Fairway Rollin' - Emergency Reactions to Jon Rahm’s Surprise PGA Victory

Episode Date: August 31, 2020

House and Nathan share their instant reactions to Jon Rahm's playoff victory within a playoff over Dustin Johnson at the BMW Championship at Olympia Fields. Hosts: Joe House and Nathan Hubbard Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

my birdie buddies night and you have arrived here at the golf podcast on the ringer podcast network. This is Fairway Rowland. I am your starter Joe house. I'm joined by our PGA tour correspondent on the ground. Nathan Hubbard, we have one rule here on Fairway Rowland. That is this. When number one in the world and number two in the world get together and start trading heavyweight blows on the 8th. 18th hole at a venue that's playing like a U.S. Open, we got to podcast about it. Am I right,

Brother Nate? We are here. You are out of bed. Let's do it. I'm not yet quite yet ready for bed. I heard a drink. What's in the glass at the Hubbard household? Two things happen today. One is we had a pretty intense finish to the golf tournament that I'm still recovering from. And the other is, you know, homeless hubs was one of the bubble guys that they just didn't seem to talk about much. And homeless subs had a great season. This is the end of it. So we're toasting a great year for him. That's terrific.

But none better than DJ and ROM, who absolutely gave us the best we could have asked for today. The best we could have asked for. And I really feel like it has to start with the venue. So I'm just going to do a little bit of a nerdy thing. If I can, Nate, we were treated to this extraordinarily rare instance of a giant big league ballpark set up to play in a manner that required big boy golf. And boy, oh, boy, did the cream rise to the effing top. We got awesome play out of the best players in the world.

at this, this beautiful golf course. It's everything we could have hoped for. Look, coming in, there was a lot of snobbery poo-pooing about this golf course because Jim Furek had won and Open and Vijay had shot the best score, you know, in a major or close to it at that day, shot of 63 or something at this course. And so it had been abandoned and the U.S. Open had never come back to the Midwest. Well, this course, they set it up in the perfect way to cap what we've seen since the restart. Because what we've seen since the restart is, first of all, the best players all playing almost every week, which has been super exciting.

But secondly, the best players are really goddamn good. And so what that means is that we got birdies galore, even at a course like TPC Boston from last week, where they, everybody else played around the average score, but DJ being, you know, on Unreal, laid down a minus 30. So we came into this week to a course that some people thought, you know, we didn't really know until you and I did the pod. And we were getting the reports from the guys on the ground that this thing was going to be a beast.

But as you know, sometimes they'll overdo it with the setup of a course. And they'll make it just unfair or stupid in the way that it's set up. because a hole is dumb and no one can get their aura. You know, it's unfair in the way that the Greens receive the ball. What was amazing about this week is we didn't hear one complaint about the setup. Every single guy on the course said it's super hard, but it's super fair. And so I hope that this crew, whoever set this golf course up, let's get them to the U.S. Open from here on out for crying out loud. Well, Rory McElroy, who I think is a decent authority on these matters,

raved about the setup and even took a tiny bit of a shot at the USGA. He said they asked Rory if he thought that this would be a good U.S. Open venue. And he said, yeah, I think if they hired the Western Golf Association, which is the entity that handled the setup. This would be a wonderful test for a U.S. Open. And you know what? The numbers were there for it, right? Like we got guys barely in the red through the first three rounds.

And it was Hideki and DJ who were the most consistent and had the best, you know, scoring around the way. And then Rom went 66. 64 over the weekend with one bogey. And the only bogey that he made was as was the result of a penalty because he didn't put a ballmark down. He picked his ball up without putting a ballmark down. There are so many great stories.

I mean, just an all-time brain fart, which just gives you a sense of how intense it is to be out there in this situation trying to concentrate through all of it. First of all, can we just, can we just pour one out for pre-partum saucy Rory? Who, you know, now, everything broke in the last 24 hours that he's having a baby, which helps explain, you know, his lack of engagement in his day job over the last few weeks. And, I mean, who knows? Who knows why the timing of leaking it now. But this is the, you know, the most intense baby watch on the PGA tour since Phil at the U.S. Open all the way back in the day.

