There was no PGA tourney for the ‘Master’ to Mush this week so no summary in the Degen Den which meant no moolah to lose (sigh of relief). However! We did have the Walker cup, pitting the top amateurs from the U.S. against those from Great Britain and Ireland with an historic and improbable ending. It’s near polar opposite result from yesteryear uncannily appears in the Golf History spot. What a week for no PGA action! Golf goes on no matter who swings dem wrenches. Let’s get into it.
PGA Recap
No PGA Tour event this week, so we headed across the pond for something a little different. This weekend Lahinch Golf Club in Ireland hosted the Walker Cup, which is essentially the Ryder Cup for people who still have amateur status and a day job waiting for them Monday. The best unpaid golfers from the U.S. compete against a combined Great Britain & Ireland squad, biennially, for a trophy that pays exactly zero dollars and matters an enormous amount regardless.
This year, GB&I pulled off the largest comeback in the event's 51-match history. The Americans swept Sunday morning's foursomes to build a three-point lead, needing just 3½ more points out of ten singles matches to keep the Cup safely in hand. Instead, the home side won seven of those ten points, and it came down to the very last putt of the very last match! 22-year-old Josh Hill, who wasn't even a lock for the team until earlier this summer, drained a birdie on 18 to beat Tyler Watts and seal it, 13½ to 12½.
It's GB&I's first Walker Cup win since 2015, their first ever on Irish soil, and it snapped a five-match U.S. winning streak. Somewhere, eight thousand fans at Lahinch are still hoarse from screaming.
Worm of the Week
This week's trophy is a group effort, which feels appropriate for a team event.
Niall Sheils-Donegan, 21 years old, playing in front of 8,000 screaming fans at Lahinch, missed a short putt on the 9th hole of Saturday's foursomes. It was the kind of putt that gets conceded ninety-nine times out of a hundred in a friendly Saturday round. So he did what every single one of us has done at some point in our golfing lives. He assumed the gimme, scooped the ball up, and moved on with his day.
One small problem. Nobody had actually said the words. Team USA's Ryder Cowan and Josiah Gilbert hadn't conceded it, and under the actual rules, picking up before it's given costs you the hole outright. Technically, by the book, they were right. Many online were not gentle about their disapproval for not conceding the putt, but they were correct. Donegan lost the hole on the spot.
To his enormous credit, he didn't make excuses about any of it. He looked reporters dead in the eye afterward and said, quote, “I hit the 6-footer and missed it like an idiot. I had a foot back, and I just dragged it away like I’m in a Sunday bounce game.” Respect for the honesty, Niall. We've all been there. Fortunately for us we weren't doing it in front of 8,000 people and a television audience. But the kid’s got moxie. He and his partner only lost that one hole in the entire match.
So congratulations to Donegan for the most relatable mistake in golf. You won the match and the trophy and gave the interwebs something to talk about until the next Walker Cup. Winston has no comment. He’s wriggling around in spilled Jameson on the 18th and seems content to say no words, for once.
Chili Dip Golf Tip
Play Smart - (Course Management for Hackers)
Here's an uncomfortable truth about your golf game: most of your bad scores aren't coming from bad swings. Ok, a lot of them are. But sometimes, they're coming from bad decisions made before you ever pulled the club back.
Every hacker has stood over a ball in the trees with a sliver of daylight between two branches, thought "I can thread that," and then spent the next four minutes trying to calm his blood pressure after dodging a ricochet that nearly made him unable to have children. That's not a swing problem. That's a course management problem, and it's costing you way more strokes than your slice ever will.
Play to your bogey, not your birdie. You are not going to birdie every hole. You're barely going to par a quarter of them, and that's fine. That's golf for 90% of us. Instead of aiming at every flag like you're Scottie Scheffler, aim at the fat part of the green, take your two-putt (3 unless you use practice putting drills - see tip in this issue) and move on. A boring par (or a smart bogey) beats a heroic double every single time.
