ROCHESTER — At every major championship, it is possible to witness a golf shot that makes you feel something deep in your soul.

Maybe it’s a 2-iron stinger from Tiger Woods or a towering drive from Rory McIlroy. It could be a buttery flop shot from Phil Mickelson, or a nuked 4-iron from Brooks Koepka. Even a putt from Jordan Spieth — like the double breaker he made on the 16th hole at St. Andrews in 2015 — might qualify. There is something about a great golf shot that looks effortless and seems ethereal, the way the ball seems guided by sorcery as much as force.

However, I don’t want to talk about those kinds of shots right now.

I want to talk about the visceral spectacle of a violent hosel shank.


Michael Block hit one on Friday in the 2nd round of the PGA Championship, a shank so unsettling that I’ll likely still be thinking about it when I climb into bed tonight. (And perhaps tomorrow.) But I’m not interested in mocking Block, a club professional from Arroyo Trabuco Golf Club in Southern California. Instead, I come to praise him.

There is something endearing about seeing a shank hit by a man in the midst of one of the greatest rounds of his life. It’s a reminder that golf, even at the highest level, can feel like a tightrope walk on the edge of a cliff. (While juggling snakes.) Even the best players in the world flirt with an element of golfing death. It looms in the back of your mind like a kernel of despair, and it can never truly be killed. No one who has ever dared to swing a golf club — not Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Ben Hogan or Bobby Jones — can say a shank hasn’t bitten them at least once. It is the one experience in the game that is truly universal, the despair you feel in your stomach when you see the ball knifing sideways, headed expeditiously toward parts unknown.

Block is a 46-year-old teaching professional who has played his way into six major championships. He has won (according to Ryan French of Monday Q Info), a staggering 43 times in California PGA Sectional events. He is, by any reasonable measure, one of the best ball strikers in the world. There is a decent chance he could, if he’d chosen a different path in life, be playing on the Korn Ferry Tour or even the PGA Tour. He is friendly with Patrick Cantlay and Beau Hossler and, for the most part, plays them straight up when they play money games. Block is good enough, at minimum, to hover on the fringes of the professional game. And if he was doing what we normally expect out of club professionals at the PGA Championship — playing mostly a ceremonial role — we likely wouldn’t have seen any evidence of his vicious hosel rocket.


But because Block had climbed into contention at a major by making four birdies on Friday, he was part of ESPN’s coverage window when he arrived at the 5th hole, a somewhat-benign Par 3 (by Oak Hill standards) that was playing around 165 yards. Up to that point, he had flushed nearly every shot he stood over. He discussed club selection with his caddie John Jackson, determined it necessitated an 8-iron, then stood over the ball feeling free and loose, without a single demon in his mind.

What happened next was, well … best to let him tell it.


“I love hitting baby draw with my 8-iron,” Block said. “I've done it well all week, and all of a sudden … we've all been there, done that. We look up, and I'm, like, ‘Oh, my goodness.’ The ball was just going off, somehow hit the tree, almost killed somebody, and then comes off and goes in the deep rough”


As someone who is, by any reasonable measure, NOT good at golf, I know what it’s like to hit that kind of shank. I have hit so many, in fact, I could not count them with an abacus. My main concern is the crippling fear that the next shot (and perhaps the one after it) will also be a shank, that I’ll never make solid contact with the clubface again. I have also never done it in front of thousands (perhaps millions) of people. I was fascinated by what was going through Block’s head as he trudged to his ball. Mostly, he said, it was shock. All his swings on the driving range (and in his round to that point) felt like he was an avatar in a video game.


“It came out of nowhere,” Block said. “I thought I hit it great, then I saw it going off a tree. I actually made a pretty good double from there, to be honest. I just played [the ball] off the toe the rest of the holes and hit some pretty good shots, so that helped me forget about it.”

It feels a little cruel to watch a club professional climb into contention at the PGA Championship — Block is tied for 10th at even par, the same score as Rory McIlroy — and only write about the worst shot of his round.  So I want to call your attention to the fact that he stuffed a wedge on No. 10, stuffed another on 12, hit a great pitch on 14 to set up another birdie, and made a stress-free par on No. 6 (right after his shank!), the toughest hole at Oak Hill in Round 2.

There is something unifying, however, about a great shank. It can serve as a round-wrecking lighting bolt thrown by the golfing gods as they try to humble even the best of us. And Block knows it better than most, having walked many students through the delicate swing surgery that’s necessary to suffocate them.

(The shank, by the way, can never truly be killed, only sent into hibernation for lengthy periods.)

I was curious, what advice did he give his clients when they felt paralyzed by the shanks? Normally this type of advice costs $125 an hour, but it seemed like Block was in a generous mood and selfishly I wanted to write it down for future reference.

“What I like to do is set up to the golf ball and swing and hit the ground on the inside of the golf ball,” Block said. “Like not even hit the ball on practice swings. Just take it, hit inside the golf ball a couple of times to feel that space and to get the hands in tight. If you watch a lot of the best players in the world, their hands are extremely close to their body at the moment of impact. A lot of the worst players in the world, their hands are far away from their body at the moment of impact. That's the difference.”

Informed that Dustin Johnson also hit a quasi-shank during his round, Block couldn’t resist a little chuckle.


“Well, that actually makes me feel better,” he said.

Despite the lengthy and insightful shank discussion, the highlight of Block breaking down his day didn’t come until a reporter pointed out that he was beating Jon Rahm, the No. 1 player in the world, by five shots. Block got choked up as he wrestled with how to answer.

“Pretty cool, to say the least,” Block said. He paused, weighing his words. His lower lip quivered.


“I wish you guys could come to my office and hang out with me and come teach with me on the back of the driving range with my students who are out there right now,” Block said. “I don't know why that makes me emotional, but it does. Sorry, Jon. I don't know who I beat, who I didn't beat. I'm going to go out there and do my best and put my head down and play as well as I can for the next two days.”


Then he headed off to grab lunch and an IPA.

“I guarantee you, within the next hour, I will have a beer in my hand,” he said.


Talor Gooch wasn’t interested in sticking around Oak Hill for very long after his second round ended. He jogged straight from scoring into the locker room, scooped up his stuff and then walked briskly to the parking lot. I managed to catch up with him on the walk, curious how he felt about likely missing the U.S. Open. Gooch could have secured a spot with a strong showing at the PGA Championship, bumping him inside the Top 60 in the Official World Golf Rankings, but he never felt like he had control of his golf ball and missed the cut after shooting 76-74.

“It always sucks when you don’t have your A game at a major championship,” Gooch said. “This was kind of the first week of the year where I just didn’t have the ball control. It’s not a good week to not know where the golf ball is going. I was just hitting it in the rough a lot and then I probably missed 8 or 10 putts this week inside of 8 feet this week. That’s just golf sometimes.”

