‘Most pressure’: Devastation driving Cam Smith

Still chasing his first individual win for the year and desperate for Australian PGA redemption, Cam Smith will use this week’s Queensland PGA to get his competitive juices flowing again after six weeks off and with a career-first in his sights.

Having signed a LIV Golf deal reportedly worth $140m in 2022, Queenslander Smith has no qualms about competing in this week’s $250,000 PGA Tour of Australia event at Nudgee, where he hasn’t played since his junior days.

The only major champion in the field, and a former world No.2, Smith dismissed suggestions engravers should start putting his name on the trophy, conceding there’s expectation on him to perform having missed the cut in emotional scenes at last year’s Australian PGA.

“I would say I’ve got the most pressure on me out of everyone,” he said.

“A lot of people are expecting me to come down here and just win. I really don’t think that’s the case.

“I’ve played with a lot of these guys growing up, and they’re really talented golfers as well, so it is going to take some of my best stuff this week to get the job done, and I’m aware of that.

“I’m preparing well and doing all the right stuff, but I still need to go out there and play some really solid golf hopefully to get it done.”

Organisers haven’t done Smith any favours, sending him out 6.45am, local time, in Thursday’s opening round where he’ll play alongside Cameron Smith Scholarship pair Wesley Hinton and Kayun Mudadana.

But Smith is keen to get back into action in his first event since his Ripper GC team took out the season-ending LIV team championship in September, netting the quartet $20.

“It’s just good to be home and if I wasn’t playing this week, I’d probably be sitting on my bum at home doing nothing,” he said.

“I just thought it was a great opportunity to help out the Aussie tour and then also keep the competitive reps going before the couple of big ones (the Australian PGA and Australian Open) at the end of the year.

“It’s just really getting out here, being competitive, and staying in that mode.”

Despite his team success with Ripper GC on this year’s LIV tour, Smith has failed to secure an individual win in 2024. The last time he went a calendar year without a tournament win was in 2021.

With that firmly in his mind, the 31-year-old is even more determined to end 2024 lifting a trophy, or two, as he builds towards the Australian Open.

“For me, not getting a win hurts out there this year,” he said.

“I feel like I had a lot of good chances, I just wasn’t really able to get it done down the stretch. That’s the way golf is sometimes.

“I’ve been in that position before. It feels like you’re playing some really solid golf.

“It hurts a little bit, but in the long run, that does make you a better golfer.

“Usually, those stretches of golf have led to some really good stretches in the future, so hopefully that’s the trend that we’re going down here.”

While Smith’s top priority before the end of the year is winning the Australian Open for the first time, he can’t shake the disappointment of missing the cut in last year’s Australian PGA – an event he has won three times – at Royal Queensland and is still driven by it.

“I was definitely upset with how I played there last year. That’s the big reason I’m playing this event,” Smith said.

“I didn’t have the best prep going into last year. I probably had two months off before I got down here and not much practice in between.

“It was a real eye-opener to know what has to be done to prep for these events, and, especially the Aussie ones, they’ve always been so good to me.

“I’d like to think I’ve got a pretty good record, and to do something like that was pretty painful. I don’t want to let that happen again.”

Many expect Smith to stroll to victory at Nudgee this week, but he won’t take victory for granted.

With his regular caddie Sam Pinfold not with him this week, Smith will have his coach Grant Field on his bag.

“He hasn’t been on the bags for eight or nine years. We played nine holes (on Tuesday), and he was struggling a little bit, so he might get the sword by the end of the week,” Smith joked.