897 - Chris Como details his teaching philosophy and lessons from working with Tiger, Xander and Bryson

Chris Como joins Soly to recap his recent work with Xander Schauffele during his run to two major titles in 2024. We also talk through his work with Bryson and speed training from his home lab during COVID, his experiences as Tiger's swing coach and a ton more.

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A fresh, funny discussion of all things golf from the guys at No Laying Up. Episodes air twice a week and topics include tournament recaps, interviews, deep dive player profiles, golf travel, and more.

No Laying Up Podcast

Solheim Cup week is here and our preview features Randy, Cody and Tron looking at the course, team rosters, potential parings and a fantasy draft at the end as we try to select the top point scorers this weekend. Be sure to join us Thursday for a Happy Hour show once Friday pairings are announced, plus our Live Shows after the conclusion of play each day.

896 - 2024 Solheim Cup Preview 

895 - Revisiting the 2014 NLU PGA Tour All-Pigskin Team

895 - Revisiting the 2014 NLU PGA All-Pigskin Team

Ten and a half years ago, Neil posted a pair of articles on the NLU website naming a PGA All-Pigskin Team, placing current PGA Tour golfers on a fictitious football team.

On this weekend's pod we're back to update our roster and coaching staff.

I am absolutely filled up after the PGA Tour offseason. East Lake feels like it was ages ago. I used the time to fight down the number of tabs I have open, which currently stood at 73 open on the various Safari and Chrome windows on my laptop and 488 tabs on my phone. Made some progress last week but we're still not in a great spot on that front. However, I only have 43 total emails in my inbox, which is a win.

Randy really stretched the bounds of the “GHIN” category in the last G&T by writing about his dog, Arthur. This week, I’m going to reset us by getting really literal and talking about my actual handicap index and address some of the haters in the process. 

Barstool released a video last week in which Riggs (who seemingly plays 10x more golf than I do, yet has an impossibly unathletic move) challenges an internet commenter to a match. While I think a concept stemming from handicap manipulation accusations would’ve been more interesting/applicable in a stroke play format, that they pulled in an internet hater and then put him in the cauldron is something we’ve been talking about for years as a fun “what if” but never had the bandwidth to put it in play.

This comment, from a prolific hater of ours on YouTube, is what got me going on this topic a couple of weeks ago:

People see me play golf on camera and it’s often not pretty, which can be chalked up to a combination of factors: Playing on camera isn’t easy - filming a round is a pain in the ass and often results in various stops and starts. Sometimes good shots get edited out. Sometimes bad shots get edited out. I’m 38 years old, have two kids, and until recently, hadn’t worked out in a decade. I have an ugly over-the-top move, and many of the videos we’ve filmed this year have been the morning after a cross-country flight (and sometimes the day of that flight, or on another continent), and I’m the least flexible person on the planet. 

All of this adds up to a potent, high-variance, feel-based combination that can yield drastically different results round-to-round. I rarely warm up at this point — and usually play better when I don’t — and I’ve practiced twice this year and I often go weeks without playing. All of this is deeply self-inflicted and unnecessary, and I’m in the early stages of fixing it (

as are Casey, Cody and DJ - if you haven’t seen our latest video

I’m a 1-handicap because the GHIN system says I’m a 1-handicap. And there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of (or refusal to accept) how the system actually works. To refresh: the system only looks at your last 

 best score differentials to par when factoring in slope, rating, and conditions that day. At any given point, despite my volatile and streaky nature, the best eight rounds of my last twenty are usually pretty good. These rounds tend to come in the middle stretch of golf trips, after I’ve gotten a few days of golf under my belt, have found the bottom of my swing, and have mixed in a free afternoon to rest up and stretch.

Page Break

At various points during NLU, I’ve been called a sandbagger and a vanity cap, sometimes at the same time, which is interesting! I would rather be getting strokes from Soly, Neil, Ben and Cody, and have a far higher floor and a lower ceiling than I currently do. Something in the 3.6 range would be very comfortable. Unfortunately, I can’t pick what my handicap is!

