Good Read: "Smith went really deep, immersing himself in the labyrinthine work of existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre."

Jaime Diaz was honored at Wednesday’s annual Memorial tournament ceremony that also included 2014 honoree Annika Sorenstam. I wrote about Diaz's speech after he received the Memorial Golf Journalism Award, which he earned for writing pieces like the one in this week’s Golf World.

The topic? Byron Smith, winner of last week’s Web.com event. Smith is a a Pepperdine golf team member who quit after two years to focus on academics, Smith’s story is a dandy and told only as Diaz can do it in the restrictive format of a 660-word column.
 
The opening paragraphs:

Byron Smith looks like a conventional modern tour pro -- southern Californian, a youthful 33, trim, good-looking and well-tailored. The kind of un-famous player casual watchers of tournament golf used to call a "clone."

After he closed with 63-66 to win the Web.com Tour's Rex Hospital Open by four strokes on Sunday, Smith stood before three packed grandstands that served as respectable facsimiles of PGA Tour skyboxes and gave an earnest but conventionally uninspired victor's speech and collected the biggest check of his life, $112,500.

But a few minutes later, the intimacy that makes the Web.com Tour an underrated place to mine the real stuff of playing golf for a living was on display. Smith popped open a beer, leaned back in a chair, and in a scene that would have given Dan Jenkins a vivid flashback to the 1950s, revealed to the three reporters sitting close by his journey in golf.

And then the column gets really good! Check it out here...and that's right, he's a Pepperdine graduate who knows his Sartre. I've never been so proud of the alma mater!