Tommy Fleetwood is one of the best golfers in the world and the 27-year-old from Southport, England displayed his considerable skill during the 2018 Open Championship. While he didn’t come away with a victory, Fleetwood fired an impressive 65 on Friday to zoom into contention and, in the end, emerged with a 12th-place finish that paid him more than $154,000.
However, Fleetwood didn’t immediately receive that money because, well, another man named Thomas Fleetwood did.
A.J. Perez of USA Today brings word of a bizarre mishap that briefly “benefitted” a 58-year-old PGA pro of the same name, who was stunned to see the money appear in his account out of nowhere.
“I didn’t know at first where the money came from because it just appeared as a wire transfer,” said Fleetwood. “When it (fully) got posted to my account, that’s when it said European PGA Tour. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out whose money it really was.”
On the flip side of things, Sean Zak of Golf.com caught up with the younger (and more famous) Tommy Fleetwood’s wife, Clare. She indicated that “apparently the payments were made manually, not on automated system and there are two TF’s somehow?” before referencing a tweet from Florida PGA pro Greg Thorner that actually alerted her to the mix-up for the first time.
https://twitter.com/GregThornerGolf/status/1027246829283540992
Fortunately, the elder Fleetwood seems to be a good sport, even with what might have been an annoyance. He jokingly told USA Today that he wouldn’t have kept the money “unless he won $1.84 million” and, in that case, he’d “disappear to Canada.” In reality, though, he had actually decided to contact Wells Fargo and reverse the inadvertent funds transfer before he even knew the full backstory.
It isn’t every day that a six-figure payment ends up in the wrong spot due to a “clerical error” from the European Tour but this made for a bit of a wild tale on the eve of the 2018 PGA Championship.
