Sahith Theegala Is First Indian In A Major Sports Ad In The U.S.
February 11 2024
February 11, 2024
Sahith Theegala finished fifth at the WM Phoenix Open golf tournament in Phoenix. In today’s final round, he scored two below par for a total score of 17 under par, four strokes behind the winner Nick Taylor of Canada.
”The Pin Hunters,” an advertisement that debuted during the TV broadcast of the tournament on the Golf Channel, features Theegala and Will Zalatoris, a fellow American golfer. The one-minute ad is staged in the style of a Hollywood Western movie. Theegala and Zalatoris fight a duel with golf clubs instead of guns. The spot was produced by Opinionated, an ad agency based in Portland, Oregon.
This is the first major ad in the United States featuring an Indian American sports figure. ”The Pin Hunters”, a twist on the Western formula of bounty hunters, is a pitch for FootJoy shoes, worn by both Theegala and Zalatoris while playing golf. FootJoy also sells golf apparel. It is part of Acushnet Holding, based near Boston, which also owns Titliest and other golf brands and has a stock market value of $4.6 billion.
Theegala annually earns fees totalling hundreds of thousands of dollars from FootJoy and seven other sponsors, including Ping, a vendor of golf clubs, RBC, a bank, and Zurich, an insurer.
Theegala, who lives in Houston, is the most successful Indian American in any sports. Last September he won his first Professional Golf Association (PGA) Tour event, the Fortinet Championship at the Silverado Resort and Spa in Napa Valley, California. He is ranked 20th among world golf professionals. Since joining the PGA tour in 2022, he has won $13.4 million in prize money.
Competing in 81 PGA tournaments, Theegala has finished second in three and was among the top ten in 15 contests. He qualified for the PGA Tour, the top golf competition in the U.S. and the world, after finishing among the leaders of lower-level tours.
With a height of 6 feet 3 inches and 200 pounds in weight, Theegala’s drives average around 300 yards. His favorite professional golfers include Tiger Woods, Henrik Stenson, and Tony Finau.
Theegala, 26-years-old, has a unique swing built on feel, unlike other professional golfers. This is because he has scoliosis, a sideways curvature of the spine, which forces him to make a head move on the downswing.
Sahith Reddy Theegala is a rare non-White player on the PGA Tour as well as a rare Indian American to achieve major success in sports.
When he is competing in tournaments, Theegala is followed around the golf course by a loud cheering group of relatives and friends. They are led by his father Murali (Muralidhar) Theegala, mother Karuna Theegala and his girlfriend Juju (Julianna) Chan. A competitive swimmer, Juju met Sahith Theegala in 2017 while they were students at Pepperdine University, California.
In 1987, Sahith’s father moved to the United States from Hyderabad, India, to attend graduate school. The family traveled to India at least once every two years. Theegala’s favorite food is rice and curry. In 2001, while his mother battled thyroid cancer, his maternal grandmother Vijaya Laxmi moved to U.S. to help raise Sahith and his brother.
Theegala grew up playing golf on the local municipal courses in Orange County, California. While the fees are low for county residents - about $30 for a round currently - very few of these courses are challenging and most are not well-maintained. The garage in his home had a poster stating: Here lives the world’s greatest golfer.
Once, when he was ten, his father took him to practice on the greens of a private club in the Los Angeles suburbs. A man walked up to them and said “You’re not supposed to be here,” Theegala’s father told The New York Times.
“My dad even though he never plays golf…he’s the one that taught me the game pretty much,” Theegala told an interviewer for Players Group Managment. “I wouldn’t say we were in a terrible financial situation, but we were definitely like lower middle class. Not a lot of expendable income and all the expendable income that we had was being spent on my golf…(my parents) sacrificed so much time and money on me when I was a kid.”
Pursuing a career in golf “was different because we had no experience with sports at all, so (my father) spearheaded the whole mission to college and professional golf,” Theegala added. His parents spent their savings on buying him clubs, paying course fees, travel costs and other golf expenses.
His parents “could have gotten a nice car. That’s one of the reasons the first thing I want to get is to get them a nice car,” Theegala told Players Management in 2021. The nicest car the family had, when he was growing up, was a Volkswagen Passat, which his parents gave him when turned 16. He now drives a grey BMW M5 Competition and apparently got his parents similar nice cars.
In 2015, Theegala graduated from Diamond Bar High School in California as an honors student, while also winning several golf awards. “I’d say I was a pretty good junior golfer,” he told PGATOUR.com, though not good enough to be actively recruited by Pepperdine in California, ranked among the top ten in men’s golf among U.S. universities. “But at Pepperdine, I went from average to slightly good to what I felt like was ready to be a decent professional golfer,” adds Theegala.
In four playing seasons over five years at Pepperdine, he ended with the best scoring average in the University’s history. In 2019, unable to play golf for ten months due to a wrist injury, he immersed himself in improving his chess game. The next year, more focused and fired up, he won the Haskins Award and the Ben Hogan Award for the best player in U.S. men’s college golf.
Theegala credits Michael Beard, the head golf coach at Pepperdine, for his transformation into a golf professional. He majored in sports administration. Carl Smith, an assitant golf coach who recruited Theegala to Pepperdine, is now his caddie. While on the golf course, they talk a lot about basketball.
“I’m an introvert by nature,” Theegala told The New York Times. “When I’m in the act of playing golf, I don’t even think about the people watching.”
Besides golf, Theegala enjoys playing basketball, chess as well as smaller video games like Among Us on his personal computer, not on consoles. He is a fan of The Ranger’s Apprentice series book; The Spongebob Movie; the TV shows American Ninja Warrior and The Queen’s Gambit; and musicians RL Grime and Flume.
Theegala likes golf because “the mental toughness needed to play this sport at a high level is unbelievable and it requires your attention all the time,” he told PepperdineWaves.com. “Although it may not necessarily require the most physical ability, it is by far the hardest sport I have ever played.”
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