I wondered how Gooch felt about missing out on the U.S. Open at Los Angeles Country Club, considering the fuss his LIV Golf teammate made last week over the USGA’s decision to tweak the language in its exemption category this year. Gooch originally believed he would be exempt into the U.S. Open based on having qualified for the PGA Tour Championship (the Top 30 in the FedExCup standings are given an exemption), but the U.S. Open changed its language to say only players who were “eligible” could qualify for the exemption. Gooch lost his eligibility when he signed with LIV Golf last summer. Mickelson called the change a “dick move” and a “direct attack on [Gooch] and his career.”

Gooch, a two-time winner on the LIV Tour this season, seemed fine with his fate.


“I knew with all the craziness in golf happening right now there might be stuff like this that would happen, so honestly it’s not surprising,” he said.

There was one last point I wanted to clarify: Why did Gooch, clearly one of the hottest players in golf prior to the PGA Championship, not enter sectional qualifying? It seemed likely he could snag a spot and perhaps contend. Was he trying to make a point with the USGA?


“A little bit of that,” he said. “But also our schedule is busy locked up right now. If I didn’t qualify via world ranking, I just felt like we have a lot of tournaments coming up. It’s time to focus on that.”

Rory McIlroy was happy to confess something late Friday after shooting a 69 to climb into a tie for 10th place.


Right now, he has no idea where the ball is going with a driver in his hands. The stats confirm it as well. He’s currently losing -.427 shots off the tee through two rounds, a number almost unheard of for him. All things considered, being even par and only five shots off the lead feels like a minor victory.

“I think with how terribly I've felt over the golf ball over the last two days, the fact that I'm only five back -- yeah, not saying it could be up there with one of my best performances, but when I holed that putt at the last, I looked at the board, and I thought, I can't believe I'm five back,” McIlroy said. “I guess that's a good thing because I know if I can get the ball in play off the tee, I'll have a shot.”

A reporter asked McIlroy if there was any safe shot in his arsenal he might be able to rely on over the weekend, something like the butter cut he’s used in the past where sacrifices distance for some control. He chuckled as he gave his answer.

“I tried to hit that little cut on 16 and almost hit it out of bounds,” he said.

It’s always hard to make definitive statements about McIlroy because there is so much volatility to his game, and he admittedly often lacks the patience to stick to a game plan when things go awry. But he has shown promising signs of patience at Oak Hill, something he tried to lean into prior to the tournament.

“I stayed really patient today,” he said. “I think my patience was rewarded with a couple of good breaks and a couple of birdies coming in.”

Will that hold up? It’s hard to say. He admitted he’s not likely to be patient off the tee over the weekend. It might be time to return to a strategy that benefited him when he was young and carefree and had little scar tissue from majors.

“I may just tee it high and bomb it everywhere,” McIlroy said.


And why not? Next year will mark a decade since he’s won a major. He’s tried a lot of strategies. Nothing has truly clicked.

What does he have to lose at this point but time?

2023 PGA Championship Notebook: Shanks and Scenes from Day 2

ROCHESTER — I have a confession I want to make from Day 1 of the PGA Championship.

If necessary, I will shout it from the blustery shores of Lake Ontario so that it can (in theory) travel beyond the American border.

I want this resurgence of Bryson DeChambeau to be real.

I want to see him chase majors again, not be mired in irrelevance. I want to listen to him explain his various eccentricities, even if those explanations sometimes don’t make sense. I want to witness him nuking drives that defy logic, then see him flash his dopey grin to the galleries, something he did frequently during his first round 66 at Oak Hill. I want him to go at the ball pain-free and take massive divots that fly through the air like someone has thrown a cheesesteak.

I don’t need him to return to the PGA Tour, because he seems happier with LIV Golf than he was on his former circuit — happier than he’s been in years. But I do want to see 

 kind of golf from him in majors once again. And I know I’m not alone.

Everything about the sport is more interesting when DeChambeau is relevant, whether we’re talking about his prodigious feats or his frequent faux pas. He still looms large, even though he is no longer quite as large, a topic he was happy to expound on after his round. DeChambeau says he’s lost about 30 pounds in recent months after some drastic changes to his diet. Gone are the days when he would drink eight protein shakes a day, overwhelming his body with calories, all in the name of speed training.

“I’m eating properly instead of eating stuff that inflames my body,” DeChambeau said. “I took a Zoomer peptide test, which essentially tells you what inflames your blood when you eat it. I was allergic to corn, wheat, gluten, dairy. Pretty much everything I liked, I couldn't eat. I took that out. Started taking it out in August and over the course of time I've lost all this inflammation, lost a lot of fat and slimmed down like crazy. I lost 18 pounds in 24 days. It was crazy. It wasn't fat. It was all water weight. You know how I looked before. I was not skinny.”

But it wasn’t just his stomach that was a mess. His wrist — and ultimately his psyche — needed healing too. DeChambeau withdrew from last year’s PGA Championship at Southern Hills, deciding to have surgery to fix a fractured hamate bone in his left wrist, and has struggled with his game and his confidence ever since. The player who dominated the 2020 U.S. Open at Winged Foot, winning by six strokes, looked like a shadow of his old self. At the LIV Invitational Tucson in March, DeChambeau finished 44th out of 48 players. Listening to him describe how he climbed out of that nadir, you couldn’t help but feel good for him.

“Each day, I had this glimmer of hope that I could get back to it,” DeChambeau said. “It was never like I've got nothing, I'm done. I could have easily been like, you know what, I had a great career, I'm good. But I didn't because I knew I had it in me to do it every single day, and I worked as hard as I could every single day. There were times I doubted myself, severe doubts, but never got to a point where I was done. Maybe for like a day I was done, I'm just going to take a day off, whatever, and the next day, I came back. All right, I think I got something.”

 building during his round on Thursday. DeChambeau’s bulk is gone, but the speed in his swing is still astonishing when he needs it to be. On 16, he pounded a drive 343 yards down the middle of the fairway, then nipped an elegant wedge that stopped 15 inches from the hole. It was a stark reminder of how easily he can dismantle a 466-yard hole when he’s healthy. Off the tee Thursday, he gained 2.77 strokes on the field – and while Adam Scott trails close behind (2.62), both players were more than half a stroke ahead of Billy Horschel and the rest of the field.

“How do I explain this easily?” DeChambeau said, holding out his left wrist for reporters after the round. “I’m just in a place where I’m more ulnar. I’m keeping the handle higher through impact, and that allows the clubface to stay more stable. I feel like I was pushing down to the left, and it was closing the face down really hard. And I had low left, high right (misses). So that's five years of trying to figure that out and not being able to, as well, like my wrist has not been able to do it.”

There was also a moment Thursday that reminded you that no DeChambeau round is ever dull, and sometimes for the strangest reasons. On 17, he lashed an approach out of the rough and watched it sail 30 yards right of its intended target. It came screaming down from the sky toward the 18th tee box and drilled Kenny Pigman — one of the PGA Professionals in the field — in the back, just below his right shoulder blade.

