The Nest Invitational Tournament (NIT) is No Laying Up’s year-end championship and the culmination of our 2024 event series presented by YETI. This year, 96 participants spanning 4 countries traveled to Dobson Ranch Golf Course in Mesa, Arizona in hopes of becoming the 5th NIT champion. For more information on how to qualify for the 2025 NIT and No Laying Up’s upcoming 2025 events schedule, 

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MESA, AZ — For 54 holes, Ben Reinhart (@reinben) was struggling to hit a draw.

It hadn’t truly mattered. At least not yet. He’d been playing great golf through the first three rounds of the No Laying Up Nest Invitational Tournament at Dobson Ranch, and now he was in the thick of the finals, in contention.

He wasn’t leading, but anything and everything felt possible.

Still, it was a bit like showing up at a party without your most reliable friend.

A draw, in recent months, had become one of his best weapons — a big, booming, beautiful, right-to-left ball that seemed to scoff at the wind and dance on jetstream before it tumbled back to earth. That draw had helped him earn a berth into this tournament, his first appearance in the NIT, when he rode it to victory at The Olympic Prolific at Gearhart Golf Course. But ever since he showed up in Arizona, it had deserted him. Maybe it was a blessing, he decided. After all, you could miss right everywhere at Dobson. He was going to lean into it.

But when Reinhart stood on the 13th tee at Dobson Ranch, a Par 5 with a sharp dogleg to the left, he decided he would try — one last time — to turn a ball over. He picked out a line with his caddie, Calvin Cotton, and set up over the ball. He pulled the club back, coiling his body like a predator ready to strike, and fired his left hip. He hammered his drive with a vicious lash, then watched as it rocketed toward the dogleg.

If it went straight or drifted right, it might end up in the trees.

But gently, for the first time all weekend, his ball began peeling to the left. It cut the corner and came to rest more than 300 yards from the tee.

“My best drive of the week,” Reinhart said.

He had just under 200 yards, roughly a good 6-iron, left into the green.

An inflection point had emerged. This was his chance.

“That pin was kind of tucked behind that front bunker,” Reinhart said. “So I just aimed at the right part of that green thinking, ‘If it doesn’t draw, I'll be pin high, and I'll have a putt at it. But if it draws, it’s a great shot.’

Cotton, who has been Reinhart’s best friend since they were in college together at the University of Washington, knew the shot was something special seconds after it left the clubface. He told Reinhart as much as they watched the ball reach its apex.

“Every time you hit a good one, I let you know when it’s in the air,” Cotton said. “But I didn’t know how close it really was until I heard the people around the green were like ‘Woah!’”

The ball finished inside 10 feet, and when Reinhart trickled in the eagle putt, he soared up the leaderboard and grabbed control of the tournament.

There would be a few nervous moments down the stretch, including a clutch par on 18 when he hit a flop shot over a row of carts to make a par that secured the win by a single point, but once it was over, it was the approach for eagle that stood out as the shot of the NIT.

“Just hit one of the best shots I've ever hit,” Reinhart said.

In the five years of its existence, the NIT has produced a wide array of winners. We’ve had mid-handicaps and high-handicaps grab the title, and even an emerging LPGA star put on the plaid coat after a 2-day torrential rainstorm. But the connective tissue is ultimately how badly each of them wanted to win this meaningful-but-ultimately-meaningless golf tournament. Reinhart is no different.

“It’s just fun to have that exhilarating feeling,” Reinhart said. “And that's what I love about playing in the Roost events is that you get a little bit of that, but it doesn't actually matter. You're there with your friends playing golf and that's what it's all about. And so it was definitely a similar vibe here.”

Reinhart, 31, lives in Seattle and works for AWS in their billings operation team, but he grew up in Port Townsend, Washington, a small waterfront community on the Olympic Peninsula with around 10,000 residents that sounds like something you’d read about in a literary novel.

“It is a Victorian seaport, so there's a lot of old Victorian houses,” Reinhart said. “There's a wooden boat building school, so there's a little harbor and stuff. It's kind of a seaport.”

He learned the game around the age of six from his father, Steven, and they did countless loops around the one golf course in town, the 9-hole Port Townsend Golf Course that has a rating of 32.9 and a slope of 114 and tips out at a menacing 2,700 yards. He played for his high school team, but more for fun than fanfare.

“I wasn't very good, but it was fun, at least where I was for high school sports, it was the most laidback,” Reinhart said. “Everybody was out there just to have a good time.”

After graduation, he went to the University of Washington and didn’t have a lot of time for golf. The game slipped away from him a bit, as it does for many young people. But when Reinhart was living in the dorms, Cotton (who lived on a different floor of Haggett Hall) walked into the common living area one day, sat down, and they started watching a Seahawks game together.

They didn’t realize it right away, but a friendship (and eventual golf partnership) was born.

“I was never into golf,” Cotton said. “My grandpa was a big golfer and I have a distinct memory of when I was 10, my grandfather took all his grandsons out to play golf and I hit the ball into a tree and just burst into tears. It wasn’t for me. But when COVID rolled around, Ben messaged me and was like ‘We can’t do anything. All we can do is go outside and play golf. If you’re ever going to learn, now is the time.’ The rest is history. The bug hit me pretty hard.”

They started playing together every weekend, and Cotton gradually got better and better. When Reinhart and Cotton both qualified for the NIT, they made each other a promise they’d caddie for the other person if either made the finals. When Reinhart finished +7 over his quota in Round 2, it became clear he was likely going to be in the mix.

“I didn't want to embarrass myself,” Reinhart said. “It was kind of the bare minimum expectation. I knew if I just kind of kept my head down and played my game, I'd be in it.”

