LIV Golf is — according to LIV Golf — the most amazing, incredible golf on the planet.

I learned this because I tuned into LIV Mayakoba on Sunday, interested in seeing what I had potentially been missing. Unlike many of LIV’s critics, I have been to a LIV event, having 

covered the inaugural edition of LIV London at the Centurion Club

, back when I wrote for ESPN. That was part of what LIV claimed was its beta season, and there is some evidence to support that is true given that South Africa’s Hennie du Plessis finished second in London, won $3 million, and is no longer even a part of the league. In London, press releases had misspelled names, Ari Fleischer had to awkwardly defend some old tweets, and there was more talk of human rights violations than birdies.

It has admittedly been a while since I have given the league a fair shake. With the PGA Tour treading water on Sunday (perhaps literally) I decided it was a good opportunity to catch the final round of LIV’s season opener, and it seems I wasn’t alone. 432,000 people also tuned in to the CW or their local affiliate stations to watch, which is a 33 percent increase from Mayakoba’s final round a year ago. Now, I could point out that three times as many people watched a replay of the 3rd round of the PGA Tour playing Pebble Beach, but I’d like to focus on the positive. And the positive is LIV’s employees are really enthusiastic about selling the LIV narrative. It is like that meme of President Obama draping a medal around the neck of President Obama, but in the form of a sports league.


Joaquin Niemann won the Mayakoba event in a playoff, making a birdie putt on the fourth hole to beat Sergio Garcia. It was legitimately a cool scene; darkness had settled in, making it difficult to see where shots were landing, or where putts were breaking. Thankfully the giant video board near the grandstands came to the rescue, lighting up the 18th green so that Niemann and Garcia could read their putts. If I had to guess, I’d say at least 300 people were gathered around the green to watch, which I appreciated because at least they could carpool home. I was also thankful for announcer Arlo White, who used to call Premier League soccer games, for helping set the scene. When Niemann made his final putt — which I had a good sense of where it was breaking thanks to the video game graphics splashed across my screen — White helped capture the magnitude of the moment.

“A STUNNING show of character from Joaquin Niemann!” White shouted, after Niemann’s final putt found the cup. “In the crucible of pressure on championship Sunday! In almost complete darkness, the Chilean shines bright, and wins his first LIV Golf title in the most dramatic circumstances possible!”


I have always enjoyed White, who was an essential part of the TV show Ted Lasso, and appreciate that he brings the same energy to LIV Golf events that he brought to a fictional show about a fake Premier League team. Listening to him, you really might be sold on the idea that LIV events are the most important golf tournaments on earth. But that narrative became harder to sustain once Niemann was interviewed by LIV’s on course reporter Dom Boulet immediately after his victory. Boulet called Niemann one of the best players in the world — a statement that is almost certainly true — but Niemann immediately blurted out the foremost thing on his mind.


“But I’m not in the majors,” Niemann said. “I want to win majors, but I gotta get in first."

That a player could win $4 million in a single tournament — twice as much as Arnold Palmer won during his entire PGA Tour career — and still be thinking primarily about the majors during the celebration is a good window into LIV’s current predicament, particularly for players like Niemann. You can inject a massive amount of money into your league, billions even, and it still doesn’t buy you fans or carry as much weight in players' minds as the legacy of chasing majors.

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Niemann did play in all four majors last year, but because his world ranking has plummeted by playing primarily in LIV events — which are not awarded Official World Golf Ranking points — he would need a special exemption to play in the Masters. Whatever you think of LIV, it’s clear that its CEO, Greg Norman, promised players some things he has not been able to deliver on.

 Carlos Ortiz said that LIV players were told prior to signing they should expect to receive OWGR points.

“They definitely said that we were gonna get them,” Ortiz said. “We haven’t got them. But I just feel that people have to recognize that there (are) good players here. If you’re going to have a world ranking that includes all the best players, you have to have some people included in that world ranking.”

There are, of course, solutions to LIV’s OWGR problems. They could increase their field size, create qualifying criteria, and be in compliance for a year. But for whatever reason — mainly pride — Norman doesn’t seem interested in implementing them. LIV does have some of the world’s best players, but there is no way for any big name to lose his job in a closed-loop ecosystem. When Justin Thomas struggled in 2023, he was not given a spot in the FedExCup playoffs because of past success. He had to claw his way back into the upper echelon, fighting through a gauntlet of talented players. Had he joined LIV, he would have been afforded all the time he needed to regain form. That, in essence, is why awarding LIV Golf with OWGR points is difficult, if not impossible. The way young talent flows into the PGA Tour is drastically different than how it flows into LIV. Nick Dunlap was given a sponsor’s exemption into the AmEx, and 

 a spot on the Tour based on his play. Caleb Surratt signed a contract with LIV that gave him a spot in every event, regardless of his play. Both are talented players with bright futures, but only one (Dunlap) secured his spot based on his play, not his potential.

Players like Niemann and Ortiz and Talor Gooch are paying a steep price to protect veterans like Graeme McDowell, Martin Kaymer and Lee Westwood, players who are well past their primes and no longer competitive. If Norman and Yasir Al-Rumayyan wanted to allow for more turnover and admit that golf fans don’t really care that much about seeing washed-up veterans — which they do not, because if they did, LIV’s ratings wouldn’t be what they are — it would be pretty hard for OWGR to hold its current position. If I were Niemann or Gooch, I would want to know why I was being asked to sacrifice the prime of my career for someone like Kaymer, who played in 10 LIV events last year and still finished outside the Top 40 (in a 48-man field) seven times.


I would not object if the Masters decided to invite Niemann to be part of its field this year. Selfishly, I’d like to see him play Augusta National, but I also think he has the best case of LIV’s aggrieved players, particularly after winning the Australian Open in December. We ought to return to a world where the Australian Open is viewed as one of the game’s most prestigious tournaments, and it should come with certain rewards. Niemann’s win did earn him a spot in the Open Championship. It would be great to see the Masters follow suit, almost as a reward for those players who choose to play outside LIV’s tiny ecosystem.

If that doesn’t happen, I hope Niemann will try to earn his way into the U.S. Open through sectional qualifying. As one of the best players in the world, it ought to be a breeze.

