The Time of Their Lives

Hello fellow sickos,

If you reveled in a week off from high level golf a week after Scottie trounced the rest of the best players in the world at the Tour Championship, then I am sorry to report that you missed what may have been (and I think was) the golf event of the year (and one of the best of the last several years).

Name drops today: Michael Foster, Josh Hill, Big Stew, Chesson Hadley, Kihei Akina and Lane Kiffin.

TODAY’S SPONSOR

Today’s newsletter is presented by our friends at OGIO and their new Renegade Go bag. This rugged new duffel is ready for work, travel, and all the Walker Cup gear you can possibly fit in it.

(Note to outfitters for the Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup: That’s how it’s supposed to look).

Two of my current go-tos are the Alpha Venture backpack and the Renegade Vault carry on. Cannot wait to get this Go bag in the rota — as they say — with or without that Walker Cup gear (but preferably with).

Alright, now on to the news.

One Thing I Loved

Earlier this week I saw one of my favorite tweets of the entire year. It was a commentary on a clip of those ridiculous influencers from the U.S. Open (the other one), and here’s what it said.

Part of the beauty of social media — in the rare instances when it is beautiful — is the fact that you’re always one or two sentences away from writing something devastatingly efficient and concise in ways that keep this writer up at night wishing he had thought of such a thing. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does — as it did in the tweet above — it is amazing to witness.

And these sentences above are of course correct. Not all private equity is necessarily bad just as not all influencers are bad. But so often in both instances, the bloodsucking that is incentivized reduces the original business or product to a shadow of its former self. Easy to see. Gross to experience.

Which obviously brings us to Lahinch and the 51st Walker Cup, which took place over the weekend. After a back and forth Day 1, the U.S. hunted early on Sunday morning, winning all four foursomes matches with none even reaching the 17th tee.

GB&I’s hopes teetered as the U.S. led 9.5-6.5 going to the afternoon singles session.

But GB&I won the first four singles matches that went out — including an 8 and 7 mauling by friend of the pod, Jack Whaley that got the momentum going — and they re-took the lead. The U.S. countered with two huge Ws on the back end of the 10 matches.

Suddenly, with less than an hour to go, GB&I’s path to its first victory since 2015 was narrower than Akshay Bhatia after a sauna session.

It involved a series of events so preposterous that even the European broadcasters on the call were lamenting what might have been — with phrases like, “The door is beginning to close” — after such a strong start to Sunday afternoon’s session.

And then … the door was flung wide open.

Here’s how it went.

Kihei Akina missed this putt, which would have delivered a full point to the U.S. and ultimately gotten them to the 13 points needed to retain.

GB&I made all three of these putts. If they miss any of the three, they lose.

Stew Hagestad chose to go driver off the deck on the final hole. If he halves the hole (which ultimately would have taken birdie), the U.S. wins. Instead, he flared it into trouble and scrambled around for par.

Eliot Baker had to get up and down from here on 18 to win his match against Stew, which he did.

Miles Russell — whose short game is Tour-ready — needed to two putt from here to halve his match (at worst) and clinch the Cup.

In conjunction, if he makes either of these putts, the U.S. wins.

Instead he lost his last two holes.

And finally, Josh Hill had to get up and down from here for birdie at the last to win his match and the Walker Cup, which he did.

An unreal series of events that neither team will ever forget.

And that is kind of the point of it all for me. That nobody from either team will ever forget what happened on this day at that course with the most important team event most of them will ever play on the line. We don’t get to watch much golf throughout the year that makes us — the viewer — nervous. This was that golf, and it was wonderful.

Oh yes, and the influencers I mentioned off the top. You should know … I am no commercialized prude. I do not long for the days when amateur athletes played for love of school and the game itself. I do not believe that the billion-dollar athletics industrial complex should preclude the folks who star in those events from making money.

What I do think is that there are unintended consequences to capitalism, and one of those is a society in which we have sometimes agreed that a thing isn’t worth doing unless it can be done for more money than the time it was done before.

I have been reading a pastor and writer recently named Michael Foster. He recently wrote a piece about just enjoying things for the sake of enjoying them. And how everything in the world we are currently living in says this is a nonstarter. That unless your are commercializing the thing you are enjoying, it is not worth doing.

Again, I am not blind to the fact that the Walker Cup uniforms are sponsored and the event is on Golf Channel and money exchanges hands. To be clear, the Walker Cup is not a pick up game.

But as far as modern sporting events go, the union of “just enjoying things” and “world class competition” that a Walker Cup offers is as close to innocence as we’re going to get in sport in 2026 and beyond.

A quick confession: I love Lane Kiffin, mostly because I don’t have to be friends with him. I love the character and the circus. It’s pure entertainment.

And I watched like everyone else on Saturday night.

But that — the thing he participates in — is a machine. It is not done for enjoyment, and we don’t even pretend like it is anymore. It is a job for everyone involved. A fun one if you’re good at it. But commercialized to the gills and then commercialized some more.

On the other hand, the fact that tickets are only sold to 8,000 people daily so that scenes like this one can unfold at the Walker Cup is as quaint as it is praiseworthy.

Twitter tweet

And there is an irony for these kids.

These ones. Right here.

These kids.

Most of the people in this image will not play in another Walker Cup, and very few will ever play in a Ryder Cup. Not all of them will be stars or even moderately successful pros. For some of them — perhaps most of them — this will be the apex of their golfing lives.

Right now they probably believe that what lies ahead will be bigger, better and more glorious. But even when that is true, it is still a lie.

Because yes, someone from that image right there may win the Masters one day. May touch a smaller, golder trophy in Wisconsin or Rome or New York at one point. But most of them will never again enter an arena that is (mostly) free of commercialization and do something just because it is the most fun thing you could imaginably do: Play golf with your friends as a team and try to beat a bunch of other world class golfers at one of the greatest courses in the world. The most beautiful experience possible.

Why do you think current pros talk so glowingly about this time in their golf lives? Why do you think the Walker Cup has been dubbed “golf’s finest contest”?

Yes, the Presidents Cup and Ryder Cup are facsimiles of this, but even those have become very different than what this — the Walker Cup — is.

If influencers and private equity have taught us anything, it is the opposite of the gift I received from watching this event. The influencer and private equity model — which is a derivative of culture in general — is that nothing is worth doing if the highest price tag you can squeeze out of that thing is not attached to it.

The Walker Cup refutes that of course. Because the Walker Cup is a reminder that the very best things in life — the ones all the clout chasers are actually desperate for — those things do cost you a lot. They cost you dedication to a craft, commitment to a cause, vulnerability to a group and the risk of having your heart broken as the U.S. team experienced on Sunday.

But there’s a funny thing about all of those endeavors, all of which we would laud and say are aspirational for us and for our kids and within our sports.

And that funny thing is that at the end of the day, all of them are completely free and that you are allowed to do them simply because they are a great and good delight.

Thank you for reading our golf newsletter that is sometimes about golf but always made by humans. We love writing and illustrating it, and we’re grateful that you would spend your limited time and attention on something we’ve built.