BEWARE: SPOILERS AHEAD.
WATCH IT ALL PLAY OUT IN PART I AND II OF THE NO LAYING UP CLUB CHAMPIONSHIP.
The question, posed at the beginning of 2024 by a 11-year-old girl, seemed innocuous at the time: Dad, who is the best golfer at NLU?
I had no idea that my answer would set in motion an actual tournament, a meaningful clash of meaningless-but-serious golf. At the time, however, the answer seemed obvious.
It was my colleague Ben Hotaling.
Did this upset my guy Chris Solomon?
He wasn’t mad, per se. Please do not write in the newspaper (or Slack) that he was mad. He was definitely not mad.
He was just a little surprised — okay, maybe annoyed is fair — that I would declare something like that based on a vibe or a feeling. When I tried to point out that Ben had recently shot a 65, and Soly was last seen on camera during Tourist Sauce: Australia applying horse tranquilizer to his back, it did not table the discussion. Instead, NLU Slack messages flew at a furious pace.
You cannot just declare something like that, we ultimately agreed.
Soly, after all, was a gamer. Did he need to remind us that he’d finished ahead of Ben the last two years at our Nest Invitational Tournament? (He did, in fact, remind us.) Sure, Soly might not be a young man anymore. He might not be playing 80 rounds of golf a year. He might have the creaky back that most fathers develop when they spend endless hours bouncing and singing Baby Beluga at bedtime. But he would not hand over the belt without a fight. Ben needed to go out and prove it.
“When you shared that information, I was flattered,” Ben told me. “I appreciate that people can see that I have the tools to be very good. However, it spiked the anxiety a bit because I hadn’t really shown it yet.”
To be the man — as Ric Flair taught us — you gotta beat the man.
And by the way, Tron, Neil and Cody (and maybe even D.J.!) deserved a shot in the ring. Randy and Casey and I were happy to play our role too, either as seat fillers invited to the Oscars, or as the red shirts quickly killed off in the first 20 minutes of a Star Trek episode. We’d slap it around, drink Spotted Cow and make a few bogeys, but all eyes would be on the main event. We reached Erin Hills, charged up our camera batteries, descended on Milwaukee, and put a peg in the ground right after the PGA Championship.
Now that the dust has settled, and the footage has been polished and released, we can definitively declare that Ben Hotaling is NLU’s Champion Golfer of the Year. You can see the footage for yourself, and enjoy the way Ben surgically picked his spots at Erin Hills, leaning on his driving iron and his unflappable poise to win in dominant fashion by seven strokes.
You might not be as familiar with Ben as you are with those of us who appear regularly on the podcast or in our video content, but he’s an essential part of our business, focusing his talent behind the scenes on our video and social media. He is a maniacal workhorse. It’s possible that letting Ben serve as the project manager and editor of a video where he wins a fake tournament by seven shots was a bit like when Jack Nicklaus used to win tournaments on courses where he was the designer, but we have no reason to suspect (unlike the 2016 PGA Championship won by Jimmy Walker) this took place on a green screen. The skeptics will remain skeptical, but the results ought to speak for themselves.
“Listen, was it a bit like when Bryson hit it all over Pinehurst and kept drawing good lies?” said Tron Carter, who held a share of the lead for a brief spell midway through round one round before ultimately finishing 11 shots back. “Who can say, really.”
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Golf has been a big part of Ben’s life since he was roughly 10 years old. His grandfather (who worked at River Ridge Country Club in Raleigh, North Carolina) got him into the game and didn’t hold it against him when he drove a golf cart into a bush during a club event. When he moved to Massachusetts near the end of elementary school, he started to take the game more seriously.
“My neighbor — also named Ben — would spend his days hitting shots in his front yard,” Ben said. “Everyone in the neighborhood had acreage, so we would hit shots from yard to yard. That experience blossomed into summer days spent at the local muni.”
He realized he had a little bit of talent when he won a scholarship to play at Lake of Isles golf course in Connecticut. One boy and one girl from each age group was selected to receive weekly lessons and have unlimited access to the course. Looking back, it was a massive year for his development as a golfer.
