Fore Play - MEET THE PGA TOUR’S SECRET EQUIPMENT MANAGERS

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

For decades, the Hulka family has quietly run a supply, storage, and shipping business that serves PGA TOUR players. Today, father-and-son duo Steve and Ben Hulka join us to tell their fascinating, mostly unknown story. They take us inside how the business got started, the logistics of life on the road, what it’s like working with and catering to tour players, and some of their craziest stories from their business on wheels.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. Chevy is called The Heartbeat of America for a reason. They got something for everyone. And boy, oh, boy, do our guests today really just exhibit the very best of American entrepreneurship? They very much utilize Chevy, which is actually discussed and brought up. But Kiz mentioned it last week, and it took a lot of the golf. world by surprise of what's going on behind the scenes with this treor that's taken all the

PGA tour players, personal belongings, golf clubs, mattresses stop to stop across this great country. And we have Steve and Ben, Polka, who are the owners run. Now Ben now runs Polka, Inc. And we get the entire backstory. It's a fantastic, fantastic show. And it really It just reminds you how great the opportunity is. If you're a hustler, if you got a good creative idea here in the United States of America, which is the heartbeat of America, Chevy, all that comes together on this very show, gentlemen. Yeah, an amazing car brand, an amazing American company that we talk to today. It's just a real American show with a couple Americans on here, really great.

And yeah, he does reference that he has to stop at a Chevy dealership to get a new Chevy. It's amazing that someone that has to drive from east to west, north to south of this great country relies on Chevrolet to get the PGA Tours equipment and clubs from stop to stop. That's a great little shout-up for our company here, Chevy. Thanks for being a proud sponsor. We're very proud for you to be a sponsor and partner of our show. It's been a long time, man. We've been partnered with Chevy for a long time.

That's a big brand for the boys to be associated with. Chevrolet, Chevy.com. They got a great lineup of SUVs and a great lineup in general, the traverse, the Equinox, the tracks, all kinds of great options. We do Chevy Suburban quite a bit. Make sure you check out that entire lineup. It's all loaded with tech that keeps everything in sync. Check out the lineup at Chevy.com.

Once again, go check them out. Heartbeat of America, Chevy.com. I got a buddy who struggles with that shot. A lot of his name's Frankie Burrelli. So the guys actually gave him a nickname of Butter Knives because he always knites it across the green. broke 100 Now you've got to break 90

We appreciate what you guys do We've been really cool Thank you You're making it cool We appreciate it I was like hey Phil You only fucking 2999 And he grabs 100

He's like yeah I won 90,000 at these yesterday He goes Take 100 and you go fuck yourself What? What are you guys It ain't a hobby Foreplay

Presented by Barstool Sports We are officially entering The Best Month of the Year I believe Which is October where it's beautiful, pretty much everywhere in the entire country, fall golf, football season, crisp in the air,

kind of the beginning of the holiday season. We have, however, also entered the part of the golf season where, you know, for example, in my research for today's show, the top story on Golf Digest homepage was titled, The Passion of Jason Kelsey, is what the title of that was. So, you know, there's just not a ton in the golf world. that's going to be cooking right now. We have the trailer boys coming on this show very shortly,

which I think is going to be an incredible interview. Kevin Kisner enlightened the golf world on the last episode, or two episodes ago, I guess. Very end of the show, I think we ended up chopping that up and putting it into an earlier part of the show where you said something pretty cavalier, pretty nonchalantly just about Louis Oostahusen, who's Tazen, some people call him,

having his own mattress. And we were like, how does he get that mattress around? You're like, oh, yeah, those guys take it. They take everybody's stuff. And boy, did that open up a can of worms for people. And I think that in Ryan Richon's research, there's been one or two articles written about it, but nobody really knows about it. So we're going to get these fellows on pretty soon here, kids.

And, you know, I think that's going to take over most of the show, if I'm honest. Yeah, I'm sure they have plenty of stories, and we'll have plenty of questions. It'll be an epic show. So looking forward to having them on. The son has taken over to Steve's business. Steve started it, caddied, and this came up with this idea why he was caddying. And now the son is doing the exact same. And he's at the Utah Championship this week, cadding and trailer boys.

So I made that name up, but Frankie can add to it with Trailer Park Boys. I will tell you, after our clip went a little viral, multiple tournament directors on the PJJ tour text me like stories that have, because the tournaments have to help these guys. There's, you know, thousands of Piggas of luggage and they roll right in. And so a lot of the tournament staffs help. And one of them texts me and said, oh, yeah. I know about the mattress. One year we had to help move the mattress upstairs to the master bedroom and put it on the bed.

And then when Louis's wife got there, she hated the house and so they moved. So we had to go get the mattress and move it out of the house to another house. Man, God, I can't even imagine how many stories there must be. And yeah, I mean, logistics suck. Everybody knows that. Like logistics just suck. Moving is the least like thing that anybody does. And they're just moving everybody's life essentially every Sunday until Monday morning.

