Michael Wolf (@BamaBearcat) hosts “Office Hours” on the 

 In addition to being an author and unofficial golf historian, he’s also a longtime professional golf agent.

The PGA Tour season ended yesterday, just 119 days after Brian Harman was crowned the Champion Golfer of the Year and four short months after Viktor Hovland earned the FedExCup crown.

It may be years before we find out who the biggest winners and losers of the 2023 golf year really were. But at least it’s almost over.

Sea Island has always been a pleasant enough place to wind things down. It’s no Myrtle Beach, but it does offer a short commute home for many of those involved. Not all left happy, of course. Professional golf has winners and losers like any sport. It’s just sometimes been hard to tell. The PGA Tour may have embraced an eat-what-you-kill image, but its membership policies for the past couple of decades have often evolved more towards socialism. There have been second chances if you’re on the career money list. Third chances if you’ve made 300 cuts. Fourth chances if your first name is Rickie.

That’s finally about to change after a reboot of policymaking earlier this year in response to the pressures imposed by new rival LIV Golf.

I should explain what’s changing in each PGA Tour eligibility category and how it will impact different players going forward. But that will have to wait for Season 2 of Office Hours. And that’s because I’m still not confident that I understand the new system well enough to explain it to you. That feels weird to type, because my NLU overlords pay me at least in part to know such things. I’m not alone. Players at every level of the PGA Tour pecking order are headed into the offseason unsure of the details of how the new system will work when the lights turn back on at Kapalua in six weeks. Among them is my longtime friend Jim Herman.

Hermie didn’t reach the PGA Tour until he was 34 years old, but thanks to three well-timed wins, he’s held onto his card by his fingernails for the past 12 years. Every one of his starts on Tour has been earned. Thanks to a questionable choice for an agent (me) he’s never received a single sponsor’s exemption and he’s only played in a handful of no-cut events. He might just end up being the last person to reach the Tour without having ever taken a single golf lesson. But incredibly, if you had bet $5 to win on every player in every PGA Tour event since 2000, the one who would have made you the most money is James Robert Herman.

Jim’s now 46 years old, and the hardest season of his career ended last Friday afternoon with a missed cut in Sea Island that left him 198th on the final FedExCup list. With so much change coming to the world of professional golf, it was a bad year to play bad. And it means Hermie will have school carpools and shoveling snow to keep him occupied this winter.

The Hermans recently moved from Florida to a middle-class suburb of Philadelphia, closer to aging in-laws and so their kids could attend schools far from JupLife. For the first time in a decade, Jim will have to spend the holidays waiting to find out when and where he might get to play next year. He may have a few opportunities in Europe as a result of the Tour’s newly extended partnership with the DP World Tour, but it’ll remain an open question for the time being.

The cute answer has always been “Play Better,” and that’s exactly how it should work. Never has it paid more to be one of the best 300 golfers on the planet. But professional golf only survives in the long run if all of their newfound bullion is earned, not negotiated.


The NFL has space for 1,700 players, with virtually all of them arriving via an American college. NBA and MLB rosters are more diverse, but they still have room for 450 and 780 players respectively. The point being that outplaying the best from almost every country in the world just to earn one of the 200 PGA Tour cards is really, really freaking hard. Keeping that card for a decade is almost a miracle.

Being the 198th-best baseball player might mean you’re batting fifth in your team's starting lineup. In golf, it means you’re a mule. How that should translate to each player's bottom line is up for debate.

It feels like everybody has been winning a lot lately (except the fans and Jay Monahan). The remaining six weeks of the year will likely be filled with more reporting on How Much and For Who. The reality is the Tour has already been steadily bifurcating itself for years, next year will just make it official. Want proof? Hermie has played in 266 PGA Tour events and he still hasn’t met Tiger Woods. He did talk to Jim Nantz once, on an elevator.

Of course, a fourth-place finish at the Barbasol shouldn’t have earned more FedExCup points than a fifth at Riviera. But acknowledging that reality could cost the Tour some sponsors. Corrections of market inefficiencies are rarely free. But despite the costs, it’s still a net positive.

I’m looking forward to seeing some of the young faces this new system will help get onto the main stage faster. A pair of my hometown Birmingham boys – Gordon Sargent and Nick Dunlap – will likely be beneficiaries from the new PGA Tour U. You’ll like what you see.

But I’ll also miss some of the recently departed. Players like Brandt Snedeker and Nick Watney may not have won majors, but they made some of our Sunday afternoons more interesting. We can disagree with the sizes of the golden parachutes many of them will take from the game while still admiring the talent and effort they put into their craft. Jim Herman is probably better at golf than any of your friends are at anything they do for a living.

Mules may not run as fast as thoroughbreds, and they might not pull their own weight, but it still takes a lot of hard work to plow the fields.

A sincere thanks to Holderness and Bourne and to all of you for supporting my first year of working with No Laying Up. The syllabus for 2024 is already filling up fast.

What It Means to Be a Mule

Standing in the middle of the 18th fairway at The Club at Carlton Woods, the moment had arrived. Seven years into her professional golf career, this felt like Angel Yin’s chance to claim a major championship. Her tee shot had landed in the right center of the fairway, and in a playoff against Lilia Vu, Yin now had just a 5 iron left into the Par 5.

