Loving golf in 2024 is about finding where the money isn’t

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Golfpocalypse is a weekly collection of words about (mostly) professional golf with very little in the way of a point, and the Surgeon General says it will make you a worse person. Reach out to The Golfpocalypse with your questions or comments on absolutely anything at [email protected].I consider it one of life’s little miracles that I love golf more than ever before at this exact moment, because good God, literally everyone involved in the professional game seems hellbent on making us want to jump headfirst into a pile of snakes. And the poison pill every time? Money. Normally, I’m great with money. I support the earning of it. I would like more of it myself. But you know what money should never be? The main character in professional golf. From the horrorshow that is LIV to the Ryder Cup ticket prices to every story emerging from the upper echelons of the sport, things are rotten. Perhaps fatally rotten? Hard to say, but—call me crazy—it can’t be a good sign that everything keeps getting worse.In this stifling atmosphere, fans of the game have absolutely no obligation to any entity. Want to get mad on Twitter and throw abuse at your least favorite governing body? Go nuts! Want to embody the dog in the fire meme and pretend everything is hunky-dory? Sure! Want to check out entirely? Well … yeah, of course you do. That even might be the most logical move. It’s certainly the easiest.The problem is that, if you’re like me, you have a connection with golf that’s bone deep and too meaningful to give up. At best, you will stare at it and say, “I wish I knew how to quit you.” (Also if you’re like me, you have a job writing about it you would prefer not to lose … this might not be as common.) Dumping golf, while maybe attractive in the abstract, isn’t realistic for many of us.So what do we do? The first and most obvious answer is to embrace the recreational game—the actual playing of golf, by us. I wrote recently about a quasi-spiritual experience I had at a course called Royal New Kent outside Richmond, and I won’t bore you again with the details, but I played alone and felt super connected to the land, to the sport, and even in some ways to myself. Of course, doing that requires building a great big wall in your brain between the playing of golf and the consumption of golf as a professional product. To get the most of these moments, you cannot be thinking about Pat Perez’s big dumb smile or Anthony Kim’s Twitter account. I think that’s pretty easy for most people, but it’s also a reality that some of what we see and experience on TV is going to seep into our everyday lives. That’s why the mental wall between recreation and professional is so important—bifurcate or perish.However, this isn’t enough. Part of what’s so great about playing golf is coming home afterward and watching the pros play, and appreciating what they do even more because you realize how stupidly hard this game can be. Plus, as much as people love to shit all over golf broadcasts, at their best they manage to be compelling in a kind of serene way, carrying you along on a lazy current and then peaking emotionally at a few key moments of unbearable tension. Professional golf is great! And the fact that it’s been diluted is what makes all the blundering of the past two years so sad.But I think I know the answer—you’ve got to seek out those spaces where the money is least apparent. Now, you might rightfully say that such a space doesn’t exist in professional sports, and you would technically be correct. Even the most minor PGA Tour event comes with a megaton of money, and even those events have been juiced up in the war against LIV in order to hold the fort. But the truth is, when it comes to crunch time, whether it’s the Zozo Championship or the Masters, actually winning for its own sake—beating every other player in the field and becoming a champion—matters so much, and it matters in ways that go beyond the amount of dollars you earn for doing so. For all the ridiculous hype you have to wade through, there is still Scottie Scheffler crying when he wins a gold medal for free.Find that moment. Find the moment where a player is stuck behind a tree and hits a ridiculous hook that ends up on the green. Find the acts of genius, because these people truly are geniuses. Find the obscure player who pulls off some act of minor heroism just to keep his dream alive; I’m not saying you have to go full Monday Morning Q, but those stories are abundant and worth appreciating, and unlike Masters Sunday, you have to seek them out. Find the people and players who aren’t fundamentally embarrassing or heinous. They do exist. I think. (They do.) Watch college golf. Go to a tournament of any kind and follow a great player around for nine holes.