What a, you know, I mean, it's genius, but what an interesting life they must live. So I am, I'm excited to have them on. A couple other things to throw into the show. First, you know, we've got kids, your festival is this weekend. I believe today is like a building out day. I want to remind the folks through your very own words of, you know, how they can. could attend what the plan is. Yeah, the plan is, uh, we're going, man.

Uh, Friday night. We have first band gates open at five, five, 15 to 11 on Friday night with the infamous string dusters being the headline on Friday night. And then Saturday is just an all out best, man. Noon, open the gates, first band 1230 and it goes to 11 p.m. Uh, we'll have vendors, food trucks, VIP tents, uh, bounce houses, all kinds of things. So today starts the build out with the tents tomorrow, the stage, and then we hope everybody comes.

This rain or shine forecast looks a little rainy late on Saturday, but we will have plenty of fun no matter what. And bring it out, man. Aiken, South Carolina, let's go. This is for the kids in the CSRA, and we raise a bunch of money to give back to the community. So it's all not-for-profit. And so your tickets are tax-deductible.

So it's almost a free concert if you have in-com. come let's go where do they get tickets southern strings fest dot com or on the 80,000 post i've put up with the links because i've learned that rigs taught me but way back in the day whenever he used to make me try to link something on my instagram but i never did it whenever we've clipped these things when i was not working with you boys he goes you're the worst link guy i've ever met so now i've learned how to link yeah really bad link guy at the beginning but you've gotten there i think you know I've gotten better because I just, you know, repost y'all's post. Right.

We put the link in. You just hit the repost button. They've made that really easy, really easy. I'm sure it's going to be an incredible time. We have been to, you know, one of the OG formats of the Kisner Foundation event. And it was a hell of a time that we had. I think we were on like Chase Rice's bus at the end of that night or something like that. I'm trying to remember who we were.

Oh, sure. there is another sad story out there. It was probably Charles Kelly was there, and he just got diagnosed with blood cancer. I don't know if y'all saw that on his Instagram. So shout out to my boy, Charles Kelly, who was the OG Kisner Foundation musician, him and Darius Rucker started this entire thing 10 years ago.

So all the prayers up to him. I talked to him last night. He's in a good spirit, a good spot. Stese still feels pretty good. And so thanks, that's going to be great. but everybody keep him in your prayers. He's an awesome guy from Augusta, Georgia, and lead singer of Lady Annabellum.

Awesome, dude. Yeah, thoughts with him. I didn't realize he was the OG, but, yeah, I mean, how old. It's like a decade you guys been doing this, kids? Yeah, man, it's pretty crazy. We started with just a concert and fun at Sage Valley Golf Club, and then we turned that into golf and concert. Then we turned it into tour players in concert,

and then it felt like I was putting on a wedding every year while trying to compete on tour. So I just said, why don't we just start paying these musicians to come and see if we can't make money that way? And now that's turned into a bluegrass festival in the middle of town. I love it. I love it. A couple other quick things that we're going to throw the trailer boys in here. PMT match. So I believe our boy, Trent, you know, there's a lot cooking in Chicago last week,

President's Cup hole in one event, filming, merchandise, a lot happening. But, boy, knocked out some videos. And, you know, PMT guys are the biggest thing in sports media. and they're all over this golf scene. You know, I know Big Cat, he's been like really getting into golf. His favorite thing he said is off-camera golf, which is something that I've been,

I've been preaching for a long time, but Hank with Lefty Lockwood, all of them, I believe we had quite the cast of characters on the latest YouTube video. We did. We did a 3V3 scramble. First of all, I want to say,

I refucked up my back this morning. So if you see me, dude, if you see me squirming, it's because I'm just internally screaming my head off. Back problems. really just a big downer as anybody out there who has back problems knows. So that's something that I'm battling today. But yeah, the PMT match.

Fusion surgery, man. You might have to give it a shot. I would let them start digging into me right now the way I feel. I don't even need an anesthetic. Just put it, just start cutting me open and fix whatever's going on. But, um, dude,

it's I like, yeah, no, it was like you can't even like bend over to like tie your shoes when your back hurts. You're like, I'm, I'm in a bad spot.

But the PMT. match is great. 3 v3 scramble. We had the PMT boys out there. Dana Beers was out there. Jersey Jerry was out there. Sunset Valley, great golf course. We had done a breaking 100 out there with Jerry a year or two ago. So Roan's ant works out there,

hooks it up every time. We had a great time. It's a great match. It's an incredible cast of characters. We did nine holes on our channel, and then eventually nine holes will come out on the part of my take channel. But yeah, those guys are getting into golf, and we had a really good time that day. Love it. YouTube,

before play make sure you go subscribe you know we're at 650 or something thousand subscribers on youtube which is an unbelievable number from what we started with which is the number zero um so to get there's great we have a good amount cooking even on the on the four play podcast uh channel as well so those are the two ways you can subscribe um go check that out last thing i got uh administratively is just stored up arsenal sports dot com baby our fall golf merchandise and then one thing we always love we just did the new drop that like Roon hoodie is one of my favorite pieces we've ever, we've ever done. It just looks good on everybody.

