PLENTY TO SMILE ABOUT
I t’s been more than five years since neighbours first filled Maureen Silverman in on details about the place her youngest son was born, and she still hasn’t quite wrapped her head around what they told her. “It’s really freaky to me,” she says.
Maureen was three months pregnant when she and her husband, Howie, moved out of their home in the east end of Toronto, wanting more space for their family that would soon include a fourth kid. The couple decided on a house in a subdivision about 30 minutes north in Concord, Ont. The home had five bedrooms, and was on a crescent that backed onto a ravine. There were baseball and soccer fields to play on, and trails and marshes to explore, and Howie had family nearby. “It was perfect,” Howie says, and in more ways than the Silvermans knew at the time.
Maureen had that fourth child, Ben, in tough-as-nails fashion, right at home. And it was only after Ben decided to pursue a career in golf that neighbours told the Silvermans that their home, and the entire subdivision, was constructed on land previously occupied by the Glen Shields Golf Club.
“Ben was actually born on a golf course — on a green,” Maureen says, laughing, having tracked down the city planning reports that show a Par 3 green where their home now sits. Every street in the subdivision is also named after a famous golf course — theirs is Point O’Woods Drive, after a track in Michigan. “Can you believe it?” Maureen says. “It’s like it was destined to be.”
Whether or not you believe in destiny, Ben Silverman made damn sure that a life in golf became a reality for a baby born on a green (basically). Those who know anything about Silverman know his hard work and never-quit attitude fuelled a seemingly unlikely journey to the PGA Tour, the oft-told details of which are too good not to mention again: Like, he didn’t play a hole of golf until he was 14 (Tiger Woods had five holes-in-one by then). He didn’t get serious about the game until he was 16 (Jordan Spieth made his first cut on the PGA Tour at that age). In the first round of his very first tournament that same year, Silverman carded a 118 (that’s 46 over on a par 72 track). He was a walk-on to two different college golf teams because nobody recruited him (Rory McIlroy signed a letter of intent at age 15 to play Div. 1 college golf).
And yet, Silverman earned his first PGA Tour card just shy of his 30th birthday. He lost his status two seasons later, but this past October, after three seasons spent working toward a comeback, Silverman achieved that goal with a win on the Korn Ferry Tour and a fifth-overall finish on the season-end points list. If you ask him, the golfer returning to Tour action at this week’s Sony Open in Honolulu is different than the one who last played as a regular on this stage, even if the same determination got him there both times. At 36, he’s in the best shape of his life — body, game and mind — and his target has never been clearer: “I have one goal,” Silverman says of his approach to the coming season, “and that’s to win. I don’t care what tournament it is, as long as it’s on the PGA Tour.”
T he Silverman family basement had one primary purpose when the kids were little: To be the site of hockey games. Howie coated the floors with what he calls “slippery paint.” He nailed boards up overtop the bare insulation, and left the whole space open, apart from an area for the furnace. “It actually looked like a hockey arena — it was freakin’ awesome,” Silverman says. “We lived down there.”
Silverman and his older brothers, Daniel and Joseph, zipped around on roller skates and Rollerblades. They didn’t shoot at the washer or dryer, they had nets. As they got older, games included other kids from the neighbourhood, and Howie would imitate Foster Hewitt and announce big plays.
Ben and Daniel took private hockey lessons starting from the age of five, and even worked with the trainer for the Toronto Maple Leafs. “We had stars in our eyes — we figured they were going to be professional hockey players,” Howie says.
But Silverman’s passion for hockey started to flame out when he was 14. Most of the kids he played with had had growth spurts by then and he was holding steady at five-foot-four and 110 pounds. “I felt like a little pipsqueak. I was like, ‘Everybody here is so much bigger than me, and they’re all as fast as me.’ There was no escaping,” Silverman says. “I felt like I was just going to get killed.”
Being a professional athlete had been Silverman’s goal since he was seven, though, so he needed another sport to focus on —“needed” being the operative word here. “As a family, we’re pretty obsessive compulsive around our passions,” Maureen explains. She and Howie were both professional musicians, Maureen as a concert violinist who played in pit orchestras and chamber crews in New York and Toronto, and Howie as a drummer who toured and played with legendary jazz artists like Dizzy Gillespie and Moe Koffman.
