Mario Lemieux’s Son Earned His PGA Tour Debut. Most Famous Kids Just Get Handed One

Sixty-eight men showed up at the Country Club of Winter Haven on October 12 for four spots in a PGA Tour field. Austin Lemieux shot 66, six under, and finished tied for second.

That’s the whole story, and it would be the whole story even if his name were Smith.

His name isn’t Smith. He’s the only son of Mario Lemieux, which is why most of the outlets covering it led with the number instead of the round: 66, his father’s old jersey number, shot by his father’s son to reach his first PGA Tour event. The coincidence is too perfect. It’s also, in a way, the wrong story. Because a 66 is what you shoot when you want to qualify on Monday morning with no margin, and the Lemieux family has been shooting 66s for years.

The qualifier was held a week early so the four winners could arrange travel to Bermuda. It was only Lemieux’s second attempt at one, ever. Adam Long took the medal with 64. Matthew Anderson and Willie Mack III took the other three tickets at 66. Career pros, chasing the same thing. And Lemieux is a 30-year-old amateur who used to play hockey for a living, or tried to.

The hockey part is its own small pile of sixes. He played a season with the Omaha Lancers in the USHL, then two seasons at Arizona State: 66 career NCAA games, 7 goals, 20 assists, no NHL contract. He walked away in 2020. For good. He’d been playing golf since he was eight, mostly badly enough by the family standard that it took him until 21 or 22 to beat his father. “He shot a lot of 66s and 67s,” Austin said this week in Bermuda, of Mario. So the number everyone is treating as destiny is the number that used to beat him at home.

Mario Lemieux, the hockey player, was also a golfer in the way that worries club champions. He won the 1998 American Century Championship at Edgewood Tahoe (final-round 69, total 212, one shot better than Billy Joe Tolliver and Dick Anderson) and has been an around-scratch player ever since. He was at that same celebrity tournament in 2008, the photo above, with 2007 champion Chris Chandler, while his son was learning the swing that would eventually make a Monday qualifier card.

Since retiring from hockey, Austin has built the kind of résumé that reads like a man who decided to stop being famous-adjacent and start being good. He won the Western Pennsylvania Mid-Amateur in 2023 and again last month at Fox Chapel (67-66, four-shot margin, with a hole-in-one on the third hole of the final round, the fourth ace of his life). A week before Winter Haven, he’d won on Florida’s Minor League Golf Tour at Indian Spring, in a playoff. His one previous taste of Tour-sanctioned golf, a Korn Ferry start in 2024, went 78-68 and home early. He’s registered for PGA Tour Q-School’s three stages this fall, which is where this is all actually headed. Bermuda is the detour.

The celebrity route into professional golf runs on sponsor exemptions. The tournament hands you a spot because your name sells tickets. Steph Curry got one in 2017 and shot 74-74 on what was then the Web.com Tour, missing the cut by eleven. Tony Romo got one at the 2018 Corales Puntacana and shot 77-82, dead last in a 132-man field, sixteen shots off the cut. Jerry Rice got three. He missed all three. The exception is John Daly II, who took his exemption at this year’s Puerto Rico Open and actually made the cut, finishing T37 after briefly leading on Saturday. Charlie Woods, 17, the most-watched golf teenager alive, has never played a PGA Tour event at all.

Austin Lemieux didn’t ask for one of those. He went to Florida on a Monday and took a spot from 64 players who wanted it, in his second try. He wasn’t invited to the party. He crashed the door list. Golf’s history has room for late starters who earned their way: Calvin Peete didn’t pick up the game until 23 and won 12 Tour events; Larry Nelson started in his twenties and won three majors. But it has almost no room for famous sons who qualified on Monday morning. Almost none of them do it.

Lemieux is still an amateur. If he makes the cut on Friday at Port Royal he earns exactly zero dollars. The $6 million purse, the $1.08 million winner’s check, the 500 FedExCup points — all of it adjusts around him to eligible professionals. He also gets no status, no exemption, nothing that carries to next week. What he gets is the experience and the number: top 65 and ties after 36 holes, against a field where the defending champion Adam Schenk needed 243 starts to win his first, and the wind is forecast to howl.

The people who broke the story saw all of this before the outlets did. Monday Q Info, the X account that covers the qualifiers nobody watches, posted the scoop on October 12: “Pretty damn cool story at todays Monday Q for Bermuda… Austin Lemieux, son of the legendary Mario Lemieux just shot 66 and qualified for his first ever PGA Tour event… He’s legit and adds a pretty cool story line to the field.” The PGA Tour’s own account followed with the family line, 66, his dad’s longtime number, and noted the Q-School signup. And in Pittsburgh, where this story reads differently, the Facebook page Straight Outta Pittsburgh posted the news to 220,000 followers and got three thousand likes and the only reaction that mattered: “66 though…C’Mon!!! 🥹”

Lemieux did a sit-down with Pittsburgh anchor Bob Pompeani in Bermuda, at the tournament backdrop, and sounded like a man trying to be honest about the size of the week. “My game was good enough to get through the Monday qualifier,” he said. “It’s been trending in the right direction for some time now.” And: “I’m already pretty nervous, a little bit.” Mario and Nathalie are in Bermuda to watch. Nathalie, Austin says, is also a very talented player. Nobody asked what it costs to raise two scratch golfers and a hockey legend in one house.

He teed off Thursday morning at 7:52 a.m. Eastern alongside Luke Clanton and Neal Shipley, two of the best young players on the planet, at a par-71 Port Royal measuring 6,828 yards with weather moving in. The cut is the only scoreboard that matters for him. Not because of the money (there is none for him), but because Friday is the first time anyone will find out whether the family standard travels. The 66 got him to Bermuda. Everything after that, he’s earning the same way he got here, with nothing handed to him. One round at a time. No exemptions.