“He wasn’t aiming for me, but it stung pretty bad,” Pigman said, mostly chuckling over the incident.

Years ago, when DeChambeau was in a stretch of blasting the ball toward galleries with little regard for their safety, it might have sparked a controversy, the kind that frequently seems to follow DeChambeau around. But Pigman was quick to add that DeChambeau did holler out “FORE!” when the ball was in the air and he was effusive in apologizing when he arrived on the scene.

“He was going to sign a glove for me, then he realized I was a player,” Pigman said.

“We were like ‘How about flights somewhere? Or cash maybe?’ ” joked Pigman’s caddie Andrew Alderice. “We’ll take some tickets to the next LIV event.”

It turned out to be a minor blip on a day when DeChambeau was vibing, grinning at the gallery and soaking up some welcomed praise after good shots.

“The emotions have definitely fluctuated pretty high and pretty low, thinking I have something and it fails and going back and forth,” DeChambeau said. “It's humbling. Golf, and life, always has a good way of kicking you on your you-know-what when you are on your high horse. It’s nice to feel this today.”

If you listened closely, you could still hear a flicker of the kind of jokes that used to torment DeChambeau when he was in a more fragile, frustrated state. On the 11th hole, someone waited until he was walking up the fairway before belting out “Let’s go Brooksy!” a throwback to a time when the galleries tormented DeChambeau by calling him Brooks Koepka’s nickname. But it felt flat at Oak Hill, like listening to someone at a party repeat a joke that everyone has heard, and grown tired of, years ago.

“Bryson is lucky he didn’t hit it over here, I bet he’d have trouble with this rope,” I heard one man tell a friend, a reference to the time when DeChambeau accidentally clotheslined himself with a gallery rope at a LIV Golf event in Chicago.

His friend could only muster a courtesy laugh.

It was more fun to listen to kids in the crowd, to see them bobbing between adults, craning their necks to peek through the gaps near the rope line, yearning to get a better view of DeChambeau.

“I bet he annihilates this ball,” I heard one tweenage boy whisper to a friend as the three of us stood just behind the 1st tee, waiting for DeChambeau to hit.

“Oh my gosh,” his friend whispered back as we watched DeChambeau’s golf ball go piercing through the sky. “Wow.”

A Reminder of the Bryson Experience

Welcome back to the NLU Mailbag. In this space, we’ll address topics big and small, smart and dumb, irreverent and serious.

A quick reminder: You need to be a member of The Nest to submit a question to the mailbag, but the mailbag itself will be free to read (as long as you behave yourselves). Most of our questions are submitted via our message board, The Refuge, but if you’re not a message board person, please send me an email at kvv@nolayingup.com with your Nest handle and your question. If your question gets picked, we’ll send you a free NLU towel.

Dgolfman62281: Is Oak Hill CC the Torrey Pines of New York? I can’t even get one elevated pulse point for this course. I still have negative memories of the 95 Ryder Cup and I can’t remember a single thing about Jason Dufner’s win here. It’s a stinky bland generic east coast track and I might check in on the final 2 holes Sunday but that’s it.

Always love to begin a mailbag with a salty golf course review! I was probably in this camp before I did any research about Oak Hill, and then I watched 

this excellent video our friends at The Fried Egg produced

 about the Andrew Green redesign, and I totally flipped. I love interesting green complexes, and this course has them again. It’s almost unrecognizable from what it was before. When you see what Donald Ross greens used to look like, and what they became, it feels almost criminal they were allowed to become so bland and lacking in character. I think we’re in for a cool championship.

As for memories of Oak Hill, I have two from Dufner’s win. The first is, I’m not sure anyone 

has ever hit their irons better while putting worse than Dufner did that week

. It was surreal. He was hitting shots to kick-in distance, but even those putts didn’t feel like a sure thing. It was transcendent ball-striking and close-your-eyes-and-say-a-prayer putting. It was a tribute to Ben Hogan — whom Dufner modeled his swing after — in more ways than I think most people realized.

Hogan is widely regarded as the greatest iron player to ever live. His swing has been copied by generations of players. But Hogan grew to loathe putting so much late in his career, he actually suggested (perhaps in jest, perhaps not) it be eliminated from the sport. He grew anxious over the ball and was embarrassed to play in front of crowds.

"If I had my way, every golf green would be made into a huge funnel,” Hogan t

. “So that when you hit the funnel the ball would roll down a pipe into the hole. That way there would be no expensive upkeep of grass on the greens. And there would be much less misery among the golfers."

The second memory has to do with trees. Oak Hill was, at the time, nearly overwhelmed with trees. And from these trees, acorns were falling. Dufner’s wife, Amanda, one of the first social media stars connected to golf, picked up several of those acorns and 

declared she was going to plant them on the Dufners

’ land in Alabama. One day, from those Oak Hill acorns, majestic trees would grow. They would be strong and always serve as a reminder of that major championship. At the time, I thought: “That would make a beautiful lead to a story. I wish I was there to write it.”


That anecdote is an interesting window into how fragile some things can be, and how rare permanence is in golf and life. The Dufners are no longer married. Jason has gone from being the 6th-ranked player in the world to the 692nd-ranked player. Oak Hill has undergone a complete restoration. Many of those trees are gone.

It’s a sad story. But there is something moving about it too. You want to hold onto things but the world changes in ways you never expect. Someone could win the PGA Championship next week, and a decade later, they might feel lost with a putter in their hands. Sometimes heartbreak can lead to a better future. That’s one of the reasons why it’s a compelling sport to watch. You might be watching something beautiful unfold, but also quite fragile.

Wiganerlyon: Why does the run-up to the PGA feel less juicy from a grand slam perspective for Jordan Spieth than pre-Masters feels for Rory McIlroy? Both are very popular players in the game. Is it just the narrative with Rory and the amount of scar tissue now accrued at a single course?

I think needing just the Masters to complete the career Grand Slam is the biggest blessing/curse in professional golf. Jon Rahm will never have to answer questions for an entire offseason the way Rory has for 12 years about whether this might be his year. It’s always the first major, so the build-up feels enormous. It also feels like the more you want it, the more you hope it will fulfill something in you, and the more the tournament seems to delight in rejecting you. The fact that Rory came so close at such a young age, only to fail in such a spectacular and memorable way, plays into that narrative. Everyone has been saying for years that the Masters sets up so well for Rory, that he could win three or four of them, but that’s not how sports work. It’s possible his best chance was when he was 21.