I saw, I saw you guys arrive to Medina and, uh, and put out a little video where at the beginning you hadn't changed into the Medina gear yet. You were both rocking the maroon hoodie. And I thought, damn, they both look good. It's almost like, it's like sharp, but slimming. And it's like, it's incredible with that thing. We've, that thing's awesome. We've been calling it the Ron Burgundy.

You wear that Ron Burgundy. It's so good. And you show up and people are like, where did you get that thing? And we tell them store. Store. Dot barstalsports.com. Go, everybody out there, if you love that hoodie, go get the Ron Burgundy on the Barstall store. You're going to love it.

And people are going to be like, wow, I love that color. That Adidas collab. It's just got athletic fit to it, but it's super comfortable. It's one of their new hoodies. It's an amazing, amazing fit. I absolutely love it. All the Adidas apparel that we collared with this year is really good. Obviously, the butter spun stuff is outrageous.

So make sure you go check it all out. And I got a little clip hanger for them on the since we're on the merch deal is I, we, us have got something dropping in the next couple weeks. So you'll be ready for that. That's actually got greenlit. We're ready to rock on that thing. Oh, yeah. I think it's coming out in like 10 days, two weeks.

I'm going to start promoing it. Hell yeah. And it's badass. I love it. Come on now. So store it at parcelsports.com. You go to the collections part, Fordplay or golf. And, you know, we like to highlight the handful or 10 or so new.

that we've got. We've got more coming in a couple weeks. But you also scroll through there, man. There's just pages of really good gear that we've had on the site for a long time. So check all that out. All right. Without further ado, I think Ryan Richardson, let's greenlight it. Let's get these trailer boys in here for, you know, one of the more enlightening stories that we've had. What's up, fellas?

Oh, good morning. Good morning. I love it. These guys white socks jersey on after a big win last night. Let's go. Indeed. Sporting the colors. Good guys wear black.

You know that. That is a pot. That's a pod sending jersey, by the way. Yeah. Wow. As a St. Louis guy who hates the Cubs, I got no issue with the white socks. Oh, you're right in our league, Briggs, buddy. Ain't no cubs in this family.

Right, Ben? Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. We were raised right. We were raised right. I got to ask you, you know, like last week, kids kind of dropped this bomb on us of what you guys do. I think, you know, Steve, what you, it sounds like, started? What kind of reaction have you guys gotten over the last week of people reaching out to you being like, hey, somebody, somebody sort of like unveiled your business here?

It was pretty shocking for me because I woke up for a guy's golf trip in Washington State Thursday morning. like why why do I have like 50 new followers and they all seem to be like golf bros what's what's happening right now I thought it's a bunch of bots and then and then I just like hit the road for gamble sands and like I kept getting followers and then I finally saw the real I'm like oh that's awesome that's so cool that's unreal yeah it's it's uh it's truly something like nobody knew about which at this point I mean we've done eight or 900 podcasts everybody has a golf podcast. Everybody's interviewed everybody. Everybody's done YouTube videos. And then for us to kind of be like, wait, there's this whole operation going on on tour

that nobody knows about. For 25 years. For 25 years. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you guys want to know how it started. I'd love to hear the story about the inception of Hulk Inc. I was going home right after 9-11 for my aunt's funeral. and I was flying through the Baltimore airport, and I left my vehicle with a caddy buddy. We were out east at the end of that year, and 9-11 happened. And at the same time, my aunt passed away. So I was going to head home for just a couple of days with a backpack of clothes to pay homage to my aunt. And I get to the airport, and there's a line for two hours to get through security.

And as I go through this line, and I'm standing. there and I'm standing there, there's two army personnel up against the wall with M16s across their chest. And I'm going, whoa, is this what airports have become one week after, you know, one of the greatest tragedies our country's ever faced? And I got to thinking while I was standing there, if I've just got a backpack and it's taken two hours, what's going to happen to the players and their wives and their kids with clubs and suitcases and strollers? It's going to create a havoc in every week, week in and week out, because as Ben knows, we drove everywhere as caddies, and he still does.

Here it is 25 years later with the business. But I got home and I thought about this long and hard and called Henry Hughes, who at the time was the head of all the tournament directors on the PGA tour. And I said, Mr. Hughes, I've got this idea. I think I'm going to start a truck and trailer business. And he said, oh, really? That sounds like a great idea. I said, well, you know, I think it's going to be much needed on tour.