I came into 2024 as a 2.1 handicap, before going up to a 3.8 in mid-February after some exceptional scores from 2023 fell off. I then got in gear with some good rounds in March, June and July that got me down to 0.9. Currently sitting at 1.4 and it’s trending in the wrong direction. I’ve posted 50 rounds this year. 28 of which were in the US and 22 internationally (I think I missed posting a couple of rounds from Australia, particularly RM West; I’ve also played quite a few rounds of alt shot that obviously aren’t post-able, so the total rounds played is higher. I’ve posted nine rounds from my home club, which is nearly twice as many as last year’s total already. Average score this year is 78.1, with the low round of the year an even-par 71 at Bel-Air on the fourth day of a trip there and the high round of the year the 87 fired at Colorado Golf Club during the event we hosted a couple weeks ago. Truly bleak, to the point that I’ve made the decision to shut it down for a few weeks, work on my body and reboot it from scratch before we get into the fall. Tear it down, rebuild, forgive, forget, things of that nature.

this from Brendan and Joseph over at TFE on the upcoming renovation work at TPC Craig Ranch

. I am fascinated to see how much lipstick they can put on that pig for $15MM #RememberTheFive #CJK5H

We had our Summer Festival out at Colorado Golf Club a few weeks ago and I was blown away. Bill Coore & Ben Crenshaw are two of the best to ever do it, and this is among their best work. It combined the feeling of alpine prairies that you get at Bandon Trails with long vistas and brilliant short par fours and some of the topography you see at Prairie Dunes. The par three short course was best in class, too. Can’t wait to get back. I am grateful to our friend 

 for making the trip out to Colorado to shoot for us and memorialize the day - here's a sampling of my favorites:

I want to shout out Golf Course Graveyard Instagram account. Always sends me down an interesting wormhole each time a new post goes up.

The other day I found myself watching The (Golf) Channel and they had a documentary called “Peter the Great” and it brought back so many memories of watching the European Tour in the mornings when I was early on in my love of golf. Alliss was a big part of that. I yearn for similar coverage these days. What an interesting man. I’m unable to find a link to any information on the Golf Channel Film, but 

here’s what (I think) they adapted it from

 and it’s just as good. Worth your time!

 Instagram account got on my radar in February and I watch every reel that goes up. I try to casually keep tabs on golf fashion, but the way that Raymond organizes, curates and delivers information is remarkably creative and draws you in. He’s got a good eye and a way with words, even if sometimes the golf fashion scene can make me roll my eyes.

Basically a consumption log of the past month or so.

We were out in Denver for the BMW Championship and I had a truly elite meal while out there. And no I’m not talking about the Shanahattan I had at 

. Instead, it was at an Israeli/Mediterranean place called 

. I thought about going back the next night but couldn’t make it work. That good. Will plan my trip around it next time I’m in Denver. Also failed to take any pics because I was so locked in on the food and the convo.

Popsicles run DEEP in the Schuster family. My dad, aka “The Franchise,” used to house dozens of freeze pops in one sitting. Then he went to the traditional “Popsicle” brand, before switching to their sugar-free version. My younger son Gustav is completely off ice cream these days and addicted to popsicles, or “posspickles” as he thinks they’re called. 

 entered my life about two months ago and I haven’t looked back since. There are half a dozen flavors I like and it’s sort of a dealers choice on which stores have which ones. Thus far, in order of favorite to least favorite, I’ve had the Rainbow Fruit Snacks, Star-Spangled Flag, Summer Sunrise, Blue Wave, Tropical Paradise Punch, and Watermelon (which is the only flavor I haven’t liked - an upset because I usually love all things watermelon.) I’ve seared the top of my mouth from eating too many of them on multiple occasions. An all-around elite product with simple, natural ingredients, and they don’t stain your mouth.

Weather is cooling off in Jax and I’m looking to get back into the cadence of gardening and cooking over the next few months with some increased time at home. I also want to do something extremely nerdy and organize my golf pencils (the one thing I collect from every course I play.)

Currently reading a book called “How To Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea” - I feel like I’m surrounded by it and don’t really understand it like I should. Plus, it’ll help my fishing.

A confluence of Legos, geography/climate and logistics.

Brian Kelly losing his mind. That’s not going to end well down in Baton Rouge.

Northern Illinois beating Notre Dame. In the past, this would’ve made me happy because of ill will toward Notre Dame (see: Kelly, Brian), but I like Marcus Freeman and think he’s moving that program forward and going through some growing pains and I legitimately hope he succeeds. This was all due to NIU Coach Thomas Hammock letting the gravity of the moment overcome him, speaking from the heart, and acknowledging all the kids who stuck with him. Along with Big Randy, I follow MAC football pretty closely and the transfer portal and NIL have completely gutted rosters over the last few years in a way that’s made it more difficult than ever to build a coherent program at a mid-major. Coaches spend a few years developing a class, only to have the top 20-30% get plucked away by a power conference school after a strong sophomore or junior season. To see a guy who played at NIU come back, do it the right way, experience the ups and downs and go on the road to beat the fifth-ranked team in the country as a 30-point underdog by dominating the line of scrimmage and overcoming bad officiating is why I watch college football. That resonated.

