Player Profile - Aaron Badderley

This week’s player profile showcases the career of Australian-American golfer Aaron Badderley, whose recent resurgence in the golfing world has fans celebrating and competitors taking notice.

Badderley was born in 1981 in the town of Lebanon, New Hampshire but his family relocated to Australia when he was just two years old. Growing up in Australia Badderley had ample opportunity to develop his natural talent for golf. As a teenager he gained notoriety as an up and coming star on the amateur circuit and was quick to accumulate several accolades before his eighteenth birthday. Badderley was the youngest golfer ever to represent Australia at the Eisenhower Trophy, and won the Holden Australian Open two years in a row in 1999 and 2000. Following this victory, he turned professional.

Badderley’s early professional career in Australia was marked by success. He won the Greg Norman Holden International in 2001, and by the end of that season he was number one on Australia’s Order of Merit – all this before his twenty-first birthday.

In 2002, Badderley travelled to the United States to play on the second-tier Nationwide Tour in pursuit of a PGA tour card for the following season. Though he played on the PGA Tour in the years that followed, persistent swing problems prevented the young golfer from reproducing his whirlwind of wins in Australia on US soil. Not content to come second, however, the young golfer weathered this difficult period and worked consistently on rebuilding his swing, a process that took many years to perfect, but would yield results yet again.

After years of lacklustre performances on the PGA Tour, Badderley’s fortunes reversed at the weekend when he won the Northern Trust Open at the Riviera Country Club in California. With his swing back in top form, fans can look forward to many entertaining and victorious rounds of golf from this talented young professional.