The Spieth Balance Beam

Edition No. 21 | August 15, 2023

Hey,

I’m taking my sons to see Ohtani play tonight, and I’m probably more excited than I should be. If you haven’t seen (or heard) this video, watch (and listen) to it. It should get you prepped for some Lucas Glover talk below.

Onto the news.

Normal Moment(s)

All very routine sports stuff.

1. Great Traj

On Saturday, a massive FedEx jet did a flyover at TPC Southwind while players were hitting shots during the third round. Completely normal stuff that had multiple golfers turning their head, and, apparently, Jordan Spieth going full 5-year-old.

2. Lost in the Woods (my brain is broken by Disney soundtracks)

On a week in which Jon Rahm petitioned for more port-o-johns with the look of a man who has been desperate for a port-o-john a time or two, this shot of Taylor Moore hit a little harder than it normally would have.

3. Hell of a Plug

This was the exact scenario from Patrick Reed’s infamous dalliance with the Rules of Golf at Torrey in 2021. Except that, you know, Glover waited for an official to come over before he picked up the ball and an exploration for an indent in the earth’s surface began. Glover, like should have been the case with Reed, was denied relief but went on to make a 20-footer to save par regardless.

4. Icing his veins

This is like when QBs jam their mitts in the around-the-waist hand warmer when it’s 4 degrees at Arrowhead except the exact opposite.

5. Hangers

Golfers wearing their gear in the wild will never not be funny. Imagine this photo, but with Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro in their Heat jerseys and shorts.

Idea of the Week

They should have brought the FedEx plane back for the Cantlay-Glover playoff on Sunday. Since we’re no longer drawing pieces of paper from mini FedEx trucks (or John Deere tractors or BMW X7s) to determine who tees off first, you might as well get weird with it and have interns from Goldman Sachs and Srixon parachute from the plane.

First one to touch the water on 18 determines who hits first. We certainly had enough time to accomplish it, and as far as marketing for the PGA Tour goes, it’s hard to imagine anything more compelling than interns jumping out of a plane to sort out order of play.

Flagged

One of my favorite things in golf is listening to players (or coaches) talk about listening to the sound of other player hitting shots.

Here’s Max Homa on Saturday after Glover shot his third consecutive round of 66 or better: "Anybody who's ever listened to him hit a golf ball knows he's different."

Homa wasn’t the only one who talked about how Glover (like Ohtani) hits it, as my guy Min Woo once described, flush flush. Others chimed in with their (recent and distant) experiences.

Golf is so sensory, and nothing gets folks in this game wound up quite like a flushed long iron.

I heard a quote the other day from Patrick O’Shaughnessy (who has nothing to do with golf) that I thought of when I was considering Glover’s iron play: “There’s nothing like someone immersed in a field they love, no matter what the field.”

This, of course, has nothing to do with Glover, but more so with the folks who get wide-eyed when talking about his strike. And while I could listen to Glover (and a handful of others) hit it all day, I’m actually more interested in listening to those who are closer to it and even more obsessed than I am talk about how preposterous that sound — which must last for no more than a half second — actually is.

Flagged II

“I never bet on the Ryder Cup.” -Phil Mickelson

That such a sentenced even needed to be written is remarkable, but if — and this is a big if — betting $1 billion on professional sporting events (you may have been playing in) can be relatable, this certainly was.

Let me explain.

Nobody can relate to playing in a Ryder Cup, much less wondering whether you should bet on yourself in one. But everyone — literally everyone reading this sentence — can absolutely relate to the personal civil war we have each day of choosing right or doing wrong.

Shortly after the news of Phil’s detailed gambling history, somebody on Twitter (X, whatever) wrote this story about his experience of Phil’s generosity and magnetism from 2010 when he was a 13-year-old watching the reigning Masters champ at Muirfield Village.

The entire story — talking to a kid for 30 minutes during a rain delay and mailing him a putter cover after the tournament — is everything you want from Phil and, I would imagine, what Phil envisions from himself at his very best.

Life, though, is a constant tussle with the inner self. That this news and that story came out around the same time (surely the latter was informed by the former) was fitting. It’s Phil’s entire career. Should I try to hit a ball through this window the size of Bones’ head, or should I punch out? Can I hit a backwards flop over this bunker off a downhill lie, or should we just pitch away from the hole and take 5? Should I carry 11 drivers at different lofts or should I be a normal person?