Seeing fans of other sports realize the depravity and ineptitude we’ve been dealing with from NBC’s golf broadcasts the last few years makes me happy because I know we weren’t the crazy ones. Jason Garrett is driving Notre Dame fans NUTS as the color analyst on their games. This past weekend’s primetime Colorado-Nebraska game featured Colt McCoy in the second chair in what I believe was his first-ever college football broadcast appearance, and it showed - he sounded like he was falling asleep at various points throughout the game, and then when he did try to liven things up there were whiffs of the 

 from the early internet. That’s not even Colt. The halftime studio show was abhorrent. I’m told that NBC having a second NFL game (in Brazil, no less) stretched them thin this week and they didn’t have a bench to draw upon, which, gosh, feels like something that could’ve been foreseen.

Between the budget cuts, an arrogance that pervades the entire organization, the disdain with which they treat the audience, and the wrong people getting promoted, it’s tragic to see what’s happened to a once-proud organization. It remains to be seen if their best-in-class (outside of the pregame show) Sunday Night Football production is falling off, too. Can’t wait for them to get their hands on the NBA!

Juxtapose everything above about NBC with this fantastic 

Bryan Curtis piece on Fox’s courtship of Tom Brady

 that digs into Fox's approach to talent. TB12 didn't exactly crush his debut, and while I disagree with throwing him right into the fire there's no doubt he'll get better and find his footing. Fox has built a deep bench and it stinks that Greg Olsen's competence led to him being considered a solid backup plan. 

 Somewhat related: YouTube TV! Finally cut the cord from Comcast and made the switch. What took me so long?

The Jaguars! Hope springs eternal. I’m hoping that Brian Thomas Jr. is everything I thought Calvin Ridley was going to be!

The U.S. Open ruled. Major championship tennis continues to be at the apex of the sports viewing ecosystem.

My fantasy baseball squad made the playoffs in our NLU league and looks to be on a collision course with Soly’s Infinite WAR franchise for the finals. It’s a keeper league that allows future draft picks to be traded, and I’ve completely leaned into that. Imagine the LA Rams of the last decade mixed with the 1997 Florida Marlins. I haven’t just mortgaged my future, I’ve got a reverse mortgage on it, too!

Haven’t been drinking much wine (or anything else) this summer. Just too hot and I've been focused on sleeping better. But when I have been indulging, it’s mostly been my friend 

. I’ll chill it down a bit and it’s just so versatile with whatever we’re eating. Light, fun, and kind of zippy on the tongue. I’ve canceled a few of my wine club memberships and doubled down on Darling, as it’s what I’m always reaching for.

GHIN & Tonic, Vol. 18 (TC)

One of the most interesting things about The Old Course at St Andrews is its ability to play in both directions – clockwise and counter-clockwise. Soly, Tron and D.J. were among the fortunate group that got to see the reversed routing earlier this year, which gave them a chance to reflect on a career full of trips to St Andrews.

The Old Course

Every summer night when I was a kid, I would sleep on the pull-out couch in our basement. It was cooler down there than up in my room, and there was a little TV where I could watch Baseball Tonight several times over, soaking up highlights (again and again) until I could barely keep my eyes open.

In the morning, I would wake up and play baseball, often by myself. Since I couldn’t pitch to myself, I would hurl a tennis ball against the garage, then get into my crouch and try to hit it over the house and into the backyard. I was a righty hitter, but had to play this game left-handed, because the second story was on the pull side, and I was trying not to break our windows.

I only broke a window once, at least from what I remember. Looking back, our next-door neighbors were ridiculously patient with me as I peppered their house with pulled foul balls.

When I grew tired of hitting, I would fire the tennis ball for hours against the brick pylon between our two garage doors, pretending I was painting the corners of the strike zone. I threw so many imaginary pitches, a wear pattern started to emerge on the brick. It’s decidedly not on the corners of the strike zone and might explain why I spent a fair amount of my high school pitching days craning my neck to watch balls sail over the outfielder’s heads.