The narrative for Spieth is different. For starters, the PGA doesn’t return to the same place every year so there isn’t the same psychological baggage surrounding the event. Will the baggage grow if he never wins a PGA? If he has a heartbreaking near-miss the way Tom Watson did in 1978, it’s possible. But at this point, it feels like a Spieth victory that completed the Grand Slam would almost come as a surprise. No one knows, at this point, if he can hold a Sunday lead in a major. His own scars are thick in that department, so I think he’d have to come from well off the lead (the way he’s almost done a couple times at the Masters) to make it a reality. He wouldn’t have to mull the gravity when his head hit the pillow or even talk about it. He’d just have to play a great round at the right time when no one expected it. With his recent wrist injury, I’d say the expectations for him will be fairly low, assuming he plays at all.

Even if Rory entered the final round of the Masters in 8th place, all eyes would be on him. For whatever reason, the way we view them is just going to be different. In 2015, it looked like they were poised to be rivals for a decade, the best players of the post-Tiger generation. Now it’s fair to wonder if either of them will end up completing the Grand Slam. As absurd as it sounds, Phil Mickelson winning the U.S. Open at LACC or Jon Rahm winning the PGA and the Open Championship might be our best chance at a Grand Slam.

Wnf08a: Who has a better week at the PGA — Rickie Fowler or Jason Day?

Regular listeners to the pod know that I’ve been predicting Jason Day will win this year (something he hasn’t done since 2018), all season. But his recent allergy issues — which seem to be contributing to the return of his vertigo — are a genuine cause for concern. As my colleague Chris Solomon recently pointed out to the world, Rickie Fowler has been so solid in 2023 (Data Golf has him as the 18th-ranked player in the world), he is a genuine candidate for one of the last two spots on the U.S. Ryder Cup team, something I definitely didn’t see coming a year ago. Oak Hill is definitely a course where I could see Fowler sneaking into contention.

Even if you agree with my colleague Big Randy and feel like Fowler's fame within the sport represents late-stage capitalism, you have to admire how he’s rebuilt his swing and salvaged his career. I’m sure it must have been tempting to join LIV when he was deep in the wilderness, but without a path into major championships, Fowler would have been trapped in a lucrative but substance-free existence, the exact space his critics accused him of occupying for years. It would be pretty rewarding if a major were the payoff for all that work.

Gottliebk12: What is your ideal food and drink option at the turn?

I think this depends on the season. In the summer, nothing beats a bratwurst with mustard and a cold beer, particularly a gose or a sour. That might seem blasphemous to those who feel passionate about the simplicity of Miller Lite, Coors, or Bud, but when you play most of your golf in the sweltering humidity of Maryland, it’s basically like living in the Devil’s armpit. There is something delightful about a crisp sour or gose with a hint of salt that makes the perfect golf course beer. I think a Transfusion runs a close second, but it needs to be a good one. If the grape juice is too strong, I’m dumping it out after a few zips. (They make an incredible Transfusion at the course I just joined.)

In the fall, I mostly just opt for beef jerky. It’s simple, it’s not messy, you don’t have to think too much about it. But a good Bloody Mary is undefeated on the golf course.

ThatDuffGuyPat: What’s something, other than golf, that you have struggled with to get to the point you’re at but still enjoy through the frustrations or difficulties?

My genuine answer would be writing. It’s such a subjective thing to believe you are good at writing. The standard you’re trying to reach exists mostly in your own head. It requires both hubris and vulnerability. One smart person can look at the words on the page and see brilliance and another smart person can look at the same words and dismiss them as pedestrian. There are days when many writers (myself occasionally among them) stare at the screen and feel miserable, like we’re trapped in a decades-long fraud of pretending we’re good at this stuff. Any day now, we fear, someone is going to tap us on the shoulder and say “You realize you’re no good at this, right?” And at the same time, we can look at writers who are commercially or critically successful and think “How can anyone think 

In golf, there is a score. We can measure each other and compete against each other and reach a conclusion about ability based on facts. We often joke about the Eye Test at NLU, but for the most part, we know the difference between someone who is great and someone who is fine. Every result is compounding evidence.

Writing — beyond objective standards for punctuation and grammar — has more to do with whether or not it speaks to the reader’s soul.

Few things in life are more satisfying to me than writing paragraphs that make a reader feel something, whether that is humor or anger or joy. And yet, sometimes the road to those sentences can be torture. Most writers, even the great ones, are chasing a standard they’ll probably never reach. But the striving becomes addictive. When you write a good sentence or a great scene in a story, it’s like a perfectly-struck long iron. All you want to do is chase that feeling, even if you know, deep down, how difficult it will be to repeat.

To borrow a lyric from the subject of our next question: It gets easier but it never gets easy.

Mathew823: Do you have any thoughts on the Jason Isbell “Running With Our Eyes Closed” documentary? I was, as ever, struck by his directness. There are plenty of musicians who can open a vein in their music but won’t talk much about it outside of that. Isbell has no pretense about that at all.

Regular readers of this mailbag know that I am something of an Isbell devotee — 

so much so that I was interviewed by The Ringer

, which produced the documentary, about the curious connection between Isbell and sportswriters — so it pains me to admit that I wanted to love the doc more than I actually did. I thought the film had so many themes it was trying to juggle, it lacked a cohesive narrative.

Was it about the anxiety of making an album where an artist feels like his reputation is at stake? Was it about Jason and Amanda’s marriage? Was it about Isbell’s sobriety? His childhood? Was it about the isolation of COVID? Is it about trying to outrun the ghosts of your past while still, somehow, honoring pieces of them?

In trying to touch on all these themes, I think it struggles to answer two fundamental questions: What is this documentary about and why are we telling this story?

I am certainly grateful the documentary exists. There are elements of it that moved me deeply. I understand Jason and Amanda better and appreciate their willingness to lay themselves bare for all the world to see in the name of art. That is the deal they’ve made with the audience throughout their careers, and it’s the reason they feel almost like family to me, even though I am just a faceless fan to them — one of millions. The hardest thing about being vulnerable is you hand someone the weapon they can use to destroy you. But writers and storytellers also owe each other the truth, and if I pretended I loved the documentary just because I love and admire the people involved, I’d be dishonoring that agreement.

But again, we return to the subjective evaluation of art. It’s possible the documentary is great, and I’m too close to its subject matter. Either way, I’m excited for Weathervanes, particularly after listening to 

, which already feels up there with some of his best work.

TTrentC: As a Girl-Dad-to-be this fall, what would you include in your “starter kit” mentioned on the pod for new dads?

If you missed our April Nest Pod with Soly, it contains a thoughtful discussion about what the anticipation is like when you’re about to become a father for the first time. I joked on another pod that there should be a starter kit for New Dads, but I didn’t get specific about what it would contain.


I’ve thought about it a bunch and I don’t think it would contain many physical items — although a good stroller and a good swaddle blanket are magic — as much as advice, so here goes, from the father of three:

There is no RIGHT way. You're gonna get a lot of advice, and you're going to get people who cannot resist giving it as you try to figure out what you're doing. This is especially tough when it's your parents. New babies can be tough on any relationship. It's important to trust your own judgment (yours and your partner’s) and be united on that front. There might be times when you have to referee a bit between all the people in your life. Always let your partner know you've got her back. 