When Gooch decided last year that he wasn’t going to try and qualify, it sent a message that LIV’s best player would rather pout than risk potential embarrassment. Westwood, Bubba Watson, Louis Oosthuizen, Paul Casey, Charles Howell III, Ian Poulter and Charl Schwartzel also sat out qualifying, so Gooch found company in his timidity.

I want to believe Niemann is made of tougher stuff. As Arlo White reminded me this past week, he’s already been forged in the fires of the crucible of pressure that was LIV Mayakoba, even if his mind went immediately somewhere else.

Kevin Van Valkenburg is the Editorial Director of No Laying Up.

LIV Golf: Major Questions

PEBBLE BEACH — If you step back and look at the last several years, you can make a fairly convincing case that no sport has thumbed its nose at its own fanbase more so than professional golf.


To be clear, there are a handful of contenders: Baseball had a work stoppage for the first time in nearly 30 years; football bungled the tension between players and owners over social justice protests; the richest soccer clubs in Europe announced they were breaking away from their current leagues to form a European Super League, then abandoned that plan when the backlash was even more severe than they had anticipated.

Yet golf, somehow, still managed to win the crown of dishonor by allowing the conversation around an already elitist sport to be dominated by warring factions of squabbling millionaires.


I am not a Bruce Springsteen guy (a rarity in my profession, I know), but a verse from his song 

 frequently ran through my head during the past two years as I watched the sport light nearly all of its goodwill on fire.

It almost doesn’t matter which side of the divide you planted your flag — the PGA Tour or LIV Golf — there was enough evidence to suggest nearly everyone played at least a small part in the professional game losing the plot.

Fans do not care about the size of purses, and they don’t give a damn about who got themselves a guaranteed bag. They might have rooted for disruption or delighted in pointing out various levels of hypocrisy, but in the end, nearly all of it was performative. When golfers talked about growing the game, fans knew deep down it was really just a smokescreen they could toss-up as they further enriched themselves.

When the PGA Tour announced on Wednesday that it had reached an agreement with the Strategic Sports Group to inject $1.5 billion into a new business model dubbed PGA Tour Enterprises, it felt like more of the same. Sure, it was welcome news for all the guys who didn’t join LIV Golf. The new model, which will create equity for as many as 200 players in the new venture, might even pave the way for an eventual agreement with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, and the reunification of the sport’s top players.

But none of it appeared to benefit golf fans in any tangible way. Even if the PIF and PGA Tour Enterprises can come to an agreement quickly on what investment the Saudis might make into the new venture, it might be a year before it could gain approval from the U.S. Department of Justice. If golf doesn’t do something with all this cash to improve the experience of the viewer, it’s hard to imagine anyone under the age of 50 following this sport within a decade.

Thankfully there is at least some evidence professional golfers are starting to realize how tone deaf they seem, and how things have to change going forward. Collin Morikawa and Max Homa had a conversation about it on the way to the range Wednesday morning, shortly after the partnership with Strategic Sports Group was announced to the public.

“This doesn’t work unless golf keeps growing, unless golf gets more eyeballs,” Morikawa said. “I get it, we all want more money, and that’s going to be phenomenal. In the players’ interests, it’s going to be great. But at some point, we have to adapt. Enough of the complaining. I’ve done my share of complaining too, and I finally just threw myself to the side and said ‘What am I doing?’ … Everyone can still have an opinion, but I think when we look at the old model, it’s kind of stagnant.”

Homa echoed some of those feelings on Twitter.

I know everyone is sick of hearing about how much more money golfers are getting. My optimism lies in the main point of this which is we now have very savvy and experienced stakeholders who have a lot of incentive to improve the product creatively and make it better for the fans.

None of this is going to be easy. But it’s going to be essential. It was at least nice to hear a handful of players acknowledge that the television product — the way that 98 percent of us consume the sport — has to improve. It’s unthinkable to imagine a world in which Patrick Mahomes and Lamar Jackson might play one another, and you wouldn’t be able to watch it live until deep into the second quarter, but that happens regularly in golf. The Pebble Beach Pro-Am is a great example. For years, hardly anyone at home knew what Spyglass looked like because rounds there received almost no live television coverage.

“We need to make golf more intriguing to the viewers,” Morikawa said. “How do we make broadcasting more approachable, how do we see more golf shots at the end of the day, right? I turn on golf on a Thursday if I play early, I turn it on and I see three golf shots and I question why. The reason why other sports are -- people pay attention is because people see more, you can probably bet more. People like betting when you can watch it live, not watch it on ShotTracer.”


Few people in golf media have been as dismissive of LIV Golf as I have over the last two years. My moral objections to the product and the reasons for its existence remain what they are. There is no need to rehash them. But I will give the organization credit for grasping that the current broadcast model is broken, and someone needs to fix it. LIV Golf announced on Thursday that they will be launching an “Any Shot, Any Time” feature this summer that will allow viewers to see any golfer in the field. If you’re a fan of LIV Golf, you can tune in to watch — and eventually, I suspect, bet on — every one of Dustin Johnson’s shots, even if he isn’t in contention. LIV has its faults, but I’m willing to praise them for realizing what has to happen.

The Masters has worked with IBM to deploy this technology in the past, and been greeted with rave reviews, but the PGA Tour has struggled to implement it in its own tournaments. They claimed they were going to have it for The Players in 2021, but after two years, it quietly went away. One of the reasons? Players and their agents seemed to complain any time a little personality emerged.

 at The Players? Casey Bannon of The Golfer’s Journal just happened to be watching PGA Tour Live late on a Friday, and recorded it so that it could be shared with the world. It was met almost immediately with a DMCA notice from the PGA Tour and had to be removed from social media. It only returned when Mitchell reposted the video on his own Twitter account the following day.


Players, agents and golf executives have to wrap their brains around the idea that personalities, rivalries and even embarrassing viral moments work to 

 the sport. They bring in additional eyeballs, they don’t scare them away. Think about the window HBO’s Hard Knocks and the Netflix documentary “Quarterback” has offered into the lives of NFL players. Players curse, they cry, they talk shit about their opponents. There are still some guardrails, still things that get deleted when players are miked up, but NFL players grew to see it as a normal part of their jobs.

