Downrange: A No Laying Up Podcast

Crash Course Podcast

No Laying Up Podcast

TrapDraw Podcast

Live from the Kill House

Soly, DJ and Tron gather for our midweek pod fresh off the USGA / R&A announcement of a rollback of the golf ball beginning for pro golfers in 2028 and in 2030 for the recreational golfer. 

We offer our initial reaction to the announcement as well as some other reactions from around the game of golf, plus a look back to how we arrived at the announcement - particularly in light of the rejected Model Local Rule bifurcation proposal from earlier this year. We also sift through the various opposing points of contention around today's announcement, the responses from other organizations in pro golf, and much more.

Viral sensation KVV joins the pod after his SCATHING column where he threw his hands up in the air and questioned the sanity of anyone who continues to call themselves a golf fan!


a great column and you should check it out.

News broke out just as the guys hit record that the PGA Tour Player Advisory Board has selected an outside investment group, SSG (Strategic Sports Group) – a Boston-heavy contingent of private equity.


Soly declares none of it means anything to him if it doesn’t involve the best players in the world playing together on a regular basis. What could it mean for golf, globally? How will the interests of ALL of these investors, plus PIF, align? How much closer is Yasir to his Augusta National membership?


(19:00) Jason Day and Lydia Ko take the Grant Thornton Invitational title at 26-under par…in an event that should have probably gotten a lot more buzz. Probably doesn’t help that it’s the second LPGA event at the same course in the past two weeks, says Tron. But there’s probably a lot more that could be done to boost the profile of the event – such as a better time of year, a more accessible location, an exciting course, etc.


(24:40) Rory is officially back on Twitter and dishing out clapbacks, strays, things of that nature.

The LIV Golf Promotions ended with Kalle Samooja, Kieran Vincent and Jinichiro Kozuma earning LIV membership. Some additional reactions to the Jon Rahm to LIV announcement, but the crew took a dive last week when the news broke 

Soly asks: What is stopping a wave of guys from going to LIV for one year?


(36:00) KVV suggests the extremely depressing possibility that all of the charities the PGA Tour works with will arguably suffer the most, prompting a larger discussion about how the PGA Tour’s tournament sponsors might be feeling right now.


(32:20) I think it’s safe to say we rooted for Ohtani’s deal – whatever it looked like – because he is someone who sincerely plays for the love of their respective sport. He is asking his employer 

to withhold most of his paycheck for the betterment of the company.

Also, Shohei Ohtani, who has the makings of a GOAT, is justifiably worth $700M. If an alien invasion took place and said invaders specifically asked for an explainer on major sports contracts, Jon Rahm to LIV would have them stumped – who, BTW, had quite the grin on his face talking about how “nice” the money was on McAfee! Just a lot of two-faced behavior here.


 Seasons greetings: I will spare everyone a bad take nomination this week.


KVV jumping in to say: Apologies to the mules who might be appalled Tron won’t be taken to task for saying we should consider mercifully euthanizing mules.


"I'm sure Twitter will be sending me a check any moment now for the eleven cents I have generated for the platform." -KVV

(34:00) “Having Rory acting like a real human being again on Twitter, that’s why I liked Rory in the first place.” -TC

(39:16) KVV: If you wanna win that money, play better.


Tron: Nate Lashley’s gonna show up at your doorstep tonight.

Halfway through there’s an interview with Martin Slumbers and Mike Whan, discussing the rollback and how the two governing bodies arrived at the decision.


Here’s a sneak peek at their conversation… (answers edited for clarity and conciseness).

I'll start with this one with you Martin. You guys are two different people. You represent two different bodies. I'm curious if we could get a little insight into your guys' process. Are there examples you can give us of areas where maybe you two have disagreed or your teams have disagreed? How have you worked out internally? I struggle to believe that you guys have been a hundred percent aligned in every step of the process. But I'm wondering if you could give us a little bit of an insight into how your guys' internal processes worked on that front.

 You're absolutely right. We've not agreed on everything, but we have agreed on the final outcome. We both have some very talented scientists and engineers who work in our equipment standards who have been doing it this for a long, long time. The way it's really worked between Mike and I is we knew what we were trying to get to, which is: Do we make a change in regulation around golf balls? And if we don't make a change, what are our options? And he and I would talk a lot – I would talk less than Mike – but we would talk a lot around kind of the, the sort of the, the higher level things and then work with us, our teams to answer specific questions.