Give each other grace, particularly after 8 pm. One of my friends told me he and and his wife had a pact to forgive anything said after 8 pm, because you're so tired after the adrenaline runs out, you can't help snapping at each other. Forgive quickly, just like golf.

Don't be afraid to take the kid places. In a car seat or stroller, they're actually super easy to cart around when they're little and just sleep all the time and it will make you feel a little slice of normal if you take the kid to a casual restaurant for a brunch or a lunch. The people who hide inside for months and then venture into the world end up feeling overwhelmed and scared when it's time to live a more normal life. Yes, you have to make your own calculation about COVID and such but get outside. Kids are super adaptable! When my daughter was a baby, I used to take her to the driving range and hit a bucket while she watched me from the stroller. Now she’s a genuine golf obsessive with a swing infinitely more graceful than mine. Who cares if you get funny looks from golf hardos. You’ll be grateful for the normalcy. 

There will be a moment when everything hits you, that you love this kid more than you've ever loved anything. It's powerful and surreal. Take a few moments and bask in that feeling, because you'll want to revisit it from time to time. Parenting can be hard, and your life is going to change a lot, but nothing is as fulfilling. 

You'll be great. Everyone doubts themselves. Everyone gets a little scared with the first one. You will too. But one day you'll tell yourself "Shit, I'm good at this." And it will be true.

: I get a lot of messages from NLU dads who want to know how I got my daughter interested in golf. They mention they would love something similar with their daughters, which I think is a great sign. The more welcoming we are to girls at a young age, the more interested they’ll be in making golf a lifelong sport. My friend Hally Leadbetter released 

 imagining what it would be like if men were treated the way women often are in golf. As funny as that skit is, there is an underlying message. It’s clear we have some work to do.

I decided to ask my 11-year-old how I should answer this question. Her answer was short but pretty poignant, I think.


“You’ve got to make it just you and your daughter,” she said. “Don’t invite other people. That’s important. Make it like a club. Also, watch women’s golf on TV with them. Not just the men."

KVV Mailbag: Early PGA Championship Talk, Parenting and Jason Isbell

It’s a Wednesday afternoon, and Stanford junior Rachel Heck is walking back to her dorm from her piano class – one she takes with her teammate, Caroline Sturdza. “We’re the only ones who don’t know what we’re doing,” she says, laughing. Right now, the class is learning Chopin in preparation for a performance in June. One of the best amateur golfers in the world is keeping busy these days, just not with golf.

This is one of the rare times, she claims, that she isn’t with her team, who are in Arizona fighting for a PAC-12 title. Instead of playing beside them, she’s refreshing Golfstat for the duration of this conversation. “Right now, I’m my team’s biggest fan,” she says. “I’m so nervous – they’re three back.”


Stanford’s number-one fan was once the team’s greatest contributor. Heck’s breakout freshman year amounted to a six-win season (the most single-season wins in program history) and won the NCAA individual title. In her sophomore year, she won two more times in a season interrupted by a bout with mono before she contributed to Stanford’s team title in 2022.

But for a second spring in a row, Heck has had to reprise her role as the Cardinal’s biggest cheerleader. This time, the culprit is thoracic outlet syndrome, a condition where the blood vessels or nerves in the space between the first rib and collarbone are compressed. As of now, there’s no timetable for her return.

 so it made up for everything,” Heck said of her absence in her sophomore year. “Learning I had to get surgery in February and that I was going to be out for an indefinite period of time, it’s hard to come to terms with. I’m a competitor. I want to be out there.”

The bubbly, positive demeanor she usually displays has been much harder to maintain. The physical scars on her body cut as deep as the emotional ones. Three months after Stanford won the National Championship, Heck was back at school gearing up for her junior year when she began to feel an uncomfortable sensation in her shoulder and neck. Whenever she played golf, her fingers would become numb, and the blood vessels in her hands would swell up. The pain was mostly localized to her hands, but simple tasks like cutting her food at dinner became unbearable.

One event, in particular, exposed the inevitable. Nearing the end of a round, Heck could barely grip her club. Her head coach, Anne Walker, began walking beside her when Heck burst into tears. She’d hooked and shanked her last two shots. “I can’t hold the club. I can’t do it,” she cried. Walker couldn’t bear to watch Heck continue. “Rachel, pick up the ball. Let’s be done.” Heck insisted on the opposite, scrapping together a steady end to her round – but a visit to the athletic trainer with few answers left her feeling despondent.

In the following months, the pain migrated to her elbow, shoulder, and then her neck. Desperate for relief, she started intense physical therapy and decided after Stanford’s home event that she would be done for the season. She noticed some slight improvement within a few months and opted to try playing again.

One week of dedicated practice only proved how much she’d fallen apart. She was worse off than before, and surgery became her only option. In order to live pain-free, Heck would need her rib removed in order to clear out space for her blood vessels and nerves.

The day before her operation, Heck was all alone while her best friends were competing at the Juli Inkster Meadow Club Invitational. Her mind was racing. She’d never had any type of surgery before, let alone a major one that required losing a rib. The season was just entering crunch time. She’d been reinstated into ROTC and was anticipating field training in Alabama after the National Championship. Now her entire future was in doubt.

Seeking peace, she ventured outdoors with her Bible in hand. Combing through passages, her worries quickly abated when she read through 2 Corinthians 12:9: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Heck has held onto those words since. “I felt God had me in his hands,” she said. And so did her people. After her surgery, her mother, Stacy, and Sturdza traded nurse duties – from driving her to class to bringing her medicine whenever she needed it.

A few weeks later, spring break arrived – a week she intended to spend at the Augusta National Women’s Amateur. The weight of everything was overwhelming.  She called home to Memphis in the middle of the night, bawling. The next morning, she was on a flight home.


“I think it's important for people to know that you can let yourself break,” Heck says. “It's important to let your soul process things, to be patient when you do have those breakdowns, and to seek out what you need, instead of bottling up and pretending that you don't need anything like at that moment.”

As broken as she felt,  Heck couldn’t stay from her team for very long. From Memphis, she followed Rose Zhang’s historic run at Augusta – and quickly realized she needed to be there. She booked a last-minute flight for Friday and was Zhang’s plus-one for the player dinner at Berckmans Place. The two friends watched Niall Horan perform, and it was then Heck understood this was where she was always meant to be.


When Saturday morning rolled around, she prayed with Zhang before her final round. She walked every single hole. She sat in the winner’s press conference, grinning ear to ear as Zhang gave her a heartfelt shoutout: “I’m so so inspired by her constant demeanor and her mindset on recovering and her ability to just have a positive outlook on things, even when things are very hard,” Zhang said. “No one knows what she’s actually going through except for herself.”