Better television alone isn’t going to bring in millions of fans and billions of dollars. It’s going to require the product to be reimagined in numerous ways. Should that involve some aspect of team golf? It probably should. There might be a future where TGL franchises and LIV Golf franchises face off in both the real and virtual world. If that happens, all the animosity between the two tours could be a boon to interest and ratings. The new partners in the Strategic Sports Group include the owners or controlling partners of franchises like the Boston Red Sox, Liverpool FC, the Atlanta Falcons, the New York Mets, the Boston Celtics, the Milwaukee Brewers, and the Milwaukee Bucks, so you can bet they will want to lean into some kind of team aspect to make money.

“With SSG joining, they’re not just smart business guys, they’re smart guys within sports who understand how to build fanbases,” Morikawa said. “Right now for us, there are no teams. A player might be out for two rounds and you don’t even see them. So I think that’s what the focus is going to be, and that’s what we’re going to trust them on. They know how to essentially build things up. You go to big sporting events and you can tell how into it the fans are. That’s what we have to see on a week-to-week basis in order for this to see it through.”


There is always the risk that the Strategic Sports Group and the PGA Tour could take all the wrong lessons from this venture. As a veteran of the media business, I don’t have a particularly glowing view of private equity after watching countless media companies get stripped for parts by finance thugs at a rate faster than they could die, all in the name of a few quarterly profit increases. It’s been like watching a hospital sell off the organs of a hospice patient while claiming it’s meant to increase efficiency.

If PGA Tour Enterprises adds more commercials, and tries to squeeze its partners for more money, while only paying lip service to improving the product, it’s going to be a disaster. Everything should be on the table: Better venues, more access for media, interesting formats, new leadership, few restrictions on sharing highlights (and lowlights). Baseball resisted those kinds of changes for years, but it flourished in 2023 by adopting tweaks like the pitch clock that would have once been viewed as sacrilege.


Adam Scott, a member of the PGA Tour policy board who helped negotiate the deal with SSG, didn’t want to get into specifics, but he feels optimistic about what’s coming. It’s important to grasp that players, under this new alliance, are essentially owners. They’re no longer incentivized to think solely of themselves.


“I feel like it’s probably the start of the next chapter in the PGA Tour,” Scott said. “It’s a big thing. I think it should be really celebrated. This is an iconic American sports league joining forces with other iconic American sports partners. It’s really hard to know what’s next. There are still a lot of moving pieces to be resolved. There are still open discussions with the PIF (Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia) and exactly how the professional golf world will shape up over the next few years is really unknown. But I think this is really the right direction for the sport.”

But what about fans? I asked Scott what he would say to fans who remain skeptical, and burned, by the events of the last two years.

“I think soon enough fans will see this will help evolve the competition side of the PGA Tour,” he said. “I think this will give Tour the opportunity to evolve and grow and give the fans what they want. Ultimately, we don’t know how it’s going to end up. But I think everyone’s intent is for it to be more fan-friendly, whether it means everyone can play together more often, or if we can just make the best product we can between the PGA Tour and DP World Tour, and make those big events better and better.”

Players, Pebble, Money

This is the first in a series of what we’re calling NLU Special Projects. In each edition, we’ll do a deep dive into one particular topic, unpacking it in ways you may not have considered previously. This piece was conceived as a podcast — and we’d encourage you to listen to it in that format — but we also wanted to make a print version available for all you luddites out there.

For our inaugural episode, we explore the Tall Tales of Gary Player.

In 2015, The U.S. Open was held in the Pacific Northwest for the first time in its history. The venue was Chambers Bay, a public course designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr., that was built on top of a sand-and-gravel quarry, on the shores of Puget Sound. A links-style course with little rough and even fewer trees, it represented a dramatic departure from the tournament’s recent traditions. The fairways were muted and brown; the tall, wispy grasses that lined the course’s numerous bunkers were a stark change from the U.S. Open's typically suffocating rough. From the highest point on the property, you could see miles of calm blue water and sky. 


Despite the fact that the tournament boasted a star-studded leaderboard, and that it was ultimately won by one of golf’s rising stars — 21-year-old Jordan Spieth, who just a few months prior had won the Masters — reviews of the course were decidedly mixed.

Henrik Stenson said the greens were like putting on a field of broccoli. Rory McIlroy said a round at Chambers Bay felt like you were playing on the surface of the moon. Several players described the conditions, particularly the greens, as a disgrace and said the USGA should be ashamed.

But the harshest criticism of the course came from someone who wasn’t even competing in the tournament. On Saturday morning, prior to the third round, Damon Hack and Gary Williams of the Golf Channel welcomed nine-time major winner Gary Player to the show, eager to get the 80-year-old Hall of Famer’s thoughts on the peculiar U.S. Open that was currently unfolding.

Player, who did the interview remotely from Chambers Bay’s driving range, was grinning as the camera cut to him. There was no indication he was about to unleash one of the most famous course critiques — and diatribes — in modern history, particularly after Hack opened with easily the most benign question to ever inspire a 7-minute monologue:

“Good morning Mr. Player, how are you?”

Morning Damon! And morning Gary! I’m standing in the most beautiful state in the world. Washington. Seattle here. Unbelievably beautiful. And we’re playing the U.S. Open, this great championship. A group of people that I have great respect for. But this has been the most unpleasant golf tournament I have seen in my life. I mean the man who designed this golf course had to have one leg shorter than the other! It’s hard to believe that you see a man miss the green by one yard, and the ball ends up 50 yards down in the rough. And can you imagine? This is a public golf course. This is where we’re trying to encourage people to come out and play and get more people to play the game. They’re having a putt from 20-30 foot and they’re allowing for 20 foot right and 20 foot left. I mean it’s actually a tragedy.”

He continued for several more minutes, invoking his desire to save the environment, to save amateur golf, to save marriages by helping husbands return home sooner to their wives, but it was Player’s hyperbolic use of the word “tragedy” that would stick with me and my friends.


