GHIN
Earlier this year, I grabbed Xander Schauffele as he was leaving the driving range at Riviera Country Club and asked him what must have felt like a random question: What’s the most memorably bad shot he can remember hitting?
He thought about it for a few seconds before landing on a definitive answer.
“I remember I was trying to get a college scholarship and I topped my tee shot in front of like six college coaches,” Schauffele said. “I remember looking up at them, trying not to stare at them, being like ‘This is really embarrassing. I probably just blew my chances of getting a scholarship anywhere.’”
The road to becoming a great golfer is rarely a linear path, and Schauffele is a good reminder of how silly it is to make definitive statements about someone’s potential, even though that kind of punditry plays better than nuance or restraint.
Schauffele didn’t exactly blow his chances of getting a scholarship, but for whatever reason, the biggest programs in college golf did shy away. He ended up at Long Beach State for a year, then transferred to San Diego State, where he became a third-team All-American. He was a decent prospect, eventually ranking in the Top 10 of the World Amateur Golf Rankings before he turned professional, but hardly a prodigy. In the first round of the 2014 U.S. Amateur, Schauffele lost 7&6 to Justin Tereshko, someone who ultimately never even tried to turn professional, and is now the head coach at Eastern Kentucky University.
Schauffele, however, gradually got better, earning his way onto the PGA Tour (just barely) in 2016 through the Web.com Tour Finals. He won twice that year and was the PGA Tour Rookie of the Year in 2016. He won the Tour Championship in 2017, a gold medal at the Olympics in 2020, and he finished in the Top 10 in nine of the first 18 majors he played in.
But along the way, something interesting happened: He started to take heat for being good, but never great. His consistency was weaponized against him.
Here is what one moronic pundit had to say after Rory McIlroy boat-raced Schauffele in the final round of the Wells Fargo earlier this year:
“I would go home right now if I were Xander and I would say ‘I don’t know if I’ve got it. I don’t know that I’m good enough to win against the best of the best. It would be kind of deflating and humiliating. I don’t want to pick on Xander, but he just never shows me something special.”
By the way, that moronic pundit? That was me.
I’m a big believer that if you offer a fiery take about someone, you can’t pretend it doesn’t exist when it is no longer supported by evidence.
This summer has been a necessary reminder that we probably shouldn’t shit on golfers when they are consistently good, but fail to break through and win. It wasn’t a character flaw that Schauffele didn’t win a major until this year, but it was frequently framed as one by people like me for the sake of argument.
“I don't think I'd ever look at it as lacking,” Schauffele said after he won the PGA Championship. “I looked at it as someone that is trying really hard and needs more experience. All those close calls for me, even last week, that sort of feeling, it gets to you at some point. It just makes this even sweeter.”
There are echoes of that fallacy in the idea that LeBron James' record in the Finals (4-6) can only be held against him in the GOAT debate. Michael Jordan, after all, went 6-0 in the Finals. He never lost, and James lost six times. But once you think about the logic of it, it falls apart. Wouldn’t Michael Jordan have loved four more chances at a ring? Why are all those times he lost to the Boston Celtics or Detroit Pistons in the Eastern Conference playoffs not held against him?
Putting yourself in contention is a good thing, even if it means it hurts a little more when you don’t finish first.
If anything, McIlroy might look at Schauffele’s two majors this year and feel like he’s on the right path, despite mounting criticism. He keeps putting himself in contention, and with a few different bounces, he could easily have won three majors (St. Andrews, LACC, Pinehurst) where he came up just short. Does that mean it will happen? Certainly not. In fact, Schauffele might be a better bet at this point to win the career Grand Slam than McIlroy. But McIlroy could also smash through a decade of disappointment and win two majors next year, and it wouldn’t feel all that surprising. Suddenly, all those near misses would feel like context.
I thought about all of this over the weekend when I watched my friend Lauren Coughlin win for the first time on the LPGA Tour at age 31.
There have been a lot of times during the last five years when Coughlin could have given up the dream of professional golf, when it would have made sense to stop burning through money traveling to tournaments on the Symetra Tour and begin the next phase of her life. Like Schauffele, she’d been a good college player, she’d won some tournaments, but other golfers got the sponsorship dollars and playing opportunities. Coughlin did not.
But every step of the way, when people assumed she’d maxed out her potential, she kept making incremental progress.
“Just don't give up,” Coughlin said Sunday, when asked if she had an overarching message for junior golfers. “Just because you're not good from 12 years old, doesn't mean you won't be good at 25 or 30.”