It was a cathartic moment. Only one week before, Rachel Heck had hit the panic button on life. Supporting her friend offered some much-needed perspective.  “I didn’t need to touch a club for that to be the best week of my life,” she said.

But the every day – the in-between – is the true battle.

It’s been nearly two months since her surgery. The rib now sits in her bathroom – with jokes of potentially making a keychain out of it to “freak people out.” She’s self-sufficient but is back to the grind of weekly physical therapy. Her golf is limited to putting practice – so her world is colored in things like the Memphis Grizzlies, a heavier academic schedule, and any ROTC training she physically can.

“It’s killing me not to have a certain progression timeline,” she says. But as she rehabs and waits, she’s vowed to be her team’s biggest (and most visible) fan. As it turns out, they have been thinking of her just as much as she is thinking of them. “We’re gonna step up for her,” says best friend and teammate Sadie Englemann. “She’s made everyone’s life so much better.” Englemann, whose college career has blossomed in the past few months, has assumed her best friend’s role in the lineup – even though she’d like nothing more than to be playing right beside her. As the No. 1 seed at the Pullman Regional, there’s an enormous target on the defending champions' backs, with plenty of teams eager to capitalize on Stanford’s injury-ridden lineup.

After a meteoric freshman year that saw her emerge as the best player in college golf, the past two years of Rachel Heck’s golf career have felt almost unfair. But her selflessness has shone through in the moments that don’t belong to her. She’s finding magic in what once might have been mundane. While she’s unaware of what’s ahead, she knows one thing for certain: “I can’t get caught up in making plans for myself and being distraught when they don’t work out.”

Rachel Heck is still here, even if she's missing a piece of her

When you’re young, particularly if you grow up in an environment of stability and privilege, you don’t realize that much of the world is made up of damaged, broken people.

My father was a lawyer and politician; my mother worked as a newspaper editor, then eventually became a journalism professor. We were not rich — in fact, there was a time, shortly after I was born when my parents had very little money — but the life I led growing up in Missoula, Montana was almost entirely absent of strife or drama. When I watched things like The Cosby Show or Family Ties, I saw reflections of my own day-to-day experiences: Stern but loving parents; annoying but earnest siblings. There were vacations with sing-a-longs, arguments that ended in hugs, bills that were paid on time and family portraits at Christmas. My friends seemed to live a similarly idyllic existence. We understood that addictions and infidelities existed. They just weren’t present in our lives (as far as we knew).


Partially because of that privilege, The Jerry Springer Show, which became nationally syndicated when I was a freshman in high school, offered a window into a world that was as foreign as it was fascinating. I cannot pinpoint when it became appointment television for my friends and I, but I vividly recall dozens of teenage afternoons when we leered and gawked at the parade of misfits Springer welcomed on his show, people willing to shamelessly reveal their torrid affairs, and brawl over the fallout.

It felt more like a trip to the zoo than it did an afternoon talk show most of the time. I’d never seen a lion in the wild, just like I’d never seen a stripper confess she’d been having an affair with her husband’s brother, but I could observe each from a safe distance and suffer no lasting damage. If you were home sick, the episodes could feel oddly comforting, a quick dose of mindless escapism or schadenfreude to pass the hours as you nibbled on toast or Saltine crackers.

There was no humiliation that seemed beneath the show. A man once showed up to confess he’d married his horse. Hillbillies fought each other, shirtless, over unpaid utility bills. Strippers appeared out of nowhere like summer squalls, wreaking havoc and ripping out weaves, upending countless (already doomed) relationships. Sometimes a virgin got catfished, or a serial cheater was exposed as being neck-deep in baby mama drama. Furniture was frequently thrown. Tops got ripped off. More than once, a Nazi or Ku Klux Klan member got his ass kicked, which is especially satisfying considering, in 2023, the same kind of people get to befriend Kanye West and wave around tiki torches without catching a beating.


It was America’s weird underbelly exposed for entertainment, and Springer — a man who was once the mayor of Cincinnati, and whose parents escaped the Holocaust during World War 2 — seemed to float above it all. He was never the draw of his own messy circus, he was merely the master of ceremonies, gently nudging his damaged and somewhat-deranged guests to spill their tea so the audience (both in the studio and those watching at home) could sneer with glee or disgust, then chant his name when the inevitable eruption occurred. My friends and I enjoyed it so much, we paid for a VHS version of “Uncensored Jerry Springer Tales!” to be shipped to our house. My one recollection was that we found it mildly disappointing, our expectations raised too high by the promise of mayhem and chaos unsuitable for television.


Was it exploitative? Without question. Even though the guests signed on to be willing participants and air their messiest laundry, Springer certainly preyed on Americans’ bottomless appetite to be famous, if sometimes for the strangest reasons. The frequency that trans people were cast as the driver of relationship drama was, at best, abhorrent. Supposedly the show offered counseling to any guest who wanted it, though it’s hard to imagine many took them up on it. The point of Springer was to be the messiest version of yourself on screen, not go on the show with the expectation that any of your problems would be fixed.

Springer, to his credit, never seemed interested in judging his guests or their choices, he believed he was offering a stage to the kind of people that television wanted to ignore. He didn’t traffic in celebrity worship. He instead shined a spotlight on the kind of people who fill out every city and every town in the world, people who are trying to get by and live with — or hide — their desires or their mistakes.


“We didn’t have any celebrities on our show, just regular folks with no fame, little if any wealth, and very little influence,” Springer 

said on the program’s 25th anniversary.

 “It’s folks just taking a moment, which they rarely if ever get, to let the world know something about what they are thinking, feeling or doing. Admittedly it’s often crazy or outside the norm of accepted behavior, but what I’ve learned over our quarter century of shows is that deep down we are all alike. Some of us just dress better.”

When the news trickled out that Springer died this week at age 79, I realized I hadn’t thought about him in years. No one in 2023 needs a sick day if they want to tap into cringy drama; they can pull it up on their phone in seconds while waiting for their Starbucks order. Some people are convinced Springer opened the door to the further degradation of society, but the truth is, he more likely revealed than inspired it. Instead of the Jerry Springer Show, we have Instagram, Twitter or Reddit at our fingertips. People now embarrass themselves daily, and for free, hoping it will lead to bigger things.


Springer’s passing did allow me to revisit my naive teenage innocence and all the messes I’ve lived through since. I don’t know anyone who married his horse, but my friends and I — the same people who watched Springer regularly with bemused curiosity — now know a little about divorce and addiction, about heartbreak and drama. I’ve lived through some things that would make a decent episode of voyeuristic television. (Most of us have, by the time we reach a certain age.) When you become an adult, you grasp that no one’s life is the Cosby Show. Even the Cosby Show feels more sinister than Springer, considering what we now know about its creator.

