Trans-Miss Amateur Preview: 122nd Championship Brings Elite Field to Southern Hills

Will Zalatoris has some history at Southern Hills Country Club. In 2014, a lanky Wake Forest sophomore-to-be won the 111th Trans-Mississippi Amateur on Perry Maxwell's Tulsa masterpiece. Eight years later he returned for the 2022 PGA Championship and came within a three-hole playoff of winning it, falling to Justin Thomas on the same greens where he had lifted amateur golf's oldest western trophy.

That is the kind of arc the Trans-Miss has been producing for 125 years — and it is why this week matters. When the 122nd playing begins Tuesday, 144 of the world's best amateurs will chase a title that has served as a launching pad for Jack Nicklaus, Ben Crenshaw, Bryson DeChambeau, Collin Morikawa and Zalatoris himself, on a golf course that has decided eight professional major championships.

The Venue: Maxwell's Cathedral in the Heat

Perry Maxwell carved Southern Hills out of rolling Oklahoma ranchland in 1936, and it has spent nine decades punishing anyone who confuses length with control. The club has hosted eight men's majors — three U.S. Opens (Tommy Bolt in 1958, Hubert Green in 1977, Retief Goosen in 2001) and five PGA Championships, from Dave Stockton in 1970 through Tiger Woods in 2007 to Thomas in 2022. Gil Hanse's restoration, completed ahead of that most recent PGA, stripped the course back to Maxwell's original intent: wider corridors, shaved runoffs, and green complexes that reject anything struck without conviction.

The amateur pedigree runs just as deep. Southern Hills has staged the U.S. Amateur twice, the U.S. Women's Amateur that Babe Zaharias won in 1946, and the first-ever U.S. Women's Mid-Amateur in 1987. For the Trans-Miss field, the examination is familiar in outline and brutal in detail: Bermuda rough in July heat, crowned greens that shed indifferent approaches, and angles that reward the player who thinks two shots ahead. When the Trans-Miss last visited in 2014, only thirteen players broke par in the opening round.

Trans-Miss at Southern Hills: A Fourth Chapter

This is the fourth time the championship has come to Tulsa, and each visit has left a mark. Arthur Doering won the first, in 1940, when the course was barely four years old. In 1968, Philadelphia legend William Hyndman III — a five-time Walker Cupper — defeated Edward Hopkins 2-and-1 in the 36-hole final during the championship's match-play era.

Then came 2014, when Zalatoris announced himself to the amateur golf world. He would win the Trans-Miss again in 2016 at The Olympic Club, becoming the championship's first repeat winner in decades, before a professional career that has included a major playoff — at, of course, Southern Hills. The player who wins here Friday joins that lineage on the same ground.

125 Years West of the Mississippi

The Trans-Mississippi Golf Association was founded in 1901, making the Trans-Miss one of the oldest continuously contested amateur championships in America. For 106 years it was a match-play event, and the roll of champions reads like a wing of the World Golf Hall of Fame: Jack Nicklaus back-to-back in 1958 and 1959, Charles Coe four times, Deane Beman, George Archer, Ben Crenshaw, Gary Koch, Bob Tway and Mark Brooks.

From 1987 through 2009 the championship was restricted to mid-amateurs, before the TMGA made a decisive pivot in 2010: open entry, 72 holes of stroke play, and an explicit ambition to gather the best collegians and mid-ams on the best courses west of the river. The modern era has delivered exactly that. Bryson DeChambeau won at Meadow Club in 2013. Zalatoris followed at Southern Hills in 2014. Collin Morikawa ran away with the 2015 title at Flint Hills National by seven shots. In December 2021 the Trans-Miss became a founding member of the Elite Amateur Golf Series, where it anchors the fourth leg of the seven-event summer gauntlet.

The Man to Beat Last Year Isn't Walking Through That Door

Lance Simpson's 2025 performance at Indiana University's Pfau Course was one of the cleanest weeks in the championship's modern history: wire-to-wire, rounds of 64-67-67-69 for a 17-under 267 total, and a single bogey across 72 holes. The Tennessee standout beat Kansas' Cooper Schultz by four and collected the U.S. Amateur exemption that comes with the trophy. Simpson has since turned professional, which means the 122nd playing will crown a new name — and the field knows it.

The recent history suggests margins will be thin. Drew Goodman needed a playoff — and a closing 64 — to win the 2024 championship at Flint Hills National over William Sides, the third straight Trans-Miss decided in extra holes before Simpson's runaway. Southern Hills, playing firm and fast as a par 70, tends to compress leaderboards rather than stretch them. Expect the winning score to sit far closer to par than Simpson's 17-under, and expect the cut — low 54 and ties after Wednesday's second round — to bite hard.

What's at Stake

Beyond the trophy: an exemption into next month's U.S. Amateur, five years of exempt status in the Trans-Miss, and a significant haul of Elite Amateur Golf Series points at the season's midpoint — with the Southern, Pacific Coast and Western Amateurs still to come. The field draws from Trans-Mississippi Golf Association member clubs plus championship committee invitations, all of it walking-only, all of it on a course that has never once handed a title to anyone.