GHIN
What’s the coldest temperature where you will still consider playing golf? This is a question I ask myself every February in Baltimore, and I still don’t have a great answer.
I suspect the answer is different depending on where you live, and how long your golf season lasts. I know people who reside in California and Florida who find the idea of playing golf in 50-degree weather to be insane. I don’t know a single person in Maryland who would balk at a tee time where it was 50 degrees.
I will go even further and tell you that I subscribe to the Stringer Bell Theory.
If we get a 40-degree day, that’s not even worth celebrating or complaining about.
It’s just a reasonable day for golf.
Everything south of 40 degrees is where this debate gets interesting. I played my first round of 2025 a couple of weeks ago at Clifton Park Golf Course in Baltimore with my friends Colin and Devin, and I think the temperature when we walked to the first tee was 37 degrees.
Objectively, this is absurd. I know it is. A lot of courses won’t even let players out on the course at that temperature because you’re potentially creating issues for the grounds crew, snapping the grass when you walk — particularly the greens — instead of bending it. But Clifton is not a course that has a budget to pamper its golfers. If you want to tee it up, and there isn’t snow on the ground, you’re welcome to play.
Can’t put a peg in the ground because it’s still semi-frozen?
In the eyes of Baltimore City, that sounds like a YOU problem. Maybe put some work into hitting your 3 wood.
One thing I like about February golf, other than it represents the tail end of winter’s icy grip on my seasonal affective disorder (self-diagnosed), is how fun it is to play golf with low expectations and just enjoy the experience. It feels almost like you’re stealing, in a way.
You should listen to our recent podcast about the aspirational golf that some of us want to play this year. It’s a great episode and I have some lofty places I’d like to visit this year, too. But after thinking about it this winter, I also want to reconnect with the kind of golf with zero stakes and low expectations. Working on our series about public golf in America has reminded me of how many of us just want to walk around a big dumb field with friends (and beers) for four hours and not have to stress over all the other B.S.
Winter golf is a good reset button.
I cracked a joke recently on a podcast about Clifton, mostly trying to make fun of my daughter — who has grown up playing most of her golf at a country club, and so she has a snob’s sensibility when it comes to conditioning — and I got a couple enraged DMs from Baltimore people telling me I should walk into traffic. (Online discourse remains a delight, doesn’t it?)
The truth is, I love Clifton and have been playing it regularly for the 25 years I’ve lived in Maryland. It feels a little like a quirky family member. I reserve the right to joke about it, but I would be pissed off if someone shit on it, so I understand why the comment seemed snobbish.
Is there noticeable trash and broken glass just off some of the fairways? Yes. It’s also $34 to walk and has a couple of holes that are among my favorites in Maryland. Whenever I dream about winning the Mega Millions, one of the first fantasies that comes to mind is dumping like $50 million into Baltimore’s municipal golf courses and keeping the greens fees under $40 while at the same time giving them the budget that Baltimore Country Club and Caves Valley get. But that also might destroy the ethos of the place.
If you haven’t played winter golf recently, I recommend giving it a spin. Yes, it hurts when you catch a shot on the hosel. When the wind blows, it can be borderline miserable. Some winter days, to paraphrase Rogers Hornsby, I stare out the window and wait for spring.
But some days, I can’t wait any longer, so I put on three layers and trundle through the frost.
On the first tee, my friend Colin reached into his pocket and pulled out a hand warmer. He handed it to me, and I don’t think I would have been happier had he handed me a thousand dollars.
With warm hands, I managed to push my tee a quarter inch into the ground, then somehow roasted my drive down the middle.
No idea what I ended up shooting that day; it didn’t matter.
Only one thing did — I was golfing again.
TONIC
If you are one of those people who hates the dumb voices I do during our Major Deep Dives, I have an explanation for you: Blame Saturday Night Live for their existence.
If they occasionally make you laugh, you can thank SNL cast members like Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Phil Hartman and Will Ferrell, because they did a lot to shape the storytelling instincts of a teenage kid who grew up in Montana. I’ve said this a few times on our podcast, but it’s worth repeating: impressions aren’t supposed to sound exactly like the person you’re portraying. In fact, the closer they get to mimicry, the less interested I am. I think you try to embody the person’s spirit, not sound exactly like them. If you think they’re cringe … you might be right! Not all content is tailored to you.
