Who Is Dylan Dethier?
Dylan Dethier is a Senior Writer at Golf.com and Golf Magazine, and has been in the position for several years now. Born in Williamstown, Massachusetts, Dethier is quite the player himself as he turned professional in 2014 and played on the PGA Tour Canada (opens in new tab) in 2015. After a T27 finish in the PGA Tour Canada Q-School-California, Dethier competed in eight events with his best finish coming in the Cape Breton Celtic Classic presented by PC Financial. With rounds of 69-67-77-68 he finished at T40.
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On his PGA Tour (opens in new tab) profile it says his favorite golf course is Taconic GC which makes sense because it is located in Williamstown, the place of Dethier’s birth. He also attended Williams College, an institution that actually owns the land, and played on the golf team there.
However before attending college Dethier looked to travel. Speaking to The Williams Record (opens in new tab) he said; “I went through the process of, ‘OK, if I am going to go to college 10 minutes from the house I grew up in, I should at least get out and see the rest of the country first,'” he said. “Just to get more life experience and get a little more perspective, before I was going to spend four more years in Williamstown.”
He decided he wanted to try and play a round of golf in every state and he chronicled the experience in an online blog.
“I think it was a fairly unique thing, because it was just an 18-year-old’s lens into …different parts of America,” Dethier said, looking back on his earlier blog posts. “And there’s something about seeing things from a fresh perspective that I think is appealing to other people that maybe know about those things in a different context.”
This experience and writing eventually transformed into a 2013 book, 18 in America: A Young Golfer’s Epic Journey to Find the Essence of the Game.
“I got a bunch of offers from people who read my blog and were wondering if I’ve thought about turning it into a book,” he said. “I had thought abstractly about it, and I thought that I’d seen some interesting things that people would be intrigued by. So I went all in on that process during my first couple years at Williams.”
In a peculiar twist, just before the publication of the book, the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association), suspended his eligibility as a student athlete for playing golf for profit.
“It was hard,” Dethier said. “This was a week before my only trip ever to the national championships, so the timing was not good. And it didn’t have a happy ending. I ended up getting reinstated right before [the national championships] and then played just by far the two worst rounds of my college career. It was a tough stretch.”
After graduating he tried to make it as a professional for a couple of years, before eventually ending up at his current role with Golf.com and Golf Magazine.
“It was a little bit of an experiment combined with chasing a dream,” Dethier said. “I did it for two years. It was really fun. It was, again, a great way to travel, to meet a whole bunch of interesting people. And it’s funny, the way things work out: It ended up feeding me into the career that I’m now in, which is writing about golf.”