This American golfer won $1.5 million in a tournament. Here’s why he couldn’t cash the check

Life comes at you fast when you’re a prodigiously talented young golfer, so fast in fact that an awful lot of money might just slip through your fingers.

Life comes at you fast when you’re a prodigiously talented young golfer, so fast in fact that an awful lot of money might just slip through your fingers. At the start of last year, Nick Dunlap was studying finance at the University of Alabama and he set himself up for a payday that no student could ever imagine: $1,512,000. Dunlap earned the money, but unfortunately, he never got to cash the check. “It stings a little bit,” Dunlap explained to CNN Sports, reflecting on his incredible performance at the PGA Tour’s American Express tournament in California, where he’d been invited to play on a sponsor’s exemption. Few could have imagined what would happen next, as Dunlap became the tour’s second youngest champion in 90 years and its first amateur champion since Phil Mickelson in 1991. It was a remarkable achievement, but it came with an extraordinary catch: as an amateur player, Dunlap had to forfeit the cash prize. “At the time, I don’t think I really knew what $1.5 million was,” he smiled. “It wasn’t as hard as it is now. But ultimately, I got what I wanted in the end: a trophy.” Dunlap’s rapid success shouldn’t have been a complete surprise to anybody who’d been tracing his trajectory in the amateur game. Just months earlier, he’d joined Tiger Woods as the only other man to win both the US Junior Amateur and the US Amateur titles.