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In other words, find where the money isn’t an overwhelming black cloud, because it’s abundantly clear that money has ruined so much in this game already and is poised to ruin more. The same way that you have to build a wall in your mind between recreation and the pro game, you need to build little walls within the pro game. It’s definitely an annoying bit of mental acrobatics, but the alternative of jumping ship and pretending to like car racing or pickleball is worse. It’s still possible to love this sport at the professional level, but it requires averting your eyes from the corrosive spectacle of dollars. Do that, and you may survive the ugliest era in the game’s history and still have some affection left if and when we ever get to the other side.FIVE TOUR THOUGHTS, SHRINERS CHILDREN’S OPEN EDITION1. I was in Ireland on vacation last week, hence no Golfpocalypse, but it also meant I watched very little of the Shriners. My apologies to J.T. Poston, who has one of the best nicknames in sport, “The Postman.” It’s pretty sweet when you can just get a great nickname from your actual name. He never had to earn “The Postman.” He did nothing for it. He basically inherited it. I should have named my own children Lightning & Thunder, or something. The problem with “The Postman” is that there’s a great burn baked in, which Scottie Pippen used against Karl Malone in the ’97 NBA Finals (Malone was called “The Mailman,” but same difference) on a Sunday game. Pippen went up to him at the foul line in a crucial moment and whispered, “the Mailman doesn’t deliver on Sundays,” and Malone gagged it. Clearly, this line would be even more devastating for a golfer, since Sundays are extremely meaningful in a way they aren’t in other sports. So good for Poston for winning his third event; nobody can use that line on him now … at least until the next time he’s in contention and blows it, at which point they’ll use it again happily, because it’s truly a great line.2. It has to be annoying for the other players when someone like Poston, who was already in the top 50 at the end of the regular season, wins a fall event … right? The fall is supposed to be for people like Matt McCarty, winner of the previous week’s Black Desert Championship, to go from 232nd to 95th in the standings and change his life. It’s kind of like that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer beats up all the kids in a karate class. (Note: It’s nothing like that.)3. I’m not going to pretend I know a ton about Matti Schmid (26 years old, German, on the “Hojgaard Continental European Coolness Scale” he looks cooler than Nicolai but not as cool as Rasmus), but his finishes in the fall so far are T-16, 5, and T-3. He’s not at the Zozo this week, but still, he’s got bigtime Legend of the Fall potential in 2025 if he can close with a flurry. Somewhere, Brendon Todd is staring at him and saying, “he reminds me of a young me.”4. Michael Kim has successfully made me pay attention to him because I like the cut of his jib on Twitter, and his T-5 at the Shriners was one of the most out-of-the-blue results of the year. His previous eight results looked like this: MC, MC, T-24, WD, MC, MC, MC. Also, he shot a 62 on Sunday after shattering a glass jar in his hotel room by accident, and it seems possible that he’s now going to shatter a glass jar every time he plays, which I love because that’s exactly the kind of shit I would do as a professional golfer until I had a mental breakdown.5. Do you have a player who is mostly obscure and unremarkable, but who you follow every week for some personal reason? My stepdad does this with Nick Watney because Watney was nice to him one time at the Travelers, and my guy is David Skinns because I liked him when I wrote a story about him at the Players earlier this year. Every time I open a leaderboard now, I’m checking for Skinns, and it adds approximately 2.3% more joy to following golf. I highly recommend finding a rando of your own.THE ABSOLUTE IRONCLAD LOCKS OF THE WEEKGolfpocalypse is not a gambling advice service, and you should never heed anything written here. Better picks are here.Career Record: 4-38. GAHHHH Padraig Harrington almost got me another win at the SAS! This is not going well … 4-38 is a bad record. Who am I, Duke football for the four years I was at school?The PGA Tour is at the Zozo Championship in Japan, and this presents a huge opportunity for me for two reasons. First, it’s a limited field of just 78 