But look, it really brought out the best in the players. John Rom was 51st at the end of the day on Thursday. And he just absolutely cleaned up this weekend. And what's been great about these last couple of finishes, even the Jim Herman win in North Carolina is we've seen these guys step it up on the weekend and win. And it just means that you've got to stay glued to the tournament. over four days because anything can happen. One of the things we touched on in our preview pod last week with Pat Mayo was you and I and Pat

all sort of relishing what lay in front of us, which is, you know, it's a field of 70 getting compressed down to 30 and guys jockeying for an advantage to land in Atlanta. So we have two different kinds of pressure, all jam-packed. into this single event that we just enjoyed, which is guys playing for enormous privileges in the upcoming year. You make that top 30. You immediately have a passageway into the upcoming majors. You immediately are in the WGC event at HSBC. I mean, all kinds of accolades. You immediately get a check for no less than $400,000. If you just can make it to Atlanta, here's your check if you finish DFL dead effing last.

I mean, a lot of great stuff to crack that top 30. And then on top of that, the guys with a legit chance at winning this event, $15 million and then it runs on down the line from there, like a lot of money. So go ahead. Well, we're going to set up the Tour Championship later this week. But this was one of the most fun golf tournaments we've had in a long time. And that is saying a lot because this spring has been super fun.

But you said it. There was two prongs to the fork today. And one was the best players at the world all clustered around the leaderboard with a couple of fun young guns at the top, trying to figure out who was going to, A, win the tournament, but be also some important jockeying for position for next week to figure out who's going to have the stroke advantage heading into a $15 million tournament. But the second thing was this fun around the bubble. And we can talk about the coverage. I wish they'd given us more than just words about how cool the bubble was going to be because there were sneaky a lot of guys today who were able to and flirting with that line.

I mean, today there were no less than 10 people who could have broken. into the top 30. And what was so great about the course set up, as you mentioned, is that they made it a little bit easier today for guys who played incredibly well to go low. Ram shot six under. He won the tournament. But there are some guys who went low who were able to crack the top 30 because they had that opportunity today. And we got a whiff of the course being set up in a way to induce scoring kind of early. Scotty Sheffler went out. and shot 66. Joel Damon went out and shot 66, I think.

Yeah, he almost played his way in. He was right there. He was with two more birdies on the back. He was going to break all the way through. And they didn't even mention it on the pod or on the on the on the telecast. I saw a little bit of him on the golf channel portion in the like, you know, early afternoon. Because he was on a heater. I mean, he had eight birdies.

Yeah, he buried 13 to go six under for the day. And I think if he'd gotten two more from there, he was in. He had a bogey in there coming down the stretch. So it's just a small fade down the stretch. But, you know, shouts to the to the Den Mother. I mean, you know, he played. This was the thing, though, when we were, the point I was making about us talking about it last week. What we wanted to see was in nut crunching time.

Yes. the guys are going to step up to the plate. And we talked about the fact that they were, you thought the digital screens that they had available on the golf course was going to be showing the position of guys. We know that had to be true because McKenzie Hughes absolutely positively knew where he stood when he walked up to that putt on 18. He knew he had to get up and down to get inside.

I mean, we should have, we should have weighed his pants walking off the 18th green. And on top of that, why can't we get a camera on Billy Horshull, who is 30th? And he has, it's now out of his control. Why do we not have a camera on Cameron Champ, right? All these guys. You want bubble cam. I do.

And I think we're entitled to it because at the end of the day, like, they're going to pump up this FedEx Cup all year long where we're supposed to care about how many points the guy in, you know, Jackson, Mississippi gets for fourth place. But then when it's in the damn stretch, and Adam Long is sitting 31st and there's a five-footer that McKenzie Hughes has got a put, right? And if he makes it, McKenzie's in and Adam Long is out. If he misses it, Adam Long makes the tour championship. He gets into every major. Like, I want to see Adam Long, you know, six Miller lights in, like sort of drooling on his couch. We could, got it. We got to fix this problem because it actually is exciting. We got a whole bunch of

interesting scenario. Hell, if homeless hubs had shot four under today, he would have made it. If he'd shot three under, I think the math says he would have missed it by two points. So put a damn camera on him and watch his face, you know, through the whole thing. Yeah, we want the drama. Give us the drama. They have set this up to be full of drama. Let's capture it and go all in. Thank you, DJ and Rom for making it fun at the end, but the real fun of this tournament is that moment where guys are bouncing in out of the bubble like a bunch of ping pong balls in an NBA lottery. Yeah, and I will say one guy, and I don't mean to pick on him, but a guy that we identified as somebody we thought could play well and had a decent chance of cracking the bubble was another Adam, Adam Scott, who really struck

