Fore Play - Dark Visor Down

Episode Date: August 3, 2023

Dan is on vacation in Africa. Riggs, Frankie and Trent start the show discussing Tiger Woods joining the PGA TOUR Policy Board, Justin Thomas’ struggles and if he should be picked for the U.S. Ryder Cup Team, a hidden backyard golf course on Long Island, and more. Lt. Col. Dan Rooney and Kyle Rudolph join the show (1:10:30) to outline a unique Ryder Cup experience through Alltroo and Folds of Honor. They also discuss being a Fighter Jet Pilot, having a “dark visor down” mentality, comparing nerves on the golf course, catching Tom Brady’s final regular season touchdown pass, and much more.You can find every episode of this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Prime Members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. For more, visit barstool.link/foreplaypod

Hey, 4Play listeners, you can find us every Tuesday and Thursday on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or YouTube. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Oh, Rick! What's up, my brother? I got a buddy who struggles with that shot. A lot. His name's Frankie Borrelli. So the guys actually gave him a nickname of Butterknives because he's always knitized it across the green.

Broads 100. Now you've got to break 90. We appreciate what you guys do for golf. It's been really cool. Thank you. You're making it cool. I was like, hey, Phil, you only fucking $29.99. And he grabs 100.

He's like, yeah, I won $90,000 a lease yesterday. He goes, take 100 and go fuck yourself. What? What are you that different? It's ain't a hobby. Foreplay presented by Barstool Sports. Dan Rappaport is on his honeymoon. So you probably won't hear from Dan for a few weeks.

I think he's in Africa. Is that right? Yeah. That's right. Africa. For like two weeks. Excited to hear about that. Africa is a cool place.

Interesting place. animals, right? You do like the African safari. That's kind of the move when you go out there, giraffes and shit. I think you're going to get a lot of videos of him on a Jeep looking at cheetahs. That's what I think of when I think of like an African safari. Maybe a lion, like a pride of lions sleeping and looking at each other and stuff. Tearing apart a gazelle. Probably be like the worst like Americanized thing I'll ever say, but I'll get my fix from like Disney. You know, I don't need to go all the way out of there to see the cheetah or

the giraffe. It's too much for me. I have no interest in it as well. I would rather go to... I'll see that shit for like four hours and then I'll go sit on my couch and like then just be able to do everything else aside from look at the animals. Right. I would prefer to go to like Maui. Amazing. Roan just went there and they looked incredible. I got a lot of enjoyment watching their Instagram stories, him and his wife.

I just don't know if I could do it. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe if you're there, it's like you're awe inspired by the beauty of nature. I'm sure you are. I'm sure it's great. I'm sure there's so many people that go. There's got to be a reason, but I would rather go to like a really nice hotel in Hawaii. But to each their own, it is what it is. I really want to go to Europe, like through Greece and Italy and all the historic places as a history guy. I think going through and seeing all those places and walking kind of like we do in golf,

like walking the streets and through the cathedrals that these icons of history walked through, that I would be into. And I imagine you'd get swept up once you're there with all the giraffes and elephants. I'd like to see like a fucking wild elephant. I'm sure that'd be really cool. But it's almost like, yeah, I don't know that I would choose that over other possible vacations is essentially what we're trying to get to. But Dan did.

Dan did. Dan's over there. He's in Africa right now. He's probably looking at a fucking cheetah or a hyena or a zebra. I'd like to see a zebra. But you could see him at the zoo. St. Louis Zoo is a great zoo.

I've seen a bunch of these things at the fucking zoo. Speaking of zoo, you guys see the fake bear at the Chinese zoo? Do you guys see this thing? Dude, I was watching that video this morning going back and forth on whether it's a fake bear or not. Basically, Frankie, the story is there's a video of a bear standing up, like looking at people and people are convinced that there's a human being inside the bear and that the zoo is lying to the people.

The zoo, I think, doubled down and said it's definitely a bear. I think I'm on the side of bear because all right, it looks. I'm going to look. Dude, it looks like a human when it's standing up, but every other action that it takes, when it sits down, it looks like a bear to me. Dude, Frankie, this is, it's some special kind of bear that's like. It's the fakes bear in the world. But watch it sit down.

Just a person in a bear suit at the zoo. And the zoo, like Trent said, the zoo was getting all kinds of flack for this just being a person in a bear suit, like that's Halloween. And they doubled down hard. It's one of my favorite stories. What do you think, Frankie? I mean, the face makes it extremely real. But the body, man. It does make you wonder how many zoos over the years have put human beings inside of a bear suit and been like,

this is one of the rarest bears in the world. And it's just some guy working a nine to five sweating his ass off inside of a bear costume. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I've never seen that kind of bear that's just perfectly human size. like most bears, Codiac bears or black bears are massive. They're like a trillion times bigger than that. Whereas that's just,

if that thing is real, that is just a perfect human size, especially when it's standing on its hind legs, bear that I've never seen like that. Even the neck is weird. The hind leg, being on its hind legs is what raised a few eyebrows for sure. Because it just looks like it's a standing human being.