“Ben was in an environment where he saw I was determined and very accomplished and always practicing,” Howie says. “No matter what, nothing would sway me from my goals. I used to talk to him about that all the time: If you really love something and you really want it, no matter what stands in your way, you must keep your focus and stay determined.”
The message came from both parents. Maureen stopped performing music as the family grew, but when Ben was in Grade 1, she pursued a bachelor of science in midwifery. She used to cover the kitchen cupboards in Post-its so she could study while making dinner. “He witnessed all that — I had four kids I was raising, and I went back to school,” Maureen says. “The kids took it for granted that that was what you did. You wanted something, you pursued it, you practiced hard and you studied hard.”
That it would be golf for their youngest came out of nowhere. Ben played every sport he could in school, but his exposure to his future career was limited to mini-putt courses and the local driving range, where he’d whack balls as far as he could using rented clubs. “We knew nothing about golf,” Maureen says. “Like, absolutely nothing.”
The summer he was 14, she and Ben went to visit her family in White Rock, B.C., and she signed him up for a week-long junior golf camp after they walked by a sign advertising it. They bought three clubs at a Salvation Army. Silverman was the oldest kid at the camp by a couple of years, and the only one carrying his golf clubs in a plastic grocery bag.
On the final day, campers got to play a nine-hole Par 3 course. It was the first time Silverman ever stepped onto a golf course, let alone played one. “It was so much more involved than just hitting on a driving range, or playing baseball or hockey,” he says. “There was so much to learn and so much to get better at. So many parts of the game were tricky, and I love a challenge — I’m inspired by a challenge to push and conquer it. It’s almost like solving a puzzle: How can I get good at this?”
When camp ended, Silverman went back to the Salvation Army and skimmed through the $2 clubs, rounding out his trio into a set. It cost him $25. “I got a bag, too,” he says. “I was like, ‘I can’t be carrying my clubs around in a grocery bag.’”
Once he got home, Silverman started riding the bus to the local golf course to practice. He hit indoors during the winter. His is not a country club family, so he got part-time jobs at a driving range and a golf course. He could hit for free as a perk, and scored lessons from on-site instructors. He also sold clubs off the wall at Golf Town.
“All the work I did was just to be able to be in the golf world,” Silverman says. The sport took up basically all his free time. Yes, he went to his high school prom, but he didn’t party with the “cool kids,” as he puts it. He played maybe an hour of video games per week, usually with one of his brothers. “Nothing that would get in the way of me getting better at golf,” he says. After graduating high school, Silverman took a year off to focus on… golf.
He studied the scores, distances and averages to strive for. He took out library books about golf, watched VHS videos. But he swears he wasn’t a quick study on the course.
“It took me a long time to get good, because it was never a sport that was in my family and it wasn’t something that came naturally to me,” he says. “It was more of a mindset, determination, that I decided at 16 that I didn’t want to do anything else with my life other than to become a professional golfer and play on the PGA Tour.
“I had no interest in teaching. I had no interest in studying something in school that was going to get me a good job in business — like, I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was to be a professional athlete, and at that point I was addicted to golf. So, I was going to get good at golf and make that happen.
“And that was it.”
I t’s a Monday in early November, and Silverman is driving to BallenIsles Country Club, where he usually practices. He officially earned his PGA Tour card for the 2024-25 season about a month ago, and he stashed it — metal, credit card-sized and engraved with his name — in a closet at his home in Juno Beach, Fla.
The commute to the golf course is about 15 minutes. Usually Silverman would be blasting his go-to pump-up tunes, but there’s no music in the car today. Instead, the world’s 159th-ranked golfer is spending the drive talking about how he got where he is. And as many times as Silverman has heard Macklemore’s “Glorious” and Aloe Blacc’s “I Am the Man” — songs on repeat when he’s driving to a tournament or practice — there’s no doubt he’s told the story of his journey in golf more often. “Probably a million times,” he offers, give or take. Silverman isn’t tired of it, per se, but he much prefers telling the story to someone who can use it for inspiration. I promise him that’s what I’ll do.
The home where Silverman lives with his wife, Morgan, and their two sons, Jack (6) and Connor (4,) is right on the beach, and the family spends a lot of time barefoot. Morgan is currently the busiest of the four, homeschooling the boys, and was out the door with them first thing this morning. She’s also a big part of Silverman’s story and success on the course.