After so much doubt and anguish and frustration, after years of second-guessing herself, it looked like Angel Yin finally found her way. She just needed one more great swing, and all the pressure would be on Vu to match.


Yin and Vu knew each other well. The two Southern Californians, a year apart in age, had once dominated the junior golf scene. They chose different paths on their way to adulthood — Yin taking an early leap to professional golf in 2016 and Vu taking the collegiate route at UCLA — but now their paths were crossing again.


One of them was about to win their first major.

Yin stood over the ball, a gentle breeze in her face. She visualized the shot she wanted to hit, a towering draw over the lake. Everything was quiet. She drew back her club and fired her hips. The ball started right at the flag.


It drifted left, then farther left. Yin watched in anguish as it curled toward the grandstands.

Her ball continued to tumble out of the sky, splashing into the lake a foot from the bank in front of the green. A groan rippled through the crowd.

Yin, who had played so well throughout the Chevron Championship, had let it slip from her grasp. She could only watch in shock as Vu made a birdie to put an exclamation point on the win.

Standing at the podium after the loss, fielding various questions, the 24-year-old reflected on one of the most exhausting days of her life. “You’re taking the loss pretty well so far,” GOLF.com’s Zephyr Melton observed.

“Watch, I’m going to go home and cry,” Yin said, laughing.

What do you do when someone’s greatest triumph is your biggest disappointment?

In Angel Yin’s case, you rely on the mental fortress you’ve spent years building. That’s why, as Vu was lifting the trophy, Yin was still smiling.

“I think I’ve just come a long way,” Yin said. “I’m just really happy with who I am, where I am, and what I’m doing right now. Just a lot to appreciate. If I can talk about how much I appreciate life right now, I’ll get emotional — (but) not over this.”

When Yin thinks back on her 2023 season, a year where she won for the first time, where she is (projected) to finish 13th in the Race to CME Globe, and climbed to the best world ranking of her career, it’s how she handled the disappointment of losing a major that sticks out the most.


All the hard work, in that moment, was far behind her.

As affable and personable as athletes come, it might come as a surprise that Yin 

spent most of her days as a kid alone on a golf course.


A lot of that time was also spent in observation. Yin wasn’t taking lessons, so she’d watch a range full of “old men,” hovering her driver like Tiger Woods. Just by observing

 she developed one of the most powerful swings the eye could see. First exposed to golf from word of mouth, her mother mistakenly purchased a book on croquet to learn more. “I didn't grow up in a golfing household,” Yin said. “There was the knowledge that we lacked, and we didn't really seek more because the truth is, financially, to seek more, it's hard. Not everyone has that kind of money. We just did what we thought we needed to do and that was enough.”


Despite being one of the most promising prospects in junior golf – nearly qualifying for the U.S. Open at 11, medaling at the U.S. Women’s Amateur and reaching the final at the U.S. Girls Junior – she only won once on the AJGA, where she spent most of her amateur career. She still landed an offer from USC, one of the best programs in the entire country. Close to home, close to great courses – what could be a better fit?

But for Yin, a college education felt like something she could pursue at any point. She didn’t want to “miss the train” that was professional golf. She took the leap in 2016 and turned pro.


Yin’s few years playing professional golf turned out to be an education of its own, one she never knew she needed. At times, Yin was too powerful for her own good. She lacked any course management and had to learn the hard way about controlling her distances and shot-shaping.

Even amid the growing pains, she’d call the start of her professional career “fortunate.” She spent her rookie year on the LET and earned LPGA status at the end of it at Q-School. It only took a year before she earned her first professional win, and though she’d spent years without one, it felt like Yin would always be around. Her trajectory kept going up.

In her lowest moments, she could barely climb out of bed. She didn’t even recognize herself.

Some of it was pain. But Yin was also a prisoner of self-doubt.

She was 24 years old, still full of potential, but in 2021 — Yin’s third season on the LPGA Tour — nothing felt right. She couldn’t break through and get a win. She’d been tinkering with her swing, obsessively trying to reconstruct it to look the way it did when she played free and loose as an amateur, but all that work caused a grueling nerve injury in her left shoulder. On top of that, a recent diagnosis related to organ issues made things even worse. She was completely lost in her golf game, and to add insult to injury, she'd missed out on perhaps the year’s biggest goal: making a third Solheim Cup team in a row.


When the first week of September arrived, she refused to watch it. “I saw the scores. I was rooting for America. But I didn’t watch any golf,” she said. “I tried to stay out of it as much as possible, but it’s hard. My friends are all golfers. Everyone talks about it.”

“It was just too much for me to handle,” 

 “My reality collapsed a little bit that year.”


Four missed cuts in a row followed, mentally pushing to the absolute brink. She somehow managed to make the Tour Championship, but her body ultimately failed her. She withdrew after the first round, effectively ending her season.

One day, in the midst of her lowest point, Yin received a random DM from the site director of the Riverside LPGA-USGA Girls Golf chapter. Jakeishya Le knew of Yin from her local success as an amateur, but was a fan from afar, thinking Yin was still locally-based. She asked if Yin would be willing to host a clinic for the young girls, many of whom had never touched a golf club.