It was so absurd, we couldn’t resist taking it even further, inventing a parody of Gary Player where nothing felt off-limits. By week’s end, I’d re-imagined his monologue in a cringe-worthy South African dialect, pretending he’d called the course “Chambers Bay of Pigs” and that it was basically “the 9/11 of courses.”


By 2015, golf media was in the midst of a seismic shift, though few people fully understood it at the time. Newspapers were slashing travel budgets; the make-up of the press tent was rapidly changing. Younger voices, many of us buoyed by our Twitter followings, were filling the void with humor and irreverence, and raising a new generation of golf fans on a steady diet of podcasts. Virtually none of us had been alive during Player’s prime.

I was an exception, but only technically. When he won the 1978 Masters, his ninth and final major, I was three months old.


For that reason — and a dozen others — we did not view him with the same reverence we did Arnold Palmer or Jack Nicklaus. Player was a curiosity, a Paul Bunyon-esq figure more famous to our generation for appearing naked on the cover of ESPN The Magazine than he was for winning any of his majors.


When I began appearing regularly as a guest on this podcast, Soly couldn’t resist goading me into sharing my Gary Player caricature with the audience. The goofball in me who grew up idolizing the impressions done by Dana Carvey and Phil Hartman was happy to oblige. Everything that came out of my mouth felt a little ridiculous, and increasingly cringe, but none of it felt dishonest.

KVV: That take was despicable, Porath! I can’t believe you would call out Jordan Spieth like that and say he lacks pop!

Soly: What about the crowd? What did you think of the crowd Mr. Player?


KVV: The crowd was horrendously spirited! And tragically into it! Hopefully next time they have a Ryder Cup in the United States – I personally never played in a Ryder Cup, but if I did, I would want Fatty Patrick Reed to lose a few pounds and play with me, he would be a great partner, if he took on my gluten free diet.

I wasn’t mocking Player so much as I was embracing a version of him that felt spiritually true, even if in reality, it was more like the kind of SNL skit they air just before 1 am.

Soly: Last one, I want to get your thoughts Mr. Player on CBD oil. It seems to be all the rage on the circuit. Have you dabbled in it at all yourself?

KVV as Gary Player: CBD oil? I’ve never heard of such a thing. Sometimes I’d go to the garage and take a little sip of motor oil and say how tough is Gary Player? Let’s see if he can just process this right through or if he’ll be rolling in pain and lose five more pounds that he can’t drop.

Besides, it was hard enough to discern where the line between fact and fiction existed for Player. Early in his career, he would boast that he did 300 crunches every morning as part of his routine to stay fit. Later on, that claim rose to a thousand crunches four times a week. In his 80s, he insisted, with Orwellian certainty, the routine had always been thirteen hundred per day. In 2022, he told the New York Times he’d shot his age or better Twenty-four hundred (2,400) times in a row. In 2023, he told the same story to the Palm Beach Post, only now he claimed that number was three thousand and seventy two (3,072) times in a row.


It wasn’t that Player was lying — framing it that way felt nefarious — but it reminded me of a passage in one of my favorite short stories, Tim O’Brien’s Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong, a meditation on war and storytelling.

“It wasn't a question of deceit,” O’Brien wrote. “Just the opposite: he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt. Facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.”

The only way to make people understand what Player had put himself through, what he had sacrificed and overcome, was to fill every tale with Biblical details, like it was a chapter in the Greatest Story Ever Told.


It wasn’t just that he’d befriended Nelson Mandela. It was that he kissed Mandela’s feet when he first met him, that he spoke up at the height of apartheid and insisted that his hero be released from prison, and he didn’t care if he was branded a traitor. That the arc of their friendship was a bit more complicated was not important, at least not to Player. That is how he remembered it.

 I realized that despite all my jokes, I knew little more than the basics about Player’s life. I knew he was an important figure in the game’s history, arguably the most important player born outside the United States. But I knew far more about the exploits and accomplishments of Palmer, Nicklaus, Woods, even Tom Watson and Phil Mickelson. It felt like an embarrassing oversight, and one I intended to remedy.


The more I read about Player, the more I realized I likely wasn’t alone in my ignorance, at least among my generation of golf sickos. The best Gary Player stories seemed buried in books or magazine archives. They hadn’t matriculated to podcasts — at least not yet.


Player — now 88 years young — is showing few signs of slowing down. He has lived such a long, colorful, strange life, it seemed worth examining, particularly while he is still with us. Then again, it’s possible Player may outlive me. He has never been shy about critiquing the health and fitness of journalists.

“It just amazes me to see a young man like that, 50 pounds overweight,” he once told a reporter from the magazine Today’s Golfer, referring to the previous journalist who’d just interviewed him. “Why can’t he realize that he’s going to die? He’s such a nice man, obviously intelligent – he asked very good questions – but he’s going to die. He’s going to get diabetes, a heart attack or cancer, and within 10 years he’s going to die. The doctors, they’re bastards. Doctors should be saying to him, ‘Look, you’re going to die. You’ve got to stop eating.’ I find it fascinating.”

By the way, I’m not doing the Gary Player impression throughout this podcast. Listening back to some of those, we've exhausted that bit.


In December of last year, I went to work, vacuuming up as many stories as I could, sifting through three dozen sources, trying to cross reference or fact-check both the outlandish and the absurd.

Eventually, I realized it was a futile exercise. Every Gary Player story, whether it was real or embellished, had a purpose.

What he FELT was just as interesting as what may have happened.

And what he wanted YOU to feel, as the listener, was usually the most revealing part of the story.

Gary Player meets the world—just kidding. The world meets Gary Player.


Gary Player was born in 1935 in Lyndhurst, a small village that once sat a dozen miles outside of Johannesburg, South Africa, before the city grew and essentially subsumed it.


His ancestors, he believes, were of French and English stock, and he credits them for his large brown eyes. In 1838, his great-grandmother was part of a large wagon train that was making it way through the territory of Natal, and seeking safe passage to the coastal plains of South Africa, when the leader of the caravan, Piet Retief, attempted to parlay with Dingane, the King of the Zulus.