Cotton and Reinhart talked their way through some tense situations in the final, including a wild sequence of events on the Par 3 12th when Reinhart chunked his tee shot woefully short of the green. It landed in one of the cement canals that winds through Dobson Ranch, then ricocheted backward. It left him with a 55-yard pitch over the bunker to a tucked pin.

“I was like ‘Well, I’ve got to hit with it in order to get it close at all,” Reinhart said. “And when I hit it, I thought ‘Boy that is going to be really close to not clearing that bunker.’ It just barely did and rolled out to like six or seven feet.”

He made the putt for par, securing a crucial two points. Then on the 16th hole, Reinhart cold topped his driver off the tee, leaving him in no man’s land and still nearly 250 yards from the hole. He thought about laying up to the corner of the dogleg, but knew he was almost certainly going to make bogey, and possibly worse. He and Cotton talked it over and he decided to hit a high draw with a hybrid, and Reinhart hit possibly his second-best shot of the day, drawing it around a tree and leaving it in front of the green. He didn’t get up and down for par, but the easy bogey secured yet another crucial point.

Reinhart didn’t want to know where he stood in the tournament when he got to the 18th tee. He was too nervous to think about it and tried to block out a dozen spectators repeatedly asking him if he wanted to know his position. As it turned out, he needed a bogey to tie Dustin Ball of the High Cotton Club and a par to win outright.

His drive found the massive bunker in the middle of the fairway.

Reinhart decided his best bet was to advance the ball as far as he could, and he nuked an approach with a hybrid that went way right of the green, nearly the 10th hole. A massive train of golf carts was now blocking his path to the green, and with the sun sinking low in the sky, confusion briefly reigned. Did Reinhart want the carts moved? Was there going to be enough light left to finish if he did? Did he realize he was chipping 

Reinhart and Cotton talked it over. They decided the carts could stay. He was always going to hit a flop shot, so why complicate things? He nipped his pitch with perfect tempo and watched it climb into the sky, arching over the row of carts. It landed softly on the green and rolled out to 20 feet. A burst of applause filled the dry Arizona air.

He lagged his birdie putt to 18 inches, then marked as the rest of the group finished. He still wasn’t sure where he stood.

“That’s about when I heard Cody and Neil saying on the live stream that I had a one-and-a-half footer to win the NIT,” Reinhart said. “I was like ‘Oh shit.’ It puts a little more pressure on you. I felt pretty confident about it, but still, there are 96 of your friends watching. I know I rushed it a bit.”

It didn’t matter. Reinhart’s par putt tumbled into the hole, and a big grin slowly spread across his face. He was officially No Laying Up’s Champion Golfer Of The Year.

“I don’t think I’d ever won a tournament before this, certainly not in high school,” Reinhart said. “This is definitely the biggest thing I’ve ever won. I was telling LC [Lauren Coughlin] after it was over, that it’s just fun to feel a little nervous and then step up and hit a shot. It’s super low stakes, obviously.

“But that doesn’t make it any less fun.”

Kevin Van Valkenburg is the Editorial Director at No Laying Up

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2024 Nest Invitational Tournament: Reinben Reigns Supreme

We hosted our annual season-ending event this past weekend in Arizona. I’m confident it was the best one yet. It proved that we could capture the magic that we had the first few years at Jax Beach at a venue elsewhere. The golf was fun and competitive, and while not the most thoughtful course off the tee (I realized after my first round that shipping driver off every par four and par five was the play), it offered a really interesting challenge for iron play. A confluence of factors - shaggy, wet fairways coming out of a recent overseed application (and the associated mudballs); firm, awkwardly slow greens that were very smooth and consistent; extremely sloped greens and a willingness to cut holes in provocative spots - made for a unique challenge that wasn’t just a putting contest. You had to hit the ball close to score, which had me wishing the tour would stage an event with a similar setup at some point and lean into the sort of golf that the general public often plays, instead of every week offering the same perfect surfaces and predictable hole locations. Variables!

Beyond the inherent pleasure of watching people grind on low-stakes (yet meaningful) competition, making new friends, reconnecting with old friends, and caddying for Joe Mayberry in the finals, the unequivocal highlight of the entire event was Lucas Beaudoin, the magician who Neil and Randy met at Liberty National a couple months ago and insisted we book for the event. Along with D.J., they hadn’t shut up about Lucas for months and I thought “Oh, that’s cute, a magician.” Well, two nights in a row Lucas performed and made me feel genuine joy and amazement. The humility, personality, and thoughtfulness with which he operated was a highlight - a true mastery of craft that is all too rare these days. I’m incapable of describing it all, rather I hope one day you will have the opportunity to watch and interact with Lucas, if you haven’t already.

That NIT stuff was really stretching the bounds of “golf.” Alright, back to some other recent stuff that’s more golf-y.

I met my colleague Ben down in Palm Beach a couple of weeks ago and we played some golf, filmed, and ate some good food (more on that below) with friend of the program Nico Darras. The first stop (after Istanbul) was the Palm Beach Par 3, which is always a blast. It may lack variety (all the holes are seemingly 70, 120 or 170 yards), encourage aerial shots to a frustrating degree, and always shock to see how many people ride carts, but the piece of land is spectacular and there’s a bunch of flourishes. The next day we filmed my episode of our ServPro Game Improvement Series up in Hobe Sound in some serious conditions (stay tuned for that!) And then we played The Park, the old West Palm Beach Muni that’s been sexed up in a big way. A group of influential locals brought in Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner to re-do the golf course and it’s fantastic. The front nine plays over less interesting land on the East side of the property, with a few standout holes (the 6th hole, a rollicking par four over several ridges with a green site that wouldn’t be out of place at Royal Melbourne, is all-world) and green designs that make you want to play over and over again. And then you make the turn to the back nine and it feels like something straight out of the Melbourne Sandbelt, with holes doglegging over exceptional ground and a ton of variety. I loved it.

