GHIN
I know that by now it’s well-worn territory around these parts, but it’s hard not to start with and reiterate what it’s been like to watch Lauren Coughlin over the past month as she’s proven that she is one of the best women in the entire world at the game of golf. It’s a very heady claim and a conversation that she has every right to insert herself into right now.
It’s funny how these ten-year overnight sensations tend to work. Of course, there are technical things that have clicked – her putting has improved, she’s been more comfortable in final-round situations, the partnership with Terry McNamara seems to be a grand slam, and so on. But my favorite part has been seeing how her confidence in herself and her abilities has improved on and off the course over the past few months and years. Along with Max Homa’s similar journey, Lauren’s is one of the things that has filled me with the most joy I’ve experienced since I started following pro golf.
As anyone who has followed NLU stuff for a while (or anyone lucky enough to meet LC or John at a Refuge event or elsewhere) already knows: She is one of the most genuine people in the game and has been that way as long as we’ve known her. But like Max, her openness publicly and privately about the peaks and valleys of confidence just makes you even more emotional when the inevitable dam breaks and her talent wins out.
She doesn’t like being the center of attention. I was friends with her for two years before she finally corrected me on how to actually pronounce her last name. (I had always defaulted to the pronunciation employed by TC’s boy Tom Coughlin and I was in the middle of caddying for her in an actual pro tournament before she finally said “Hey I have to tell you something.”) Flash forward to a couple of weeks ago: After winning her first event in Canada, she showed up to a virtual video shoot wearing the goalie mask she got as a makeshift trophy, still beaming days after the W. You can hear in her voice that she’s ready to go grab some more. It’s the best.
I can’t imagine what the mind f*** of grinding through a professional golf career must be like. Spending years trying to find little moral victories while watching someone else walk away with the trophy and then driving to the airport to go do it again in another city. Then throw in the pressures of making a career’s worth of money inside the financial realities of the women’s game.
But LC just got two shiny, physical representations of her supreme talent to put up on the shelf (right next to her prestigious NIT trophy). This week, she walked into one of the most famous pubs in golf and the bar stopped and sang “We Are the Champions” to her.
From the outside looking in, it’s always been easy for us to watch her hit a golf ball and know that she’s one of the best in the world at doing it. Now, I think she knows it too, and I couldn’t be more excited to see what happens next.
Last month, I took a trip to Colorado with Randy and two other friends for a buddies’ golf trip.
I bring this up for two reasons: 1) For as much as I love talking about golf courses (and for as much as social media can become an arms race to see who can plan the most trips to the most Places You’ve Heard or Read About) the amount of fun I’ve had on trips very rarely correlates with the ranking of the course you’re playing. I’ve had afternoons following Randy and Neil around munis in Peoria or matches with Tron on some homemade course with one mower that have been perfect encapsulations of everything I love about golf. On the flip side, I’ve had anxious, stressful experiences at world-renowned places that made me wish I had stayed home and cut my own grass.
It’s the biggest cliche in the world, but it’s worth repeating: It’s hard to have a bad time playing golf with good people.
The point of this: In past versions of this trip, we’ve gone to Bandon Dunes and had the time of our lives. But when it became clear that crazy schedules and full tee sheets everywhere were going to prohibit a similar trip this year, I’m glad that we decided to just get something on the books. Instead of holding out for availability at some bucket list place, we went to one friend’s hometown, got a house together and spent three days playing his two favorite courses in the area. We made one trip to the grocery store, cooked out each night and had just enough whiskey in the evenings. The competition was fierce and mostly meaningless. It was absolutely perfect, just as it would have been at pretty much any course in the world.
Bucket list places are great and they can expose you to things that make you see the game in a whole new way. But for every article, video and Instagram post praising them (my own included!), it’s also worth reiterating that it’s not the only way to fill up the tank.
The second reason I bring up this trip is to express just how badly I played. I want to apologize to my perennial partner Nick and thank him for dragging my corpse around the greater Steamboat Springs area. A heartfelt, written congrats to Randy and Tim on a decisive victory.
This year has been a big one for re-tooling my golf swing and while I’m confident I’m working on the right stuff, it hasn’t been without some seriously dark moments. So for anyone who has spent a year looking forward to an annual trip, only to have invasive swing thoughts and an invasion of the body snatchers turn you into a completely unfamiliar golfer: I see you and I deeply feel for you.