That wear pattern still exists to this day at my parents’ house, a permanent reminder of what it felt like to be a kid who loved a sport in ways he couldn't begin to put into words.

I can’t say exactly when Joey Votto became my favorite professional athlete to ever walk the earth, only that it happened the way these things sometimes go, gradually, then suddenly.

He didn’t sneak up on me, necessarily. I saw his name in Baseball America. I read the scouting reports. I understood he might one day be a contributor to the ballclub. But it never crossed my mind that he might be The Dude. If you polled Reds fans in 2005 or 2006, I think 90 percent of us would have told you Jay Bruce was The Prince Who Was Promised. He was the Beaumont Bomber, the generational talent who had the potential to be a savior.

Votto seemed, by comparison, like just about any other prospect. There’s potential there, sure, but is there anything special?

He was a little older than Bruce, and he arrived with considerably less sizzle. A Canadian kid from the suburbs of Toronto, Votto’s approach to hitting in the minors was methodical, whereas Bruce’s was instinctual. Votto had a great ability to avoid making outs, and if he had a strength, it was his patience. Every at-bat was a chess match. Votto, vs. the pitcher. Bruce, by comparison, dominated minor league pitching with pure talent, particularly in 2007, when he was Baseball America’s Minor League Player of the Year.

It was easy to get excited about Bruce, and all the potential wonders soon to unfold. I had not one, but two Jay Bruce jerseys. I even sprung for the authentic one at a time when I absolutely should not have been spending $200 on a jersey, just because I could not stand how cheap the letters and numbers looked on the back of the replica.

It was hard to get excited about a guy with an excellent walk rate.

Baseball, however, was in the midst of what can only be described as a modern enlightenment, a sea change of strategy and thinking. It would take years for it to permeate the public consciousness, but Votto was at the forefront of the idea that the most important skill a hitter could possess was to avoid making outs. Home runs, hits and RBIs still mattered — and he compiled plenty of those traditional stats — but they didn’t matter quite as much as simply getting on base as often as possible.

Counting stats has traditionally ruled the day with baseball fans, but it led us all to very faulty conclusions. To this day, if I surveyed pretty much any audience with the question of who was the better hitter between Joey Votto and Tony Gwynn, the majority would almost certainly choose the wrong guy.

No matter how bad the Reds were during certain stretches of his career, no matter how far away they were from being competitive, he believed that every time he walked to the plate, the people watching (even if they were Cubs fans!) deserved his best effort.

I could cite a hundred different stats that would paint a picture for you, but here is perhaps my favorite of all: In 8,746 major league at-bats, Votto popped up once to the pitcher.

When Votto announced his retirement last week at age 40, I was surprised how hard it hit me. It was the end of an era for me, and thousands of Reds fans. But mostly I was grateful. I was grateful he never had an at-bat in the majors for anyone but the Reds, having spent 17 seasons in Cincinnati before one final stint in minors with the Blue Jays. I was grateful he came into my life when he did, and that he drew me back to baseball when I thought I’d left it behind.

I was grateful — in the end — for everything I got to witness.

He was only two years older than me, which seemed hard to believe when I was living through my 20s. Professional athletes never feel like they’re supposed to be your peers, but then one comes along, right as you’re coming of age, and suddenly the ebbs and flows of their career become a touchpoint for certain periods of your own life. If you’re lucky, they become a constant, a reminder of home, even as you live through job promotions and break-ups and celebrations and disappointments.

Votto made his major league debut in 2007, hitting .321 in 84 at-bats, but it wasn’t until 2008 that he grabbed a permanent spot in the Reds line-up. That was the same year I graduated from Miami University and ventured out into the world. I landed a job in Chicago, and I rented an apartment on West Patterson, 180 yards west of the stadium. We were so close that when you watched Cubs games on television from our living room, you could hear the roar of the crowd filter through the windows before the broadcast could catch up, the promise that something exciting was unfolding, somehow outracing your eyes.

I hated the Cubs, but the Reds meant more to me than I can properly put into words. I don’t really know why. They never did anything in my childhood to deserve the love, and through the 2000’s, the franchise was essentially in disarray.

But for some reason, I lived and died with every series, and when they came to town, I had to be at every game. For a weekend series, I might splurge for bleacher seats. But a Monday night game, you could catch me up in the rafters after scalping a $10 ticket in the 3rd inning.

