Fifth-year senior Rob Tighe’s game has improved vastly
since he first set foot in Ann Arbor. He has come a long way on the
Michigan men’s golf team since his freshman year. As a
collegiate walk-on, Tighe red-shirted his freshman year, and only
played in two tournaments his sophomore year. But for Tighe, golf
wasn’t necessarily about playing — it was about his
love for the game.

“Even by my sophomore year, I didn’t get a chance to
play that much,” Tighe said. “But I kept practicing
because I really enjoy the game.”

Tighe said that his love for golf began in Arizona —
before his family moved to Michigan — when the men in his
family introduced him to the sport.

“Sometimes I was with my stepdad and sometimes I was with
my dad, but we would go and play a couple of rounds at random times
during the week, ” Tighe said.

He started hitting the links more often when he started playing
in high school competitions.

Today, Tighe enjoys traveling all over the country for golf
tournaments, but his main focus is improving his game. Tighe earned
a scholarship for playing golf by his junior year.

“I had to give him a scholarship going into his junior
year,” Sapp said. “He paved his own way and his hard
work is really paying off.”

But hard work does not prepare you for everything. Tighe
experienced a mishap while the team traveled to Bandon Dunes, Ore.,
for the Big Ten-Pac 10 Challenge. When they transferred from
Northwest Airlines to Horizon Airlines in Seattle, Tighe’s
bag of 14 golf clubs, worth $2,500, was misplaced. He still had not
located his clubs by the time the practice for the tournament
began, and had to borrow a local professional’s golf clubs
for the practice rounds of the tournament. And according to junior
Christian Vozza, the new clubs did not fit him properly.

“Tighe is pretty tall,” Vozza said, “So his
clubs are longer than standard clubs.”

Luckily, Tighe’s clubs arrived just in time for the
tournament. He finished the tournament 45th with a score of 156,
tying with freshman teammate Brian Ottenweller.