Yeah, like when you're, when a guy is, like when you're in your underwear, standing in front of the refrigerator at 3 a.m. That's what that guy looked like. So I'm still on the side of the bear, but I really hope that there's a human being

inside of that bear house. It's almost so, yeah, it was almost offensive how not like a real bear it looked at first when I saw it, that it made me think maybe it's got wrinkles on its ass from the costume. Anyways, so Dan's on his honeymoon.

So safe travels to him. Hope they're having a great time. Excited to hear about all the encounters with animals that he'll see from Jeep. You nailed that one. Chevrolet. Chevy is working to make charging simple. We love Chevy. Obviously, they are our favorite motor company in the world.

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and gives you real-time data about charging station availability, which I feel like might be the only thing that people get nervous about when getting an electric vehicle is when am I going to charge it? How long is it going to take? where am I going to do it? How am I going to do it? And this just sets you all up. Yeah, they've been they've been making electric vehicles for like 10 years. This isn't something they jumped into 18 months ago or two years ago even. It's, it's been going on for 10 years. So Chevy is ready and they've got the best line of vehicles, the best line of EV vehicles available.

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is at Chevy.com slash electric. Anyways, we got a lot to get to quite a bit of news actually right now in the golf world. Tiger Woods, he was all over yesterday. I woke up.

He was trending. You always get a little bit nervous when Tiger Woods is trending. No doubt about it at this point. We've been through enough of it. He's trending for a good reason. He was announced as the newest edition to the PGA Tour's policy board.

which I imagine anyone who did any research whatsoever figured out that there's now, this is the first time that the PGA Tour board has been numbers-wise skewed more towards the players than towards the independence as they call them, which is essentially, you know, business guys. There's like a private equity guy, whomever, that are sort of these independent voices that act on behalf of the PGA tour that make up the board. And then there are, there were five players on the, that board, Tiger Woods becomes the six.

Now it's six to five in favor of the players over the independence, which means that the players will have more of a say. It's essentially their answer to all of the hoopla and all the negative pushback from everybody, including the players, and especially the players, after the PGA tour announced the deal with the PIF, the framework deal,

and everybody came out, was like, we had no fucking clue. Roy McRoy went mute. Ever since then, basically, on the issue, he's been like, I just don't want to talk about it. I'm over it. And so this was kind of their answer to that, transparency. I kind of said last night when I hopped on the people that love me over at CNBC, the great folks of CNBC, that anytime you get Tiger Woods on your side in the world of golf, that's just a win for you. So yeah, that's kind of my take on the whole thing.

It does feel a little bit like from the PGA tour to the players like, we mean it this time. Like we mean it, we're going to give you a chance to have a voice in the room. And I saw a Dan tweet about it. And I agree with what he said. The big thing happened. The big thing that the players would have loved to have been involved. in the merger with Live or PIF or however you want to phrase it. That already happened.

So, yeah, it's good for the players now. They're going to be involved in more decisions going forward. But the one that is going to affect the landscape of golf the most over the next 20 to 30 years was already decided without them. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's absolutely. It's like what could what big decision could happen in the next? who God knows how long that would be bigger than that.

I guess the thing is that, yeah, I mean, you could sit here and argue that, well, now they could technically, you know, vote down the deal and how it comes out. But at this point, those fucking players are not voting down or vetoing this deal. At this point, once the stigma wears off, which it already has of like the stigma being that they're upset, that they kind of like stood with the good guys. And they were told by the PGA tour that they're on the moral high ground. and then whammy, they just got completely undercut from all that. Once that wears off, the PJ tour players are not going to veto this thing unless it's outrageously skewed against them, which it won't be.

But because at this point, now they're just going to be on the PGA tour except they're going to have a billion plus dollars injected into their profession. So for them, it's an absolute no-brainer. It's like, yeah, of course we're not going to vote anything down. we've already gotten over the fact that we publicly were embarrassed because we thought we were on the right side, the PGA tour, flip-flop or whatever, and now we're just going to make a ton more money. They're not going to veto that. They're not going to turn that down. I set up a whole little pergola or a gazebo, whatever you want to call it, in my backyard. And I put a couch in there, and we just got a fan installed. It's a beautiful little outdoor setting. We got a TV installed last night. The first thing that I watched on the TV was Riggs on CNBC. The first character that showed up on my outdoor TV was rigged. Because you had tweeted it and I literally hooked up the cable box and like everything was working perfectly. And I kind of went on Twitter as the TV was booting. And I was like, I said to Hannah, I was like, oh, I think Riggs is on TV.