Plenty of professionals would have blown off the request, mired in the depths of their slump, but something about it piqued Yin’s interest. She flew from Florida back to Southern California to teach the group, ranging from ages 3-12.

What transpired next was what Le calls “the funniest clinic I’ve ever seen.” One child asked Yin to demonstrate a trick shot, and Yin threw the ball up and kicked it “like a soccer ball.”

Another participant asked how she hit the ball so far, and she responded: “It’s the drugs,” she deadpanned. “Just kidding!” Maybe it wasn’t quite the clinic Le imagined she’d get from a professional golfer, but it blossomed into a fast friendship.


All that laughter from that day was slowly healing Yin.


“When you go through enough pain in life, you just go and laugh at it,” Yin said. “I also have this weird habit, when something is really serious, I just laugh at it. I’m happy it hasn’t gotten me in trouble.”

2021 wasn’t a laughing matter, and neither was 2022. She had finally begun recovering from her nerve injury, but her health issues persisted. Her livelihood began to feel like it hung in the balance. Money grew tighter, and her play wasn’t getting any better. Her status was in limbo, and she had no choice but to play more. Her best finish was a T3 at the Cognizant Founders Cup, but she wouldn’t sniff anything close to a top ten again that year. She missed out on the Tour Championship entirely.

In even dire straits than before, Yin decided to go against the grain. She had an epiphany. Instead of writing letters to sponsors to fill up a patchy schedule, why not listen to her body and delay the start of her season?

She didn’t tee it up until late March. Her first two starts were a mess. 76th place at the LPGA Drive On Championship at Superstition Mountain. A missed cut at the DIO Implant LA Open.


But then came Chevron. Something clicked, and she finally found her wings.

Yin opened with a 69 in the first round, then surged into the final group with a 67 on Saturday. She’d even been able to laugh off an ugly shank on the 17th hole while in contention and birdie 18 to get into the playoff with Vu.

It was all right there for the taking … until that 5 iron found the pond.

‘You’re on the right path,’ she told herself. ‘Something’s working. Let’s keep digging.’

“My entire life, it’s always been like, ‘You need to show no emotion,’” Yin said.

That’s what Yin thought the best golfers were supposed to do.

Occasionally, coaches and mentors would encourage her to open up, to channel that emotion. Juli Inkster tried to convince her it was okay, even productive, to get mad at times. But Yin always defaulted to trying to suppress her feelings.


It would be years before she understood how much it was holding her back.


At the Chevron, you could see Yin wrestling with her emotions, still trying to bottle them up. There was joy when she almost chipped in on 13. There was heartache when she found the water on 18, and when her second attempt over the lake landed 10 feet short of the cup, effectively ending the playoff. But she wasn’t quite ready to let go.

She wouldn’t miss another cut for the rest of the season. She was enjoying golf more than she ever had, even without that win and even within those close calls. Why, she began to wonder, at the pinnacle of her career, wasn’t she allowed to show that joy? Who would it hurt if she hung her head to diffuse her frustration? At the Women’s British Open at Walton Heath, she climbed within striking distance on Saturday, only for it to fall apart once again in the final round.

What good was flatlining doing for her game?

Something was missing, and it wasn’t just a win.

Three weeks after a successful Solheim Cup — she went 2-1 and earned a crucial point for the United States in singles by defeating Celine Boutier — Yin was playing one of the most exhausting stretches of golf of the year. Her body felt like it was breaking down again, but she kept making birdies. At the Buick LPGA Shanghai, she shot a sizzling 7-under 65 in the third round, making her the 54-hole leader going into Sunday.


Maybe this time, she wondered, things might be different.

She didn’t want to inundate herself with golf in preparation for the next day. But she also wasn’t interested in rest. She was more motivated by watching another set of professional athletes — tennis stars — who were chasing a trophy at the Shanghai Masters. Yin and her caddie, Markus Zechmann, went into town to watch Andrey Rublev and Grigor Dimitrov play in the semifinals.


As she watched the match, Yin noticed something about Rublev, the fifth-ranked player in the world. He effused 

of emotions. Anger. Sighs. Cheers. Joy. As Rublev claimed the second set over Dimitrov, Zechmann leaned over to Yin.


“Rublev’s body language is bad,” Zechmann said.


Angel Yin: Finding Her Wings

Every so often, a small group of people within the world of professional golf will behave in a manner that makes you question why you spend so much time caring about the game.

They essentially view the sport as an accounting exercise, a series of profits and losses, and it is clear they spent very little time thinking about the people who drive those figures. There is an assumption, one that is rarely questioned, that market forces will always reward them, and that a backlash will never emerge.

On an intellectual level, I actually agree with Patrick Cantlay and Xander Schauffele (and even Phil Mickelson!) about the value of labor. People’s interest in golf does generate billions of dollars in revenue, and it’s perfectly fine to have occasional discussions about how that revenue should be distributed.

Having that discussion in the middle of a Ryder Cup, however, is enough to make you want to puke.

It would be wise for players to remind themselves of this reality: You have every right to care about how much money you make, but fans are not going to care. Virtually no one watches professional golf because they’re in awe of the purse sizes or appearance fees, as the ratings for LIV Golf over the last two years have clearly demonstrated.

By all means, fight for what you think you deserve. As Mickelson hinted at this week, he’s still making chess moves. But caveat emptor to anyone on that journey.

