The Serious and the Absurd

I can’t pinpoint exactly when it was that I fell in love with golf.

My parents played the game often, but I was indifferent about it growing up in Missoula, Montana. As a teenager, I would join them for nine holes a couple times a year, but I was far more interested in driving the cart the minute the marshal was out of sight. I didn’t have the patience for the game, and didn’t understand why the stuffy culture of the sport was so essential to its essence. My mom — a bona fide stick who just this year won her 12th club championship at age 75 — kept telling me I needed to find a life sport, and that my knees and back would one day betray me and turn my pick-up basketball and flag football obsessions into a cruel joke. But I wouldn’t listen. In an act of privileged high school rebellion, I chose tennis and spent countless weekend hours wailing on topspin forehands and pretending I was Andre Agassi.

I do, however, remember the moment I fell in love with golf writing.

I was a freshman in college, and someone (I wish I could remember who it was, considering the impact it had on my life) passed along a copy of the story Rick Reilly wrote in Sports Illustrated about the day Jack Nicklaus won the 1986 Masters. Reilly was 28 years old when he wrote it, and he’d just replaced Dan Jenkins as the magazine’s golf writer. The moment felt so big that seasoned sportswriters were hyperventilating. But he taught me a lesson that stuck with me for a quarter century: Whenever the moment feels huge, start small. The story begins with the image of the Masters scoreboard operator furiously pumping his fist, signaling like a silent town crier that Nicklaus had just won his sixth green jacket.

That story also taught me another lesson: Golf commentary is never more fun than when it's a mixture of the serious and the absurd. When I finally fell in love with the game, it was because I embraced the idea that it's only as stuffy as you choose to make it.

Today is my first day at Fried Egg Golf, where I’ll serve as the Director of Content. I’m elated to help this company tell stories that make you think and make you laugh, and while that starts with the Ryder Cup next week, it’s just the beginning. We’ve already got big plans we’re putting into motion. When Andy and Brendan first started talking to me about working together, they emphasized how much writing still matters to them, and how it’s the one aspect of golf media that’s timeless.

I’ve admired FEG and its talented staff for many years, but if I had to trace my journey here back to its origin, it would probably begin with Andy and Brendan asking me to come on the Shotgun Start in 2022 and, in the middle of the PGA Championship at Southern Hills, compare professional golfers to various kinds of cats.

I was working for ESPN at the time, and I leaned into the joke so much, I even snuck a line into my Saturday night column about Justin Thomas and Rory McIlroy, suggesting they were like the “once-vicious lions who’d forgotten how to hunt.” It backfired the next day, rather infamously, when Thomas came back and won the tournament. I was reminded of a paragraph in Reilly’s 1986 story, one where Jack revealed that he had delighted in sticking it to a writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution who dismissed his chances of winning before the tournament. History doesn’t always repeat itself, but as Mark Twain wrote, it often rhymes. Thomas and I shared a laugh about it months later.

If this is the first time you’re reading something I’ve written, I hope you’ll join me for this new chapter. I’m 47 years old, I have a wife and three daughters (including one who taught me new ways to love the game), and no interest in fighting. I’m an extremely mediocre golfer. Occasionally, I do dumb impressions when I’m behind a microphone. Mostly, I try to find the right words on a keyboard that help describe things I love about the sport.

Sometimes, it’s as serious as a search for that historic fist pump. Sometimes, it’s as silly as a housecat clawing at the back door.

If you’re familiar with any of my work from a previous stop, I’m grateful. I’ve learned a lot from every place I’ve been. If you’re extremely familiar with my stuff, you probably know that Jason Isbell is one of my favorite storytellers. One lyric of his that’s always resonated with me the most is: I’m lucky to have the work.

I’m lucky I get to work with so many talented, smart, and funny people at Fried Egg Golf. Everyone here makes talking about golf and watching golf more fun, and I’m thrilled to be part of what comes next.