They met in rom-com fashion, waiting for their flights at a Florida airport, when he struck up conversation by asking the brand of her sneakers. A chiropractor based in New York at the time, Morgan thought Silverman was “really cool” but had to hide her disappointment when she learned his profession: “I thought watching golf was like watching paint dry,” she says. Just over a year later, they were engaged, and after they got married in January of 2016, Morgan switched from chiropractor to caddie ahead of Silverman’s first season on the Korn Ferry Tour, the PGA’s feeder loop. Knowing little about golf back then, Morgan was “a mind caddie,” she says. “My goal was to keep him happy and smiling, because he plays much better, and most golfers do, when they’re not frustrated about something that just happened.”
Morgan caddied for Silverman until she could no longer fit into her caddying clothes, when she was four months pregnant with Jack Palmer Silverman (named not for Nicklaus or Arnold, but for her favourite uncle Jack and the founder of chiropractic study, Daniel David Palmer). “She was a great caddie. She was never trying to give me advice on golf stuff because she wasn’t a golfer,” Silverman says, laughing. “But she was great at keeping me in a good mindset and trying to boost my confidence or keep me positive if something wasn’t going well. She was really, really good at that.”
His coach, Jeff Leishman, a Canadian and former PGA Tour player himself, says Silverman’s mental game is among the reasons he’s found success despite starting later than most pros. “What Ben really makes up for is in his self-belief and self-talk — it’s incredible,” Leishman says. “He is my new reference for how golfers should talk to themselves. Motivation and encouragement and belief, and emotion, at times. That’s a real skill. You’ve got to train it.”
Leishman recognized that skill during their first-ever lengthy conversation, in 2021, when they decided to start working together. Golfers don’t change coaches when things are going well, and Silverman was no exception. He had by then played two seasons on the PGA Tour before losing his status on that loop and the Korn Ferry Tour. Once ranked as high as 230th in the world, Silverman had fallen to 1007th.
“Ben didn’t appear to have a negative impression of his game, even though he really didn’t have any status anymore — he didn’t really seem like a guy that was beaten down too much,” Leishman says. “That in itself said something, and if you talk to Ben, you understand, that’s what comes across. He has this energy that he exudes.”
Silverman does bring a certain zest to everyday conversation. He talks at times in motivational slogans. He wakes up every morning and looks at Post-its on the bathroom mirror that say things like “Confidence is a choice” and “Act the way I want to feel” while he brushes his teeth. Some of those inspirational lines are borrowed, some he and Morgan have made up. And he credits Morgan for his “attitude of gratitude.”
“She pushes it big-time on me,” Silverman says. “To this day, if I don’t frame something in a positive way, she’s so big on that. She’s the one that has really molded that for me.”
Bryan Kopsick began caddying for Silverman in the summer of 2021, and part of his education on the job was around language he uses on the course. “He’s not saying something that’s going to make me think about a shot in a way I don’t want to think about it,” Silverman explains. So instead of, “Don’t hit it over by that bunker, that’s trouble,” Kopsick will say: “We want to keep it over to the right, toward that target.”
“Little things like that, we talk about on a regular basis,” Silverman says.
Kopsick recently left his job with an investment firm to work with Silverman full-time. “I’m not sure if I could be a good caddie for anybody else, but I know how to caddie for Ben Silverman,” Kopsick says. “My job is sort of to be his friend, his cheerleader, his psychologist. To help him stay positive and help him make the best decisions.”
The first week they worked together, Kopsick took a picture of all the motivational Post-its Silverman had, then wrote down every phrase in his yardage book. “It was almost like a checklist,” he says. “I would go through them like, ‘Oh, did I say that one yesterday?’ It seems silly, but those are the types of things that can really help somebody when they’re getting in their own way.
“And it feels odd when you’re kind of regurgitating these lines back to him, because they’re his own thoughts. But that’s what he wants and needs to hear, and that’s what helps him. And nothing makes me happier than seeing him do well.”