It’s easy to be a curmudgeon, of course, a trap I fall into from time to time. You can spend a lot of time grumbling about the stuff that annoys you, or you can choose to appreciate what brings you joy. It’s an exercise that got me thinking this week: What did I see in golf the last few months that made me grateful the sport is such a big part of my life?

Campos is, admittedly, not someone I was aware of before the Korn Ferry Tour Finals aired last week. To describe him as a PGA Tour journeyman would be generous. He has been a professional since 2011, but in that time, he’s made little more than a ripple in his career. He has bounced around golf’s minor leagues, grinding in virtual anonymity, occasionally getting status on the PGA Tour and then letting it slip from his fingers. There have been injuries and slumps and bogeys, and also just enough flashes of 

 to keep hope alive. In 2021, he led the Puerto Rico Open after 54 holes and finished 3rd. A month later, he finished 2nd to Joel Dahmen in the Corales Puntacana Resort and Club Championship, a stretch that was good enough to make him feel like he’d turned a corner. Every golfer has been there. You grab on to a certain swing thought — or feel — and convince yourself you’ve cracked the code, that you’re an artist with an iron in your hands. This is going to carry you to the promised land, you tell yourself, knowing deep down it’s a lie.

Whatever Campos found those two weeks wasn’t sustainable. It so rarely is for mortals. He missed 10 of his next 15 cuts. Now deep into his 30s, his body was riddled with constant pain. He went back to the Korn Ferry Tour, and made just five cuts in 19 starts. He was teetering on the verge of despair. Time, he understood, was running out.

He hired a trainer. A nutritionist. A chiropractor. He went all in on 2023. And for the first time in years, he was able to play a full season without injuries. He played solid throughout the Korn Ferry Tour season, compiling enough points to enter the Finals in 23rd place, seemingly in good position to earn his PGA Tour card (awarded to those who finish in the Top 30.) But over the course of the tournament, the dream started to slip away. A few wayward swings here and there, and he slid down the standings. The pressure was mounting.


He came to the very last hole needing to make a birdie to finish 30th. He knew it, too. Campos stood over an 8-foot putt for what felt like a century. He took one last look, then sent it — and all his hopes — trickling toward the hole.

He was 31st in the standings. Campos crouched down, put his elbows on his knees and looked like golf (in all its cruelty) had broken him.


I have never had a putt that meant even a fraction as much, that truly mattered beyond my own oafish pride, but I understood exactly how Campos felt in that moment. His nerves had dashed all his hopes down the stretch. Knowing you are mentally fragile, and being unable to do anything about it in the moment, might be golf’s most devilish trick.


“Horrible,” Campos said, when asked to describe how he felt after the miss. “Honestly, horrible.”

The story could have ended there. It probably should have, because it usually does. But an unlikely 2-stroke penalty by another player in the Korn Ferry Finals, Shad Tuten, offered a reprieve. Tuten had taken an improper drop on the 15th hole, a misunderstanding with no advantage gained, but a clear violation.

When all the accounting was done, Tuten was outside the Top 30. Campos was in.

None of this would have ended up on my radar if Campos hadn’t agreed to an interview with Chantel McCabe of Golf Channel. The interview — 

which you should watch here, because reading the quotes could never convey them properly

 — was like watching a middling professional golfer perform a masterful version of Hamlet. You can watch Campos wrestling with joy and anguish and love and bewilderment. He is on the verge of tears the entire time. His family had come to Indiana to support him. He’d felt like he’d put them through a lot to chase this dream. Now he was trying to wrap his brain around the idea that it was okay to celebrate with them.

“God, it’s tough,” he says. “I’m tired. It’s been a long year. A lot of thoughts, positive and negative. I just kept on thinking about the work I put in this year. God, I put in so much work. I’m really happy it paid off.”

It was, for me, a reminder of how tormenting golf can be, how much heartache it can cause, how embarrassing it is to feel like you’re going to throw up in the middle of your backswing.


And yet there are the rare times when the sun shines on you and you get an unlikely reprieve.

Luke Donald was a little surprised by the question.

The Ryder Cup victory press conference was in full swing, celebratory beers had already been poured, and the European party was just on the other side of the doors. Shane Lowry and Tyrrell Hatton looked, mentally, like they were already there. The mood of the room was jubilant.

But then Donald, the European captain, fielded a question from a perceptive journalist that gave him pause: 

Have your parents been on your mind at all today? If they were alive, what would they think about their son in this moment?

I was sitting maybe 20 feet from Donald as he turned this question over in his mind. It was obvious he was genuinely contemplating it, and he was moved by the thought. Donald’s father, Colin, died unexpectedly 12 years ago, at a time when Donald was the No. 1 ranked player in the world. His mother, Ann, passed away more recently. As he was speaking, Lowry reached over and put a hand on Donald’s shoulder.

“I miss them, of course,” Donald said. “I would have loved to share this moment with them.”


One of my favorite things about golf is the way it stitches together generations, not just of parents and their children, but also of the people who taught you the game or put a club in your hands for the first time and turned you loose. Donald understands this better than most. It’s why he surprised his team on the eve of the Ryder Cup with individual 2-minute videos he’d commissioned for each player. In the clips, family members and loved ones spoke directly to each European Ryder Cup member, saying how proud they were.


