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Chapel Hill’s Ben Griffin has won his first PGA Tour championship.
The former East Chapel Hill High and All-ACC golfer for the Tar Heels teamed with old friend Andrew Novak to win the PGA’s only team event in the New Orleans Zurich Classic that supports survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Griffin’s 35-foot birdie putt on the next to last hole sealed it.
Together, Griffin and Novak went 28-under-par in the alternate shot format with some of the game’s biggest stars. The trophy will be amongst hardware with adolescent signs of a champion and gaps from almost quitting golf.
When Giffin was qualifying only for foreign events after college, winning one tournament, he actually took most of 2021 off to work for a mortgage lending company and was leaning toward a career switch. A friend invited him to partner in the Korn Ferry pro-am in Kansas, and Griffin did so well that he changed his mind and his life changed along with that.
Griffin had placed in a number of PGA events to further kickstart his career on the links. From the Zurich Open purse of $9,200,000, Griffin and Novak each took home 1,330,000 bucks. Novak had won on tour and stayed in touch with his long-time friend when Griffin stepped away from the game. They both now live in South Carolina and are members of Sea Island in Georgia.
A gradual but steady increasing net worth from golf was also part of his continued comeback. In 2019, he earned only $7,540 from a few events he qualified for. His biggest victory was at the 2018 Staal Foundation Open in Canada.
The next year, Griffin earned $358,000 in PGA prize money. In 2023, he cracked the seven-figure mark, winning $2.9 million. Last year it grew by another half million. The 2025 PGA tour is just teeing off, and Chapel Ben is off to a great start, wouldn’t you say?
His golf story began at the Chapel Hill Country Club, where he was an undersized high school star with a herky-jerky motion. Coaches and club pros helped him smooth out that swing as Griffin won the state high school championship as a freshman and junior, often annoying some smug and taller opponents who smirked at the 5-2 peanut and went home with tails between their legs after Griffin beat them in head-to-head matches.
He started a growth spurt that ended at 6-foot-1 when he graduated high school in 2014 and then played for UNC coach Andrew DiBitetto. Griffin was a two-time honorable mention All-American. He tied the course record at the Finley Golf Club with a 62 in a qualifying event. He entered his last college season tied with fellow senior Will Register for the second-best stroke average in UNC history and is now in seventh place.
At 28, Griffin has a chance to win multiple PGA events, as more and more of the national media will discover Chapel Ben’s inspiring story.
Featured image via UNC Athletic Communications
Art Chansky is a veteran journalist who has written ten books, including best-sellers “Game Changers,” “Blue Bloods,” and “The Dean’s List.” He has contributed to WCHL for decades, having made his first appearance as a student in 1971. His “Sports Notebook” commentary airs daily on the 97.9 The Hill WCHL and his “Art’s Angle” opinion column runs weekly on Chapelboro.Chapelboro.com does not charge subscription fees, and you can directly support our efforts in local journalism here. Want more of what you see on Chapelboro? Let us bring free local news and community information to you by signing up for our newsletter.
Art, you’ve done this long enough. We’re all happy for Ben but he didn’t win a PGA Tour Championship, he won a PGA Tour event. There is only one PGA Tour Championship and it takes place every fall and culminates the end of the tour season. It would have also been appropriate to say he won a PGA Tour tournament.