The 98% rule for trouble shots. If a shot requires everything to go exactly right to succeed, meaning the miracle punch-out, the flop shot over water to a tight pin, the 3-wood through a two-foot gap in the trees, then ask yourself what happens on the 98 out of 100 version of that swing, the one where you catch it just a little heavy or a little thin. If the answer is "disaster," take the safe shot instead. Professionals hit these shots because they practice them for hours a day. You do not. That's not an insult, it's just simple math.
Take your medicine. When you're in trouble, your only job is to get back in play, not to make it look heroic. A chip out sideways to the fairway feels unsatisfying in the moment, but it turns a potential blow-up hole into a manageable bogey. Ego is the most expensive club in your bag. I know, I paid a lot of strokes for mine over the years. And I still go for the crazy shots. Because they are fun. Which is what golf is meant to be. This is admittedly a ‘take my advice, I’m not using it’ situation. But if you want to drop your score, it’s the smart play that will get you there.
Know your miss. Everybody has one, be it a slice, a hook, a chunk, whatever your particular flavor of disaster happens to be. Aim away from the trouble on the side your miss tends to go. If you slice, aim down the left side of the fairway (for right handers) and let your bad shot end up in the short grass instead of the water hazard on the right.
Club up on approach shots more often than you think. Most hackers come up short on greens because they club for their best-ever shot with that club, not their average one. Take one more club than you think you need and make a smoother swing. You'll hit it closer more often than not.
Play the course that's actually in front of you, not the course in your head where you never miss. Your scorecard will thank you. The group behind you might too when you’re not in the woods as much as Smokey the Bear anymore.
Today in Golf History
We're bending the calendar a few days again this week, but it's too perfect to pass up given what just happened at Lahinch.
On September 3, 1936, the United States Walker Cup team did something that had never happened before and hasn’t since. They shut out Great Britain & Ireland completely, 9-0, at Pine Valley Golf Club. Not a close win. Not a comeback. A total, humiliating, nothing-left-on-the-table annihilation. It remains the most lopsided result in the tournament's 90-year history.
Ninety years is a loooong time to wait for payback, but GB&I finally got it this week with their epic comeback, as seen above in the Recap section. Somewhere, the ghosts of the 1936 Pine Valley shutout are watching this unfold with a mixture of pride and horror, depending on which side the banshees were on.
Golf has a long memory, even when the people playing it don't. What goes around, eventually, on a long enough timeline, comes back around, sometimes on a rain-soaked links course in Ireland with 8,000 fans losing their minds on the 18th green. (I am betting there was a wee bit ‘o Jameson nipped down to warm some bellies at Lahinch).
The Degen Den
The Lord works in mysterious ways on occasion, although this week held no mystery as to how money stayed in Mush Master’s pocket, he simply had no chance to lose it. However! The golf gods present another opportunity this upcoming weekend at the Amgen Irish Open. It’s part of the DP World Tour (formerly the European Tour) and DraftKings has contests to enter. This being the Degen Den, who are we to deny ourselves the opportunity to squander some cash money? Perhaps last week off will right the sinking ship that the Master has been sailing? Time will tell the tale. Here we go for the $5 contest for a total prize purse of $12,000 smackeroos:
Rory cause it just seems like his thing, Pat Reed cause it also seems like his thing, LaCroix has made some cuts and I’m currently chatting with a cute French girl on X that’s into crypto so let’s count him in (I take this seriously, clearly, but hey, it’s a no system system), I’m diggin’ on Harrington, and gimme Marcus Armitage whose made 18/21 cuts. This leaves us with $8300 in salary and the Belgian Thomas Detry who has been warming up nicely fits that bill to the last dollar.
It always looks like a can’t miss on the Monday before the tournament, amiright?
Golf Joke of the Week
A golfer is playing terribly, he’s 20 over par through nine holes. Standing over a short putt, his caddie coughs and he misses it. He turns and snaps, "You've got to be the worst caddie in the world." The caddie replies, "I doubt it. That would be too much of a coincidence."
Again, thank you so much for consuming my golf dribble. If you’d like to take a gander at some actually meaningful content (kind of), check out the latest blog post here for the story of maybe the most brutal collapse in golf history. See you next week for the results of the Amgen Irish Open. Thanks again for reading and if you subscribed, well, then all those things your playing partners said about you just aren’t true. And thank you.