Jerry Springer was not a philosopher or a sage. That would give him far too much credit. He was a uniquely 90s creature who endured even as the world around him grew more comfortable with the exploitation of relationship drama. But he also understood we’re all a little broken, and we’re all carrying baggage. Whenever a brawl would break out, he’d drift to the edge of the stage and fold his arms across his chest like a disappointed school teacher as he waited for things to simmer down. Then he’d ask the guests if there was any way they could reconcile or work through their issues.

As stupid as it was, as staged as it often felt, there was something endearing about his desire to stand there, amidst these peculiar people with an assortment of problems they were eager to share, and listen.

Nest Exclusive: Jerry Springer Was Here to Listen

Sometimes you just need to go do the damn thing. That’s my challenge to Nelly Korda heading into Sunday’s final round of the Chevron Championship, the LPGA’s first major of the season. 

If you want to be a generational golfer (and Nelly, to her credit, has publicly stated as much), it’s impossible not to view this opportunity as a golden one in her chase for major title number two. She sits two behind leaders Allisen Corpuz and Angel Yin heading into the final round.

Viewed through any lens, Nelly Korda has had a wonderful career up to this point. She won her first career start on the then-Symetra Tour as an 18-year-old. She won for the first time on the LPGA tour as a 20-year-old in 2018, quickly chasing that with two more wins the next season. She really broke out in 2021, winning five times, including her first major championship at the KPMG Women’s PGA. Turning 25 years of age this July, she’s won eight times in total on the LPGA, including the aforementioned major. She’s been ranked inside the top five in the world since late 2019. She won an Olympic gold medal in 2020 at the Tokyo Games, and has two wins on the Ladies European Tour. Like I said, a fantastic career.

 far ahead of us is a fork in the path of Nelly Korda’s career. Down one track – maybe we call it the goat track – lies a Hall-of-Fame induction, a cache of major titles, and a place alongside somebody like Annika Sörenstam in the fore of modern golf history. Down the other track, the technician’s track, is a career most known for an impossibly beautiful, proficient golf swing, though not necessarily responsible for producing as many majors as we’d all believe such a masterpiece should yield.

Jordan Spieth, at last December’s PNC Championship, said of playing with Nelly Korda, “It’s like playing with Adam Scott. She swings it so sweet.” High praise from one of the best in the world, though a bit damning when we consider Scott’s accomplishments (one major title) relative those of his peers. Earlier this week, Nelly revealed to reporters that she has upwards of 6,000 videos of her swing on her phone. She has an obsessive passion for perfecting the aesthetic of her swing, but we know majors are won with any number of different looking swings, sometimes not nearly the prettiest.

Annika won her second major title (of 10 total) when she was 25 years old, a bit older than Nelly today. And though she would rattle off her final eight majors after the age of 30, that type of success in one's thirties has proven to be extremely fleeting in the women’s game. The larger point is, if Nelly is going to get to four majors, or seven majors, or perhaps beyond, she must have the ability to go take titles like today when they’re there for the taking. Wield that painstakingly perfect swing, those enormous talents and show us you’re a killer.

Nelly, for her part, has been very clear about which path she’s chasing. 

She told GOLF.com’s Dylan Dethier in a May 2022 cover piece

, “I want to be the best golfer in the world. I want to be the World Number 1, and I want to have the Grand Slam, and I want to work toward something no one’s ever done before.” Put simply, she yearns to be among the best of all time to tee it up on the LPGA tour. If that’s her goal, I believe it’s fair for us to want something similar.

This January, Nelly signed an endorsement deal with Nike. This was significant for the simple fact that Nike hasn’t really invested heavily in women’s golf since their big splash on teenage phenom Michelle Wie nearly two decades ago. That Nike believes enough in Nelly to sign her to what surely is a very lucrative deal speaks volumes to what Nelly Korda has achieved up to this point, but critically, also to what Nike expects Nelly to accomplish in the years to come. They’re famously in the business of peak athletic achievement, from Michael Jordan to Tiger Woods, Roger Federer to Serena Williams. Nike’s searching for generational greatness, and it’s impossible not to connect the dots to what Nelly is searching for herself.

Nelly will begin the final round at 8 under par. In the two strokes she needs to make up, there are five women ahead of her. They possess four tour wins between them and zero major championships. Corpuz, one of two women at 10-under, has never placed inside the top 20 at a major in her young career. Yin, also at 10-under, is wildly talented but also incredibly volatile. She’s banked exactly one tour top-10 since mid-July 2021.

The group of three women at 9 under includes Amy Yang, Megan Khang, and Albane Valenzuela. Yang is easily the most decorated amongst them, having won four times on the LPGA tour alongside a gaggle of top-10 finishes in majors, but at 33, she hasn’t exactly been relevant on the biggest stages since 2017. Khang is an absolute pitbull, to be sure, but finds herself still in search for a maiden tour victory since earning her card way back in 2016. Finally, Valenzuela is in uncharted territory, never finishing inside the top-20 at a major.

Taking nothing away from any of these women, all of whom have played phenomenal golf across three rounds at the Carlton Woods’ Nicklaus Course, none should strike an ounce of fear or trepidation within Korda.

This is her tournament to win or lose, and over the course of these eighteen holes today we’ll get to learn a lot about what Nelly Korda, the golfer, is all about. Will she take a significant step toward becoming the once-a-generation type player she craves to be? Can she show us she’s capable of being the world-beater Nike has bet on her to be, that American women’s golf craves? Or will it be a close call, an opportunity lost, for her and her picturesque swing? We shall find out.

Randy: A golden day for Nelly's second major

Welcome back to the NLU Mailbag! This is a place where we answer questions that have a lot, a little, or nothing at all to do with the world of golf.

A quick reminder: You need to be a member of The Nest to submit a question to the mailbag, but the mailbag itself will be free to read (as long as you behave yourselves). Most of our questions are submitted via our message board, The Refuge, but if you’re not a message board person, please send me an email at 

 with your Nest handle and your question. If your question gets picked, we’ll send you a free NLU towel.

Scottyrp4: Given how close Brooks Koepka and Phil Mickelson were at Augusta, do you think any LIV players win a major this year? If so, who do you think it is, and where?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot during the last two weeks. A fascinating summer awaits us, doesn’t it? I’m hesitant to say I think that Phil will contend in majors the rest of the year (Augusta is a place he can think his way around until he’s 60) but I would be surprised if Brooks wasn’t in the mix at the PGA, a place that seems perfect for his game. Major championship golf is really more interesting when he’s in the mix, and as much as the LIV bros want you to think Brooks’ success at the Masters was supposed to upset LIV critics like myself, I loved every minute of it. I wish he’d played better on Sunday so we could have a true duel, but now that he’s gotten a taste of major pressure again, maybe he’ll be better for it. If anything, LIV has made the majors even more entertaining because it’s the only time we see all the best players together, and there is a natural tension as a result. I think a lot of the LIV players are washed, but obviously, many of them are not. Cam Smith seems like a great pick for the Open Championship, but I could also see Sergio or Lee Westwood or Paul Casey having a moment like Darren Clarke or Henrik Stenson did when they won an Open Championship after what was considered their prime.