And he asked me right away, he goes, well, Steve, do you have a plan? And he said, I heard from another caddy about the same idea. And I'd like to see a plan of what you want to do with this. I said, yes, sir, I do. I stayed up all night and I typed eight pages on my computer, and I sent it to Henry FedEx the next day. And he got it a day later, and he called me, and he said, Steve, I want you to cover all your bases.

You are good to go because there was no way I was going to work on the tour's turf without permission from the head man. And so the trailer and truck and trailer business, as we called it, Hulkink. Actually, we started Ben, wasn't at Hope? Hope that they use it. That's right. The acronym was Hulkas Overland Players Express because we hope that this was going to fly. and players were going to sign up.

Well, I went to the, right after 9-11 and got this thing launched at the end of 2001, I needed players. And at the time, I was working for a guy from Florida who went to the University of Florida, Pat Bates, we used to call him Fabio, because he had the longest air on tour. and he and and j j henry and all the guys that i knew from the tourist fellowship uh but pat and i ran the idea of past pat and and uh jonathan bird and ben crane and some of the other guys and i got my original six to sign up and give me fifteen hundred dollars seed money to buy a truck and a trailer. Now that didn't cover a whole lot, but as I got it out on tour in 2002, the first year,

I was at the Bob Hope for the first week, and Corey Pavin pulls me aside. And he goes, hey, Hulk, I hear you got this business. You're going to haul our stuff for us. I said, yeah, Corey, it's going to be on me to get the stuff to the next tournament. And you can fly hands free through the airports. He goes, how much do you want? And I said, 1500. He wrote the check right there in the parking lot. And that's how things got rolling. And then, then when he was in high school, he came out in the summers and he started being my right-hand man. And, you know, I mean, that's why he can, you know, bench breasts, what, 300, Ben? You're lifting all that stuff in the trailer at an early age. I can squat quite a bit now. Yeah. These bins are heavy.

Yes, they are. Well, thanks to your mother getting those bins going. We got, All these. You tell them about the bin service, Ben. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, Kisner kind of touched on it. But my mom randomly found a container store and has these massive black bins that are on wheels. And it just kind of clicked that like, hey, this could be a portable locker. Guys can put whatever they want in it.

Like, some are golf bins, some are family bins. And some guys have two, one for them, one for their wives. And Gary Woodland is three. I think one is devoted to his personal shit. and it's just pots, pans, whatever the chef needs. But yeah, they can fit whatever you want, and it is amazing that we just tetriss them in every Sunday. I thought you're going to tell us for his hair product.

Yeah, it could be. I don't dig through them. Yeah, there's probably like a privacy, right? You have like a privacy policy that nobody's going to comb through anything? It's like a gentleman's agreement. I'm not going to dig through it at all. I mean, sometimes they lift a lid and I see it, like, I'm pretty sure Justin Thomas's is all filled a really nice golf shoes because he wears those nice foot joys.

He's got a messy outfit. Yeah, remember Ricky Fowler's bin had a lock on it? Yeah, yeah, that was smart. We would take Ricky's bin into the original container store bin into the locker room where all these went. And guys were going in there and stealing Ricky's hats. So he eventually put a lock on that was genius. Eventually, he got a bin that could lock. So his hats were so popular.

Yeah. Those bright orange ones. I don't have an orange one for Sunday. What am I going to do? I don't think that ever happened. But yeah. Another service they added throughout the years was you could pay more and they would take it to your hotel room or your house for you. The schmooze option.

Yeah. Shmooze option. I still call it that. So you show up and Ben's already taking your bin and golf clubs, whatever you have on the trailer. And it's sitting at your house. you've rented or your hotel room. So you literally, and then when you check out, he comes back and gets it for you. You don't even have to do.

I used to roll that sucker down eight miles of hotel floors, yelling at my wife the whole time about how heavy it was. I'm like, why don't we just pay them more if they do this? I had 10 guys this year that paid for the drop off pickup service. But yeah, it's a lot of coordinating addresses on Sunday night, Monday morning. So how big is the team? Is it just you two and who's all on the team? So it's pretty much.

I'm retired, Trent. I'm retired. I had to quit my job with the Seahawks to get him to retire. Otherwise, I don't know if he ever would have. Interesting. But yeah, my buddy Josh, he lives in Phoenix. I live in Gilbert, Arizona. And he works from home, but he comes out on the weekends if the drive's like nine,