And we went back to the engineers, the clever guys. They joke around equipment regulation isn't rocket science, but it does help. But our head of regulation, equipment regulation used to work for NASA. These guys, they go back and they come back to us and say, Martin, you're wrong. You need to go and tell Mike he's on the wrong path. And he would call me and say, my guys are telling me that you are wrong, Martin. We looked at hundreds and hundreds of different options. It's been an incredibly challenging period of time and we've iteratively worked from our thinking and then using our scientists and engineers come to a logical, sensible, simple answer.


(1:42:10) Lastly, listen to a reading of KVV’s column, “Jon Rahm, The Rollback and an Entire Reevaluation.”

PGA Tour: PGA Tour Policy Board picks SSG

Gabby Herzig: ‘Moving the Needle:’ The Grant Thornton Invitational Delivered As a Cross-Tour Collaboration

 Eamon Lynch: Jon Rahm’s greed isn’t the PGA Tour’s biggest problem. It’s the guys who want Saudi-sized money for staying.

 (1:50) Thanks to our friends at Footjoy for keeping us dressed in the best cold-weather gear. As the day evolves, you can evolve with it. Check out their Thermo Series line 

A fresh, funny discussion of all things golf from the guys at No Laying Up. Episodes air twice a week and topics include tournament recaps, interviews, deep dive player profiles, golf travel, and more.

772 - Grant Thornton Recap, PGA Tour Investment News + Mike Whan & Martin Slumbers Interview

For an audio version read by KVV, listen below.

I’m often hesitant to assign much weight to anecdotal evidence, but this week, during one of the busiest seven-day stretches in the history of professional golf, I received a text from a friend that stopped me cold.

We don’t play golf together as much as we’d like, owing to our busy work schedules, but he follows the game closely and reads about it constantly. He listens to podcasts, watches videos, then shares them with friends. He is, in simplistic terms, a golf sicko. He also belongs to what is arguably the sport’s most coveted demographic: He owns his own business, he has disposable income, he isn’t married to any particular political ideology, and he buys new clubs as often as some people buy golf balls.

He wanted to let me know he was fed up with the professional game. Done with it.


He still loved the sport, and still looked forward to teeing it up together, but he wasn’t going to watch anymore. He might tune in for the majors, but that was probably it. The PGA Tour and LIV? All of it had started to feel a little gross. Everything going on — 

whether it was Jon Rahm’s departure to LIV;

 the squabbling over billions of dollars in equity in a potential merger between tours; 

even the governing bodies’ decision to try and curtail distance

“The fan experience,” he wrote, “is secondary at best. And fans don’t like getting fucked with.”

As someone who makes a living writing about golf, and frequently commenting on the professional game, I would love to pretend my friend is an outlier. He might be mad now, but this too shall pass, as the idiom goes.

In recent days, I’ve come to realize he is more likely the tip of the iceberg.

It is impossible to understate how many people have been turned off by what’s transpired over the last two years, by the litany of decisions that feel driven by greed, narcissism or stupidity. I came into this week thinking I supported the USGA and R&A’s rollback proposal. I had done the reading, weighed the complexities, and felt like it was a prudent decision. By week’s end, I began to feel like it was just one more instance where fans were being asked to pay for the sins of the professional game, whether it was in yards or dollars or time.

“Remember baseball after the 1994 strike?” my friend asked me. “If golf does the damage I think they’re doing, it may take another Tiger-like figure to bring people back.”


The highest level of professional golf, for starters, has completely lost touch with reality.

Golf is a niche sport. It will always be a niche sport, certainly outside the majors. Deep down, golfers know this. They are 

 compared to other athletes. They get to have long careers and they get to rub elbows with wealthy, important people, business tycoons and heads of state, but their skills don’t move the needle.

We know LIV ratings have been laughable, so let’s ignore them for a second. Let’s take the PGA Tour’s most important event — The Players Championship — as Exhibit A when we examine the allegation of golf’s cultural irrelevance.

In 2023, the Players Sunday broadcast drew 2.83 million viewers. That was up 11 percent from the previous year.

Do you know how many people tuned in to watch Ohio State play Michigan in college football’s marquee regular season match-up? 19.07 million.


When the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles faced off recently, it was watched by 29.02 million people.

The most important event on the PGA Tour drew about 500,000 fewer eyeballs than a game between Iowa State and Kansas State.

Are we really supposed to believe, based on numbers like this, Rahm’s $450 million contract (who knows the real number when accounting for clauses and equity) is driven by a real market? It’s asinine.