On the flip side, it’s quite expensive and the insistence on caddies before 9 am feels heavy-handed and out of place for a muni, especially since these aren’t local kids, but full-time caddies like you’d find at a Streamsong or well-regarded private club. I often prefer to take a caddie, but feeling like we were being descended upon in the parking lot by guys looking to pick up a loop when I just wanted to have a pushcart and explore the course on my own was jarring (and was part of the reason we booked a post-9 am tee time - any earlier and caddies are mandatory). We played on a Thursday morning, and the course was mostly empty prior to 10 am, which unsurprisingly, coincided with the time that carts were allowed. Aside from a couple of writeups I’ve seen, my only real prior exposure to the course was “The Match” with Rose Zhang, Lexi Thompson, Rory McIlroy and Max Homa, which, after playing, was seemingly played on a routing comprising the least interesting nine holes on the course, and was curiously staged at night, which minimized the aesthetic strengths of the course. The clubhouse and entire complex are impressive, with a substantial back porch, multiple food and beverage offerings, a huge practice and range facility, and a short course that garners mixed reviews. Yet I need to return on a weekend and see how it’s all being utilized, as my impression, and that of a variety of locals I talked to, was that the community got something it wasn’t really asking for, at least in its current presentation. On the whole, the entire operation feels a little like a white tablecloth experience when there’s really an appetite for a great neighborhood bistro with a menu that can flex from a low-key Tuesday dinner to a Saturday date night. In any case, they got the hard part right - the golf course is damn good and surely plays differently every day with consistently windy conditions, a variety of teeing options, and spectacular greens. Excited to return and see how the entire experience evolves.

Candidly, I don’t explore Florida with any intention or regularity, and that needs to change. I plan on heading down I-95 more often and dipping a toe into more of the well-regarded existing courses along the East Coast, as well as the two dozen or so new layouts. The amount of development going on down there is truly crazy.

Putting a bow on golf travel: Will Bardwell’s 

initial dispatch from his recent trip to the Scottish Highlands

 is excellent. It’s unexpected and approachable travel writing, and Golspie deserves more love than it gets. Dornoch is the star in that region, Brora is the darling, and then everything else is sort of disregarded. Will’s itinerary digs deeper into the region than most visitors get, and I’m excited to read the next piece.

The trip to Jupiter/West Palm was a culinary delight. It’s a really interesting place with a ton of layers and different little pockets, and while I’m not sure I actually like it on the whole, I am fascinated by the entire area. Nico crafted a thoughtful itinerary of his favorite spots that showed a wide range:

 - SE Florida’s version of Erewhon. The most expansive prepared foods case I’ve ever seen. Outrageous people watching.

 - a space that feels uniquely Palm Beach and all-world wood-oven pizza. The same proprietors run the restaurant at the Palm Beach Par 3 - highly recommend it!

 - Holy shit. This is the sort of restaurant that I didn’t know existed anymore. Blends various ethnic influences, great ingredients, high-level skills, and a daily menu with comfort food and a strip mall location that I think is a few doors down from the infamous former “Orchids of Asia” spot. In love.

 - everything I want out of a local breakfast/lunch spot. Exceptional entrepreneurialism and consistency plus some fun spins on classic dishes. World-class hot sauce.

 - West Palm spot right up the street from The Park. Popped by the walk-up window for jet-fuel coffee and empanadas before we played. Walk-up windows are highly underrated and too rare.

 - world-class bakery and breakfast/lunch spot. The daily specials were on-point, the service was friendly and anticipatory, the candied bacon was an unexpected flourish, and the bread was so good I bought a sourdough loaf to take home.

A lot of flag football lately, which I’m really thankful for. The team that my older son, Freddie is on, is the epitome of what youth sports should be. The practices are both fun and skill-building, the games even better, and the coaches, all with boys on the team and one of whom recently retired from a long NFL career, vibe really well together. They sat the boys down before the season and said “There’s going to be some teams that we’re better than, there’s going to be some teams that are better than us, doesn’t matter, we’re gonna treat everyone with respect and have fun competing and be nice to each other.” At the end of each practice, the coaches play the kids for 10 minutes and it’s 3-on-10 and I could watch it all day. During the games they manage, they’re so cognizant of playing time and get everyone involved. The experience has been a rejuvenating reassurance that there are great coaches and parents out there who are capable of keeping things in perspective.

On the subject of perspective, our younger one, Gus, is incapable of keeping the Jaguars' successes and failures in perspective.

The Jags had been in London for a couple of weeks, and the day after they returned Alex took the kids to the car wash  (which, if you don’t have kids, is like a cheat code - they LOVE it), and as they’re waiting, they see a guy in Jags apparel with a team key card/credential and it turns out he’s one of the support staff guys. Alex tells Gus he works for the Jags, and Gus walks up and asks him if he works for the Jags, he says yes, and then Gus says “Well the Jags stink!” He responds, “I’ve been hearing that a lot this week, but I don’t mind when you tell me that because you’re a passionate four-year-old and you care!”

We went to Whole Foods the other night after practice to snag a quick slice of pizza and a bowl of soup, and Gustav was wearing his Christian Kirk jersey (he almost exclusively wears jerseys). Who is in the deli section? Christian Kirk.

 “Hey, there’s Christian Kirk, show him your jersey!”

 “No, this is Christian Kirk’s jersey.”

