Pass the PAT
The tour nobody wants to be on

Welcome to the PAT Tour.

Assistant pros, PGM students, career changers, and good club players, every one of them trying to get off the tour. Seven in ten won't, this stop. Pass the PAT: First Try is the plan that gets you off it in one.

Get the book Find your number
Cover of Pass the PAT: First Try. A golf cart on a misty fairway at dawn.

Revere Golf Club, May 7, 2025. Target 158.

Seventeen days after failing my first PAT by eight, I took it again with the plan in this book. Here's the corkboard.

Pos
Player
R1
R2
Total
vs number
1
Colquhoun
71
71
142
-16
T2
Passed
 
 
157
-1
T2
Passed
 
 
157
-1
4
Passed, on the number
 
 
158
E
 
Everyone else in the field: see you next stop.

Medalist by fifteen. I didn't hit one shot at a flag all day. Eight of nine up-and-downs in the afternoon, twenty-eight putts, one bogey, and I was tired enough to feel it in my grip. That's the book: not the 71. The afternoon.

The tour, by the numbers

28%
Pass rate
National average, per Mississippi State's PGM program. Fewer than three in ten, on a given day.
5
Tries, for the average member who eventually passes
Five entry fees, five days off, five first tees with your heart in your throat, four drives home.
$150
Dues, per stop
Plus the cart, the hot dog, the fuel, and, if you're traveling, the hotel.
$0
Prize money
There's no trophy either. The leaderboard is on a corkboard and nobody wins it.
0
Birdies required
The number doesn't ask for any. It only takes things away for the big numbers.
1
Try, if you read the book
That's the pitch. Seventeen chapters, five appendices, and one day you never have to repeat.

You know you're on the PAT Tour when...

What's the number?

Twice the course rating, decimal dropped, plus fifteen. That's the target. Here's the half nobody tells you: your real budget is the target minus par for 36 holes, and on most courses that's twelve or thirteen bogeys, not fifteen. Type in the rating for your stop and see what you're actually playing to.

Then notice what the number doesn't ask for. No birdies. No greens from 200 yards. A card with no doubles on it, twice, and you're off the tour.

× 2, decimal dropped141
Your number for 36 holes156
Per round78
Bogeys you can spend (no birdies)12
One more, and it's next stop157

Drop, don't round: 141.2 becomes 141, and so does 141.8. The number on the board at check-in is the one that counts, so confirm it with the examiner.

Inside the book

It isn't a swing book. Nothing in it about your grip, your plane, or what to do with your left heel. The PAT Tour isn't full of bad golfers. It's full of good golfers taking a golf test as if it were a golf tournament, and it isn't one. Once you see the rules for the thing it actually is, you can't unsee them.

Part one: the test you're taking

  1. You don't need to play well
  2. Why good players fail the PAT
  3. Know the number before you leave the house
  4. Pick your site like a pro

Part two: six weeks out

  1. Audit your scorecards
  2. Build your bogey game
  3. The short game that passes the PAT
  4. Practice 36 holes, not 18
  5. The three-shot bag

Part three: test day

  1. Fuel: the day before and the day of
  2. The night before and the morning of
  3. The first tee
  4. Playing the number
  5. The turn and the restart
  6. When it's going wrong
  7. Rules that cost strokes

Part four: after

  1. If you passed. If you didn't.

Appendices

  1. The target table
  2. The test-day checklist
  3. The six-week calendar
  4. The per-hole decision card
  5. Rules and penalties on one page

Seventeen days apart. Same swing.

Boulder City, Nevada
April 20, 2025. Target 156. Scratch golfer, no plan, no sleep, and a case of the hooks I hadn't had in years.
164failed by 8
85 + 79A 9-handicap in my group passed on the number
Revere, Las Vegas
May 7, 2025. Target 158. Same swing, with the plan in this book.
142passed by 16
71 + 71Medalist by 15 strokes

Nothing about my swing changed in seventeen days. I didn't take a lesson. I picked a course I knew like the back of my hand, I slept, I showed up with a plan for every hole, and I didn't hit one hero shot all day. Center of the fairway. Center of the green. A wedge distance I could hit in my sleep.

Everything in the book is what I did between April 20 and May 7, written down so you can learn from my mistake instead of your own.

Who wrote it

Shaun Colquhoun

I'm not a tour player and I've never been close to one. I've been playing since I was five, when my grandfather put me in lessons before I could really hold the club. I came to golf as a career late and sideways, after the Army and after a long run in Las Vegas nightlife, which teaches you a lot about reading people and nothing whatsoever about hitting a 7-iron.

Golf Academy of America, Professional Golfers Career College, then the PGA Golf Management program at UNLV, where the PAT was standing between me and the rest of my career. I failed it. Then I passed it by sixteen.

I also wrote You Suck at Golf (And It Has Nothing to Do With Your Swing), which is the same argument for people who aren't being tested on it.

Get off the tour.

Paperback on Amazon now. Read it once, read the rules chapter twice, then go get your card.

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