Sometimes, Kopsick will remind Silverman to smile if, say, he leaves a putt short. “I’ve had caddies come up to me and say, ‘Why the eff would you say that to your player? If I said that to my player, I’d get fired,’” he says, laughing. “But it’s one of those things he likes to be reminded of, because if Ben is smiling, he’s relaxed.” Silverman’s ball marker says “Smile” on it, the word surrounded by the names Morgan, Jack and Connor.
It hasn’t always been easy for Silverman to force a smile, though. In 2021, he made zero starts on the Korn Ferry Tour, and just one on the PGA Tour, where he missed the cut. A year later, Silverman missed four of seven cuts on the Korn Ferry. Around this time last year, Silverman’s world ranking was 1020th. He wondered whether his 59 PGA Tour starts might be it. He thought about quitting golf.
“He got very disheartened,” Maureen says. “He’s had to draw on a lot of inner resources to push through. He had reached his goal, made the PGA Tour, and he thought that once he got on the PGA this is it, right? You just stay on the PGA. But that’s not it. That was a tough lesson.”
When Silverman mentioned leaving the game behind to his dad, Howie said: “Hell no! You’ve got one shot in life, make it count!”
Howie suggested the coaching change. He also told his son to work with Bob Rotella, a renowned sports psychologist, to read motivational books and listen to inspirational podcasts, to get his mind and body right.
“I was never really considering quitting — that’s not in my nature, that’s not how I operate. It was more of a passing thought,” Silverman says. “Negative thoughts crept in because of how far I had fallen. I just had to snap myself out of it. I mean, if I quit, I’d regret it for the rest of my life.
“Never really trying to pursue winning on the PGA Tour again? Like, are you kidding me?”
S ilverman was 26 years old when he played in his first-ever PGA Tour event, Monday qualifying his way into the 2014 Canadian Open at Royal Montreal GC. He’d been a pro for four years by then, and felt ready-ish for the top level. After all, he’d earned his way there. It had been a real process, too.
As soon as he graduated from Florida Atlantic University, where he’d starred on the team as a walk-on, Silverman decided to try out the mini tours. In five weeks, he lost $5,000 (loaned to him by a cousin) and quickly realized he wasn’t quite ready for pro events. On a minor-league tour in Florida, it took him a year to get his first win, and he learned how to turn a 71 into a 69. He earned one start on the Korn Ferry Tour in 2013 and missed the cut. That year, he also won a gold medal in Israel at the Maccabi Games. In 2014, he had his first season on the Canadian Tour, where he managed a pair of top-10 finishes. “But it was still a bit of a shock,” he says of his debut on the PGA Tour, which happened nearly a decade ago. “Almost felt like my first pro event.”
Jim Furyk was one of his favourite players, and now they were on the driving range together, in the same field. “I remember seeing him there, and it was just nerves and feeling like I was in this new world where I didn’t know where I fit, and everywhere I looked there were these stars of the game, and I was wondering if I was any good,” Silverman says. “When I played, that’s when I realized how much faster everybody played. I felt like I was kind of rushing to keep up.”
Still, Silverman played well, missing the cut by just one after a double-bogey on the final hole on Friday. He and Morgan had been dating for just a couple of months then, and it was the first tournament she watched him live. “I was like, ‘Don’t get used to this yet, because I don’t have status on this tour,’” he says.
He earned that status three years later, the same season he won for the first time on the Korn Ferry Tour, at the 2017 Price Cutter Championship. Silverman had planned to skip that tournament; Morgan had given birth to Jack just three weeks earlier. But she’d convinced him to play again, so despite not having practiced in weeks and running on very little sleep, Silverman set off for Springfield, Mo., with very low expectations.
“Maybe it was my freshness going into it, naivety, because I hadn’t been practicing, but I was playing well and just in this flow state with my golf game where I knew exactly where the ball was going,” he says.
Silverman earned the win in a playoff, and his flow state continued right into the fall of his rookie season on the PGA Tour. In just his second start, he finished T-8, and bettered that a couple weeks later with a T-7.
Then came the West Coast swing to kick off 2018. Thanks to his play in the fall, Silverman had qualified for marquee tournaments. He found himself in fields with McIlroy and Matt Kuchar, and playing more difficult courses. “I entered a new world again and I was like, ‘Aw shit, my game doesn’t seem ready for this,’” he says, laughing. “I felt like it was another step up, and I was thinking, ‘I need to get better.’ The rest of the season was kind of a battle to keep my card.”
