the mix to make a cut at a major championship going into my junior year in college,” he said. “There’s still a lot I know I can do in the next two to three years of college, which is just going to prepare me better for when I turn professional.”
Buchanan has since returned to USC’s fall season. He placed 10th individually at the Vuori Invitational in San Diego last week, helping the No. 22 Trojans to a third-place team finish with his sixth top-10 finish and best result of the season so far.
The Trojans head to Dallas next week for the Trinity Forest Invitational. It was there two years ago that Buchanan posted the lowest score by a USC freshman since 2017, a mark that still stands.
Nine years after collecting a hole-in-one ball and a signed glove from his idols at Birkdale, Buchanan is no longer chasing souvenirs. He’s chasing his way back onto that golf course.
Edited by JohVonne Roberts