The Pride of Rutgers Golf Tees Up for the Masters
A New Jersey native who is off to a stellar start to the 2026 PGA season, Chris Gotterup is the first former Scarlet Knights golfer ever to reach the pinnacle of professional golf—an invitation to play the Masters at the Augusta National Golf Club. He has the support of generations of fellow Rutgers alumni behind him.
Billy Garbarini enrolled at Rutgers in 1959 and went on to be captain of the Scarlet Knights men’s golf team in his senior year when it won the prestigious Metropolitan Collegiate Golf Championship.
“I had a lot of fun at Rutgers,” says Garbarini RC’63, of Somerville, New Jersey. “It was a great time.”
Since then, Garbarini has donated to the university every year since he graduated. “My college career cost me nothing,” says Garbarini, president and founder of an executive search firm. “I believe in giving back because if I wasn't allowed to go to Rutgers, who knows what I would've done?”
Garbarini’s support of the university has included decades of giving to the golf program. He has cheered for many excellent Scarlet Knights golfers who have teed it up over years, but he has never seen one who went on to play in the Masters tournament at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia.
That will change on April 9 when Chris Gotterup, a 2021 graduate of the Rutgers–New Brunswick School of Arts and Sciences, becomes the first golfer from Rutgers to play in the iconic tournament that began in 1934.
Garbarini has met Gotterup—who grew up in Little Silver, New Jersey, and played high school golf and lacrosse at Christian Brothers Academy in nearby Lincroft—a number of times. He has followed his rise in the pro ranks closely and will be watching him intently when the first round of the Masters begins.
“Chris was always a gentleman, just a tremendous talent, and he could hit the ball a mile,” Garbarini says. “I can’t root for him hard enough.”
‘The Highest Level’
Rutger’s men’s golf coach Rob Shutte, who recruited Gotterup and coached him in the four years he played for the Scarlet Knights, says former Rutgers golfers have played in the other three major tournaments that constitute golf’s Grand Slam—the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship, and the Open Championships (often called the British Open, where Gotterup finished third last year). The Masters is regarded as the most exclusive because it is invitation only and hosts a smaller number of players, usually about 90.
“It represents the highest level of a tournament you can get into as a professional golfer,” Shutte says, noting that Rutgers has had a golf team for more than 80 years. “It’s a milestone for our program. Chris represents breaking another barrier for Rutgers golf.”
Gotterup won his first PGA Tour event in 2024 but last year made a name for himself in the golf world when he won the Scottish Open, besting Rory McIlroy, last year’s Masters champion and one of the world’s top players of the past two decades.
Gotterup remains tight with the Scarlet Knight coaching staff, especially Shutte. "I definitely wouldn't be where I am today without Rutgers and coach," he said last year after the Scottish Open.
A Stellar Start to 2026
Gotterup started this season by winning the first PGA Tour event in Hawaii. In February, he won the WM Phoenix Open in dramatic fashion by rolling in a birdie putt in a playoff to beat Hideki Matsuyama, a past Masters champion and currently the top-ranked Japanese player.
The tournament in Phoenix was the reason that Gotterup had to decline an invitation to the wedding of former Rutgers teammate Jack Panagos. “What a weekend,” Panagos SAS’18 wrote afterward in a social media post that included a video of the former teammates celebrating his victory. “I got married on Saturday and my old teammate Chris wasn’t able to make it because he had to work. Watching him win with the boys was one special wedding gift. Amazing win my friend!”
The post went viral, prompting a story on the Golf Digest web page.
Matt Holuta, a 2018 Rutgers Business School graduate, was among the former teammates celebrating Gotterup’s win in the Orlando bar with the Panagos wedding party. “I met Chris as a recruit when he was on one of his recruiting trips, and I got to play with him when he was still in high school,” Holuta says. “I got to see him as a baby.”
Holuta, whose senior year coincided with Gotterup’s freshman year, says he wasn’t certain Gotterup would reach the highest level in golf. “You definitely always saw that he had talent, but it's certainly hard to predict when you are going to have someone whose game explodes like that,” Holuta says. “He's one of the best players in the world right now.”
As a professional golfer trying to make a name for himself in qualifying levels of professional golf, Holuta has particular insight into Gotterup’s success. “It is unbelievably competitive,” Holuta says. “What he's doing right now—it is so rare for that to happen.”
Gotterup remains closely connected to his former teammates and encourages Holuta’s play. “Anytime I do anything well, he always makes sure to reach out to me,” Holuta says.
And although Gotterup used an extra year of eligibility to play one season for the University of Oklahoma after four years at Rutgers, he remains true to his Scarlet roots. “It's amazing how much he still supports Rutgers,” Holuta says. “He's always talking about Rutgers and is very proud of the university.”
For another Rutgers connection to the Masters, see “They Call Him ‘Doc Hurley’” about New Jersey native and Rutgers turfgrass PhD alumnus Richard Hurley. He has been a leader in breeding grasses used on golf courses around the world. For decades, the Augusta National Golf Club has used cool-season grasses developed at Rutgers.
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