So before a channel even turned on, I went to the thing and I said into the room, I said, CNBC, bang, it popped up. And you were the first person they had you right on the screen. It was bizarre. That is unbelievable. Hope I looked all right. Yeah. Hope I looked all right.

I was, uh, you christened it. It was not. It was, it was nice doing the hit. I like because they usually put you up there with a couple other folks, you know, and it's like, whatever, you got to be ready for war. You don't know what their like stance is going to be whatever. This one, it was like North Korea and TV. It was just me.

It was just me and this. She was like a, uh, a stand in for the show. So I just got to rant about how great Tiger Woods is basically for like three or four minutes on CNBC with nobody countering me, which was, which was really nice. But, but, yeah, I, you know, I mean, look, Tiger Woods is going to be, I think it's very exciting for all of us that Tiger is in any way interested in doing something like this.

Like he would be so easy for him. True. I've got a billion dollars. I don't like being in the spotlight. My giant yacht is literally named privacy. And instead, he's like, I'm going to, you know, he's going to be on meetings and Zooms. We've heard Kisner talk about it because, you know, he's been on not, not this level of

the board, but right underneath it, the pack. you know he's been on these like we're in especially during COVID and all the bullshit zoom after Zoom nine hours of calls and emails and BS that like I get that it's not the same as being you know a full-time executive recovery but that's a pretty big commitment that he's making for an indefinite period of time where he's going to be invested in shaping the future the p.jutor so I like that from our guy Mr. Woods that he's kind of locked in and and yeah it's it's big news that Tiger got that. I saw Kevin Streelman said it's not a pleasant surprise. It's a great surprise. I saw Justin Thomas in his interview about it yesterday being like this is if there's one human being I can imagine us wanting on there. It's Tiger Woods. I laughed at Phil Nicholson who he tweeted. This is great to see players having equal representation on the board. Tiger getting more involved in accountability across the board. Awesome news. You had to take everything Phil says with a great insult at this point. It just kind of makes me laugh. Everything Phil says, he says with

of huge shit eating grin on his face. And it's been that way since the merger was announced. Everything he says is a little bit like, yeah, this is great. This is really good. I'm really happy that this is happening. I like, I like when Phil is out there and like he's just, he's happy.

He's happy with what's going on. Phil, for all the things that he's gone through, deserves a little bit of like a victory lap, just like to himself, right? He's not going to get a public victory lap, but to himself,

he can get his jabs in. everything that he aspired for and wanted to have happen and fought for is happening. I mean, players have way more access on the board and in decisions and more money is being presented to players. Phil has really, really done a great job when you think about it from all the things that he got shit for. Obviously, the book comes out. Everyone knows everything about Phil's personal life, is gambling issues, and he's an asshole, and he wants, and he's greedy, and he's, and he never stops his gambling debts and those are all true. But in the end, Phil got what he wanted,

even though he doesn't get to reap any of those benefits. He's sitting there somewhere in front of that. What does he have? He has that Rolex in his house. Remember that one shot? He did that one video where he had that huge clock in his house, just the biggest clock anyone's ever had. He's just sitting in front of it.

The whole wall is a digital clock. It's the craziest thing you've ever seen. But yeah, he's happy right now. Phil's just, he's taking his victory last. as he should i think yeah he no he is and it's i i like to that phil has done the uh he's like constantly teased stuff about like how it's going to come out that he was right i feel like for like a year and a half he's always been like i like just wait and see and then like as stuff does kind of come out and then he puts these absolutely spot on these like shit eating grin type tweets that

he replies with i i love it it it gets a good chuckle out of me uh and yeah i mean i can't wait for a year or whenever it is that like when Phil and everybody are just back on the PGA tour and they're all playing because Phil I mean he put out whatever it was a week or two ago when they were talking about a path back to the PGA tour and he was like nobody on live wants to go back to the PGA tour like that's just clearly not true like they're all going to be playing golf together and I think it's one of the main missions of Jay Monahan is to just squash and get rid of live they actually said that during the Senate hearings of like the only like the only thing they've even agreed on in the framework is like oh and by the way like we're getting really really.

rid of live golf is pretty much what monahan put in there uh so yeah so this whole thing too i think is a um i've heard amen lynch kind of talking about this yesterday was a kind of a job saving a little bit of a cushion for a few months at least of j manahan because it was put explicitly in tiger woods's statement that he has the confidence of j monahan so clearly that was like all right we'll give you this poor position please say something nice about jay so that the whole world doesn't hate him as much uh so i kind of laughed too that that was included in there So good for Jay seems to be surviving for now. And then something that kind of got swept under the rug, I feel like, was I think it was last week that the PJA tour announced that they're rejecting the golf ball rollback.