Not only did Coughlin believe this day would eventually arrive, so did the people around her. And as I watched the final holes of the Canadian Open, I thought about them, too.
In 2022, Coughlin’s husband John Pond and I sat on the putting green at Jacksonville Beach Golf Club, drinking bourbon late into the evening, listening to the glorious madness of No Laying Up’s Nest Invitational Tournament play out in the cart barn a few hundred yards away. A couple of burly ex-football players with janky golf swings wanted a quiet moment to reflect on matters big and small, and so for an hour, we drank by ourselves and talked about what the future might hold.
“I know she’s going to win,” Pond said. “She’s so close. I’m just worried I won’t be there when it happens, and it’s going to kill me.”
Pond ultimately decided to quit his job at the University of Virginia and go out on the road with his wife, caddying for her in stints as she looked for a full-time looper. (She eventually found one in Terry McNamara.) They knew it was a leap of faith, that money might get tight, but it was one they needed to take together. At the Masters this year, Pond and Coughlin and I spent the day walking the grounds, laughing and drinking beers together, and I told John I wanted him to consider writing about what it was like to caddy for his wife.
He warned me that 8,000 words might arrive in my inbox in the middle of the night, and I said I couldn’t wait for the day when it did.
That essay hasn’t arrived (yet), but I’m not sure words could paint a better scene than what played out on Sunday. I was nervous for Lauren throughout the back nine, but I teared up when the cameras cut to Pond waiting behind the 18th green at the Earl Grey Golf Club with a bottle of champagne, ready to douse Coughlin in victory.
When you believe in people, you have to risk something for yourself, too. To see that risk pay off, to see my two friends celebrate their faith in each other — was my favorite moment in golf this year.
Anyone who follows me on social media knows I’m not shy when it comes to sharing snippets of my daughter Keegan’s golf swing and our shared love of the game. Her swing has all the grace and tempo that mine lacks, and watching her navigate her way through various stages of junior golf the past few years has been one of the most enjoyable parts of my life.
I’m also very conscious of the false reality that Instagram can convey, and how easy it is to pretend like everything is wonderful and everyone is happy. We tend to filter out difficult moments when we share our lives with the world, and that’s true whether you have 10 followers or 10,000. I think it’s important to debunk that myth from time to time, which is why I’m sharing this story about our experience trying to qualify for the Drive, Chip and Putt this year.
Drive, Chip and Putt is, for the most part, a wonderful thing. I do think the initiative has increased youth participation in golf, and it’s awesome that this year, Akshay Bhatia became the first Drive, Chip and Putt alum to make it back to Augusta by earning a spot in the Masters.
It’s also become a tremendous source of anxiety in our household.
The first year Keegan entered the competition, at age 10, she advanced by finishing third in her local qualifier. I was as shocked as anyone. She didn’t advance through the sub-regional, but it set the stakes for her expectations going forward. Every year, she figured, she’d make a little progress and maybe someday she’d have a real shot at getting to Augusta. Who is to say she shouldn’t dream big?
Unfortunately, not all progress (as we’ve learned) is linear.
She didn’t make it through her regional qualifier in 2023, let down by a bout of nervous chipping, and she was devastated by the result. She cried in my arms in the clubhouse, and vowed to spend the entire year working on her short game, insisting that it would be different the next time.
I expected it to be different this year, too. Everything about her short game is better, and the hours she put in (all on her own) had her feeling confident and ready when we showed up for her regional qualifier at Cattail Creek Country Club last week.
The nervous chipping returned, sadly. (I’m reluctant to tell her it might be my genes she needs to overcome.) It became obvious, to us both, that she wasn’t going to advance once her final chip drifted outside the largest circle, and to her, it felt like a year of hard work had been all for naught. She is an emotional player, and occasionally those emotions work against her. She sat cross-legged next to the practice green, pulled her hat down low, and tried like hell to keep from crying.
It’s hard to know what to do as a parent in those situations. You understand, on a rational level, that disappointment is part of growing up, that learning to cope with it can be a tremendous life lesson. But as a dad, you also want to hug the pain away. I’ve found myself questioning, in those moments, why I ever introduced her to such a maddening sport. When I wrote about the challenge of passing along golf to her in a piece for the Western Golf Association, it was actually Lauren who texted me after it ran to reassure me that this was all normal.