“Dingane murdered Retief and his men, then fell on all the wagons, massacring women and children,” 

Player wrote in his 1966 autobiography, Grand Slam Golf.

 “My great-grandmother was stabbed in the side by a Zulu spear, but somehow dragged herself into the bush, and survived.”


It would not be the last time that fortitude would play a role in his family lore. Player’s father, Harry — whom everyone called Whiskey — went to work in the Johannesburg gold mines at age 13, and he spent 30 years working below ground, every day riding an elevator that descended 10-12,000 feet below the surface, praying he would return at shift’s end and see the sunlight.


“I went to visit him one day,” Player told Golf Digest in 2010, "and when he came off the "skip" — the elevator that lowered them into the mine — he immediately sat down. He took off his boot and poured water out of it onto the ground. I asked him where the water came from, and he said, "Son, that's perspiration. It's hot as hell down there." He told me how men died like flies in those mines. He said a miner's best friend was the rat, because when the rats took off running, it meant a cave-in was imminent. Every day the workers gave the rats bits of their sandwiches as tribute.”


Player spent much of his childhood outdoors, the youngest of three children, learning to love the land and unpack its mysteries. There was a pear tree in his yard, and from one of the branches, their father hung a rope. He and his older brother Ian took turns racing to the top, the muscles in their arms and shoulders hardening with each climb. “If Ian did it once, I would do it twice,” Player said. “If he did it twice, I would do it four times. If he jumped five feet, I would try to jump ten.”


(By the way, decades later, Gary Player went back to that house, climbed that tree, cut down that rope and took it home with him as a keepsake. That’s how crazy Gary Player was.)

He worshiped Ian, who taught him how to shoot an air rifle and a catapult, skills he believed eventually translated onto the golf course.


“I was exceptionally good with a catapult as a young lad,” Player wrote in Grand Slam Golf. “I could knock over a bird once in three shots, at distances up to 50, 60 and 70 yards, and I don’t suppose one person in 50,000 can do that. I don’t boast about it — it was a fact of life.”

When Player was eight years old, his mother, Muriel, died of cancer. He was too young to understand what was unfolding, though he knew she had been sick for some time. “[My sister] Wilma has told me how in the closing months of her life, she was in great pain,” Player wrote. “But when people asked her how she was, she would say ‘Just fine’ or ‘A little better today.’ Wilma, who knew this was not true, would often chide her for this, and ask her why she said it. She would always answer ‘People don’t want to hear you complain. They have their own troubles. And they feel better if someone else says she feels better.”

Player told Golf Digest that for years, long after he became an adult and had a family of his own, he would wake up sobbing in the middle of the night, dreaming of her.


“Deep inside,” he said, “we all want and need our mothers.”


As a boy, he would dig golf balls out of the mud with his feet from the pond at his local course, then sell them by the dozen. But he had no interest in playing the game. He preferred rugby and cricket, swimming and soccer. But at age 14, Player’s father surprised him one day by asking him if he wanted to play golf.

“Dad, I don’t play golf, that’s a sissy game,” Player told him.


Somehow, his father persuaded him to come along anyway. The first three holes of his first-ever round, Player recalled, he made three consecutive pars.


“Then I got down to all the eights and nines and four putts and all the rest, but it was a fair start to the ‘sissy’ game,” Player wrote.


Within a month, he was hooked, taking countless swings (without a ball) off a rubber mat in his garden. Eventually, he discovered the local course at Virginia Park. One afternoon, he peeked his head over the fence and saw a 13-year-old girl hitting balls under the watchful eye of the head pro, her father. The girl, Vivienne Verway, would become the love of his life. The second time he saw Vivienne, he told his brother he was going to marry her. It turned out he was right. Within a few months, he’d proposed, but suggested they wait until he had enough money to support a family. He was, after all, 15 years old.


Golf, he believed, was his ticket to fame and riches. He wanted to own a fancy car, and maybe even a farm someday. When Player informed his father of the plan, Whiskey Player all but collapsed. He had promised Player’s mother, on her deathbed, their son would finish his studies and go to university. But Player was stubborn. In his autobiography, he said that he told his father: “I want to be a professional golfer and this is my life and I want to do it.”

The Tall Tales of Gary Player

Nick Dunlap was walking down the 18th fairway at PGA West on Sunday, holding a one-shot lead in a PGA Tour event, and trying to catch his breath. He was not ready to take his next swing.

“I was so nervous that I don't know if I could have done anything,” Dunlap said. “Most nervous I've ever been, by far. Just tried to breathe, but also look up and enjoy it a little bit. I've said it numerous times … it's a really cool spot to be in as an amateur. I don't ever want to forget today.”


By the time he reached his ball, he had calmed down. He did not look like a frightened 20-year-old, he looked — once again — like a hardened competitor.

The greater golfing world was just being introduced to Dunlap, but those of us who have been following his career for a while know that look well.

No, we weren’t bold enough to predict he’d become the first amateur to win a PGA Tour event since Phil Mickelson did it in 1991

 but if you were paying attention, the signs were all there.

Dunlap couldn’t catch his breath last August in the U.S. Amateur either. Not accustomed to the high altitude, he spent the week at Cherry Hills in Colorado battling headaches and dehydration. But by the time the week was over, no one thought he was some lucky 19-year-old who’d caught lightning in a bottle.

He drew Gordon Sargent in his first match, and didn’t flinch against a player many regarded as the best amateur in the world. It was just two Alabama kids, a graduating class apart, trading birdies like they were Greek Gods throwing lightning bolts. When it was over, Dunlap had knocked out Sargent 2&1.

From there — his head clear and his body finally acclimated to the thin air of Colorado — Dunlap unleashed his own discomfort onto the rest of the draw. As the week went on, he was driving the ball 380 yards, holing unlikely putts and flexing some big-brain golf IQ that had you questioning where 

 came from. When the dust settled and the last putt dropped, he’d won the whole thing, the first player since Tiger Woods to win a U.S. Junior and a U.S. Amateur.


After that, he might have landed in your inventory of golfers to keep an eye on, especially after he helped lead the United States to retain the Walker Cup a few weeks later. But don’t pretend like you had Dunlap winning the American Express on your bingo card.

