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Mostly Cloudy Clarke alumnus Arjun Atwal wins first PGA title
With historical victory at Wyndham Championship, golfer earns Tour card
Golfer Arjun Atwal began last week without any guarantees. His card with the PGA Tour had expired, and he needed to win a Monday qualifier to make it into the Wyndham Championship at the Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro, N.C. He succeeded.
Then he won the tournament.
Atwal, a 1991 graduate of W.T. Clarke High School, sank a clutch putt for a birdie on the 16th hole and followed it with two straight pars to clinch the championship on Sunday by one stroke over David Toms, with a 20-under-par score of 260. It was the 37-year-old’s first PGA Tour title.
When he called his old coach and friend Larry Dell Aquila on Monday, not much had changed. “He won the biggest tournament of his life, sunk the biggest putt and his head is not even swollen,” said Dell Aquila, who coached Atwal at Nassau Community College. “He said: ‘You told me I’d always get one. Well, I got it.’”
When he was a teen, Atwal and his family moved from their native India to Salisbury. After attending Clarke for two years, his brother, Govind, a track athlete at Nassau, approached Dell Aquila about his sibling’s golfing talents.
Atwal went on to win two national championships with NCC. In October he will be inducted into Nassau’s first athletic Hall of Fame class, Dell Aquila said.
His college coach recalled a time recently when the Nassau team traveled to Florida for a tournament. Atwal, who lives in Windermere, Fla., with his wife and two children, invited the players from his alma mater to golf with him.
“Arjun is so special — he is a sweetheart of a human being,” Dell Aquila said. “He doesn’t forget where he came from.”
Especially when it comes to his Indian roots. The victory at Wyndham made him the first Indian to ever win a tournament on the PGA Tour.
The spotlight was on Atwal in India after he opened the tournament on Aug. 19 by shooting a 9-under 61. He was told that some television stations even tracked his process on news “crawls” at the bottom of the screen.
