After chasing his golf dream, Jonathan Pannone is living another one at the RI Amateur

WARWICK — Jonathan Pannone is living his dream. It just took him some time to realize it.

Pannone, who was raised in East Greenwich, always wanted to find out how far golf could take him. It ended up taking him on a journey that brought him back home. On Monday, with his amateur status reinstated, Pannone found himself at Warwick Country Club for the first round of the Rhode Island Golf Association’s 119th Amateur Championship.

And he couldn’t have been happier.

“I wanted no regrets,” the 37-year old Pannone said. “I can look back and say I didn’t make it, but I had a shot.

“I had some great rounds and great memories — and I tried.”

Pannone was a star in high school (at East Greenwich and Hendricken), spent two years playing at the University of Rhode Island before transferring to the University of South Carolina-Beaufort, where he had an All-American career thanks in part to the help from coach Shane LeBaron.

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He wanted more. Pannone needed to see just how good his game would get.

“I wanted to give it a shot,” Pannone said. “[LeBaron] told me Mid-Am golf is fun, and if you want to play Am golf, you wouldn’t be a failure if you did.

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“But my brain, once I got going on my path at USCB, that was the path I wanted to go.”

Professional golf’s minor leagues are more of a grind than any other pro sport. While minor league baseball players are famously paid in peanuts, there are plenty of weeks where mini-tour players don’t get paid at all.

Pannone spent years driving around the country, going from event to event, trying to earn checks. He didn’t mind the grind, living out of his truck, because he was dead set on accomplishing a goal he had set for himself.

But every tournament he played, he found players with the same type of goals. There was a round during his first year where he battled to shoot even par and felt great about how he played, right up until he saw the leaderboard where a player shot 59.

Pannone was putting in the work and found some success, but not at a consistent enough level to make it a full-time job.

“I saw what the talent was at basically a fourth mini-tour level,” Pannone said. “I was basically donating to Tony Finau and Mark Hubbard all year. [Finau] was a nobody at that point, but it was like ‘cool, there’s another level.’

“You think you’re good, you’re a first-team All-American, rah rah, then a guy knocks it 100 yards by you and hits wedges just as good as you do.”

Pannone wanted to chase pro golf as long as he could, but had two non-negotiables that would tell him when it was time to stop.

“If I stopped getting nervous on the first tee, I was done competing and, if I stopped having fun, I was done competing,” Pannone said. “I never lost the nerves, but I was starting to get angry. Even if I played well, I was never happy.”

As age 30 approached, Pannone was about to get engaged to now-wife Caitlin, and started to figure out what he wanted from golf — and life. No more trying to raise money for Q-School. Fewer events. He worked under Tom Spargo at Spargo Golf and eventually took over the business.

There was time to work and play golf, but also time to have a life. COVID hit and the golf boom hit. Suddenly, there was less time to practice and play.

Last summer, Pannone failed to qualify for the Mass Open. He played in a Monday qualifier for the Traveler’s Championship in nearby Cromwell and struggled down the stretch.

On the way home, he decided that was enough.

“I didn’t want to play and travel for five grand for winning a tournament when I could make that working a week in the shop,” Pannone said. “It wasn’t a good life balance.”

Once he turned pro, Pannone figured his amateur days were dead. He was locked in on trying to succeed, but watched from afar as players he grew up playing with and against had success at the state and regional level.

“I watched Bobby [Leopold] do all of this while I was playing [crappy] mini-tour events and I was like ‘God that looks fun,’ ” Pannone said. “You get to play these events, play sweet courses and get to be around good people.”

With work going well, his wife pushed him to look into getting his amateur status reinstated. It’s a process that starts on a state level, then gets to the USGA and you cannot play professional tournaments during the time period.

Pannone was granted his amateur status back just in time to play one of the RIGA’s state amateur qualifying rounds at Fenner Hill. Pannone treated the pre-qualifier like a pro tournament, playing eight practice rounds before going out and shooting 1-under to earn his spot in the big tournament.

On Monday at Warwick, Pannone felt nerves. Warwick is his home course, but he still felt the pressure of trying to compete.

He wasn’t trying to win the tournament on Monday. He knows better. Pannone also knows his former status hardly guarantees he’ll win anything this week.

“I’m not going to just go out and dominate. There’s a reason I got my am status back,” Pannone said. “There’s a little guy on my shoulder like ‘this is awesome, you can win,’ but the realist in me is trying to take it one day at a time.”

Day 1 went fine. Pannone struggled to find fairways, but managed to grind out pars. He was 3 over though 14 holes, made birdie on No. 15 and had looks on Nos. 16 and 17 before finishing with another bird to shoot a 1-over par 71.

It put him in a good position to earn a spot in match play — the second qualifying round takes place on Tuesday — but, more importantly, he left Warwick happy about how everything was falling into place.

“I’ve gotten better over the last six months,” Pannone said. “Since I’ve gotten my am status back, I’ve looked back at it and have been proud. During it, if you had asked my wife if I thought I was failing, yeah, every time.

“If I didn’t bring money home, I was failing. If I wasn’t living anything up to what I thought my expectations were as a player, I thought I was failing. It got to a point when making that decision I was looking at most of my rounds as failures.”

That’s not the case anymore. Now, it’s joy.

“I look back at all of it and now, I’m OK with the position I’m in,” Pannone said. “I have an unbelievable wife and I get to be at home and I get to sleep at home in my own bed. It’s the best.”

Who leads at the RIGA State Amateur

Pannone’s 1-over par 70 had him tied with more than a dozen players for eighth, but the top of the leaderboard featured a few familiar faces.

Leopold, the defending state champ, looked very much like someone intending to add another trophy to his mantle. The four-time State Am champ played solid golf, then came alive late with three birdies over his final four holes for an impressive 4-under 65.

“Last year I kind of did the same thing,” Leopold said. “I’m trying to get some feels to see where my game is at and I feel like the more I play the better I get. To come out here and post a good number and really didn’t have any blemishes on the scorecard, no real danger of making a mistake out there, that was really nice to see and shows I can get more aggressive here and there if I want to.

“That’s what you want to do when you get to match play. Know your game is good enough where if I need to get aggressive here, I can, but if I can hit middles of the greens the whole time maybe you can win that way too.”

Right behind Leopold was former Prout All-Stater Bennett Masterson, who shot a 3-under par 66. Former champ Brad Valois was also in the mix at 1-under par, tying him with a few others for third.

There were a glut of current and former Rhode Island Interscholastic League stars tied for 22nd. Current RIIL state champ Rocco Capalbo, a rising sophomore, shot 71, as did former two-time RIIL state champ Max Jackson, the recent La Salle grad who’s headed to Rutgers to play in the fall.

Day 2 of qualifying starts on Tuesday morning, with the top 32 players moving on to match play. Wednesday will feature Round of 32 matches, with Round of 16 taking place Thursday morning, followed by the afternoon quarterfinals. The semifinals take place Friday morning, leading to Saturday’s 36-hole championship.