Outside of Mickelson and Woods, it’s always been hard to predict what amateur studs will become stars as pros. Unlike college football or college basketball, where we study players for years before they get drafted, the next generation of golfers is usually a mystery until they win.

Unless you love spending most of your year refreshing HTML leaderboards and using your imagination to fill in the blanks of whatever photographic evidence you can assemble, amateur golf is a challenging sport to follow. Its spotlight shifts frequently throughout the year, the tournaments are rarely televised, and even in the fleeting moments we amateur golf junkies do get to enjoy some TV coverage, the product (in most cases) leaves a lot to be desired.

So I understand why Dunlap’s ascension may seem sudden. Or not what you expected.

But this is where I suggest you join me and engage in what might seem like strange behavior.

Come and appreciate the charm and excitement of amateur golf.

It can be so much more rewarding than listening to millionaires squabble over billions.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a golf sicko already. So it’s not really a leap of faith. But there are so many great players like Dunlap on the cusp of breaking out or just itching to get their shot. They’re poised to clear out a lot of aging veterans at the next level.


Let’s go back to that Gordon Sargent guy for a second. He’s already earned his PGA Tour card (the first through PGA Tour U Accelerated) but he has deferred taking up membership until the end of his junior year – in hopes of finally earning Vanderbilt, consistently favored to win, a NCAA title. But he’s already done a few cool things, such as win an NCAA individual title, play in the Masters, finish as low amateur at the U.S. Open, and he’s already the winningest player in Vanderbilt history. Just to name a few.


He’s not the first guy to earn a PGA Tour card out of college. That was Ludvig Aberg – who you may have heard this company yapping about for several years. Yes, some players win eight times and college and disappear into the void of mini-tour professional golf. Aberg proved why that’s an antiquated practice: He broke out and won twice professionally, and was a contributor to the winning European Ryder Cup team.

Those last two names each became the No. 1-ranked amateur in the world. (Sargent still holds that honor.) But let’s dig a little deeper: Adrien Dumont de Chassart earned Korn Ferry Tour status by finishing third in PGA Tour U after his college career. Two months later, he earned his PGA Tour card. Michael Thorbjornsen, still an amateur, earned his second top-20 finish at the Dubai Desert Classic after not competing for five months. He’s first in line to earn a PGA Tour card when his college career ends in a few months. Oh, and remember that time he finished solo fourth at a PGA Tour event, the Travelers Championship?

Let’s continue our stroll down memory lane: What about the amateur who wound up in the final group on Saturday of the Masters in 2023? Yes, Sam Bennett. That one!


Have you seen Christo Lamprecht’s swing? Ben James’ ball-striking?

In the words of Coach Prime, “Do you believe now?”


But there’s a more complex answer as to why this concentration of college stars is suddenly pulling a Kim Kardashian-peeking-through-the-bushes-GIF. Handing out Masters invites to winners of prestigious amateur events and giving out PGA Tour exemptions isn’t new. They’ve been hitting the ball farther, faster and smarter this whole time, too.

The only thing that’s changed is recognizing and 

the extent of these brilliant amateur careers. That thing called NIL helps a lot, too.

The best college players in the world used to picture life after turning pro as a fairly bleak and lonely endeavor. You might string together some exemptions, you might try to Monday qualify, driving all night from one tournament to the next, then struggle to parlay whatever money and success you could into a stable playing career. Think Brooks Koepka bouncing around Europe and Africa early in his career just trying to earn status. It would be like telling Victor Wembanyama he’s got to spend a few more years playing professional basketball in France if he REALLY wants to play in the NBA. Or asking Caleb Williams to play in a few UFL games and seeing how he stacks up there.

It feels silly to stop at awarding the best senior a PGA Tour card, or the most highly accomplished amateur within three years of his college career. Wouldn’t you love to see how the NCAA champion starts his PGA Tour career the week that follows? What about the U.S. Amateur champion? Even the best five players out of college?


Those opportunities, scant as they’ve been, were invaluable to Dunlap, particularly when he struggled with nerves or when he shanked a ball off the tee on No. 7 on Sunday.

Said Dunlap: “The PGA TOUR is giving an unbelievable opportunity to some of the top players, whether that's a junior or a senior or a fifth year or whatever that is, to go out and compete on the Korn Ferry Tour and showcase what they have, and I think that's been shown with Ludvig and some of the guys on the Korn Ferry Tour coming right out and having success. I've always said it, you know, to just see some of the players that are playing amateur golf in these college events and, you know, with the USGA, you play well, you know you're getting some spots in U.S. Opens and stuff like that. For me to be able to experience that at such a young age, it only helps me, and especially in some moments like today, to kind of bounce back on that and be like, hey, I've been in a situation like this. Obviously it's escalated now, it's on a PGA TOUR level, but to kind of look back on that, it was really helpful today.”

Allowing the newest crop of talent at the highest amateur level to start their PGA Tour careers right away is a lot more exciting than mule purgatory. No other sport protects its 45-year-old veterans the way golf does, letting them hold onto spots well past prime,

and at a time when the PGA Tour could desperately use more intrigue, it no longer makes financial sense. Just look at the ratings that came out on Tuesday! Dunlap’s victory saw a 37 percent increase in eyeballs (535k) over Jon Rahm’s win at the American Express (391k) a year ago. With tournament sponsors backing out left and right and its future in question, this feels like a no-brainer.

What’s so hard about sacrificing a few more cards?


If you’re paying attention, you’re not sacrificing anything at all.

Nick Dunlap: A Lesson In Paying Attention

It rained recently in Baltimore, and it was the kind of rain that lingers like a bloated literary novel, one that isn’t subtle, or particularly well-reviewed.


For days, it was heavy and intense, then it would lighten up for a few hours, only to return to its previous parade of miseries. When it rains for days on end, that’s when I tend to miss golf the most. When it snows, I retreat into a state of resignation and acceptance because I know I won’t be hitting putts any time soon, but when it rains, I often look out the window and tell lies to my golfing soul.