By the time it was over, most of the players on the receiving end were in tears. I thought about those videos throughout the week when I watched Jon Rahm, after his matches were over, dart around the course as a fan, bouncing from tee box to green to offer fist pumps of encouragement for every teammate he could find.


“It's really, really important to not just play for each other but play for those that mean the most to you,” Donald said. “I think that's super powerful.”

Golf wasn’t everything to Donald’s parents. He offered that up as a reminder. They wanted him to lead not just a balanced life, but an honorable one. In the weeks following the Ryder Cup, I kept returning to the idea that the perfect man to lead the team had not been Europe’s first choice, how that distinction had gone instead to Henrik Stenson.

Stenson had lost the job when he couldn’t resist the allure of a lucrative guaranteed contract with LIV Golf. He made a decision that was the right one for himself. Donald stepped in and not only rescued the European Tour from embarrassment, but he did such an impressive job, that there were already calls for him to keep the gig for another spin in 2025. They would have appreciated the win, he said, but they would have been even more proud of how he conducted himself as captain.


“I think that's why we always play this game,” Donald said. “It's not just for ourselves. That's what makes the Ryder Cup so special –  is we play it for the people that mean so much to us. Certainly, my parents meant a lot to me. Yeah, they would be very proud.”

Two weeks away from your kids can feel like an eternity when they’re growing up.

A trip to Rome to cover the Ryder Cup, then a buddies golf trip to Forest Dunes right after, sounded like an enviable adventure when I booked it. But by the end of the fortnight, I was short on sleep, my feet were on fire, and I was missing my family. When my flight touched down at BWI, I was ready to put golf on the backburner for a bit.

Time doesn’t stand still, however, just because you’re exhausted.


No one — no matter how much they love you — wants to hear that you might need a vacation to recover from your vacation. And time certainly doesn’t stand still when you’re an 11-year-old girl who loves golf and you want to show your dad all the progress you’ve made in your game since he flew across the Atlantic Ocean. So the day after I returned from my golfing sojourn, I climbed in the car with my daughter and headed (once again) to the golf course. She was slated to play a match in her weekly league, this one against two high school boys.


On the rare occasions when I write about my daughter’s golf game, I don’t want to deceive you into thinking she’s some kind of prodigy. She is not. When Lexi Thompson was 12 years old, she played in the U.S. Women’s Open; six months from now, my daughter will be that same age, and I’ll be grateful just to buy a ticket for us. (Breaking 100 in tournament conditions from the junior tees is about where we’re at right now, which is still a thrill.)

It’s a trip, however, to monitor a young golfer’s progress at this age. While I was overseas, Keegan’s other set of parents sent me a series of videos of her most recent swings. (Youth sports are often the shared love language between divorced families, if you’re not aware.) I could already tell from the grainy footage the ball was jumping off her clubface with more speed, but to see it in person — like when she smoked a 3 wood onto the final green when I was on the verge of telling her to lay up — felt like witnessing a magic trick.

One second, the magician throws a sheet over a young girl and waves his arms around as a distraction. The next minute a young woman emerges. The magician is time, and you can’t quite piece together how he does it.

In a match against two high school boys, my daughter was firing at tucked pins, rolling in birdies, taking deep breaths and refusing to back down. As hard as they tried, they couldn’t beat her. The word pride felt like an insufficient descriptor.

At the Ryder Cup on Saturday, I watched Rory McIlroy hit one of the best shots I’ve ever seen someone hit, a majestic 3 wood into the 16th green that carried 300 yards and tumbled out of the sky like a raindrop. An entire amphitheater of people went bonkers. You could feel the ground shake. My friend Kyle Porter and I were still talking about it a week later. It was the best 3 wood I’ve ever seen in person.

It was also the second-best 3 wood I saw this month.

There is no shortage of joy in the game, even as money threatens to consume so many parts of it.


You just have to be open to it and remind yourself where to look.

The Prevailing Magic of Golf

Sitting on the interview dais with a Peroni and reflecting on what could very well be his final Ryder Cup, Justin Rose helped it click for me.


When asked what unites the European Ryder Cup team, Rose thought for a moment and gave an answer about “team culture” worthy of the Harvard Business School.


, but the upshot (with insightful additions from Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm) was this: To a European player, the Ryder Cup is about history. More specifically, it’s about your chance to add to that history. It’s about playing a small role in a collective story that has been going on for decades. The entire privilege of the week is having the chance to help write the next chapter.


During the ranging answer, Rose, Rahm and McIlroy rattled off the names of the players responsible for making them love the Ryder Cup. Seve Ballesteros, of course. Jose Maria Olazabal and others.

“We're caretakers of this European jersey right now,” McIlroy said. “And we're hopefully going to pass it on in the future in a better spot than where we found it.”

“It's the ability to walk through those gates and those doors and forget about who you are outside of this week. What you have done or what you may do afterwards, really truly doesn't matter.”

There’s a trope that gets thrown around far too often about the Ryder Cup: The Europeans win the biennial event because they have more fun in the team room. They sing songs and give each other shit and they just look like they’re closer than the Americans. It’s an absurdly oversimplified way to look at things and it discounts both the immense talent on the European side and the two previous home blowouts in the United States.

