Young star from Mexico, Carlos Ortiz, is making his mark

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Ochoa has been around him for the better part of a decade, though he didn’t immediately stand out. Ochoa would come home from college at Arizona and practice with the juniors at Guadalajara Country Club, and she recalls a little boy who loved his golf.

“He was there every afternoon,” Ochoa said in a telephone interview from Mexico City. “I used to see the little kids running around and practicing and playing. He was just a little one, a happy guy. Every time I came home, I see him growing. He was very skinny, very tall. And he was hitting the ball very hard.”

Ortiz made a few trips to America for junior events, though he never played well enough to get anyone’s attention.

Brad Stacke, the golf coach at North Texas, managed to find him with a little help and some intuition.

Stacke had a player from Mexico named Kenji Maruyama who had played on his junior college team in Iowa, and the coach told him to keep an eye out for any promising young players from south of the border.

“He called me three weeks later and said, ’I’ve got a player for you. He’s really good,”’ Stacke said. “I said, ’Why don’t you go play with him?’ So he went and played with Carlos and he said, ’He’s really good.’ I said, ’What did he shoot?’ He said, ’He’s really good.”’

Once the coach finally got a number out of him, he paused. Ortiz had shot 81. But it was enough of an endorsement for Stacke to remember the name, especially a few weeks later when Ortiz had rounds of 63-65-67 to set a 54-hole scoring record in a Mexican junior tournament he won.

“I was sold,” Stacke said.

Ortiz headed to Denton, Texas, for four years he wouldn’t trade. He won three times as a sophomore. He qualified for the U.S. Amateur at Cherry Hills. He earned a degree in international studies. And he started to believe he was good enough to achieve everything he had dreamed.

“It took me a while when I came to the States,” Ortiz said. “I looked up to all these guys. To play with them made me realize I was good enough. People always tell me, ’You’re good enough,’ but I need to see it with my eyes.”

He was hard to ignore last year on the Web.com Tour. He picked up his first win in Panama with a 66-64 weekend. Playing a month later before a home crowd in Mexico, he recovered from an opening 74 with rounds of 67-66-68. Ortiz nearly lost a three-shot lead until he birdied the last hole to beat Justin Thomas.

Could he be the male version of Ochoa? That might be asking too much of anyone.

Ortiz looked up to Ochoa as the best player in her sport and the best person in golf. Ochoa was renowned for her humility and her charity even as she rose to No. 1 in the world. And there is the pressure of playing for a country with a limited golfing heritage.

Ochoa still keeps in touch with that little kid, the “happy guy” she saw running around the golf club.

“I emailed him right away when he won his last tournament,” Ochoa said. “He said, ’You can feel what we all felt when we were following you.”

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