the ball decently. He put it above average for himself. He scrambled. pretty well, and then arrived on Sunday and puked. He hit every line of just six inches short. Six inches short. Every put on the front was six inches short, and then the bubble burst for him on the back. He was like, you know, even par plus one, and then he finished at plus six,

because it all sort of flew out, and he can go back to his surfboard in Australia. Or actually, you know what? He's going to play in the U.S. Open, so. And I don't mean to disparage Adam Scott. I'm just saying some guys handle the pressure well and some guys didn't. That's all I'm saying. He started inside the bubble. You know, Bubba Watson had a chance to get in there. Cantlay had a chance to get in there. Wolf had a chance. Like guys, we've come to know

through the course of this spring. And the thing that drives me nuts about this is PJs set this thing up to be an event that we're supposed to care about. Like through the spring, we've had all these opportunities to get to know these guys between, say, 20 and 50 on the list. And yes, Tiger was out of it. But today was the perfect day to have that, you know, that human interest story about, you know, Ben-on, teed up, or Adam Long so that we actually cared about it to just give us the quick little bit about these guys and elevate the profile of some of the people who aren't Dustin Johnson and John Rom, because then you come back to the action and you got these stars. But it's just an ability to expose a broader array of people if you're going to have 175 or 200 guys with a tour

card, then you've got an opportunity down to make us care about them more. And I just didn't feel like for all of the talk about the bubble and what this tournament was about, that they really gave us the opportunity to give a bunch of shit about anybody except that put by McKenzie Hughes on 18. Yeah, and that was, you know, that's a function. I guess if I was going to be generous about if I'm in a generous frame of mind, the narrative of the tournament did kind of take over, right? Because we had DJ out there validating his 30 under win from the previous week and coming into a U.S. open venue playing U.S. open golf and showing that he is,

you know, he don't care what it is, what you put in front of him. what the venue requires, he just has all the game in the world to meet the challenge. And I understand why that narrative was worth spending some time on. I also give credit, we got a ton of Joaquin Neiman today. Yeah. And that was well deserved because I see that kid, the 21-year-old from Chile, and I can't believe his body moves the way it does when he hits a golf ball. It's a perfect C, it's a perfect L.

I can't even, it hurts me to try and describe it. But boy, is ball striking. Talk about a guy who's going to be on my ticket for the U.S. Open at Wingfoot. Holy cow, does he have it. I have a confession to make. I did an emotional hedge against homeless hubs not getting into the top 30 this week by building a fan duel team out of, you know, a couple top guys, including DJ. but I picked some guys in front of homeless hubs so that if he didn't get in and they did,

at least I'd win some money. And so Joaquin absolutely delivered this week. And I think we now have to step back and look at this guy and go, my God, he's one of the youngest ever to play a tour championship. He's got one win under his belt. He's competed in a couple others. Hey, he's faded down the stretch. Well, he's 21.

So let's give him that break. But you're right. He is in that sort of. of preeminent ball striker category of guys who, if they can really keep the nerves together and put a bit better, you know, this is a guy who's got six, seven, eight, nine, ten wins ahead of him if he can really keep this up. Yeah, I mean, you know, and I don't want to overdo the pressure is just incredible seeing it out of a 21-year-old, you know, especially under these circumstances with, you know, the challenge that Olympia Field posed.

But, you know, we have to sing John Rom's phrases a little bit more, I think. I mean, we just have to, like the, a lot of guys have been saying this. The golf Twitter has been overjoyed with what we were, you know, it really has been an embarrassment of riches. But like, a lot of folks have made the point that John Rom has now won at the two by far most difficult venues post restart and two of the foremost difficult venues

that the guys have touched all season long. He's the combined score that he put together at Muirfield Village in the Memorial and what he did here at Olympia Fields. Those two scores together, I think he's like