They're just not, they're just not going to accept it, which, you know, on that front, I think that's pretty much where we kind of ended up on the whole thing talking with, especially talking with Taylor Made about it and realizing that the onus for this whole thing would fall in the golf manufacturers to like, golf equipment manufacturers to create this a new ball that would only be used like in elite level competitions, which is a very vague term of like what's elite, like what technically is an elite level competition, whatever. Anyways, PJA tour basically said, nope, we're rejecting that. They said that we're not going to accept or, you know, we're not going to support the modified local rule as proposed. So it'll be very interesting to see how that shakes down because if the USGA goes through with it there's a chance that you would have two tournaments a year because it'd probably be the usGA and r and a i think are going to agree on it you'd have maybe two tournaments a year where people

have to use a different golf ball which would be fucking wild so uh so yeah it is funny that we're going to get back to a time where whether or not they're going to roll back the golf ball is the biggest bit of news and it is a big bit of news i it is important like the pjah tour is talking about the usgs talking about it the rna is talking about it but there was a time a lot of a lot of it during when this podcast was going on where it was like, are they going to roll back the golf ball or not? For the last two years, it's been like,

is the entire world of golf going to split in half and who is going to go where? But yeah, the rollback thing, again, I didn't dive deep into it totally, but it just seems crazy to roll back the golf ball. That has always seemed insane to me. And it will be crazy if,

yeah, if the USGA and the RNA agree to it and two tournaments a year, we have a golf ball that just isn't the same as the rest of the year. That will be honestly outrageous. Yeah. The rollback is, rollback's really interesting because there's a part of me that does want to see the difference it makes as a viewer. I would like to watch a tournament and see how much of a difference it would make. I think that'd be interesting.

If it was just like the rollback open and we were just like, all right, how much different is this than every other championship that we watch, right? If they did it in a fucking, they did in the U.S. Open, would it just be absolute chaos? Would guys not be able to be like reaching it over these bunkers and carrying all the shit that they present for a US Open type golf course it'd be it'd be complete carnage right that's what we're expecting but maybe it wouldn't be maybe these guys are just persevere and just play the same golf that we're expecting of them and it just wouldn't be that big of a difference i'd be interested to see a full field full

tournament high stakes hard golf course what does that ball do yeah yeah i would love to see i mean it's a great point like i would like to see them present the you us open exactly as they presented it except you have to use this golf ball like don't don't roll back the golf course like knowing that you're rolling back the golf ball be like let's just do it first let's go to pinehurst number two next year and let's do the roll back u.s open but just present the course exactly they were going to present it and are the scores going to go from the winner is eight under to like 12 over because of this new golf ball what's the what's the difference going to be I would love to see that.

I would have loved to see it like at Wingfoot. Like if next year were a Wingfoot-type U.S. Open where Bryson was able to shoot, you know, six under or whatever the hell he shot when, you know, we were doing all of the behind the greens and we were hyping it up. How hard that golf course is. People have won the U.S. Open at Wingfoot before at five over, seven over par. If you went and just played that exact U.S. Open with this golf ball to see, you know, where they're going to be at.

So I don't know that they can really roll it best. at this point based on all the feedback and everything that that's come out and the response that's come out, I guess their best move is probably just to like stop it at this point, right? Like just stop the advancement of the golf ball or the equipment or the drivers or whatever it might be. But yeah, it might be wild if they have two tournaments where there's just a different golf ball.

It would be unbelievable. Yeah. Kyle Rudolph. We got Kyle Rudolph on this show, right? You guys are going to chat with our boy, big country here, Sue. We've got Big Country and I believe Colonel Rooney, the founder of the Folds of Honor Foundation. He'll be coming on the show as well with Kyle Rudolph. Yeah, Rudy is one of our close friends here.

Obviously, I had an amazing career in the NFL. I don't know if he's announced like what his future plans are actually. Maybe we can get to talk about that on the podcast. But they're doing this amazing sweepstakes with All True. That's A-L-L-T-R-O-O and we've talked about it. We're going to be doing a big push here so we can get. somebody and a guest to roam for the Rider Cup. It's like an amazing all expenses paid. They're paying for the hotel. They're paying for the flight. They're paying for the grounds passes to the

rider cup, a swag bag, the whole deal. It's a amazing sweepstakes with all true. $10 minimum donation. We'll get into all that with Kyle Rudolph, why he's doing it, why we're pushing it, what folds of honor is but that's later on in the show love big country what a nice guy what an insanely nice guy is obsessed with golf too