“Just keep being there! I argued with my dad so much about golf when I was a teenager. It’s normal! It’ll be memories forever with you two.”
All you really can do is tell your kid you’re proud of them for putting themselves in the arena. It hurts to fail, but that hurt can also lead to great things. Schauffele and Coughlin are real-life examples of it.
When I got home that night, I noticed someone had sent me a DM on Twitter. It was a picture of me, crouching down to whisper to Keegan that I loved her and that I was proud of her. The person who had taken it recognized me from my work at NLU, but wanted to give us some space. The more I stared at it, the more I appreciated it. I decided it would be worth sharing here, even though it was a painful memory, because sometimes filtering out all the sad experiences from what we share with the world makes it seem like we ought to be ashamed of our disappointments. It’s probably healthier if we talk about how universal they can be.
TONIC
My colleague D.J. Piehowski used this space a few weeks ago to share his reluctant assessment that Season 3 of “The Bear” — which was the subject of not one but TWO episodes of Perfect Club — kind of sucked. “It felt like revving the gas on a car stuck in neutral.”
His analysis seemed to be shared by many critics and fans, including our friend Shane Ryan, who began the year with the highest of hopes and then absolutely hated the finale.
I recognize, respect and acknowledge these POVs, but I’d like to offer up what now feels like a contrarian take on the season. I enjoyed it! The issues that seem to have bothered many viewers actually felt like a very deliberate choice by the showrunner Christopher Storer, and I came to think of the season more as an experimental mood piece than I did something lacking a narrative engine. If this was an album by Radiohead, I’m fairly certain people would see it as a transcendent piece of art instead of a masturbatory showcase of Chicago cinematography and mid-90s needle drops.
I don’t think the show should be immune from criticism. I was reminded, at times, of George R. R. Martin spending hundreds of pages delving into complicated backstories of minor characters instead of doing what everyone really wants, moving the plot forward. But I also think that real life often moves at a meandering — and at times maddening — pace.
The show is, quite intentionally, mimicking the quirks and complexities of fine dining, asking you to indulge in artistic digressions that can be frequently rewarding, but also occasionally unsatisfying. Ultimately, as the many famous chefs doing cameos attempt to convey in the finale, cooking is about the controlled chaos of every life experience happening within the four walls of a kitchen, and the chef gets to be the conductor. You are trying to make people feel something, even for a fleeting moment.
I think that’s Storer’s goal with the show.
“There is a nobility in this,” says real-life chef Will Guidara. “We get to help people celebrate some of the most important moments of their lives. We can give them the grace, if only for a few hours, to forget about their most difficult moments. To make the world a nicer place. All of us in this room have this opportunity, perhaps even a responsibility, to create our own little magical worlds in a world that is increasingly in need of a little more magic. And every time I find myself ready to burn out, I reconnect with the fact that that is the business we’re in.”
Now, is The Bear occasionally too cute for its own good? Does it sometimes feel like Storer is turning up the dial on “emotion” and constantly looking back at the audience for approval and validation? Yes. It’s pretentious and cloying in the same way Ted Lasso was both of those things.
But Storer essentially admits as much in a monologue delivered by real-life chef Genie Kwon.
“I feel like an imposter because I feel like I don’t like cooking as much as everybody else does. I knew that I always wanted to make things for people. Growing up, my parents were never in a good place, but I always knew that I could make something so specific that would bring them joy. That was the thing I got addicted to. I seek approval out of people every single day.”
In its own strange way, The Bear reminds me a lot of how we function at NLU.
We all bring our own baggage to this endeavor, we’re all stubborn and prideful, we occasionally (perhaps frequently) struggle to communicate our feelings. We have different ideas about art and commerce. We’re loving and mentoring, but we also occasionally shout at each other. Some of us are naturally funny, some of us have inherited trauma, some of us fret over the future and some of us live moment-to-moment in the present. We have partners and employees and sometimes that’s complicated. Our dumb inside jokes that are funnier to us than they could ever be to an outsider.
We’re all, ultimately, trying to create something. And there is an undeniable satisfaction that comes from the act of collaboration. Every day, we’re essentially starting from scratch.
We don’t have needle drops by Weezer, R.E.M., Counting Crows or The Ronettes humming in the background, but sometimes, I wish such a thing was possible.
If my life had a soundtrack, I’d probably choose those songs, too.
Kevin Van Valkenburg is the Editorial Director of No Laying Up.
Email him at kvv@nolayingup.com