Then Gustav got really quiet and nervous and we took a picture. Then they went to the game this weekend and Kirk broke his collarbone, which means Gus likes him even more now, as he broke his collarbone playing football earlier this year.

Anyway, welcome home to Los Jags after a few weeks in London. While the season isn’t going the way we’d like, Coach Pederson is probably on his way out and GM Trent Baalke and the roster he’s constructed are problems, I feel fortunate we have the Jags and happy they’ll be here for years to come with the stadium project. I don’t mind the London games and would like to go to one soon. It’s all we’ve got in town as far as major sports leagues, so it’s a significant point of pride and can dictate the mood around town. I imagine Buffalo and Green Bay are like that tenfold.

In the same vein, it’s fun to have lower-stakes teams in town, too. We've got the Jumbo Shrimp, a Marlins affiliate and a hockey team, the Icemen. We took the boys to the Icemen opening game. They are the Buffalo Sabres’ ECHL affiliate (so lower-level minor league hockey) and they were playing the Florida Everblades, the three-time defending league champs from Southwest Florida. Los IceMen were in control the whole game, and then it got chippy and they lost their edge in the third period and lost in OT.

Then a massive fight broke out at the end after the game, which the boys got a big kick out of. Freddie said “Our Coach wouldn’t be happy, he told us to respect the other team. I said “Yeah, Freddie, but sometimes you start there and then realize after a few matchups you just straight-up don’t like those guys. And that’s okay.”

As you can tell above, the increased time at home in the fall is really fulfilling. Random consumption/observations:

 this article was particularly thought-provoking

 about the various tax environments inherent in the wide variety of markets the NHL has franchises. And it’s food for thought for whenever the NFL inevitably expands internationally.

My lime tree isn’t producing fruit this year and it’s really got me bummed. It was a dry, hot spring and I think that’s got it all out of sorts.

My friend “The Party Doctor” has me really into sake. It’s clean, fun, and versatile.

Stone Crab season started a couple of weeks ago and the seafood at the local fish markets is aspirational right now. Buckle up!

I usually try to recommend a social account I’ve been following lately - this week let’s do 

, which I’ve been following on X for a few years. Josh Lipnik is an architecture/culture buff who travels to all corners of the Midwest and posts interesting pictures of buildings, storefronts, signage, statues, etc. Not a week goes by that something doesn’t stop me in my tracks and spur me to look up a town on a map or dig deeper on Wikipedia.

I wished Curt Schilling a happy 20th anniversary of the 2004 ALDS when he painted his sock. “The Dutchboy” and I had some memorable interactions a few years ago before he blocked me. That 2004 MLB playoff stretch was during my freshman year at Miami and it feels like yesterday that Soly and I were huddled around an old TV in the dorms watching those games.

memorialized the beloved bouncy sidewalk at SFO.

I’ll leave American Airlines’ misdeeds (and $50M fine for mistreating wheelchairs!) for a TrapDraw session with Randy, but I did want to congratulate my hitters at United on a provocative 2025 route release with flights announced to Mongolia, Greenland, Madeira, and Bilbao, among other routes. Truly some left-field stuff! I was also thrilled to see that they’re taking a conscientious approach to elite status and bumping it up a reasonable amount to protect the value of the perks/availability of upgrades, while also not allowing people to straight-up buy status through credit card spend like AA does. If everyone has status, status doesn’t mean anything. A lot of similarities to the PGA Tour’s recent changes (which we’ll discuss in detail on the pod.)

Lastly, it’s election season so I thought I’d share my political priorities, all of which should be bipartisan and wildly popular:

Let’s start vigorously enforcing violators who hang out in the left lane of roadways with multiple lanes. Repeated violations should result in the loss of a driver’s license and possible jail time. This will also help our economy as efficiency would improve drastically thanks to improved travel times. We also need to educate new drivers on this being a foundational societal good.

FaceTiming in an airport or public space should be outlawed. Doing so without headphones should result in the removal of someone’s ear.

Place any groups walking three-wide (or more!) in airports on the no-fly list. I imagine there is a significant overlap with those who drive in the left lane.

And then we need a few TSA reforms around the removal of gate lice, those who crowd the luggage carousel, and an evaluation of the aptly-named “Analogic” machines that have become prevalent at checkpoints around the country and instead of speeding things up through the use of AI and machine learning, have both ground security protocols to a halt and allowed for various inconsistencies around when/where to replace a bin.

GHIN & Tonic, Vol. 24 (TC)

I don’t think I’m breaking new ground by saying this: I’m all set with pro golf through the end of the year. The good news is I am supposed to be. It’s the off-season, and I’m confident I’ll be fired up for The Sentry come January. The better news is I’ve never been more excited about my personal golf game. Going 1-under through 36 holes with no double bogeys at Sweetens Cove during the 

 is heady stuff for me, but the 6-hole alt-shot, cross-country match after our formal event was the highlight of the year. These cross-country matches at Sweetens call for unique shots on-demand based on what routing the winner of the last hole calls out. Usually, these matches turn into hit and giggles after a full day looping my favorite 9 holes in golf. But every once in a while, there’s magic waiting for me in the Tennessee twilight, and I can ride a good swing feel and mood as long as the sun in the Sequatchie Valley will allow. The towering 238-yard cut 3-wood I hit from the mound behind 1 green to the front pin on 7 green stands out. From this distance and angle, the bulging 7th green looks like a stubby, golden caterpillar crawling away toward The Shed (the Sweetens “clubhouse”). My ball landed pin high and rolled off the back right (front right when played from a traditional angle), but it was executed perfectly. 

There may be no better feeling in golf than the ability to call and execute a high-level shot after a long day of golf. As I get older, I’m less interested in playing all day, and 18 or even 36 is enough. Sweetens Cove is one of the few places where I still want to squeeze in every damn shot on a perfect, early October day.