Should I bet on the Ryder Cup as a player, or should I keep engaging with those around me so that they fall in love with the game?

As easy as it is to dunk on Phil, those two stories are all of us. Should I lay down my pride and apologize to my 7-year-old, or should I pretend like I was right? Should I help my wife by cleaning the kitchen or should I see what The Fried Egg posted on Instagram today? Should I write a note to a friend I know is struggling or watch another show?

As not relatable as Phil is (again, someone who once drank a $40K bottle of wine out of the Claret Jug), I actually find the combination of his demons and his angels to be extremely compelling. We all have them, his are just more public, more prominent and more fascinating than most.

How does this exist?

I was at the gym the other day (nbd), and ESPN was showing gymnastics highlights. I have no idea what happened in whatever event they were showing because all I could focus on was the balance beam branding you now see below.

1. How is this possibly a real company? 2. Also, how are balance beams $5,000? and 3. Has there ever been a more perfectly coincidental crossover symbol in the history of sports?

Crooked Golf Media

👉️ I did a Q&A recently about my career, a few media takes and how I like to keep things fresh in my day-to-day work. Rick Gehman, who is smart and completely underrated in the golf media industry, did one, too.

👉️ The Bryson-Phil match that Bryson put on YouTube is probably 10 minutes too long, but it’s legitimately very good. I remain convinced that if Phil had a personal camera crew he could talk to on the course over every shot throughout his career, he would have won 27 majors.

👉️ Joel Beall is the best longform writer in the business right now. This on a golf pro who took everything from his partners is as insane as it is excellent.

👉️ If you haven’t seen Spieth’s u-turn on talking about Phil, it’s amazing (and emblematic!)

👉️ Normal sport, baseball edition.

The Infirmary

True sicko behavior within the golf community.

Been where Porath is. Not specifically puddles and Azinger etc. but generally have been in this space more often than I’m comfortable with admitting.

Also enjoyed this from a follower, who, while watching the St. Jude last week, got on flight tracker and tracked the path of the aforementioned jet flying back and forth over TPC Southwind. True infirmary stuff.

By the Numbies

4.1 — You know who should have won Memphis last week? Viktor Hovland. He finished five back but lost over four strokes on the week off the 18th tee alone. Three water balls, two doubles and an absolute mess all the way around. It kind of feels like he’s going to win either the BMW or the Tour Championship. 

How is This App Free?

There were some great ones this week, but this response combo-ing Rahm’s call for more port-o-johns, a ride back to the tee and the dad life so many of us are currently living was chef’s kiss.

“The rough has gone woke” got me good.

This is not untrue.

I don’t know why, but this made me laugh pretty hard.

This is … kinda true?

Beall kinda got on a heater last week

Must Follow

This is an extraordinary sentence to type, but Shane Bacon is playing in the U.S. Am at Cherry Hills this week. Twelve months ago, he was putting up with me slashing and chopping my way around some of the most profound golf courses in Scotland, and today he’s taking on Gordon Sargent and Caleb Surratt in a USGA event.

Golf is beautiful (obviously) and one manifestation of that is this: No NBA writer could ever, under any circumstances play in next year’s NBA Finals. Same for every other sport. Golf, though? Bacon, who is a fellow nearly-40 dad with multiple kids who spends too much time on Twitter making golf jokes every day is currently like 450 shots from teeing it up with Jon Rahm in the opening round of next year’s Masters.

Bacon playing this week also made me think about this insane video in which Lucas Glover nearly whiffs a putt from like 1 foot. The romance of golf is tied up in its allure. Because you hit 65 or 75 or 85 shots a day in golf, you can always (always!) talk yourself into what could have been. In baseball or basketball or football, you often need half or more of your daily outcomes to have gone differently to change whether you played well or played poorly. In golf, you only need a small percentage of outcomes to have gone differently. And when the overwhelming majority did go mostly the way you wanted, it’s easy to convince yourself that all of them could have.

Anyway, you can follow Bacon here.

What I’m Interested In

I finished The Wager on vacation a few weeks ago. It’s by David Grann, who also wrote Killers of the Flower Moon, and the description of the book is that it is “a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative … that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.”

Can confirm, it’s great.

Also, I’m not sure how well I — who struggles to type on a fancy boy keyboard if my fingernails are like 1/32 of an inch too long — would have done in 1700s on a ship where hacksaws were not a point of leverage in your rhetoric about rogue golf leagues but rather the place your shoulder or knee might end up under after a day under cannon fire.