But let’s be clear: The Europeans have now won eight of the last 11. They’ve won three in the United States since the last time the U.S. won on the road.

The team room stuff is not totally untrue; in my opinion, it’s just a bit incomplete. Listen to the players and they’ll tell you that the Europeans win more Ryder Cups partially because of the culture, but mostly because it’s been there for more than 40 years.


They meticulously plan everything, not with the expectation of winning every single one, but to make sure that the close ones break their way. They have continually made their players comfortable and confident to show up and play their best. Every one of those winning teams ends up feeling like it’s so much more than the sum of its parts.

Mine is armchair analysis, of course, but so often the Americans, by comparison, end up looking desperate to Not Lose. Soly said it well 

 “All the things Europe does culture-wise look like they lead to confidence… Everything the U.S. does on their side looks like it leads to pressure.”

Listening to Rose, Rahm and McIlroy rattle off the hallowed names that built the European Ryder Cup culture, my American heart sank at the idea of the U.S. team trying to do the same. And it makes sense why. Even as a U.S. fan, the American moments that instinctively come to mind first for me are… Not Good.

Hunter Mahan, rain suits, Tom Watson, Hal Sutton. Tiger. Phil. Paris.

Even the good stuff involves a bunch of characters that the PGA Tour is currently trying to expunge from golf history. How can any of that become a rallying cry?

Which is why now has to be the time to restart the mindset. To get beaten down in Italy with that U.S. team is such a clear signal that something non-golf is going on here. And fixing it has to start now, while that feeling of getting beaten in Europe for the first time is still fresh in the minds of Scottie Scheffler, Max Homa, Xander Schauffle, Patrick Cantlay, Collin Morikawa and others.

McIlroy said in the press conference Sunday night that, because of all the home team advantages, winning a Ryder Cup on the road has become one of the most impressive feats in all of sports. If the American team wants to do it, it needs to start building an actual culture. The kind that takes more than a three-day scouting trip or a dinner party at Jack Nicklaus’ house to create.


When American fans talk about the camaraderie of the European team, the implication is very clear. If the U.S. team had a few chants and songs of their own, this 30-year European drought would have ended by now. But spend any time with the American team and you’ll learn quickly how different they are from their Euro counterparts. The worst idea, in my opinion, is to try to create some Kirkland Signature knock-off version of the European team culture.


It has to look and feel entirely different. And the few leaders the U.S. team possesses are the ones that are going to have to lead the charge.

Be honest about what happened this week.


Usually with European Ryder Cup losses there are plenty of outside forces to blame – a tricked up course set up or a captain that glitched out. That wasn’t the case in Italy.

You can squabble over a few of the pairings or invoke Lucas Glover or Keegan Bradley. Maybe they would have made a difference, but surely not enough to change the result.


What was far more interesting to me was the invasion of the body snatchers that happened across the first three sessions. From a golf perspective, that wasn’t actually Scottie Scheffler out there. Or Xander. Or Brooks Koepka. Or Sam Burns. Or Jordan Spieth. Or Rickie Fowler. Whoever those guys were, they were bad. The U.S. team can have all the data in the world, but it is entirely useless if different human beings show up to the first tee.

So what happened? Was it as simple as the moment, the situation and the opposing crowds being too big? Was it competitive rust from a long layoff? Was it illness? Was it jet lag? Overconfidence? Did you care too much? Did you care too little?


There may be a few outlier excuses from this week, but none of them would explain the last 30 years of Ryder Cups. They don’t explain why the same thing that happened at this event to Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Jim Furyk and others is now happening to an entirely different crop of U.S. players.


It hasn’t been three decades of lucky bounces and unlikely holed putts for the Europeans. So what is it? Take some notes, get in a room and share your thoughts. Show some humility and honesty and fix it instead of showing up in 4 years assuming THIS NEXT group is different.

Things are not as far off as people think. Once they got comfortable, the U.S. split the final 20 points of this Ryder Cup on the road. If they could have gotten off to even a mediocre start, who knows how the final day shakes out? Instead, the thing was essentially over before it began.

The other thing they need to be honest about is whatever the hell is going on behind the scenes. The anonymous sources in 

 are easy to swat away. It’s a little different when 

Stefan Schauffle, Xander's dad and de facto agent, goes on the record

 with similar takes about paying players and not knowing if Xander was going to be on the team just weeks beforehand.


 Max Homa continually refuted reports that there was any division in the team and I take him at his word that these distractions didn’t make their way into the team room. But the amount of smoke that’s building around those two makes it clear that these guys are making somebody’s life more difficult behind the scenes. If those headaches make their way to the tournament organizers, the captain, or countless other people, it’s hard to think they don’t become an overall negative timesuck on the organization as a whole.


I’m not going to pretend like the Ryder Cup is some scrappy upstart non-profit. I totally get the cynicism of any player who wants to get paid for helping to build this marketing behemoth (even if this conversation is one you will never, ever, ever, ever win in the court of public opinion). The Europeans see a home Ryder Cup as a way to fund and sustain the DP World Tour, the tour they came up playing in their home countries. What connection does Xander Schuaffle or Patrick Cantlay feel to the PGA of America and its coffers?

