Breakout star of U.S. Amateur is relishing another Bay Area shot at glory in Walker Cup

PEBBLE BEACH — Niall Shiels Donegan will graciously insist that he was not the emergent star of the last month’s U.S. Amateur Championship at The Olympic Club. He is quick to point out that he didn’t even reach the final after being eliminated one step away.

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“You can call me the face of the Amateur, but at the end of the day, whose name is on the trophy? Mason Howell,” Shiels Donegan said on Thursday at Cypress Point Club, where the Scottish-born, California-raised 20-year-old will compete for Great Britain & Ireland against the U.S. in the 50th Walker Cup Match.

“We’re playing against him this week, and he played a great week at Olympic Club, and I’m sure he’s going to play great again this week.”

Howell was absolutely a worthy champion. The 18-year-old Georgian became the third-youngest winner of the Havemeyer Trophy and dusted Jackson “The Fridge” Herrington, 7 and 6, in the 36-hole final.

But with a bright smile, outgoing demeanor and a rabid following of friends from where he grew up in nearby Mill Valley, Calif., Shiels Donegan became the most memorable character on the biggest stage of his life. The tenacity of his golf certainly contributed, with Shiels Donegan overcoming late deficits in all of his matches before yet another comeback was thwarted on the 18th hole by Herrington in the semifinal.

Certainly, in the Bay Area, Shiels Donegan became a household name in golf circles, with his stature rising enough that he’s been invited to throw out of the first pitch at a San Francisco Giants game this coming Monday after the Walker Cup.

It has been a whirlwind few weeks for the college junior, who is beginning his first year at North Carolina after competing for two years at Northwestern. In fact, the highs of the Amateur didn’t last long because Shiels Donegan flew overnight that Sunday from San Francisco to Chapel Hill, N.C., landing at 8 a.m. and going straight to campus for a team meeting, workouts and to attend a couple of classes.

That had to be surreal.

“I think it was great,” he said. “Especially, Chapel Hill is a new spot for me. Just being able to see some familiar faces with the guys on the team that I've been practicing with over the summer. I think it was good for me to get out of all that attention I was getting that week of the Amateur and get me back down to earth and straight back to work.”

Raised in a household in which his father, Lawrence Donegan, is a well-known golf writer, Shiels Donegan also has a strong understanding of the media and its thirst for a juicy storyline. Had he won the Amateur it might have been a different story, but the young man ended up declining the slew of interview requests he received.

“I've always come from the standpoint of if you win, you've earned some attention, but other than that, you just got to get back to the grind, keep working, and it was a busy time for me as well,” Shiels Donegan said. With all that was going on, he added, “I just didn't think it was smart for me to be giving myself that much exposure at such an early time.”

Shiels Donegan’s rise this summer has been noticeably steep. Growing up in Mill Valley, he wasn’t a kid on the national radar, and he had a solid if unspectacular time at Northwestern, where last season he notched the third-best scoring average. This year, he made the Match Play of the British Amateur and was fourth in the St. Andrews Links Trophy tournament. After his semifinal showing in the U.S. Am, Shiels Donegan is No. 63 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking and has some ground to pick up, even against most of the players he’s playing with and against this week.

"I think, obviously, getting picked for the team was a massive honor, and to be able to play in the match on Saturday and Sunday is going to be great,” Shiels Donegan said. “But at the end of the day, it's just golf. It doesn't define who you are as a person. I try and live my life as much as I can, not basing it based on how I play my golf.

“I mean, I work. Don't get me wrong, I work as hard as I can to be good at this game. But at the end of the day, we'll just go out, see what happens, and my goal is just to have a smile and enjoy the experience.”

We know he’s dreamed big. In trying to get college coaches’ attention through recruiting videos, Shiels Donegan said he would post videos from his local muny every morning and tag “random” courses. One of those was Cypress Point.

“Yeah, I think there might be an old Instagram post saying ‘Walker Cup 2025 here we come,’ or something like that,” Shiels Donegan recalled with a grin.

Was he serious about playing one of amateur golf’s premier events, on one of the world’s greatest courses, near his hometown?

“Once I got that golf bug, it was certainly a dream of mine,” he said. “Going to that Walker Cup in 2017 kind of sparked it all for me. Yeah, it was a dream for sure."

Unlike most of the other golfers this week, Shiels Donegan was well aware at a younger age what the Walker Cup meant to amateur golf. In ’17, he and his dad attended the Match at Los Angeles Country Club, and he watched the likes of Connor Syme and David Boote play for GB&I. They ultimately lost to a more formidable American squad with a killer lineup that included Scottie Scheffler, Collin Morikawa, Will Zalatoris, Maverick McNealy and Cameron Champ.

“All those guys who are kind of now household names. They've won on tour, done great things in the professional game,” Shiels Donegan said. “I just think it's such a great kickoff point for what hopefully will be a long career.”

This week, Shiels Donegan treads visiting soil, though he’s certainly no stranger to the Pacific Ocean and Poa annua greens. And he’s hardly less American than U.S. team star Jackson Koivun, who grew up in San Jose.

But Shiels Donegan will wear the GB&I colors and can’t expect to enjoy the same fervent support he did at Olympic, if only because the lottery for precious few tickets this week wasn’t weighted toward Mill Valley. On Thursday, the Donegan family was still trying to scrounge up as many tickets as they could.”

From the excited look on Shiels Donegan’s face, he’d love it if was taking on American solo.

“I think it's one of the great opportunities we've got, playing the U.S. Amateur and playing the Walker Cup, to be able to feed off the energy of the crowd,” he said. “I'm fortunate to have grown up not too far from here, a few hours north, so I hope that they'll come out in force again and have some more fun.”