On the surface, Wilson Dicks is a curly-haired eight-year-old boy. He loves playing sports and card games, he reads for fun and is a wiz at math. But Wilson is a unique eight-year-old in one area: Golf.
Meet ‘The Chambers Bay kid’, a youngster who has played the challenging host course of this year’s U.S. Open more than 50 times in his young golf career.
It’s only a slight exaggeration to say Wilson was born with a club in his hand. Born in 2006 during the construction of Chambers Bay Golf Course, Wilson has grown up on golf courses. While other one-year-olds were learning to crawl, Wilson was already learning to swing his set of plastic golf clubs. Just a year later, he was playing his first rounds at the par-3 course in Interbay.
Wilson grew up watching major championships with his father, Ryan, on the couch on Sunday mornings, and his love for the sport and the players continued to strengthen. Wilson idolizes players like Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods, but those players might consider taking a pointer or two from the young golfer.
“I would bet Wilson knows Chambers Bay better than probably every PGA pro out there,” Wilson’s dad Ryan said. “Not many kids can say they grew up playing on a U.S. Open golf course.”
For anyone that knows of the perils of Chambers Bay, the course is barely playable for the pros. Many will struggle this week with the fast sloping greens and the treacherous bunkers that surround the course. But Wilson, a Tacoma native who plans to attend all four rounds of the U.S. Open, has played the course enough over the last three years, that he knows every bunker divot and undulation over the taxing 18 holes of Chambers Bay.
While Wilson still has some growing up to do before competing at a high level, he is inspired by young players in the sport, including 15-year-old Cole Hammer, who is the youngest player in this year’s field of 156 players and third-youngest U.S. Open participant ever. After recently receiving his first USGA handicap of 20.8, Wilson might not be far from high level competition.
The future certainly looks bright for Wilson, but he says he’s excited for now just to watch the pros play at a course he’s made his own over the past few years. And once the tents and grandstands are taken down, you can bet Wilson will be back on the course perfecting his stroke.