I’d also say that goal and expectation setting have had a huge impact on my enjoyment of golf this year. I set a goal to play in at least two Metropolitan Golf Association events in 2024. I’ve played in four, and there’s no doubt that these competitive events spurred sincere investment in improving my golf swing, mobility, and 

. More to come next week, as we roll out a video detailing my visit to the Titleist Performance Institute to work with Dr. Greg Rose. Expectations are a curious thing. Back in January, my goal was to not get worse at golf this year. I wanted to manage my own expectations with the arrival of my son Peter in March. I expected my golf game to suffer, and my goal was to combat that. Instead, even with less time to practice and play, I’ve improved, and my handicap going from 3.7 to 1.9, and I truly believe my best golf is still ahead of me. There are not many activities in life where I can say my best is yet to come, so I’m excited to keep diving toward a 0.0 handicap. Exceeding sincere expectations is always a thrill!

Looking ahead, we have the fifth annual NIT this week in Arizona. I have never won my flight and competed in the championship round. What an opportunity to slay the dragon this week at Dobson Ranch.

Last Thursday and Friday, I binge-watched 

 the Vince McMahon and WWE documentary on Netflix while running Daddy daycare with Little Pete. 

I expected this documentary to be in what I’ll call the memoir genre, like pretty much every sports and entertainment documentary these days. Most of these high-profile documentaries now have the main subject co-producing them, and it makes sense. That is the only way the entire McMahon and WWE ‘family’ will sit down for interviews. There’s no way they would willingly give up control of the final edit, and that means this type of sports documentary now becomes a way for the subject to manipulate history in service of their legacy and perception, especially regarding the most recent history. The best example is the Derek Jeter documentary, The Captain, on ESPN. Jeter spends the final two episodes rewriting the history of his tenure as CEO of the Marlins as something other than a failure.


Knowing all this and my apathy toward pro wrestling, I had low expectations for Mr. McMahon, but again, low expectations are a powerful thing. I was rapt from beginning to end. From the start, the producers did a good job of letting McMahon craft his own reality in interviews while balancing that with diverse perspectives from inside and outside the wrestling world. Most of these documentaries are 1 to 17 episodes too long, but with all the gnarly legal stuff that’s come out about Vince McMahon, I thought the last episode was necessary and well done. I’m also going to assume that the final edit for this documentary was held by WWE, which McMahon lost control of in 2023 by merging with UFC. My guess is that Ari Emmanuel, Nick Khan, and Mark Shapiro at Endeavor (majority owner of WWE) collectively said “Let’s air out these skeletons in the WWE closest, so Vince can’t try and come back into the business a third time!” What a win for the documentary team, and my point in outlining this is to present the reality in which all these sports documentaries now have to be viewed. Are they fact-based, or are they memoirs steered by the main subject? In this case, I think it was one of the rare fact-based documentaries I’ve watched in a while that included all the characters in the story.

I am thrilled to say I was never interested in pro wrestling. Growing up, I watched one WrestleMania at a sleepover in 2005 and never understood the allure.

 shirt, pictured in the header, but that was an ironic thrift store purchase from long ago. I then lost that original John Cena shirt, and Cody sent me a new one earlier this year. It’s one of my favorites). 

After watching this documentary, I feel vindicated for avoiding it throughout my childhood and into college. I had no role in making Vince McMahon — among the biggest megalomaniacs and scumbags of my lifetime — a billionaire. Also, as a side note, what is with billionaires and bad plastic surgery? By 2023, it looks like he gave the surgeon a picture of Adam Driver and came out looking like Muammar Gaddafi.

Because of my cursory knowledge of the pro wrestling landscape, this documentary provided a much-needed overview of the history and business strategy of pro wrestling. I also love diving into passionate subcultures that I don’t understand. Valued at $6.8 billion, the WWE may be America’s most significant subculture and one that has never been more popular. My main takeaway is that pro wrestling makes much more sense when viewed as a stage play or real-life fantasy novel and less as a sporting event. Below are a few other takeaways as they relate to both our business at NLU and the business of pro golf:

Character development (and redevelopment) as a business model:

 Throughout its history, the WWE has been a “strong-link” organization. Like the NBA (and golf), it’s driven by 1 or 2 stars that can carry an average or even below-average team or organization to success. WWE's most significant competitive advantage over other sports is that they can create, develop, and redevelop characters (and decide the outcome of matches based on the strongest storylines). I found this most apparent when Dwayne Johnson comes on the scene as Rocky, a 3rd generation babyface wrestler. The crowds hate him. Within months, he changes his name to The Rock, becomes a heel, and his career takes off. We often talk about golf’s lack of star power and inability to create stars. The PGA Tour can’t recreate Scottie Scheffler’s or Patrick Cantlay’s personality, but I do think Bryson, GOOD GOOD, and some other golf YouTube channels are running this playbook. Toss in a bunch of ex-college golfers, let them go at each other in matches, and read and react to crowd feedback (comments in this case) regarding their personality and “Rizz.” Then, tweak, rinse, and repeat the characters and narratives moving forward. I don’t want to do this with our business because it isn’t rooted in authenticity and has a negative impact on the individuals in an organization (more on this below). Regardless, it’s the WWE’s core competitive advantage, and I think we will only see more of it with YouTube and digital creators.

The concept of Kayfabe: “Kayfabe” is a term I’ve never heard before, and by definition, it’s the practice of portraying staged events as reality. Kayfabe is the total commitment to the bit, and the unspoken agreement between both wrestlers in the ring and the audience to suspend disbelief and consider wrestling events, storylines, and characters as genuine. I’ve never been able to do this with wrestling, which is probably why I don’t like it, but Kayfabe is a concept we use at NLU. Is Tron’s love for the Cleeks real? Is his name really Tron Carter? Is Strapped dead because Neil and Randy spent over $500 and didn’t play three rounds of real golf in Season 11?

