Instagram Andrew Landry with his wife Elizabeth at the 2016 U.S. Open.
Andrew Landry has said it before: he’d rather be fishing than golfing. The 31-year-old Texas native told Ozarks First in 2017 while on the Web.com Tour, “I enjoy this, it’s the most fun I get out of it. I’d rather be on this water then out there on the course.”
Despite his passions being elsewhere, he’s been pretty successful on the golf course. He won the 2018 Valero Texas Open, has earned $3,361,198 on the PGA Tour and finds himself tied for first place on the final day of the 2019 John Deere Classic.
His other great love is his wife Elizabeth, but even she admitted to PGATour.com how deep Landry’s love for fishing is.
Landry loves being outdoors so much – “If it starts raining for more than a couple of days, he gets cabin fever,” Elizabeth told PGA TOUR Entertainment – and being on the water, that Landry says if he didn’t play golf for a living, he’d like to be a fishing guide.
They grew up in the same town near the Texas-Louisiana border and went to the same high school in Port Neches-Groves. She went to Texas A&M, while he went to Arkansas. They met and starting falling for each other at a Randy Rogers concert.
“My brother and her sister talked over Christmas break,” he said to PGATour.com, “and she was like, ‘Let’s go to this Randy Rogers concert,’ and that’s when we met and the rest is history.”
When he proposed to her, he actually combined his two passions in a single event. He asked her to marry him on a fishing trip.
“I just thought it was a normal afternoon at the fishing hole,” she told PGA TOUR Entertainment. “The sun was setting, and I was concentrating on taking pictures.”
Landry got down on one knee behind her, holding the tiny box with the ring carefully in his hands.
“Hey, why don’t you take a picture of this,” he said.
Elizabeth turned around and “she freaked out,” Landry remembered.
“I don’t think she said yes, though,” he said. “But we’re married now.”
Without her, he very likely isn’t in the position he’s in today. He talked with Golf Digest in 2018 about how Elizabeth convinced him to reboot his approach after eight years of struggling to consistently break onto the PGA circuit.
“I gave up my mini-tour equipment deal,” he said, “and paid, which hurt, for a new set of Pings and started driving seven hours each way to Austin to get lessons from the legendary Chuck Cook, who’d trained (Joey) Savoie.”
According to Adam Stanley of PGATour.com in 2017, the two got married right as he re-entered Q-School. It was an anxious time for Landry, but one that he got through with the support of his new wife.
“She’s probably one of the biggest support systems I have,” he said. “My parents are still involved, my brother’s still involved, but she’s truly the one that understands professional golf because she’s seen me grow from a mini-tour player to a Web.com Tour player to a PGA TOUR player to fighting back to get a Web.com Tour card and fighting back to get a PGA TOUR card.
“She’s seen the highs and lows and she’s seen how I’ve reacted to them. You have to have that there. If you don’t have a good support system or someone behind you, it’s easy to get discouraged or want to quit the game. I’ve wanted to quit the game a bazillion times (laughs) and somehow you keep fighting back.”
The Landry’s now live in Austin with their son Brooks. When he needs time off from the family, he can find a fishing hole somewhere along the Colorado River that cuts through the city.
He tees off at 1:45 p.m. Eastern time for a chance at the John Deere Classic title.