golfers. Second, because of the time difference, they’ve already played their first round, giving me a big advantage in picking a winner. Will I still blow it? Absolutely. Nevertheless, I’m rolling with Justin Thomas, currently T-7, because I think he’s going to come out on a tear next year in an effort to make the Ryder Cup team, and also because it seems like a big or biggish name always comes through at the Zozo. Past champs are Morikawa, Bradley, Matsuyama, Cantlay, and Woods. Pretty good. It’s the major of the fall. (Feel free to use this branding, PGA Tour.)At the Genesis Championship in South Korea on the DP World Tour, I also get a head start because of the time difference. So you better believe I’m going with Jonas Blixt, who I am always mildly surprised to see is still playing, but who I absolutely loved when I met him in 2014 while researching my first book. He unfortunately didn’t do anything notable on Tour that year, so I ended up having to cut his section of the book, but he’s got a great sense of humor. He’s ranked 778th in the world right now, but he’s -5 in Korea, and only Golfpocalypse can will him to a great victory.The LPGA is also in Asia this week, at the Maybank Championship in Kuala Lumpur, and I’m going with Hae-ran Ryu because she’s on a heater this fall and I’m getting serious Scheffler vibes from her. Got her first win last year, won Rookie of the Year, and then in September took down Jin-Young Ko in a playoff. The Scheffler vibes are so strong that if she doesn’t win this week, I expect her to get arrested.The extremely seasoned vets are at the Simmons Bank Championship this week for a playoff event, the field is extremely limited, and I’m just going to ride with Padraig again because I love having my heart broken.Finally, at LIV Golf Great Pacific Garbage Patch, I’m going with Hudson Swafford.THE “DUMB TAKE I KIND OF BELIEVE”It has taken me a month to say it, but I’m letting loose: Mike Weir was worse as Presidents Cup captain than Tom Watson was as a U.S. Ryder Cup captain. My brain says that this can’t be true, but my heart is forcing my fingers to type.THE READER STORY OF THE WEEKI forgot to put out a prompt on Twitter this week—oops—so I’m going with an old email that didn’t make the first cut but that still makes me laugh/seethe. This is from Chris on the topic of worst golf partner ever:Happened just last week. I was a single and stuck behind three foursomes. On 11th tee, the twosome behind me caught up. They hit in with me and one guy was a car salesman. He lived up to the occupation within 30 seconds, constantly talking. After 11 green, he ran to his house to get a 6-pack. Ok, fine, no big deal, I don’t drink on the course anyway but thanks for offering. On 13, he and I hit it in roughly the same vicinity but he gets there before I do and proceeds to hit his second shot. I immediately know he’s hit my ball, and I go 30 yards back to find his ball and yell to him (he has now driven 100 yards ahead) that his ball was right here. He yells back twice that he already hit his shot. So I drop where he hit my ball and hit my second shot. After hitting my third, I roll up to where his shot was and confirm it’s my original tee ball and I drop his that I picked up. He proceeds to get salty with me, saying, “it doesn’t matter, dude, go ahead and take it.” Did not apologize at all and made it seem like I did something wrong. He finished the hole and drove ahead to the next tee before the other twi of us finished. We get to the next tee and he’s still jabbering on about nonsense, but did throw in the desire that Hurricane Beryl hit Venezuela as punishment for “them sending their prisoners to the US.” That was about the time I decided to ignore him the rest of the way.On second thought, maybe we shouldn’t be embracing the recreational game.Previously on Golfpocalypse:I believed in the magic of Tiger Woods when I was a kid, but I’m a cynic nowIf you can enjoy playing golf alone, you have achieved NirvanaI took 12 stitches to the head for golf before I even loved itAn annual ‘Friends Ryder Cup’ trip is the greatest thing in golfMarshals at public golf courses need to get way meanerI, and I alone, have the genius tweak to fix the Tour ChampionshipIt cannot be fun to play golf when you’re egregiously badConfession: I break clubs when I’m madPlaying golf in bad weather makes me feel aliveCaring what other people think of your golf game is annoying to other peopleSympathize with Rory, because choking sucks

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com