If it just lets up just a little, I tell myself, I could throw on my rain gear and pretend like I’m in Scotland. I could throw some darts at the soft greens. 

This time, however, I couldn’t even fake it. There were several small rivers forming in my driveway, and a fetid swamp forming in my backyard. By nightfall, my wife had informed me that our basement was leaking, and the mountain of boxes on the floor that I had spent months promising I would deal with were about to meet their predictable, perhaps literary end.

We spent a full Saturday sorting through the mess, building shelves and swapping out soggy cardboard boxes for military-grade plastic bins. As the day went on, I realized that in addition to old newspaper and magazine clips, the time had come to deal with another haunting element of my past:

The overflowing, embarrassing box of golf training aids taunting me from the corner.

If you’re a golfer and you’ve spent any time on Instagram in the last few years, there is a 100 percent chance the algorithm has tried to get you to buy a training aid of some kind. If you’ve never purchased one, you’re made of smarter stuff than I am, and I recommend you don’t give in to the temptation to do so. Think of them like an addictive drug. It might be fun for a while, but it will fade, you’ll feel compelled to chase that high, and you might end up doing more damage than good.


The people who make them — the instructors who swear by them — know this, even if many of them swear they have good intentions. It’s why they keep churning out new training aids every year.


A 10-handicap and his money are soon parted.

Second and third homes have been paid for by suckers like me, the kind of foolish golfers who cannot resist believing that someone has invented a magic wand — typically made out of plastic, fiberglass and velcro — that will turn them into Adam Scott with a little solitary practice.

In my basement, I have training aids that are supposed to help keep my left arm straight, ones that promise to help me bow my wrist, and others that have something to do with radial or ulnar deviation (I can never keep them straight). There is a belt with fabric boxes attached (it sounds insane just typing it) meant to help me rotate, and a boot that looks like a medieval torture device vowing to help me load weight into my right side. There is another belt — yes, a 

 golf training belt — with rubber tubing attached to it that I’m not sure I could even bring through TSA without ending up on a watch list. There are tempo trainers and putting mirrors and inflatable beach balls attached to a lanyard that you wear around your neck like you’ve won the Olympics of Shame.

Remember that scene in Tin Cup when Kevin Costner has the shanks, and Rene Russo catches him in his trailer, shamefully draped in the same training aids he took from her during their very first lesson?

I don’t know when that sickness overtook me, but I do know I’m not alone. 

 suffers from a similar affliction, and he’s a far better golfer than I am. We are drawn to snake oil, and on the Gram, there is always a charming Harold Hill-figure in a half zip promising to unlock something in us. If we click twice and use Apple Pay, a package will be on the way (probably from Taiwan) almost instantly.

I recently had a marketing person slide into my DMs and offer me a free training aid, the kind you stand on and use to help you shift pressure to your left side during transition, and I had to sheepishly admit that I couldn’t accept it. It wasn’t because I had ethical qualms about getting one gratis.

It was that I’d already purchased one, months prior.


 D.J. Piehowski said something that made a light bulb go off in my brain, and I knew he wasn’t just speaking for himself, he was speaking to thousands of idiots like me: 

Hey, what if I stopped trying to WebMD my own golf swing every year and actually sought out professional help?

I never imagined I would be the kind of adult male who was stubborn enough to believe I could fix things I did not understand. I never liked the cliche about men refusing to stop and ask for directions, but I understand it now. I realize that I buy golf training aids for the same reason I occasionally walk into a hardware store and politely decline when someone who works there asks if I have any questions.

and even though I don’t know what those are — or where you might stock them — it will somehow be more satisfying to me if I can locate them myself before I contemplate purchasing at least three of them, all of them different sizes.

There is something alluring about trying to be your own savior, but I never understood how the companies who make training aids preyed on the insecurities of people like me until I added up the wreckage of the last five years.


There had to be more than $1000 of plastic and velcro and misery buried in my basement. Had I really purchased all this crap because I felt uncomfortable getting a series of golf lessons? That I didn’t want to ask an expert for help because I was embarrassed that they would judge me as they tried (likely in vain) 

If I’m being honest with myself, the answer is yes.

It turns out, rather than doing one hour of golf therapy, men will literally go to the driving range with an inflatable beach ball dangling from their neck, and stand on a bright orange seesaw.


I want to believe that all changes this year. I may never have a pretty golf swing, but this is the year I stop looking for the answers on YouTube and Instagram. I’m going to find an instructor, so pray for the both of us. It’s time to unload these fantasy fixes on someone else, likely for pennies on the dollar. If you’re in the market for a G-Box or a G-Snap or a ProSendr or a Pressure Plate or a Tour Striker or an Orange Whip or an Impact Snap or a SmartBall or a Pivot Pro, you might be in luck—caveat emptor.

I might keep one training aid, however. I have a set of yellow pool noodles attached to a tripod that was supposed to help establish a path that would shallow out my swing. I think it’s called a Chili Wacker, though I’ve long since lost the box. It cost about $175 and it was totally worthless, but I feel like the pool noodles could still come in handy if my next basement flood turns biblical.


Lost in the Sauce of Golf Training Aids

At least it’s over. That’s the prevailing sentiment among the gluttons for punishment, also known as fans of professional golf.

Money, rules debates, money, bad weather, money and subpar television coverage finally proved that even the greatest game ever invented can have the fun sapped out of it if we try hard enough. It was a good year to be on the course and not online.

Your patience, please, for one final complaint as we turn the page into the new year: All of the bickering has overshadowed some truly great golf that was played during the past 12 months. You may be ready to forget 2023, but the history books will take note of some special performances that occurred this year.


Brooks Koepka won the PGA Championship at Oak Hill. It was his fifth major win and perhaps his most satisfying. The victory moves Koepka past Rory McIlroy as the leading major winner of his generation. Koepka’s play has earned him a place among the all-time greats in golf’s long history. Just 14 men have won more majors than Brooks and only Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and Walter Hagen can claim more PGA Championship trophies than the three that now sit on Koepka’s mantle.