I was thinking about some of this as I watched all three hours of SNL 50 this past week. The show has been, and I say this without much hesitation, one of the most important cultural influences on my life. I can’t pretend that I tune in every week anymore, but there was a time when it felt like it was the only show that mattered. They have a saying at 30 Rock that your favorite cast was probably the one that happened to be on the show while you were in high school, and I think that’s probably true. Carvey, Myers, Hartman, Adam Sandler and Chris Farley all seemed like gods to me when I was a teenager.
SNL 50 wasn’t perfect (no episode of SNL is, by design) but I still didn’t want it to end, despite its three-hour run time. Sandler’s song covering 50 years of the show’s history probably hit me the hardest because it encapsulated all the bits I probably lean into a bit too much — nostalgia, earnestness, inside jokes, cringe voices.
I loved every second. If you didn’t feel something during the moment when Sandler’s voice almost breaks as he sings about Farley and Norm McDonald, I’m not sure we’re occupying the same emotional planet.
On the surface, I was a jock growing up, but I was also a nerdy theater kid at heart, and every Monday, my friends would spend the better part of study hall breaking down what sketches worked and what characters bombed. A lot of the sketches were genuinely cringe, but I don’t think that mattered. My attachment to them is rooted in a time and place where I was still figuring out who I was and what I wanted to chase in life.
This was a show my parents had watched, and now it was a bridge that connected our generations. I don’t think my father and I have ever laughed harder — together — than we did during the recurring sketches about Toonces the Driving Cat.
It’s so simple, so stupid, and yet so funny.
One reason SNL has lasted 50 years — other than a lack of any competition on Saturday nights — is that it manages to reinvent itself for each generation. I don’t remember Gilda Radner, but I know how important she was to the show and my parents, so one of the most emotional moments of SNL 50 was when Jane Curtain and Laraine Newman held up her picture during the goodbyes.
The photo is a testament to a lot of the things I love, the idea that a community of artists from so many different backgrounds and generations can be connected, or tethered together, by their desire to make art. Here is Martin Short, Tom Hanks, Jimmy Fallon, and Jane Curtin together, and here is Laraine Newman (whose daughter is the hilarious Hannah Einbinder of Hacks fame), and they’re all trying to do the same cosmic, unexplainable thing. Norm Macdonald once wrestled with the fact that no matter what he did, most people would know him for his time on SNL. Eventually, he was at peace with that. “As long as the show lives, then so do I,” he wrote.
It doesn’t matter if art is dumb, or if a lot of it doesn’t hold up well. The pursuit of it is as fun as anything on earth. When I think about what I consider the best cast members, the true Hall of Famers, most of them are the ones who would sell out in pursuit of the joke without fear of embarrassment or cringe: Gilda, Dan Akroyd, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Will Ferrell, Kristin Wiig, Kate McKinnon. I could name a dozen others.
My daughters almost never watch SNL when it airs, but they always love watching clips or reruns of it on Sunday. I’m always surprised at how invested they are in who is going to host or who the musical guest might be. And part of what makes the show continue to work is, as insular and masturbatory as it can be, they’re not shy about welcoming new icons into the mix to continue the reinvention. I saw a surge of criticism from The Olds online when Paul Simon opened the show with Sabrina Carpenter, the suggestion that the latest bubble-gum pop singer wasn’t worthy of such an honor. Simon, after all, had performed “Homeward Bound” with Geroge Harrison on the show back in 1976. Who was Carpenter compared to one of the Beatles?
I knew exactly why it was happening, however, and my suspicions were confirmed a few minutes later when I received a text from my 15-year-old with a screenshot of Carpenter and Simon.
“Look dad. One singer for you, one for me.”
You can be cynical about it and believe Lorne Michaels is a craven opportunist (possible!) or you can decide that, regardless of motive, SNL passes the baton and welcomes creative newcomers into their circle as well as anything in culture. Emma Stone, Ariana Grande, Ryan Gosling and John Mulaney are, to my kids, what Steve Martin and Tom Hanks were to me as hosts.