Kayfabe is a powerful and effective concept, but it’s one you have to balance with authenticity, and personally, authenticity is more important to me as both a fan and content creator. But, this is where the content around Vince McMahon and his character for WWE, the villainous Mr. McMahon, is so interesting. You don’t know where real life ends and the character begins. He spends a bunch of time in this documentary arguing that his character is not him, but I think the overarching message of the documentary is that at some point in the 1990s, he became the character, and there isn’t a difference anymore.

Setting aside the megalomania and rampant sexual assault allegations (I know, tough to do), I found a lot to relate to on this topic. I often meet people at events or off the golf course who are surprised I’m not always the “

” you see on Strapped. It’s not that I’m acting or playing a fake character on Strapped. I’ve always felt it’s an environment and place where a particular part of my personality is allowed to get out and run. It’s an outlet that I feel privileged to have, and in another line of work, it’s a part of my personality that I would have to stifle more and more over time. McMahon speaks at length about this exact feeling, and I found myself nodding along at times. The challenging balance of this real-world character development is being sincere even when people want more of #TheKid in real-life interactions. I can see how a “permanent character” like the one McMahon played weekly for over twenty years on the wrestling circuit can take over his real personality. This is the danger of living your life and crafting content based on the feedback of an audience (shoutout to Bryson).

Another related observation is Vince McMahon is one of the few people in the upper echelon of traditional sports and entertainment who operate the business and participate in the content. The same is true for me and my partners at NLU; frankly, it gets harder to do as the operation grows, but it’s probably what I love most about my job: the combination of variety and control in my day-to-day work is intoxicating. This business/talent hybrid is becoming more prevalent with the rise of creators. Still, it is a complicated arrangement to navigate, and I find it interesting that whether you like him or hate him, Vince McMahon is probably the highest-profile and most successful example of this business/creative hybrid from traditional media. The downside is he became a sexual predator and now looks like a Libyan dictator. As I think about what I want to become and what I want NLU to look like in 5 years, I often feel like finding examples of the opposite can be a great starting point. So let’s leave this thread here for now: I don’t want to end up like Vince McMahon.

Alright, the last thing I have on Mr. McMahon: I was locked in during episode 3 of this documentary as it unpacked the schism in pro wrestling brought about by the Ted Turner and Turner-backed creation of WCW. It is eerily similar to what’s unfolding in professional golf. In the end, competition was good for the wrestling industry, and WWF fought off WCW, but it took about eight years to reunite the pro wrestling world, and one could argue that reunification led to a stale product in the mid-to-late 2000s. One other callout: I need to dig up a biography of Ted Turner. He was such an omnipresent name throughout my childhood growing up in Atlanta, but I don’t know much about him. Perhaps we need to do a special edition TrapDraw Owners episode on Ted!

Here are a few other content recommendations.

 - The first two episodes of this series from Ryan Nanni and Stephen Godfrey have been fantastic. It’s a complicated issue, but I love the way these two have gone about structuring and researching the complexity of the college athletics landscape.

 - I found this during my trip to Spain last month. I went on a short city tour of Spain with a local guide, and it became very clear that this guide (and older woman) did not want to talk about Spanish history from 1930 to 1980. I thought it might have something to do with Francisco Franco. It turns out I was right, and this 6 part series on Franco outlines a cultural amnesia (or Spanish societal Kayfabe) around Franco’s rule. I highly recommend this podcast if you’re into history.

When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management

 by Robert Lowenstein - This book is very much in the Barbarians at the Gate and Den of Thieves genre. I don’t know shit about the finance industry, but I find it easier for me to understand the concept of a hedge fund when it’s trojan horsed into engaging narrative history. I’ll probably stay in the finance genre for one more book and dive into 

 by Victor Haghani next. Haghani is one of the main characters in When Genius Failed, but since the collapse of LTCM, he’s focused on building wealth in the least risky way possible (seems like a complete 180, shout out to learning from your mistakes).


GHIN & Tonic, Vol. 23 (Neil)

917: NLU Special Projects - LA's Public Tee Time Scandal

In the latest episode of NLU Special Projects, we take our first hard look at the state of public golf between what is working and what needs to change. KVV interviews various sources about why tee times just stopped being available in Los Angeles, and what a group of fed-up hackers did about it.


If you enjoyed this episode, consider joining 

: No Laying Up’s community of avid golfers. Nest members help us maintain our light commercial interruptions (3 minutes of ads per 90 minutes of content) and receive access to exclusive content, discounts in the pro shop, and an annual member gift. It’s a $90 annual membership, and you can sign up or learn more at 

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

After a painful defeat at Royal Melbourne in 2023, a refreshed Soly challenges Ben to a rematch. Ben, battling dad back and equipped with perspective, is ready to defend the crown as Best Golfer at NLU.

NLU Film Room

Ben vs. Soly Rematch: New Course at St Andrews | NLU Film Room

We have a phrase we throw around a lot at No Laying Up, coined by Neil, that I think best explains our Roost Club Championship: As you get older, there are few things as enjoyable as meaningful but ultimately meaningless competition.

If you were an athlete in high school or college, but then watched as adult obligations, parenting, yardwork or the wear and tear on the body rob you of your opportunity to feed your competitive jones, you know exactly what I’m talking about. We can age out of who we used to be in our formative years, we can add a few pounds and lose some hair or half step, but the adrenaline rush of competition doesn’t go away. It might not be as cutthroat as it once was. I don’t imagine a golf match I was involved in could ever feel as deflating as the day my high school football team lost in the state championship game. But in some ways, adult competition can be even more rewarding.