Silverman survived that battle, and made more cuts than he missed, earning nearly $800,000 that rookie season. But in the 2018-19 campaign, he missed more cuts than he made, and he lost his card.
“I noticed there were parts of my game I needed to improve on,” he says. “I didn’t realize how much, really. Until now.”
T he Wi-Fi was spotty at best, so connecting with family and friends from the Great Abaco Classic in the Bahamas was nearly impossible. Morgan and the boys hadn’t made the trip, but she’d written out motivational notes and planted them in his suitcases. Silverman posted them up all over his Airbnb.
It was January 2023, and he’d been a late addition to the field, thanks to a sponsor’s exemption. With no status on the Korn Ferry Tour, there was no guarantee Silverman would play any other tournaments that year. “He had that ‘I’ve got nothing to lose’ mentality, and he was so eager to get out there and compete,” Kopsick says. “And then once he started playing, you could kind of see something special happening.”
The birdies started falling, in bunches. “Players in our group said they’d never seen anyone putt like this,” Kopsick says. “The hole was the size of the Atlantic Ocean for Ben that week. He would look up at a putt and just make it — didn’t matter where it was from.”
On Sunday, as he stood on No. 18, Silverman had a three-shot lead over the next-closest player in the field, American Cody Blick. It had been five years since Silverman’s last professional win, and he figured the drought was about to end. Then Silverman double-bogeyed the hole, Blick birdied it, and suddenly they were headed to a playoff.
It would’ve been understandable if Silverman had been too rattled to compose himself, but on that first playoff hole, he kept his ball in play and Blick got into penalty trouble. Silverman had a 40-footer uphill, which he left three feet short. He tapped that in for the win, then pumped his fist and gave Kopsick a long hug on the green.
“When I was on that green, I started to cry,” Kopsick says. “I knew what that meant for him and what it meant for me. I knew he was such a great golfer. We just hadn’t had any sort of breakthrough.”
Leishman managed to get through on FaceTime, and spoke to the guys while they were still on the course. “They were euphoric. They were glowing and excited,” the coach says. “But there was certainly the sense of: ‘Okay, that’s done. What’s next?’”
About two minutes into the call, Silverman told Leishman: “I want to win the money title.” He didn’t manage that to close out 2023 on the Korn Ferry Tour, but Silverman came close, finishing sixth overall, with more than $500,000 in earnings.
“He’s very good at refocusing,” Leishman says. “He never gave the impression that it was over. Even now after having a very good season, he’s not done. He’s definitely wanting to continue at the next level.”
Leishman knew Silverman had what it takes to win on the PGA Tour when he watched him play at the 2022 U.S. Open, Silverman’s first and only major to date. “He missed the cut by a couple, but talking to him after that, he had a really good handle on it. It was a fabulous test that week,” Leishman says. “When I was there with Ben, I did really feel like, ‘Yeah, this guy has it. It didn’t happen this week, but it’s going to happen.’”
Silverman shares that belief, and with a second shot he has the benefit of applying lessons from his first time on Tour.
“It was always this learning curve, every new level that I jumped,” he says. “My game is at a point now where I know it’s good enough and I’m still working on improving it even more, constantly. I’ve got a different level of comfort and confidence moving forward now that I didn’t have before. I feel like I don’t have those issues with those long learning curves anymore. I’ve been at the highest levels. I feel like I know what to expect from every part of the game.”
For Howie, knowing his son will be back on the PGA Tour leaves him feeling a wave of relief, more than anything. Maureen says a lot of friends tell her, “you must be so proud.” But pride doesn’t get top billing. “I just feel so incredibly grateful that he’s found something that he’s passionate about,” she says, “and that he’s succeeding.”
Siverman will tee it up to start off this season at the Waialae Country Club in Honolulu on Jan. 11, his first tournament as a member of the Tour since August 2019, 1,623 days since he last played on the biggest stage as a card-carrying member.
“Ever since I lost the PGA Tour, all I’ve been wanting to do and trying to do is to get back to the PGA Tour,” Silverman says. “But we finally did it. I feel like I’m a much better player for it. And now I’m ready to actually compete on the PGA Tour instead of just be out there. Now I’m ready to go.”
And who can doubt that? After all, Silverman was basically born for this.