“Candy bars and Gatorades were free so I would go up there to practice most days during the summer,” Ben said.
However, by his own admission, his development stalled in high school.
“There wasn’t anyone that was all that good on the teams that I played on, so breaking 40 in a nine-hole match was looked at as very solid,” he said. “It was after college wrapped that I realized I, in fact, was not that good! I was getting beat by 60-year-olds on the regular.”
Growing up helped him reframe golf in his life. He still loved practicing for hours with the hope of getting better, but the results were less important. When Ben and his college friend Zach Brough decided to build a 7-hole, Par 3 golf course on Brough’s land outside Kansas City, it put him on a serendipitous path to eventually join No Laying Up in 2020.
“What I love about the sport is that it reflects my life in so many ways,” Ben said. “When I am doing well at work, as a husband, now as a father, as a friend, there is no better feeling than being free on the golf course. When I am not feeling free on the course, I know I need to pick it up in some other part of my life. Traveling, seeing new places, and meeting new people is fun and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. But the feeling of being present on the golf course when everything in my life is going as I would hope is unmatched for me.”
If there is a shot that Ben will remember most from his victory, it’s the wedge he hit into No. 4 at Erin Hills in the final round. He had just made back-to-back bogeys, and he was starting to feel the pressure a little, the special kind of pressure that only an imaginary event with meaningless stakes can apply.
“I’ve seen this movie before,” Ben said. “Playing really solid and letting it slip away from some silly mistakes.”
Instead of collapsing, he stuff his approach to a foot. I could try to describe it — it landed like a heavy raindrop and zipped toward the pin like a house cat pouncing on a helpless mouse — but you could just watch it by clicking the link above. This isn’t a newspaper and this isn’t 1987.
“That wedge locked me right back in and gave me the confidence to get it done,” he said.
The duel between Ben and Soly that we all hoped to see never truly emerged. In fact, Soly briefly gave the producers a scare on Day 1 when he flirted with the cut line before steering his way into the final four. Soly did ultimately finish in second, but as Rick Reilly once quipped about Tom Kite and the 1997 Masters, that would be akin to saying Germany finished second in World War II.
Soly has already been deep in the lab this summer, essentially reevaluating everything.
“This was a wake-up call for me,” Soly said. “I didn’t realize how much my physical condition had deteriorated until I got fatigued on the back nine walking Erin Hills. I’ve mistaken being able to swing with my current back situation with being healthy. So it was a wake-up call for me to get in the horse barn, start working out on my fitness, getting my legs stronger, getting speed. It wasn’t as much Ben blowing away the field as I was disappointed in my complete lack of ability to apply any threat at any point. It just felt like I had no power in my body to do anything.”
There are already rumors of Soly allegedly getting deep into the Stack System training program, but we cannot confirm them (because, as always, no free ads). With twins on the way, Soly will double his newfound perspective to next year’s NLU Club Championship, but it will be interesting to see how his back holds up to the rigors of three bedtime routines.
He vows to be ready.
“From that moment on, everything changed,” Soly said. “Everything is on the table. Any kind of horse steroids, creams, horse electrolytes, everything is in play from here on out, because I will not be embarrassed like that again.”
The coveted Yeti Bucket Trophy awarded to the winner will be prominently displayed at the Hotaling household this year. And Ben has no interest in giving it back, or resting on his laurels.
“Super boring answer here but I am going to continue preparing like I would do even if I hadn’t won,” he said. “More lessons. More self-reflection. More reps. More time in the gym. I desperately want to be good - and not just beat my colleagues good. I want to be a stalwart in Kansas Mid-Am golf. I want to win something for the history books someday. This is a great step and validation that the drive to not waste my potential is worthy.”
Tip your hat to him. Wear your white socks high in tribute.
Say it out loud with all the reverence you believe it does or doesn’t deserve:
Ben Hotaling, Champion NLU Golfer of the Year.
Kevin Van Valkenburg is the Editorial Director of No Laying Up
Email him at kvv@nolayingup.com
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