It’s not easy to make friends as you get older. There are schedules to coordinate, spouses and children to assimilate and political ideologies to navigate. But when we came up with the 

 — regional groups mostly consisting of Nest members from around the United States, Canada and even Europe — those are some of the walls we were trying to knock down. We wanted golfers to have an excuse to connect and hopefully form friendships while everyone tried to make birdies. Every Roost could take this as seriously, or as unseriously, as they wanted. The initial connecting thread was some familiarity with No Laying Up, but the larger mission was community.

Every year, Roosts face off regionally for a chance to compete in the Roost Club Championship, which we’ve held the last three years at Sweetens Cove. Once they get to Sweetens, the 10 teams that qualified (plus a team of NLU members, this year made up of Neil, Ben, Casey and me) compete for bragging rights and a custom YETI cooler. It is a made-up championship.

Of course, when you think about it, every championship is … a made-up championship. The Open Championship was more or less invented on the back of a napkin in a bar down the street from Prestwick and had just eight players in the field. It’s up to the people involved to determine how much they care about winning it, and whether that tradition can grow from there.

The High Cotton Club, one of our most passionate Roosts, cares a lot.

They have been creating their own merchandise since their inception, hosting big tournaments that bring players together from all over the South, raising money for charity and engaging in the kind of spirited banter that brings some color and pizazz to a made-up competition. They’ve even embraced the role of pseudo-villains in our weird little universe.

They were not, however, able to capture the Roost Club Championship in its first two seasons despite considerable talent and big expectations.

The Electric Phactory grabbed the crown in Year 1, and Low Cal took it home in Year 2.

Our community took considerable pleasure in teasing the High Cotton crew — all in good fun, of course — that they were destined to be bridesmaids forever.

That changed this year when the squad of Connor Hendrickson, Dustin Ball, John Stewart and Lane Rockensock took home the trophy. They knocked off the RMR Rohlers in the semifinals, then beat NorCal in the championship when Rockensock rolled in a long putt on the 7th green to win his singles match.

“It was such a grind to get there, so to be able to finally get to the mountaintop was great,” Hendrickson said.

I could, in theory, write something about every Roost squad. Give me a few years and I just might. But I wanted to talk a little bit about the High Cotton guys in this week’s GHIN and Tonic because I think their story is actually indicative of how a lot of Roost members become important to each other, and what we were hoping for when we started this endeavor a few years ago.

Hendrickson was a golf professional in Tennessee, but looked to make a life change during COVID. He’d enjoyed his time in the industry, including a stint working at Sweetens, but he was thinking about going to work with his family’s cattle company. The one thing that gave him pause was how hard it would be to connect with other golfers once he wasn’t around them anymore.

“As we all get older, we kind of lose that community,” Hendrickson said. “I wanted to start something where we could find each other. If you’re not a member of a private club, it’s hard to get that match play competition that we all love. So I started the High Cotton Classic.”

Initially, it was 16 players, all vying for a cash prize over a series of matches. It was such a hit that most of the participants didn’t want to wait until the following year to have another event, so they scheduled a one-day tournament. It was there that four Refuge members revealed they’d just listened to the monthly Nest Pod, and heard about the idea of Roosts forming around the country. They asked Hendrickson to throw in an application and take on the role of captain.

Once it was approved, the High Cotton Club went from everyone being loosely connected by Facebook and text chains to an efficient operation. Members from Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama started to meet up regularly. When a massive tornado leveled a candle factory in Mayfield, Kentucky and killed eight workers, the High Cotton Club felt like they suddenly had a charitable cause that they wanted to get behind. They’ve raised over $4,000 since.

“That’s when we were going to raise money for natural disaster relief,” Hendrickson said. “To be able to create that community while also helping our community and engaging in community really was the perfect culmination for us.”

Even the name High Cotton felt like it was fitting. Hendrickson chose it one day when he was driving home to visit his family’s land in South Tennessee, and the song High Cotton by Alabama happened to be on the radio.

“The line in the song ‘Looking back I didn’t know that times were lean, round our house the grass was green’ really just hit me,” Hendrickson said. “I was trying to come out of a low point in my life, and trying to look back at that and say ‘Things aren’t all that bad. Wherever we are, there are always things to be grateful for. I wanted to take that mentality onto the golf course. We can be so frustrated sometimes, and golf can suck so much, but we’re always playing golf. That’s a thing you can always find joy in, even when times get tough.”

It wasn’t long before Hendrickson, Stewart and Ball were on a text thread, chatting each day about their lives, their families, their struggles and their triumphs. They hadn’t even known each other before golf brought them together, and now they were as close as brothers.

“I think we really understood each other from the beginning,” Hendrickson said. “We all loved competition. But then it became so much more than golf. Anything we have going on in our lives, we’re texting each other, calling each other, and checking up on each other. I’m at a point in my life where I don’t have many other friends. My animals are everything to me, and my family is everything to me, but other than that, it’s really these guys in the High Cotton Club. It’s been an invaluable addition to my life.”

When Rockensock beat both Stewart and Hendrickson in match play to earn a spot on the RCC team, he fit right in on the squad. He’d earned their respect with his relentless play.

“He’s our match play killer,” Hendrickson said. “Last year, he really wanted to make this team and was disappointed when he didn’t. He made it a goal the entire year to make it. For him to be able to close it out on a day that was kind of tough for him, it meant a lot to the entire team. I couldn’t be more proud of him.”