When the Saudis came along and started looking for ways to launder their global reputation, a bunch of golfers suddenly became convinced they deserved to get paid significantly more than they had in the past. To be fair, that was their right. But in doing so, they have decided to take whatever goodwill their skills have built up (over many years) and light it on fire.


As easy as it would be to point the finger solely at those who went to LIV, there are very few innocent bystanders here. Those who stayed with the PGA Tour are now mud-wrestling over different piles of money and control. They do not seem to care if the sport (at least the professional version of it) is irrevocably broken in this process, as long as a handful of them achieve generational wealth.

I understand, in a micro sense, why Rahm went back on his word and took LIV’s money. He almost certainly looked at the mess that is the PGA Tour and realized he was under no obligation to support that clusterfuck of ego and uncertainty. I can’t pretend I know Rahm well, but I’ve been around him enough to know he is driven by pride more than money. He did not feel sufficiently valued by the PGA Tour, so why help them wade through a murky future when someone was dangling half a billion dollars in his face?

With all the private equity sharks circling the PGA Tour at the moment, many of them whispering in Tiger Woods’ ears about a way to box out the Saudis, you can understand why Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the Chairman of the Public Investment Fund, felt he had to make a bold chess move with Rahm. Whether the Masters winner is a knight or a pawn probably doesn’t matter, though I’m sure Rahm sees himself as the former, not the latter.

Newsletter

In a macro sense, I wish Rahm would have remained true to his word, because he is among the most thoughtful, principled, interesting people in professional golf. I fear he’ll be neutered now that it is part of his job to be a mouthpiece for an autocratic government. Perhaps he’ll prove me wrong, and I hope he does. It will be interesting to study his temper when his 2024 U.S. Open prep involves three rounds of team golf in front of dozens of fans at Golf Club of Houston in sweltering conditions in June. If the CW Network is still bothering to count viewers, they can put me down for that one.


I will almost certainly continue to follow professional golf — it is a big part of my job, after all — but I am not so sure about the dozens of people I play with regularly. They aren’t deeply entrenched in the pointless daily arguments of Golf Twitter. They don’t really care about OWGR points and certainly couldn’t name members of the 4 Aces. They like to squeeze in rounds when they can, have fun and give each other shit, drink a few beers during or after a round, and flip on football when they’re finished. It’s not a choice between supporting the PGA Tour or LIV, it’s a decision to ignore both. They might gamble a little, but a light bulb has gone off recently, and many fans have begun to wake up to the idea that almost no one involved in this Corporate Game of Thrones thinks about them at all.

For all the lip service paid to “growing the game,” it hasn’t led to less expensive equipment or access to elite private courses. Broadcasts are still choked to death by commercials, to the point where it made the Ryder Cup borderline impossible to watch. PGA Tour purses have grown so disproportionate to revenue that tournaments almost certainly won’t be able to meet the charitable obligations established in previous years — meaning communities will get the short straw. And because professional golfers threw a tantrum when the governing bodies proposed the idea of bifurcation, now amateurs are looking at a future where their version of golf won’t quite be the same. Will the game get harder? It’s possible. At the very least, they’re going to lose some distance because the best golfers on the planet recoiled at the suggestion they give up some of theirs.

For years, we’ve been told that the biggest argument against bifurcation is that amateurs (when surveyed) believe there is an essential link between regular golfers and professional golfers. We want to believe we all occupy the same universe, and when we daydream at our local muni, we can pretend we are Jon Rahm trying to win a major. That bridge between the two worlds has long been deemed imperative.

But what happens if the opposite becomes true?

What if regular hacks are so turned off by the selfish nonsense of professional golf, that they start to realize they don’t need any of it to love and appreciate the game? It feels like that day may be here sooner than most pros realize. Some, I suspect, couldn't care less regardless. They will be set for life — so who cares?

Pity the next generation of professional golfers if the current infusion of oil money ever dries up. We might have to pass the collection plate around for them. There may not be enough fans to support the husk of what’s left.

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

770 - The Rollback

772 - Grant Thornton Recap, PGA Tour Investment News + Mike Whan & Martin Slumbers Interview

Jon Rahm, the Rollback and an Entire Reevaluation

770 - The Rollback

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772 - Grant Thornton Recap, PGA Tour Investment News + Mike Whan & Martin Slumbers Interview

Jon Rahm, the Rollback and an Entire Reevaluation