10 hours or longer. And then we'll just alternate. we got an air mattress in the back seat but like conforms to it and we both sleep like babies while while the other one's driving yeah so what is your window right i mean kids was kind of talking about a little bit but from when the tournament wraps to when you you know you're people expect their stuff to be at the next stop how quick is that window it depends on the drive like if i'm going if i'm going waste management to riviera that's what a six six and a half hour drive so i'll be there at midnight. Sometimes I can get to a hotel and take a four or five hour nap and then get there

right before everybody starts showing up and start unloading. So other times I'm rolling into town at 10 a.m. Just because the drive is so long. And we ramp door down, start bringing stuff in. And guys, guys will come up to the trailer sometimes like, hey, is my, or my club's in there already. I'm like, yes, or they're lined up outside and they can just come wheel their stuff in while they pull up to the course. it's got to be priority one is the clubs oh yeah oh yeah line up right away like there's some guys that are like hey i'm in the money pro am can i can i can i get these right now like yes yes yes let's go now we've all come across our own travel issues in our lives we obviously all travel the country and you end up with delays or you end up with traffic or or just things happen on the road like

what is that stress and anxiety level of taking the pGA tour players clubs and all their belongings and going from stop to stop. Have you found yourself in situations where you're like, I can't get it there in time? Well, Dad, you've got that nice little horror story going to Belrieve decades ago. It was during the time that Ben's mother, my wife, Mary, was putting in her 10 years on the road with us. And yes, we left the Boston tournament. And by the time we got to the western side of Massachusetts, we had a flat top.

tire on the trailer, not the truck. We had to, we had a flat tire on the trailer. And so we fixed that, fortunately kept a spare inside the trailer and the type of jack you needed to get it up in air and I got it done and we got back on the road. And now we're coming into western Pennsylvania into Ohio, we lost an entire wheel assembly on the trailer. And we're supposed to be in Belrieve that Monday morning. You know, leaving Boston Sunday night, we planned on being in St. Louis with all the stuff. Sometime Monday mid-morning. Well, by the time the wheel assembly, we had Mary, quick thinking that she always was,

she got on her computer and she found a U-Haul place 40 miles away from where we broke down. So we unhitched the trailer, contacted a guy to fix it, and we drove the truck to get this U-Haul, came back, put everything in the U-Haul, and she followed me to St. Louis. I drove the U-Haul. She drove the truck. And we showed up Sunday night at the Ritz Carlton for the BMW Championship, and there's, you know, 50 players waiting for their stuff. And the funny thing about it was that Monday afternoon,

Jeff Ogilvie was on the range and flip-thwops, t-shirt and shorts. And the head official at the time, he came up to Jeff. He goes, Jeff, what are you doing? What do you dress like this for? He goes, hey, the Hulkas aren't here. They got all my stuff on the trigger. Flubs and all. but we made it and that that was the latest we ever showed up for a situation to the next town but

Ben will tell you I mean he you know Fort Worth the memorial that takes uh what 12 14 hours bet 17 did it this year 17 yeah I usually roll in at like 11 a.m or noon and but that's one of the best tournaments on tour because Mike McKee the ops guy he has a bunch of the volunteer kids. They are literally waiting in front of the clubhouse as we're pulling up. I dropped the ramp door. They whisk everything inside. It takes maybe 20 minutes on load the open.

20 minutes. Yeah. Jesus. This week in Utah, I did it by myself. It took me three and a half hours. So some weeks are better than others for sure. Hey, man,

that's pretty much on the entire tour. One thing, I don't want you, Hoka boys, to get in trouble. And I don't think you are doing it justice. But both of your wives were integrated. in this and I think you both need to give your wives shoutouts because we thought miss mary hulke was like our

tour mom out there for years you know we didn't communicate with steve we taught to mary and then ben's wife and hiding was integral whenever they started but now she's home raising babies so uh i think you both deserve a little shout out to your wives on how much they helped out i was waiting to get that in hudy would have killed me if i didn't yeah yeah she kept us in line for sure she's the best and my mom Mary helped set up this phone for me because you know me being tech. No way, no how would I be talking to you guys without Mary setting up the whole situation here. But yeah, they just left. You see behind me the whole world on the wall of our Airbnb here in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.

And when we wrap this up, I'll be heading to join them at Dollywood. And that's our homage to Dolly. Amazing. Yeah, we're here in Tennessee. where Mary went to school. I actually came down for a weekend when we were dating back in 1980. This is definitely way before Ben. But she was going to school here at UT.

And I got to see Fast Willie Galt play a game. And that was pretty incredible because, you know, what he did for our bears back during the Super Bowl era. And, yeah, here we are in Knoxville. And I'm in Black Desert right now. I'm caddying for CT Pan. So this is his second start after like 15 months off of wrist surgery. Wow.

Heidi, she's at home. Well, no, she's actually in Washington State with her family with the kids. So if I'm cadding, she's solo. If I just unload, I fly home Monday nights, get to be dad for like four straight days, fly back Saturday, do it all over again. So it's a great good train of everywhere. Polka's everywhere. I don't want you to name any names, but have y'all ever blackballed a tour player? From the trailer?

Yeah, like, he treated you like crap and we're just not going to take your stuff anymore? I have not come across. I haven't come across that. I feel like everybody's so nice to us because we are the ones handling their stuff. Yeah. They love those. Yeah. If we're mean to these guys, they might not get our stuff here on time, or they might unload it last on money.

day, who knows. Somewhat connected to that. Have you ever said no to an item? I would have liked to. Yeah, seriously. No, there's a couple times this past season I had loads so big that I was just like, I can't, I'm sorry. I was like so full that a set of clubs late in the day.