In the finals, Hendrickson said he was trying to keep the team’s energy up by hooting and hollering as much as he could, and it was clearly infectious. Stewart was walking in putts and Ball was bombing drives and Rockensock was relentless with his irons.

“I feel like we finally accomplished what we’ve always been capable of,” Hendrickson said.

During the finals, Hendrickson bottled up his Ric Flair act for a few minutes and found the bench behind the 3rd tee. He needed a quiet moment. A couple weeks before the Roost Club Championship, his dog, Lucy Lou, got sick and passed away. Lucy had been by his side for some of the hardest times of his life, but also a lot of really great times too. He wanted to remember her.

“One of the great things about my time working at Sweetens is I got to bring my dog there,” Hendrickson said. “I have a picture on my phone that I looked at a lot over the past few weeks of her and I on the bench on No. 3. During the finals, I went and sat on that bench and just thought about her and how much I loved her.”

I was curious, now that his team had finally won our coveted made-up championship, if Hendrickson had any thoughts for people out there who are curious about joining a Roost but still hadn’t taken the plunge yet.

“I would say you get what you give,” he said. “If you buy in, you’re going to get some great friendships and a community that truly care about you, that wants to see you succeed and doesn’t want to see you struggle. If you just want to show up to an event, you can play that too. It’s whatever you want it to be. But it’s one I would absolutely buy into. I wouldn’t want to envision what my life would look like without the Roosts. It’s been such an additive for me, for my mental health, and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to do this.”

If you're interested in finding a Roost near you, check out the 

I was a little surprised by the kerfuffle my tweet about Ryder Cup ticket prices caused this week, in part because I thought the information was already out there in the zeitgeist. Some friends who were hoping to attend mentioned the prices to me last week, and said they were so stunned, that they decided they were going to save their money for Adare Manor in 2027.

I didn’t see prices listed anywhere, but finally found them buried in the FAQ section of the official Ryder Cup page and grabbed a screenshot. It was quickly picked up and aggregated everywhere, including by Golf Digest and CNN of all places. If you’re not on Twitter/X these days, a quick recap:

A single-day ticket to a competition day at Bethpage next year will cost you $749.51 before taxes and fees (or parking!), which means you’re almost certainly looking at $1,000 a day, per person, to attend. You can attend a Wednesday’s practice round day for $255 and a Thursday’s practice round for $423 if that’s more in line with your budget.

A lot of people assumed these were luxury tickets, not general admission, because they are listed as “Ryder Cup+ tickets” and feature food and non-alcoholic drinks as part of your package. Surely, they insisted, there will be cheaper tickets available that just give you ground access. I’m here to let you know that seems extremely unlikely. Because of high demand, these are the tickets available. If you want to go to the Ryder Cup, this is your only option. The Ryder Cup website strongly implies that if you buy tickets on the secondary market from somewhere other than SeatGeek, there is a good chance they are fake, and they will not help you get your money back. So keep that in mind.

Will people pay these prices? Corporations almost certainly will, which is why I said the prices portend a potential LACC situation, where the club pre-purchased so many tickets to give to members and friends, it made the atmosphere lifeless at times. What will the Bethpage crowd be like? Will it be actual golf fans, or will it be a lot of executives trying to impress their clients as they half-heartedly explain the difference between fourball and foursomes?

I don’t know how high you could set the price where tickets would go unsold, but this isn’t it. And you’ll have plenty of people arguing (as many did in my mentions) that this is in line with what it would cost to attend an NFL or NBA playoff game in the New York City area. Bryan Karns, the championship director of the PGA of America, went on SiriusXM radio to make that exact point in response to my tweet.

“We view ourselves as a Tier 1 event that’s on par with a World Series or with an NBA Finals Game 7,” Karns said. “When we look at pricing, we’re able to tap into data from all these different venues. We’re able to see ‘Hey, what do people pay?’ That really drove this. There are people that have a Ryder Cup on their bucket list the same way that others would have a Game 1 of the Yankees World Series on their bucket list.”

I suspect some of the reason these tickets are priced this way is the Brookline Effect, which looms over the Ryder Cup even 25 years later.

At the 1999 Ryder Cup, American crowds were boisterous and vocal and — in the opinions of most Europeans — vulgar and disrespectful and over-served. Payne Stewart was so aghast at the way Colin Montgomerie had been treated throughout the week, he conceded a lengthy putt on the final hole (handing Montgomerie the win in their singles match) as an apology for the way he’d been heckled during matches. There is concern within the golfing world that Long Islanders will be just as poorly behaved as Boston fans were 25 years ago, at least by the standards of golf, and I suspect the PGA of America is trying to price out some of that behavior with these ticket prices.

"I have total faith in the fans of New York to cheer on their team, proudly and loudly," American Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley said last week at a press conference to mark one year out from the Cup being contested at Bethpage. "I don't want them to cross the line, to do anything that would affect the course of play. But it's going to be a tough atmosphere. It's going to be tough for both teams."

The 25th anniversary of Brookline is an interesting time to have a discussion about money, considering that was the first Ryder Cup where players (led by David Duval, Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods) first raised the issue that maybe the players shouldn’t be playing in the event for free. That issue still exists to this day, and Patrick Cantlay has made it clear what he believes, despite the criticism thrown his way. It’s not exactly true the players don’t get paid for participating in the Ryder Cup. The PGA Tour gets 20 percent of the television revenue, and they can distribute it as they choose. They currently put it in their pension plan. Each member of the team also gets $200,000 to distribute to the charity of their choice.

GHIN & Tonic, Vol. 22 (KVV)

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The No Laying Up collective chops it up with a wide variety of guests from all corners of the golf world, and more importantly, guests from the golf-adjacent world. 



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