While personally I think this whole conversation is a massive distraction emblematic of the exact thing that has made large portions of the U.S. team so unlikable, it’s probably not something that’s going away soon considering the rest of the pro golf landscape. It needs to be figured out as quickly as possible by either: a) Re-allocating the 20 percent of revenues that gets paid to the PGA Tour as a licensing fee for using “its” players or b) Helping players see the light on all of the things the PGA of America does in order to make the game of golf better.

The longer that conversation is a thing, even among a few key players, the more obvious it is that winning is not the priority.


The Europeans’ identity is based on being a part of history. As discussed, the U.S. Ryder Cup history isn’t a great headspace in which to hang out. It feels like they need to focus on a very different rallying cry.

Every single American player’s career lives in the shadow of one player. He’s the guy that sucks up all the oxygen, the guy they all watched on TV. He’s the guy that inspired them to learn how to play, how to dress and how to club twirl. He’s the guy that got to 15 majors, an utterly psychedelic number that’s impossible to comprehend in modern golf.

But at Adare Manor in four years, the American players have a chance to work together to do something Tiger Woods wasn’t ever able to accomplish. Let that opportunity sink in and figure out how to use it.

Nobody on the American team is going to win 15 majors in their career. But together they do have this chance to be a part of what would become one of the biggest moments in American golf history.


With Tiger and Phil officially moved on, it feels like this group is the one to start fresh and begin their own story on the U.S. side. The Europeans are the team that plays to honor their childhood heroes? Then start over and focus on becoming the guys that Team USA is talking about 30 years from now.

Sell Tiger Woods on the next two captaincies.

It feels like there are two ways to go from here with the U.S. captaincy.


The first way is to continue the trajectory that the U.S. team is on: Using the role as some sort of weird lifetime achievement award for inoffensive forty-somethings.


Continuing down that road brings up a list of really nice guys that I frankly struggle to picture having any kind of motivational relevance within the American team. Stewart Cink. Matt Kuchar. Brandt Snedeker. Things of that nature.

Most of the other assistant captains that were put up this year have already been a captain (Steve Stricker, Jim Furyk, Davis Love III). Despite three successful Presidents Cups, Fred Couples has never led a Ryder Cup team. But I can’t imagine there’s some secret knowledge or system he’s yet to impart on all the teams with which he’s been an assistant.

Between the PGA Tour negotiations, launching TGL and becoming somewhat of a mentor for younger players, it’s clear that Tiger Woods’ injuries have helped him embrace more of a behind-the-scenes role. We know he’s going to be a captain eventually, as he was for the Presidents Cup in 2019, which he seemed to absolutely adore. Why not pitch him the captaincy in this way—as a four-year term singularly focused on first keeping the Europeans from breaking the stalemate at Bethpage and then figuring out how to crack the code for the U.S. at Adare Manor.

We all like to laugh at the Navy SEAL stuff. But Tiger is clearly interested in that sense of team structure. Imagine what it would look like if he turned his energy and his one-track mind toward the goal of building a culture from the ground up, learning how to be an effective leader and starting a new chapter of American golf. If he agreed, I think he would get started before the phone call ended.


Read Rahm’s quote again about forgetting what you’ve done before you walk in the team room. Tiger is the only guy with a presence and an aura big enough to drown out the U.S. team’s sense of individuality. But at this stage in his career, he seems sincerely more interested in passing his insights onto the next generation, rather than walling himself off to chase stroke play trophies.


What better way to scratch his competitive itch and keep himself inside the game than to tackle a problem like this with the best young players America has?

And if he’s not into it, please think outside the box. Find someone young enough to relate to the players who will treat the job of captaincy the same way Paul McGinley and Luke Donald did: As a job.

Continue The Process and build for the future.

By all accounts, the U.S. has made a big jump towards evening the playing field with the Europeans on the analytics side of things, which needs to continue. But it still seems like there is more to be done.

One of the best things I saw in Rome was the fact that Rasmus Højgaard, who spent two years trying to make the team and saw his brother Nicolai picked instead, was out at Marco Simone, driving golf carts for Team Europe. He was in uniform, he was grabbing waters and he was part of the team room. He was there to be a part of the week and help in any way he could.

If Keegan Bradley is as obsessed with the Ryder Cup as he says, why not invite him to do the same? Or better yet, Cameron Young, who will surely be on future teams? Or Will Zalatoris? Or Sahith Theegala? Eight of the American players on this team had never played a Ryder Cup in Europe before this week and many of them ended up looking absolutely shell-shocked and totally unprepared in the first few sessions. Getting more players exposed to that feeling before they actually step out of the tunnel and onto the first tee feels like such a no brainer if you’re serious about long term success.

I actually have incredible respect for Bubba Watson being seemingly the only person to say out loud how much he wanted to just be there when he served as a team assistant in 2016. None of these other guys are going to ask to do that. It’s going to be up to the leaders on the U.S. team to have some foresight and make them feel welcome.

And keep pushing it further. For the most part, these guys play the same PGA Tour events all year. If your stats team has highlighted a potential pairing, let them know! Make them play a practice round together. Better yet, make them get dinner together. Make this thing a constant in the back of the minds of your core players; an occasional treat amid the week-to-week grind of PGA Tour golf.