I'm like, I'm sorry, buddy. I can't do it this time. Yeah. What's, is there like, I mean, we talked about the mattress, obviously. Is that the craziest item? Or is there like, are there crazier items that you've ever had to be like, yep, we'll figure it out? I feel like my dad and I can go back and forth and try to top each other with the craziest items. I'll start with the mattress.

I'll start with the mattress because one year at Torrey Pines, everybody stays at the Hilton right next door. Kids, you remember that. Oh, yeah. I mean, that was player central. So I didn't need Ustey's manager to come and get it from the golf course because I could just drive. I have a two blocks south. And I drove up right into the portico of the Hilton. And I started sliding this mattress out of the trailer.

And I grabbed it by the handles. And the bellman comes over and he looks at me and he goes, sir, you know we have mattresses here. We have bats. I said, yes. And then I explained it to him. And he helped me get it into the lobby. And from there, the manager waited for us. and he got it up to Ustey's room.

But Ustey had that mattress because of his back. It was just a perfect mattress for him, queen. It was a queen size. And he would take the hotel mattress off and put his on because he slept as best he could on his own mattress. Yeah. I mean, some guys, they're not as large, but some guys have those eight sleep mattress topers,

like the cooling system, I think it is. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a couple of guys that have. those on the trailer. One year, there was a caddy that wanted his BMW motorcycle from waste management to Pebble, I think it was a trip.

Yeah. And I remember strep in that thing and then having to pack around it and that was absurd. Absurd. That was one and done. Coach Noss's spin bike weighed about 500 pounds that he kept on there. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Or he payments

trainer, the spin bike. It was like an old school peloton. Yeah. No. Another one, Matthew Wolf, before he went to live, his grandma came to every tournament, and we transported a motorized scooter. That's right. So, yeah. And that thing was so heavy. I literally could not lift it.

So we had to, like, drive it up the ramp door and, like, get it over the threshold of the ramp door and, like, park it right at the back. Oh, my gosh. And if it was dead, I'd have to charge it just before I keep loaded into the trailer. That was a nightmare. But yeah, we've got we've got five dog crates this year for guys that travel with dogs. We have little kid bikes and scooters. Paul Casey used to have his like racing bike in a travel case for the whole year. The dog thing, and I've played a couple events this year and just the dogs in player dining.

I can't get over. What are we doing out there? We got a bunch of service animals. Yeah, a lot of service. I told somebody I said, you want to see how stressful. The Torias, we used to smoke cigarettes and drink beer when we were stressed out. Now we buy dogs. Yeah, exactly.

Oh, my gosh. Wow. That's incredible. God, I'm glad I'm retired. I'm dealing with a lot out here, Dad. Well, too, I mean, as the years go on, these players, like, the players have so many things, I would assume, compared to back in the day, right? Like, now there's so many training pieces of equipment and so many things to keep their

bodies at the top shape because now athletes are on a whole new level and they're making so much money and they're playing for so much money as opposed to the back in the day they probably were pretty much you know their clubs their gear and that's all they needed was to get onto the golf course and play the game now it's like it takes a village just to get these guys onto onto the driving rain 100% I mean I have 10 independent trainers using the trailer so I have massage tables like crazy um and those are actually nice packing pieces because like sometimes there's gaps in the trailer and I need like something perfect and that massage table slides right in. So I don't mind those as much.

They're pretty heavy, but they're soft. So it's not too bad. How big is this trailer? Like for people that don't know trailers, like visually, is it like as big as one of those tour trucks that drive around like the tailor made truck? No, I don't know what you started with that. Probably like a 16 footer, but this year I had 15. So now this year, the last few years, I've had a 30 foot trailer.

So it's like a 24 foot box and then the nose would be six feet. And then last month, I just got a gooseneck delivered for next season. It's feather light. Yeah, feather light. It's six feet longer. And feather light, they build all the big semis for like Calloway Titles, all those club companies. And so I met the guy through the cobra truck.

The cobra guys were like, you got to talk to Mike. And so I got one ordered, got delivered. and it's fantastic. It's got like hydraulic lift for the hitch. I just have to figure out how to hitch up a gooseneck instead of bumper hitch. That first trailer I bought was $5,000 and Ben just outlaid $60,000 for this next one. Yeah. In 25.

Boom. Yeah. The price of doing business. Yeah. Talk about diesel prices. My God. Yeah. I was getting ready to say.