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I remember sitting and having a morning coffee on the front porch at Pinehurst years ago and hearing some poor guy in a rocking chair on the phone with his spouse and holding back tears as he described just how temporarily hopeless his golf game had become. He had spent so much time, money and energy planning for this once-in-a-lifetime trip only to be completely abandoned by his golf swing upon arrival.
I couldn’t help but laugh at the time, but as always: It turns out it could happen to you! And the feeling is miserable. Of course, the biggest truth in golf is that everyone is in such a battle with their own game at all times that they don’t have the capacity to give a shit how anyone else plays.
Ordinarily, I would quickly flush this and chalk it up to bad timing. Like Neil has written in the past, I’d be lying if I said the meaningless competition of an annual buddies event doesn’t have me focusing my plan around peaking for next year.
Read my lips: It’s coming home.
Some other stray thoughts from the world of golf:
• Watching LC and Max move through the phases of their careers and feeling along for the ride as a fan makes me think about how these stories will change on the men’s side as the PGA Tour product continues to barrel toward the north star of being an Entertainment Product. I still do think that smaller fields and more reliance on stars is probably the right decision from a business standpoint, especially as the world of sports and entertainment continues to reach laughable economic heights. But making the eye of the needle even smaller would seem to make those types of breakthroughs to the mainstream even more rare.
The optimistic view is that as the Tour continues to slowly move toward the reality of being two tours (the 3M’s/Rocket Mortgages on one hand and the Siggie events on the other), it’s possible that there’s even more space to introduce these types of players to fans in an authentic way. You may not have been watching these events mid-summer, but I’ve learned a lot more about Davis Thompson and Max Greyserman in 2024 than I would have if they had finished T17 in some full-field event five years ago. And as a result, I feel like I have more context to follow their careers as they develop. I hope that feeling continues and that the Tour leans into more simple and creative storytelling around those events as time goes on because at least part of the reason for watching them is an investment in your golf future and it’s really fun when that pays off.
• In tandem with some of my own golf struggles described above, I’ve taken some inspiration from Soly and started doing some basic speed training with The Stack System. I’ve always battled a two-way miss and therefore been so tentative off the tee, which makes me relatively short and crooked. It’s a cyclical issue that just leads to getting even more tentative and thereby even shorter and more crooked. The idea behind a lot of the speed training is not to add some freak amount of length, but to just become more comfortable and confident swinging hard at the driver, which I have never been. At a minimum, it seems like being short and crooked is a worse situation than being crooked and… slightly less short. We’ll keep you posted.
• I spoke glowingly on the pod about the new par 68 course at Sand Valley (Sedge Valley) and will have some Instagram content from our day out there shortly. While everything above still holds true, if you ARE looking for the bucket list experience, it’s crazy how much critical mass Sand Valley has added over the past few years with Sedge, the Lido and the Sandbox (not to mention the other new 12-hole course that’s currently under construction).
• Next week, we’re rolling out a film about playing The Old Course in reverse and I’m very excited for people to see it. The production looks and feels awesome and I think it’s a big step forward in our video efforts. Our friends at YETI sponsored the film, which is a pretty cool full circle moment for me personally because not only did I get to work with my friend Andrew Schoneberger, who helped shoot this fun Lahinch piece from last year, but the “YETI Presents” films like this one have long been a major inspiration for everything we still strive to do on YouTube.
TONIC
As our due date of September 18 bears down on us, it’s hard to think about too much else. Therefore, it’s going to be a light Tonic section this time around.
The time usually spent watching movies and TV shows has been replaced with childbirth classes, furniture assembly, stroller comparisons and other work preparations to take time off when the baby arrives.
My wife Justine has been heroic at handling all of the many, many things I can’t help with. The necessary slowdown that comes with the final month of pregnancy has been an adjustment for her. Instead of battling crowds at the ballpark or getting out for long walks in the evening, it’s been more nights on the couch watching Brewers games together at home. Last night, it became clear how much baseball we’ve been watching: During one of my very unsolicited stats quizzes, she correctly named Brice Turang as the MLB leader in defensive runs saved.
People give all kinds of advice when you tell them you’ve got a baby on the way, but the truest one so far has been that the first 8 months feels like 8 weeks and the last month feels like a year. We are firmly in that anticipatory territory, but soaking up the unexciting evenings together.
Until next time.
Thanks for reading. You can reach D.J. at dj@nolayingup.com.
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