seven or eight strokes ahead of the next closest player. Like, we've got to start singing some John Rom praise, Nate, dog. Well, he's shot six under today, and his last putt was 66 feet. So he's clearly made a deal with the devil. And that's all there is to it. Yeah, a couple weeks ago when he took over the number one ranking, we spent a few minutes talking about. First of all, he's the oldest and most mature looking 25-year-old of all time. But he is a guy on a mission. And the scariest part about John Rom was if he can mentally, because look, on the telecast, they sort of annoyingly always go, oh, he had all these, you know, mental issues and now he's got him figured out. Well, he doesn't have him figured out. Like, he's still a hothead with the rest of them, and that's what the sort of mics on him show, but he's got them under control enough. But more so

than that, he's figuring out how to win. The guy's got five wins, and it just makes him unbelievably dangerous when he, I mean, stepping up to 17 with a driver today was insane unless you're literally feeling yourself. And my man was. feeling himself and he absolutely piped that drive, stepped up to 18 and survived. And it just, we have, you said it just before, we have this embarrassment of riches right now. As golf fans, we have been used for 20 years almost to the Tiger Woods scene, which is that there's one guy and we just wait for that one guy to show. But now there are almost 10 guys who when they're in the mix can win and can do something that makes your jaw drop. And this is something we've never really

been accustomed to. And boy, I'm drinking tequila because I got to get used to it. Well, I do want to make sure we talked about Rory just a minute ago. And it really does make a lot more sense. I don't understand other than the basic sort of privacy element, and it's obviously his choice and his team's choice to share whatever information about his life he wants to share. But like, it's not that big deal to let folks know that you're expecting a child. And they're so close now to the baby arriving that, you know, we're like way past the time. It seems like if there were any issues associated with the potential birth that you would want to be sensitive

about it and keep that private. I, again, I don't begrudge him handling the information how he wanted to handle it, but like it makes so much more effing sense now. Yeah. That he had other stuff going on in his life and in his head than golf. But holy shit,

this golf course caught his attention and for, you know, two and a half, three days, it's like, oh, there's, there's Rory the major winner. There's Rory who loves these kind of venues, who loves a golf course that forces him to think and create shots from all kinds of different angles and so forth. And that guy absolutely can win the FedEx Cup unless his daughter's born and he goes off and does that or go off to

Wingfoot and win at Wingfoot. In a lot of ways, it's the encapsulation of the great golf debate of our time now, which is a course better for the game when you, you're You have a chance to shoot 30 under, or is it better when it's so challenging that guys really have to struggle? Because this week, we saw for sure that this course brought out, for the most part, the best players in the game. But then you have these guys like Bryson who are making lifestyle choices effectively to meet the level of competition

that the courses generally present you on tour. and Bryson has figured out that if I can hit it 400-ish yards, 370, that that's going to give me a great chance to win. Well, guess what? Not on this course. And he was not really competitive at the memorial and a meaningful. I mean, we're seeing the sort of great separation going forward. I think a lot of the courses and frankly the tournaments that have the opportunity

to choose what courses they play, like the BMW. are going to have to decide what do we want, what do we believe here is the best thing for the game. Because BMW, this year, last year, you know, we had a lot of birdies. This year, they decided at the end of this entire stretch, we're going to put forward a course that is going to push the hell out of these guys. And it made it really, really fun. Look, I enjoyed this much more than some of the U.S. opens that we've seen previously

because the guys had a chance at Bertie and they had a chance to make good shots as opposed to just trying to survive out there. Well, and especially this setup today, and I'll share, I know that bad beats, bad gambling beats, people give as much as shit about those stories as they do hearing about your fantasy football team.

But I just have to share this because number 18 today, especially, was, such a, it had, it took on a mystical, magical kind of status. And I don't know why it is. And I don't know how this comes to be. I don't know why the golf gods shown their light down the way that they did. But I have to tell you, Nathan Hubbard, that I, my own self had an experience with 18 today that preceded all of this drama. This was probably mid-afternoon. I played several matchups this week. Talk to me, goose. This is the way that I gambled. I played. nine matchups of the course of this. I played four tournament matchups and then another five,

you know, head-to-head matchups on round three and round four. And one of the matchups that I played as a tournament matchup was Matthew Wolfe over Paul Casey. And my thesis there was, you know, Paul Casey had one good showing since the restart at the PGA championship, but otherwise, nothing inside the top 20. And I liked Matthew Wolfe with a little bit of a track record at this venue. You know where this is going. I do. I just love the idea of you thinking about this for 45 minutes of your life. Go. Well, through the balance of the day, you know, there's no TV footage. There's no TV coverage of Matthew Woolf who's going because he's plus four. And Casey, for most of the day today, was plus six. I was watching Shotlink. I was