The interesting question about Mickelson is: Does LACC represent his last genuine chance to win the career Grand Slam? Two months ago, when he couldn’t seem to break 70 on the LIV Tour, everyone would have laughed at the possibility he still had a major in him. But after that Masters performance? It doesn’t seem THAT crazy. We don’t know yet what the USGA setup will look like, but speculation seems to be it won’t have an abundance of thick rough. Recovery shots would favor players with creative minds. Can you imagine if it did happen? Phil would read off the name of everyone who’d ever so much as favorited a tweet talking shit about him. (Hey Phil, it’s pronounced VAN VAUL-KEN-BURG.) It would be a spectacle. I would love to witness it and write about it.

Tron: KVV, an earnest question to ponder for the next mailbag. Did Curt Schilling paint his sock?

This is a fascinating question because, while I think there is absolutely no chance Schilling painted his sock, Schilling is such an unlikeable, despicable person, people would love for this to be true, so the fantasy persists even 20 years after that game that he whipped out a marker to frame himself as the hero. I was actually working at the Baltimore Sun when columnist Laura Vescey wrote a column saying she thought Schilling’s sock was doctored, and of course, he went nuts, so it was interesting to see that battle waged from the inside of my own newspaper.

One thing I think I find interesting is that Schilling was one of the first athletes to realize they could punch back at reporters by blogging 

. He was basically longform tweeting before it was even a thing. It was kind of interesting when it was a post-modern rewriting of the power dynamic between journalists and subject, but then he turned into a genuine loon who was radicalized by being extremely online and clearly hated everyone and everything who didn’t share his own extreme views. It became much less interesting to me.

It does raise an interesting question though: Can you separate an athlete’s performance from his personal views? I think most people would say yes. I often feel the same. But I also don’t think you have to feel that way. You’re not required to be agnostic. There are plenty of people who dislike LeBron James because of his progressive worldview, and they have every right to root against him for those reasons.

I grew up a Red Sox fan, and the 2004 ALCS is one of my favorite sports memories. Even if Schilling had painted his sock, it wouldn’t change the way I felt about that performance in Game 6. It doesn’t inspire me to consume any of his current garbage takes, but I loved rooting for him at that moment.

TTrentC: What was the greatest sandwich you ever had?

What a great question. As someone who loves sandwiches, I wish I had a better answer to this, but I can’t pin it down to one specific meal. Maybe this is where the advice of Warren Zevon is apt: Enjoy every sandwich.

When I was in college, I got recruited by the Baltimore Sun in my senior year. Someone from the paper called my house in Montana as part of the recruiting process. They wanted to take me out to a fancy dinner in Baltimore and woo me into accepting the job, and they wanted to know what kind of food I liked so they could make reservations. I wasn’t there when the call came in, but one of my college roommates picked up the phone and answered a few of the recruiter’s questions. “Um, I know he likes turkey sandwiches,” my roommate said. It was an earnest answer, but no less true. I 

If forced to choose, I’d probably pick the Big Bad Wolf sandwich from Big Bad Wolf BBQ here in Baltimore. It’s so decadent that I only eat one every three or four months, but I always eat one on my birthday to celebrate the passage of time. It contains brisket, pulled pork and bacon, and it’s a little piece of heaven. If you ever come to Baltimore, skip the fancy bullshit and visit the little yellow shack on Hartford Road.

The truth is, every city has at least one amazing sandwich, and you usually need some local knowledge to help guide you there. I typically rely on my buddy Wright Thompson, who can tell you where to find the best food in just about any American city. But this is a good example of why you shouldn’t be obnoxious on Twitter. For all its ills, people can point you in the direction of a pretty good sandwich if you’re not a jerk.

I think in either a future mailbag or newsletter I’ll put this question to the NLU crew and make them share their pinnacle sandwich.

Jgolf1: Let’s say money IS a factor but you live anywhere in the US. You have to take your family to a sporting event and pay for everything out of your own pocket (tickets, parking, concessions etc…). This is purely a family night out, not doing anything for work. What are you choosing?

This question feels extremely relevant as I’m taking my daughter to the U.S. Women’s Open at Pebble this summer and it is definitely not cheap. But if I was bringing the entire family, I think I’d ultimately choose tennis’ U.S. Open in Flushing Meadows, particularly one of the early sessions. You know that line David Foster Wallace wrote about tennis on television vs. tennis in person is like the difference between video porn and the felt reality of human love? That is 100 percent true when you see tennis up close. Night matches at Arthur Ashe Stadium are among the coolest experiences we have in sports. Even from the upper deck, you still feel like you’re on top of the players. The food (while overpriced) is genuinely pretty good at the U.S. Open, and just walking around the grounds is great for people-watching. A couple of years ago, 

I wrote about watching Naomi Osaka closely at the U.S. Open

 and it ended up being one of my favorite things I’ve ever written, so I’d want my family to experience that energy at least once.

Dgolfman62281: Is golf the only sport where literally every media member that covers it is expected to at least be a recreational participant of said sport?

Did anyone have visions of Brent Musburger boxing out after a rebound?

First of all, I expect Brent Musburger to be able to box out because he’s one of the only famous media people from Montana, so I expect him to uphold a certain standard for people like me to aspire to. In all seriousness, you make an interesting point. There is some expectation that golf writers know how to golf, but I don’t think it’s as essential as you might think. My friend Steve Politi typically writes the best story every year from the Masters, and he’s been pretty open about the fact that doesn’t play golf. It made for a great column when he 

No Laying Up

Writing

2023 PGA Championship Notebook: Shanks and Scenes from Day 2

A Reminder of the Bryson Experience

KVV Mailbag: Early PGA Championship Talk, Parenting and Jason Isbell

Rachel Heck is still here, even if she's missing a piece of her

Nest Exclusive: Jerry Springer Was Here to Listen

Randy: A golden day for Nelly's second major

KVV Mailbag: LIV and the majors, all-timers and sandwiches

KVV: What do we do about slow play?

Jon Rahm's Inevitability

Simply Sam Bennett

Brooks Koepka (tries to) smash windows, smashes expectations

The Things People Say About Phil Mickelson

KVV Mailbag: Masters Part Two

A Newly Nostalgic Tiger Woods Remembers His Epic Chip on No. 16

KVV Mailbag: Masters Part One

7 Thoughts From A Sportswriter Upon Seeing Springsteen For The First Time At Age 45

McIlroy Supports Governing Bodies' Distance Proposal

The Loudest Voice in the Conversation