You should be asking for a little extra in the middle of the year because of the due to the gas. Oh, surcharge. Fuel surcharge. My gosh. It's funny. Like when I got lucky enough to go hunting and hang in with Kiz at his place,

the guy that was with us, Kiz was in the shipping. You know, he had a bunch of the, his history was in shipping. And he was, you know, this was five years ago,

whatever it was. And when, you know, Amazon was kind of booming. I know it's still there. But like at the time, it was still kind of newish to be able to have like everything in any second and he was really talking to us about i'll never forget the line he said he's like you learn

how expensive it is to ship air is what he told us and he was no question and he yeah and he was like when you look at he was like it drives me nuts because i'll look at amazon and they have so much money that they can ship poorly packed trucks or they can move poorly packed trucks for now but if you look at a really old school shipping transportation company you know you'll see how good they are at the tetracing of items because it's extremely expensive to transport air. And that may be think of that when you're talking about like sliding in the massage tables into like the perfect pocket. That must give you this incredible like satisfying feeling. Oh, it's the best.

My buddy Josh, he's out there to help me drive, but he knows to just sit back and let me do the packing. Like I'm so OCD when it comes to packing that he'll be like putting something in like, no, no, no, let me do that. Your mother trained you well, Ben. Yes, she did. Did you work in the NFL before this? Don't I remember that? Yeah, I was with the Seahawks. My first season, I was doing equipment management,

like full-time internship, and the first season was then they won the Super Bowl of Russ. That's what I thought, yeah. I was telling the boys that before you came on. I'm like, I'm pretty sure Ben came from the NFL to come back out and do this full-time. Yeah, so it's, oh, sorry. Do you get a ring?

Oh, my God. source of that. No, I'm still waiting for it. But I got I got a Super Bowl bonus, but like, me and the other three equipment interns were the only people in the building that didn't get a ring. And then, and then Jesus me to this day. Yeah,

but. I price won a Tiffany's for 8 grand, and when I win the lotto, Ben, you're going to have your, you're going to have your replica. Hopefully there's still a good design. The story is everybody in the building gets a ring, like literally everybody. So I was like, as soon as you said that, I was like, this guy got a Super Bowl ring. Yeah, I mean, at the time, it was disappointing, but like, it was my first season.

I can't be, like, going and asking, like, hey, I deserve this. Like, no, it's my first year in the NFL. But, I mean, I got to go to two Super Bowls, be on the sideline and be there for the whole week in New York and Arizona. Unfortunately, I was on the Patriot's sideline as a ballboy when the interception happened. So that was brutal. That was so brutal. Yep.

Yeah. Unreal. real. The equipment manager, that whole equipment side of sports is something that the average fan doesn't really get to see. I was telling these guys before you hopped on. When I was younger, I got a pretty good look into the New York Islanders equipment team just because I was like always around the organization.

Our family has a restaurant right across the street from where the islanders used to play and all the guys would come in and they'd get beers and pizza. And then I would kind of talk to them about the team. They'd say, oh, come over for, come over for practice tomorrow and come check out how we do things and I like loved that whole world of like how they would set up the room and get all the equipment set up and as a younger kid it was like really really cool to see all the stuff all the equipment looked incredible and everything was shiny and set up but then as you get older you realize and like god these guys when do they sleep when do they go home do they even have families

like oh you know when the islanders when the islanders finish their game at 10 30 at night and they're playing in ottawa the next day like who's setting up that that away uh you know locker in Ottawa that next afternoon. You know, the guys are getting on a plane. They're flying. They're sleeping. Someone's got to get Barlamov's pads and set it up so that when he shows up to the rink at 10 a.m., he's ready to go on the ice.

And that's like, that is not for the fuck. That is not for the week, man. No. You need to be a strong individual mentally, physically, to be able to handle that. You're the first one in and by far the last one out. By far. By far. I did it for University of Arizona.

I got a scholarship to do it there. and so I had like nine years of experience through an equipment management but like if you have a primetime game on the East Coast and you're Seattle Seahawks you're getting home at 4 a.m. You got to unload the we're in the bottom of the airplane

getting all the bags and trunks into these box trucks getting to the facility getting laundry started and then you have to check the jerseys the next morning so like that's literally a not going to sleep kind of night and you got to get all the jerseys checked find the stains, see if you need to order new ones for the next week.

So it was just nonstop. Like from the moment training camp begins to the end of the season. Like if you have a family, it's tough. It's very tough. And each one of these guys want specific things. I know in hockey in particular, they want their sticks taped a certain way. They want the certain amount of sticks. They want their blades sharpen a certain amount of way.

I mean, Riggs would know that whole world. The guys just throwing equipment at guys. So I can't even imagine football. You've got three times the amount of players. all the different equipment and cleats. Yeah, the wide receivers have like eight pairs of cleats. Like, what are you going to do with all of these? It's one game.

It's one game. But yeah, it was wild. So it kind of trained me to do these grueling hours and do pretty much to be the equipment manager of the PJ tour. Yeah, I was like, I remember as like a, you know, as a freshman playing like college hockey, obviously we had a great equipment management team, but it was very small. And it was pretty much the way that you could like gain a bunch of favor with the team is if you were really good. it like packing the bus. You know?

