A journeyman golfer won his first PGA Tour title in 243 tries, battling 40 mph winds and his own demons with nothing but a coffee-stained sweater and a one-handed putting stroke.

Adam Schenk packed light for Bermuda. One sweater. Why bring more to a tropical paradise? Then the wind started howling, and that coffee-stained sweater became his uniform, his security blanket, and eventually, his good luck charm. He wore it for 90 percent of the holes at Port Royal Golf Course, coffee stains and all. It probably smelled terrible by Sunday. But it smelled like victory when it was over.

Schenk closed with an even-par 71 in conditions so brutal that tour officials moved tee times up an hour just to avoid the worst of it. The wind still topped 30 mph, gusting to 45 at times. His approach on 18 went long, possibly from adrenaline, possibly from nerves, definitely from trying to calculate wind speed while holding onto a one-shot lead for dear life. He putted from off the green because of the tight lie, and the wind pushed it five feet short. One more putt. That’s all he needed. The putter shook in the wind on his practice stroke, but Schenk gave it a smooth release and watched it drop for his first PGA Tour win.

Putting With One Hand Because Why Not

The most Adam Schenk thing about Adam Schenk’s victory? He spent most of the week putting one-handed. Not as a gimmick. As a legitimate strategy to fix whatever was broken in his stroke. He even practiced in his hotel room Saturday night between college football plays, rolling putts across carpet that broke left-to-right toward the window and right-to-left back toward the door. “I think the answer I came up with is there is no answer,” Schenk said with a smile about his putting strategy. On Sunday, knowing the one-handed approach wouldn’t survive 40 mph gusts on short putts, he compromised by letting his left hand “rest on top” of the grip.

The Grind Nobody Saw Coming

Schenk came into Bermuda ranked 134th in the FedEx Cup standings, two tournaments away from having to go back to Q-School. He’d made 11 cuts in 27 starts this year. He’d missed six cuts in a row at one point this summer. “I’ll go through and look at my results every once in a while,” Schenk said. “I’m like, ‘Wow, that was an impressively bad stretch of golf.’ It’s slightly embarrassing.” But he kept believing in his process, kept grinding, kept showing up. The breakthrough came when conditions were so absurd that creativity mattered more than perfection. Schenk hit quarter-swing drivers that barely got three feet off the ground. He pulled a 5-iron from 131 yards and still came up short on the 12th hole. On the terrifying par-3 16th, perched right against the ocean with wind ripping off the water, he hit his tee shot short into rough, lost his balance slightly on the chip, then recovered beautifully to save par.

What This Actually Means

The win gives Schenk a two-year exemption, entry into at least one Signature Event, spots in the PGA Championship and THE PLAYERS, and $1,080,000. More importantly, it means he doesn’t have to spend another week away from his two young sons and his dog, Bunker, at Q-School. For a guy who’s not much of a drinker because his kids wake up too early, the celebration would be modest—a few drinks with tour buddies on the way back to Sea Island. He left Bermuda the same way he arrived: with one sweater. But this time, he also left with a trophy. And the knowledge that sometimes the breakthrough comes not when you’re playing your best golf, but when you’re gutting it out in 40 mph winds with a coffee-stained sweater and a putting stroke that makes no sense to anyone, including yourself.