Keep going! Tron mentioned an idea on our Sunday podcast to schedule a scrimmage in the lead up against the U.S. Walker Cup team. Talk about building culture for the future. What a good way to start turning these U.S. players into lions in the minds of the future American stars. Let them see what Justin Thomas, Patrick Cantlay, Brooks Kopeka and Max Homa do up close in competition. Let them ask questions. Start to build a pathway and a system and make the next generation feel invested from the start.


The U.S. Ryder Cup team should be a Boys Club. That’s the whole point. The thing is that you just have to let a hell of a lot more people into the club.

Ryder Cup: Reviving the United States

For more content from our week on-site at the 2023 Ryder Cup, check out our

ROME — Rory McIlroy was still fuming late Saturday night.

He was a little embarrassed too, but he also felt his anger was justified. Video of him shouting expletives at Jim “Bones” McKay in the parking lot of Marco de Simone had gone viral a few hours earlier, but Bones wasn’t actually the target of his anger. Bones just happened to be the first American that McIlroy encountered outside the locker room when he was leaving the course, still pissed off about what happened at the end of his match that afternoon against Patrick Cantlay.

McIlroy and Cantlay are not friends, and at times there has been tension between them over the financial future of the PGA Tour, but on the course, there had always been mutual respect. Yet when Cantlay’s caddie Joe LaCava danced around the 18th green on Saturday night, waving his hat for nearly 30 seconds after Cantlay made a long birdie putt, McIlroy felt like one of golf’s admittedly quirky but also clear lines of etiquette had been crossed. You don’t interfere with a player when he’s lining up a putt in a match, and you sure as hell don't do it if you’re a caddie. McIlroy and Matt Fitzpatrick still had a pair of putts left and a chance to tie the hole. LaCava continued a heated exchange with Shane Lowry even as McIlroy crouched down to read his line.

“We talked about it as a team last night,” McIlroy said. “We felt like it was disrespectful, and it wasn't just disrespectful to Fitz and I. It was disrespectful to the whole team.”


He couldn’t let it go, especially after losing the match. “I felt like I played the match in the right spirit, and I don’t feel like that spirit was reciprocated to me,” McIlroy said.


When he saw Bones on his way to the car an hour later, his anger returned.

“It’s a fucking disgrace!” McIlroy shouted as his wife, Erica, and also Lowry, managed to stuff him into the back of a courtesy car. “It can’t fucking happen!” When he got to the team hotel, Lowry dragged him down to the cold tubs and told him to cool down, literally and figuratively. By the time he climbed into bed, he was exhausted, but still buzzing.

“Erica and I put on the Calm App and listened to a sleep story, and that actually helped me fall asleep,” he said.

When he woke, he was rested but still wasn’t sure he was ready to let the incident go. He reached for a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations,” which he’d brought with him to Rome.

“I've studied Stoicism for a while and read a lot of those sort of books,” McIlroy said. “I just thought as a former emperor of Rome and seeing that we are in Rome, I thought it would be a good time to revisit some of his thoughts, and I revisited them on the way to the course.”


“Humility and gentleness,” McIlroy said. “Those are better virtues than being frustrated and angry.”


If you wanted to be reminded why the Ryder Cup is so much better than other events staged within the universe of professional golf — why it’s the only tournament that could enrage a 4-time major winner over a small grievance and then send him running to Marcus Aurelius for wisdom — then this week was a delight.

You’ll be able to visit Wikipedia in the near and distant future and remind yourself that Europe won the 2023 Ryder Cup by a score of 16 ½ to 11 ½, and that it held serve for the seventh straight time at home. But the score and the match results won’t properly tell the tale of what happened. Somehow, it was both closer than the point totals will suggest, and yet also ultimately a blowout very few saw coming. A surreal controversy over a hat, and whether or not it represented a fashion choice or a principled protest, became a major storyline. A new Ryder Cup stalwart (Max Homa) emerged for the U.S., as well as one for the Europeans (Viktor Hovland) and an old European lion (Justin Rose) inched his way toward the sunset with one last signature moment.

In the middle of it all was McIlroy, who delivered the best Ryder Cup performance of his career, going 4-1. No other player earned as many points. He may not be the best golfer in the world at age 34. He may have gone a full decade without winning a major. But he remains the game’s central figure, whether you admire him or you’re exhausted by him. He puts it all out there, his heart on the sleeve of his quarter zip, even in times when he knows he ought to dial it back.


Two years ago, he wept openly at Whistling Straits, both in the arms of his wife and during a pair of television interviews, convinced he had let his team down. That moment was on his mind prior to this week.


Writing

What It Means to Be a Mule

Angel Yin: Finding Her Wings

The Prevailing Magic of Golf

Ryder Cup: Reviving the United States

Sunday Scenes from the 2023 Ryder Cup

The Adversity Gap

Driving and Crying

KVV Mailbag: 2023 Ryder Cup Edition

2023 Solheim Cup Takeaways

2023 Ryder Cup: A New Era for Team United States

Lexi Thompson! Let's Talk

2023 Solheim Cup Preview

Walker Cup Observations

The Justin Thomas Gamble

2023 Walker Cup Notebook

The U.S. Women's Amateur still delivers

Jay Monahan Has A Problem

The Women’s Open: Five star players who could claim their first major