Tony Finau is competing in this week’s Presidents Cup at Royal Montreal, but he won’t be in the field next month for the first PGA Tour event in his native Utah in six decades.
Dad duties take priority.
Instead of teeing it up in the Oct. 10-13 Black Desert Championship, Finau will be at PGA Frisco’s Fields Ranch West course in Texas to cheer on his 12-year-old son, Jraice, who will compete for Utah in the U-13 PGA Junior League Championship on those same dates.
Tony, who usually gives his oldest nine shots a side when they play matches, doubles as Jraice’s swing coach, though he mentioned Wednesday that he’d soon have to find Jraice as new instructor now that he’s gotten more serious about the game. Tony won’t stop, however, trying to instill the importance of hard work and preparation in Jraice, who Tony admits doesn’t have the practice bug yet. Part of that is due, Tony says, to Jraice not experiencing the childhood, at least financially, that Tony and his siblings had.
The way Tony explained his parenting approach with Jraice’s golf is powerful:
“That’s the part that I struggle with because my kids have a different life than I had. I feel like I had to work hard and do those things because I was in a different situation. I felt the pressure as a kid. My parents giving up everything they had for me to perform. My kids aren’t – they don’t feel that pressure. So, teaching grit, I don’t know if there’s such a thing, but I try to apply enough pressure as a parent to keep him accountable for what he wants to accomplish. He told me, ‘Dad, I want to be better than you. I want to be a PGA Tour player. I want to be the best player in the world.’ So, I try to hold him accountable at the end of the day as a parent, as a father. That’s what my dad did for me, held me accountable to try to accomplish great things. I told him that’s what I wanted to do.
“My son has impressed on me that’s what he wants as well. So, I have to try to be tough on him to hold him accountable to teach him that hard work and grit, it’s not easy, though. We’re working at the course, and we can go eat at a steakhouse later and he sees the glamorous life that we live, but he didn’t see what I went through 25 years ago, he didn’t see the work.
“That’s the part I struggle with — my kids have a lot different life than I had.”
Thoughtful stuff from Tony Finau on his greatest challenge as a dad: how to teach his kids grit. pic.twitter.com/6SI6oYacb6
— Dylan Dethier (@dylan_dethier) September 25, 2024
“That’s the thing about social media, the hard part about social media, with my kids, they’re seeing finished products. They get entertainment at their fingertips. They’re seeing the finished products of Steph Curry and LeBron James. It’s so hard for me to tell them and have my son understand, like, the hours and thousands and millions of hours that they put in to get to where they are is really what it’s all about, that journey there. Everybody knows who they are now.
“But that’s the tough part, for me, trying to teach my son to not even follow in my footsteps. I want him to be the greatest. I want him to be better than I am, but that grit has to come. I think it’s more an innate thing, but I can try and put him in the environment – that’s all I’m trying to do – in the mindset to be great.”