Time will tell if Rose Zhang can reach the top shelf of women’s professional golf, but matching her achievements as an amateur will be the stretch target for future generations of girls. Zhang was already the first person - male or female - to ever win a USGA Amateur Championship and 

 the Junior Amateur. In 2023, she extended her record for most weeks ranked as the No. 1 amateur in the world. For good measure, she added back-to-back NCAA individual titles before finally capping her amateur career with a victory at Augusta National in April. Nine days later, Rose became the first to win their LPGA professional debut since Beverly Hanson in 1951.


Lilia Vu became the first American woman to win two majors in the same year since Juli Inkster in 1999. Vu’s final round 68 at the Chevron carried her from 11th place to a playoff victory over Angel Yin in the first major of the season. Lilia bookended her win with another at the Women’s Open in August. Vu began the final round at Walton Heath tied for the lead, then used her closing 67 to smother the oxygen from a crowd pulling for hometown favorite Charley Hull.


Bernhard Langer won the 2023 U.S. Senior Open and in the process, surpassed Hale Irwin for most PGA Tour Champions victories with 46. The win also extended Langer’s record of 12 senior majors and his record as the oldest player (65) to win a senior major.


The American Solheim Cup team swept a day of foursomes matches for the first time ever. It was the first time any American team went 4-0 in foursomes since the 1997 Walker Cup. Then it was Carlota Ciganda’s turn to make her mark. Ciganda produced several candidates for 2023 Shot Of The Year while going undefeated and leading a European comeback that forced the first tie in Solheim history. Perhaps it’s a good omen that the 2023 event that left players and fans hungriest for a rematch is the one that’s going to be played again in 2024.

Then it was the European men's turn. They swept the four opening foursomes matches at the Ryder Cup. It was the first time in Ryder Cup history that the Europeans led 4-0 after the opening session. The countdown to the 2025 edition of golf’s most overhyped event started early.


Ludvig Aberg earned the first PGA Tour University exemption to PGA Tour membership and quickly put it to good use. Aberg won on both the DP World Tour and PGA Tour, then played in the Ryder Cup, all in his first five months as a professional. Stay tuned.


Celine Boutier became the first Frenchwoman to win the Evian. It’s an accomplishment long overdue from a country with a stronger tradition in the game than many might realize.


Nick Taylor ended more than a century of waiting for golf fans in the Great White North. Taylor birdied the 72nd hole to tie Tommy Fleetwood, then eagled the fourth playoff hole in historic fashion to become the first Canadian-born golfer to win the Canadian Open since Karl Keffer in 1914.


Nick Dunlap won the U.S. Amateur, joining Tiger Woods as the only men to win a USGA Amateur and Junior Amateur.


Stewart Hagestad continued to outplay and outlast his competition in mid-am golf. In 2023, Hagestad won his third USGA Mid-Amatuer Championship and played on his fourth winning Walker Cup team. Jay Sigel is the sole American to have played on more American Walker Cup squads in the past 40 years, and only Nathan Smith has won more Mid-Ams.

Alison Lee rewrote the Ladies European Tour record book when she shot a pair of 61s to begin the event at Riyadh G.C. Her 122 start was six shots lower than the previous LET 36-hole mark. She hung on to win the tournament by eight shots.

On the PGA Tour, Adam Long found the fairway off the tee with 69 consecutive drives, breaking Brian Claar’s previous record of 59 in a row. Long found the final two fairways in the Shriners, went a perfect 56 for 56 at Diamante, and then added 11 more at Port Royal. An amazing performance if you’re into that kind of thing.


Also notable was the men’s U.S. Open being played in Los Angeles – the second-largest city in the country – for the first time in 75 years. The women’s U.S. Open was played at Pebble Beach for the first time ever.


And saving the best for last: We learned in August that an all-time high of 40 million Americans are now participating in the sport of golf, part of a global trend of record interest in the game. Virtually all of this post-pandemic surge is in the growing ranks of girls and women taking up the game. Clearly, the LIV and PGA Tour efforts to grow the game are working.

Fingers crossed we can keep the momentum going into Kapalua and Lancaster and Troon.


What Actually Made The 2023 Golf Year

As 2023 comes to a close, it’s important to take a moment to reflect on the important stuff, none more important than: How did each member of No Laying Up feel about the state of our golf game during the last 12 months?


You don’t have to indulge us in this blatant navel-gazing, but if you’re interested, we asked the gang to look back on the year of Prime and share what they did (or didn’t) learn about the game in 2023.

What was the golf moment you’ll cherish the most in 2023:

 The look on my dad’s face as we hugged it out on the 18th green at Pebble Beach at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. We had just spent four days walking around some of the coolest courses in the world alongside Bill Murray (?), and a month after he had lost his father, we kind of just laughed about how cool the entire week was. He was the one who introduced me to golf and we shared a truly once-in-a-lifetime golf experience that neither of us could have ever imagined. One of the biggest takeaways I had from my grandfather’s funeral was that I needed to do more stuff with my dad. This was such a great way to kick off that initiative. And this is reminding me that I need to schedule the next thing, whatever it is.

Playing alt shot with Jordan Spieth is tough to beat

. I know that’s an easy answer, but it checked all the boxes: great course, great company (my wife was helping Mrs. Piehowski work the second camera), and great partner. I’m a little bummed that my favorite golf memory of 2023 was on January 1st of 2023. I hope 2024 “builds” a little more!

I got invited to play Wisconsin’s top 10 public golf courses in the span of two days

Writing

LIV Golf: Major Questions

Players, Pebble, Money

The Tall Tales of Gary Player

Nick Dunlap: A Lesson In Paying Attention

Lost in the Sauce of Golf Training Aids

What Actually Made The 2023 Golf Year

What's Burning at the Killhouse: 2023 NLU Golf Games

Jon Rahm, the Rollback and an Entire Reevaluation

The Tiger Woods Repair

NLU 2023: What We're Thankful For

What's Burning at the Killhouse: 2023 Recap

What It Means to Be a Mule

Angel Yin: Finding Her Wings

2023 Nest Invitational Tournament Recap: The Legend of the 3PuttKing

I Walk Alone: Embracing Solo Golf

The Beginning of My Links Golf Journey

The Prevailing Magic of Golf

Ryder Cup: Reviving the United States