enjoying watching that head-to-head. Now, I had the TV on. I had a TV on. I had a phone open. I had a computer open. This is how we consume the golf. Of course. I'm watching Paul Casey come down the stretch because Matthew Wolfe gets in the house at plus four. Paul Casey is scuffling a little bit out there. He's at plus six. I watch him, you know, through, I'm not going to do the whole thing about what happened. I was 16 and 17. He hits the fairway on 18. He's two strokes behind Matthew Wolf when he addresses his ball. And the son of the. a bitch holes out on 18 and makes an eagle from the fairway and it's a push. I mean, I'm counting the, now look, that's not, maybe that's not a bed because it was a push and it wasn't

a gambling loss. But it was the only way I could like not win that bet was Paul Casey holding out from the, so I knew something was up with 18. That's all. That's all I'm saying. I've been thinking about what must have happened to betters when they saw DJ make a 43 footer, 44, four footer and then and then watch, you know, Rom drain his devil putt. So it was a hell of a day. Listen, there were some other stories that are worth touching on. We had the bi-monthly Tony Fienow backdoor top five. I don't think I saw more than two shots all week of Tony Fienow. And lo and behold, he's solo fifth. Top five, Tony. That's just it from now on. I texted you Friday and said, look, I know it's against the rules.

I'm putting a touch on Tony. I'm going to put down a little. I like the narrative of it. I like who he is. I love the idea of him winning this week. With everything that's going on in the world, he was pretty eloquent earlier in the week. He gave a really well-thought-out statement.

He has the length, and the birdies were sort of available if you could avoid the trouble. And I just went ahead and did it. And I said to you, I'm looking at him and DJ. DJ was available at 7 to 1 and Fee now was available at 15 to 1 when I did it and I said I'm just going to do it

and you know what? I watched the top 5 Tony couldn't make any putts on the front but he got rolling on the back. That's the way it goes with top 5 Tony. If I had told you that DJ was going to share the lead heading in to Sunday

and that he was going to shoot a 67 on this course I mean what are the odds you would have given me that, right, that he was not going to win. I mean, again, the same thing happened with the PGA. If you told me DJ was going to shoot a 68 on Sunday at the PGA with a 54-hole lead, I would have said he's going to win.

This is twice when it feels like somebody just shifted into a little bit of an extra gear and nipped him at the line. Psychologically, does he care? I don't know. No, no, no. He's got 15 million reasons to be a-okay with it. I mean, you just tip your hat. I think you have to.

But I'll tell you, coming into this week, it's going to be hard to bet against DJ. That's my view. Why would you bet against DJ? He's got a two-stroke lead. He's definitely incented. His game is firing on all cylinders. And I think, you know, to me, the interesting thing is, and I wish we could just fast forward to Wingfoot now. Like, I'm so amped for this entire style of play, the challenges that this kind of setup presents. I just, why can't we just go right to wing foot? Let's just really have it out right now. Let's just go have the, let's go back to back U.S. Open Weeks. Well, I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why, because the tournament that's coming up this weekend is worth five times as much money.

That's a great point. It's a great point. So we got to get through this week because DJ's got a two-stroke lead, but if there's one guy, and we'll talk about this later in the week, but there's one guy who you, I guess, can't feel awesome about carrying a lead, a Wednesday night, or now it's going to be a Thursday night lead into a four-day tournament, it appears to be DJ because even if he plays great, it feels like somebody behind him absent top five Tony is going to put their foot on the gas and pass him at the line.

So anything's possible. It's going to be a great week. It's going to be a great week. Let's just say, we're back on Wednesday, everybody. I did I we pulled this together so quickly. I didn't even have a chance to get the equipment. I zoomed this one. We had to zoom this one up, Nate.

But we're back on Wednesday, Birdie buddies. We're going to give the full breakdown of the FedEx Cup, the race to 15Ms. A shitload of cash. Come on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. An F ton of cash is on the line. We'll have all the breakdown from statistical thinking. thinking from the gambling

of the DFS and who we like to win. We'll talk to all of you on Wednesday. Until then, my birdie buddies, let's hit them straight out there.