Fifteen can be such a confusing age. The world is asking you to grow up rapidly and at the same time, demand you remain a kid too. I’ve found I love driving my kids places with their friends because if you put on some music, they eventually forget you even exist. You might as well be an Uber driver. They start talking at a rapid-fire pace in their own language, and if you just shut up and listen, you can gain all kinds of worldly insights.
The other day, my daughter and her friends (five teenage girls) were discussing the levels of interest certain boys had in them, and the interest (or lack of) they had in return. I learned that certain boys could be categorized as “huz” material, while others might be more of a “Hear me out.”
One of the girls mentioned a boy who was particularly cringe, a bit of a try hard, and I immediately felt a twinge of sympathy for this boy. But then my daughter’s best friend, Emerson, dropped a nugget of life wisdom that was so profound, it made me chuckle.
“Bro, to be cringe is to live free.”
(You would be shocked, if you’re not a parent to teenage girls, how often they begin or end every sentence with the word BRO.)
So here is to you, SNL.
Thank you for helping those of us who are a little cringe attempt to live free for the last 50 years.
****
I’m not sure any episode of The BallKnowers has ever evoked the kind of reaction that our post-Super Bowl episode did. TC, Randy and Poosh and I have been laughing for the last week at some of the DMs we’ve received over our Top 10 Quarterbacks ranking, but I promise you we aren’t laughing because we feel like we successfully trolled anyone. Those rankings represent our genuine feelings over which quarterbacks we’d want, in descending order, if we were trying to win a Super Bowl next year.
It’s obvious I’m a bit of an outlier in the group when it comes to Jalen Hurts. I had him ranked 6th, while Poosh had him 10th and T.C. and Randy didn’t rank him in their Top 10 at all. But my more traditional view of Hurts doesn’t mean I think they’re morons and I’m smart.
I appreciate that our podcast — however dumb you think it is — doesn’t do groupthink just to play it safe.
If you talk with NFL coaches off the record (something I did occasionally in a previous career) you’d be amazed at how much they differ from public opinion on who is a great quarterback and who is a product of a system. I’m a big believer that playing quarterback has something in common with golf, it’s not always about your best plays, it’s about how good your bad plays are, and I think my Trap Draw colleagues are not giving enough consideration to the fact that Hurts rarely hurts his football team. He might not be a super processor, looking off safeties and pivoting to his third read and delivering a dart. He might not have the arm talent or ball placement that Allen and Herbert do. His wide receivers openly grumbling about this at various points in the season speaks to those limitations. But it’s important to remember that every wide receiver is, by necessity, a little crazy. They are egomaniacs because they have to be.
The most visible part of a quarterback’s job is getting his wide receivers the ball, but that’s not his most important job, I would argue. His most important job is to manage the chaos of being the lightning rod for an entire franchise and city. You are the cosmos. A lot of people have very dumb, and often incorrect, opinions about how you should do your job. You have to absorb all of it (often in silence) while finding a way to thread the needle of expectations and limitations of everyone around you.
In a hypothetical scenario where Jalen Hurts played for the Ravens and Lamar Jackson played for the Eagles, would the Eagles be the best team in football? It’s possible. I can envision a scenario where Jackson’s superior arm and mobility turned the Eagles into an unstoppable juggernaut, and he broke various NFL passing records. I can also envision a scenario where he pressed too much, fumbled too much, where he didn’t handle the criticism of Eagles fans with indifference or grace, and where he came up short in the playoffs, the same way he has with the Ravens.
The same is true of any quarterback. Would Justin Herbert look like the NFL’s best quarterback behind Philadelphia’s offensive line? Would Joe Burrow?
These are fun scenarios to imagine, but at some point, you have to realize what a pointless exercise it is. We are inventing scenarios that cannot have positive or negative outcomes. They only exist in the realm of fantasy.
Here is what we do know: Jalen Hurts won a Super Bowl. He played great in that Super Bowl. And while QB wins are not a stat, neither is Performance I Imagined in Scenarios I Invented.
I do, however, believe the BallKnowers channel the founding spirit of NLU. Just tell me how you feel. You don’t need logic or groupthink to back you up. No one’s opinion — not even the tape grinders and former players — ultimately matters. The scoreboard says what it does. The rest is just a vessel to enjoy the ride.
Kevin Van Valkenburg is the Editorial Director of No Laying Up
Email him at kvv@nolayingup.com