U.S. Open: Round 1 surprise Jacob Solomon leans more into golf on his LinkedIn page

LOS ANGELES — Only a few years ago, when he was finishing up a solid but unspectacular college golfing career, Jacob Solomon created a LinkedIn profile for himself and attached a résumé.

The Auburn business major’s stated objective was to become “a marketing manager with a sports organization.”

That will have to wait with Solomon’s professional golf ambitions starting to look more realistic. The Korn Ferry Tour rookie earned the right to participate in his first major last month when he won a playoff at a U.S. Open qualifying tournament in Dallas. Then Solomon, 26, celebrated the occasion Thursday morning by playing his way onto the U.S. Open leaderboard.

Solomon shot a 2-under 68 in Thursday’s first round, sending golf enthusiasts scrambling to figure out who this unfamiliar name was. The 150,000-to-1 pre-tournament long shot even drained a long birdie putt on the par-3 15th hole to move to 4-under for the day and briefly claim sole possession of the tournament lead.

“Obviously it’s a dream come true for me,” Solomon said. “As a little kid, if you’d told me I’d see my name near the top of a leaderboard at a U.S. Open, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

While Solomon won the California state championship with an eagle putt as a high school senior and earned the chance to play at Auburn, high-level professional golf was still a distant dream to him back then. Even after he earned second-team all-SEC honors as a senior in 2019, Solomon still was nowhere-near PGA-ready.

“Coming out of college I actually struggled there for a couple years playing mini-tours and Monday qualifiers,” Solomon said. “What I like to say is everyone’s timing is different. I’m not Collin Morikawa. We’re the same age and I know him very well from junior golf, but we’ve had different paths to get here and mine has just been a little more rocky.”

What has changed more than anything for Solomon is his belief in himself. Consistently making cuts on the Canadian Tour and the Korn Ferry Tour has shown him he’s capable of achieving more than he realized.

“It’s actually crazy how much power and influence that has,” Solomon said, “when you tell yourself, ‘I can do this.’ ”

Solomon admits nerves got to him standing over his first tee shot, but he quickly steadied himself after that ball found the right rough. He took advantage of the soft greens and drizzly morning conditions for much of his round before scoring back-to-back bogeys on the challenging par-4 16th and 17th.

Solomon says he had “zero expectations” for himself entering the U.S. Open and that hasn’t changed even after his strong opening round. He’ll take each shot one at a time and see where that gets him.

In the big picture, though, a lot is different now for Solomon. He no longer envisions becoming a marketing manager anytime soon.

“I think I changed my LinkedIn profile to say I wanted to be the best golfer I could be,” Solomon said with a laugh, “and that’s still my goal right now.”