The team was still mediocre, but Votto was already a force by 2009. I took almost a perverse pleasure in watching him torment Cubs fans. He understood his role in the rivalry. He’d trash-talk their fans, particularly kids, in the most playful way possible. He won the MVP in 2010, and he could hit at any ballpark, but his numbers at Wrigley were always especially good (.321 average; .422 OBP; 1.029 OPS) and I can remember sitting in a sea of Cubs fans, night after night, and feeling like: 

Being a die-hard fan of a sports team you grew up with — especially when they’re a small market team — isn’t particularly easy. You dedicate so much time and energy and free time to it, hopeful there will be a payoff that makes it all worth it. Votto was one of the few athletes to ever make me feel like every minute of my time spent was worthwhile, and in 2012, it felt like his moment, and the Reds’ moment, had finally arrived.

Their pitching was incredible. The line-up was solid. They had guys under contract, or under control, for several more years. They weren’t big spenders, but a long-term approach to team building had finally paid off. In the middle of the line-up was Votto, our patient magician. His OBP was a ridiculous .

 the best number of his career. In an early-season game against the Nationals, he hit three home runs — including a walk-off grand slam — in a 9-6 Reds win.

They won 97 games that year, won their division, and in the division series, they took a 2-0 lead against the San Francisco Giants. They were returning to Cincinnati for three straight games, needing to win just one to advance.

It was the kind of joy that felt like it wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

The Reds proceed to lose all three games.

When Buster Posey hit a Grand Slam in Game 5 of the series, something fractured inside me. I legitimately think I went into a pit of despair.

You try to be optimistic, you try to tell yourself they’ll have another shot, but deep down, I knew their window was essentially closed.

That was their best chance — Votto’s best chance — and it came and went.

The next few years forced me to reevaluate some things. Votto kept plugging away (he hit .305 in 2013 and led the National League in OBP for the fourth straight season) but something inside me had shifted. I started to question myself: Why did I care so much about something I had no control over that could wound me so deeply?

That’s a bit of a dangerous thread to pull on as a sports fan. There’s no denying that, at my core, I cared 

. But why? The Cincinnati Reds are the only professional sports franchise I’ve ever actually cared about. But 

? They haven’t won a postseason series since I was 

. As a kid, you never had to wrestle with why you cared about the team you’re rooting for. You just did it because you didn’t know any better.

But as an adult, I knew I was wearing the losses more than I should have. I knew a part of me needed to grow up, to stop investing every spare moment I had into the whims of professional athletes. If it wasn’t the Reds, it was an entire Sunday watching NFL RedZone. I needed something different in my life.

When my job offered me a position in Amsterdam, I decided to take it. I stopped following baseball, and pretty much all of American professional sports, almost cold turkey, knowing I could never keep up with the time change. What little free time I had, I’d spent on traveling or on following professional golf, which weirdly was the only sport whose time zone played in my favor. Also, it couldn’t hurt me! (At least that’s what I told myself. Yet the 2016 Masters would have something to say about that.)

I continued to get alerts for the Reds. I checked in on the box scores, the prospect lists, and the potential breakout candidates. But when I returned to the States three years later, I’d occasionally scroll past a baseball game and realize: 

Votto didn’t need me either, it turned out. He continued to grind, and give his best, even as the franchise began to crumble around him. He hit .326 in 2016 (with .434 OBP) and probably should have won the MVP in 2017 when he hit .320 and had the highest OPS of his career (1.032). The team around him, however, was dreadful. Bad pitching, bad roster building, you name it. In maybe Votto’s best season, they won just 68 games and finished last in their division.

I almost hated myself for thinking it, but a part of me wanted him to get traded. My affinity for Votto had outgrown my affinity for the franchise. He deserved better than this. The fans were furious with ownership, ownership was frustrated with the economic reality of trying to win in a small market, and Votto was like a kid watching his parents at each other’s throats at the end of a bad marriage.

One thing you grow to expect as a fan of a small market team (and a poorly run one at that) is that, when you do have a superstar player, eventually they’re going to want to move on to greener pastures. More money, a better chance at a World Series, and a more enthusiastic fanbase to play in front of. And that’s extremely understandable. The Cincinnati Reds are very far from the best that Major League Baseball has to offer.

Joey Votto was a lot bigger than the Reds, but not once did he ever intimate as such.

Instead of complaining, he showed up at spring training every year and said something absurd: 

I believe in the ball club. I think we’re going to be great.

They had no chance, absolutely none at all, and yet Votto refused to be anything other than the consummate professional.

A Farewell To My Favorite Athlete

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