Yeah. That's good thing. For sure. If you packed that bus and you hustled, you were the first guy there, you're slinging bags of the bus, you would be like in the running to be the captain of the team in the future. You know, that's like how you cut your teeth. Yeah. For sure.

So what is your guys, what is your guys, or Riggs, go ahead. No, I was just going to ask. Dude, I'm looking at the schedule and I was trying to find the biggest issue that you were going to have. And we had, Ben already knows, trust me. Oh, for sure. 22nd, they're at Riviera in California. And then, you know, the next day, we're looking at the cognizant classic in the Palm Beach area.

How, what, you know, that's a trip where I just tell guys ahead of time, like, hey, you are not giving me clubs because I am not going to show up to Wednesday. And that's just one of the very few trips of the year where I just can't do what I usually do. So I still get there, like, on Wednesday, like the families, they'll come get their stuff, but it's a very light load going to Florida because I get no clubs, hardly any suitcases. But, like, the guys have paid for the binge for the year. Like, they're still in there. I get there.

And then the Florida swing is a dream. I'm like, I'm staying in hotels every Sunday night during Florida. Right. That's incredible. How long is that drive? Like, do you, that's where your boy has to help you out? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

we we alternate like we've stayed in hotels before just because we like we don't want to do it nonstop and it's uh 2300 miles yeah it's brutal Jesus man feels like it's longer than that it feels like 3,000 it does but the amount of times oh sorry go ahead man go ahead no just west Texas the amount of times i've to see west Texas every year's nightmare well that's what that's what I was going to add was one year, Mary and I got on the road from Riv and started the drive. And as soon as we got into El Paso, it's dark out. I'm driving. I'm just staring at the white line. No traffic around me. And then all of a sudden, right in the middle of the road was a mule deer carcass. And I whack that thing head on. And the trailer, fortunately, everything bounced over it.

and we just kept driving. Nothing structurally damaged the trailer or the truck. And the next morning, once the sun came up, we start smelling something. And it's all the guts of this mule deer that hung on to the chassis of both the truck and the trailer. And it was the best. I mean, just the worst smell you could imagine. and we spent about an hour in a self-drive-thru car wash somewhere in Louisiana and got as much of that off of there before we were going to show up at the time.

That was, yeah, West Palm. It was the, I don't know. No, we might have been going to Miami when, you know, back in the day, Ben, even when you helped me in high school, that long drive was to be direct. All eastern open. Durow, yeah. Yeah, it's all, once you get to Florida, you're like, oh, we're there. And then you're like, nope, another 700 miles.

Yeah, it's brutal. It's such a funny visual to me of you guys just wiping and washing off dead carcass. And 484's equipment is inside of that. Yes. Yes. It's disgusting. Thank God for those spray hoses at the car wash. Yeah, you got to keep the trailer looking nicer the sponsors. It's funny.

What's your, so what's your, so what's, your current relationship with the PJ tour. I know Steve mentioned it off the top, but I got to imagine everything's pretty seamless now, but like how often are you touching base with them? How often are you in contact with them? Like, what's that relationship like? I pretty much talk to the operations team. Just like let them know what my schedule looks like for the year, like what tournaments I will be at, what I won't be at. Like I obviously don't go to Mexico, Bermuda, like the international events. Don't do, don't do Canada because just getting past the border is such a nightmare. Sure. So I just do

pretty much state side. And my dad laid out the groundwork so well that it's just a seamless operation now. And, yeah, it's running very smooth. But I tell the ops team, like, when I'll be getting there, talk to the operations team for each individual tournament and let them know, like, when I'll show up where I'd need to be parked or where I'd like to be parked for loading on Sunday, that kind of thing. Has the tour ever, like, talked to you about buying you guys out or overtaking or how, like, operation because it you know like we were almost shocked that the tour wasn't providing

something like this on their own not me dad you well you know the the story goes back to uh ricky fallers buddy uh david pritchett uh oh he's actually a friend of rickie romano's uh rickie's caddy uh offered mary and me a half a million dollars to buy the business he wanted to get away from his cubicle. He wanted to go out on the road. He loved golf. And he had heard that we might be pitching the business away from the family. And so we get this offer. And two nights later, I think Ben and Heidi took Mary and me out to dinner. And Ben looked me right in the eye and Mary and said, Mom, Dad, this is all I know. I don't want you to sell the business. Yeah. So I've Basically, it's just like, I can't let this happen.

It's all yours. Yeah, he said, and he said, he looked just right in the eye. He said, this is all I know. I know equipment, and I've been with you, dad, since high school. Yeah. Helping you with this. And I want to take it over. And we said, okay.

Okay. And here we're. It's been great. Yeah. Let's go back. He's got one more year of payments and he's done. It's all his. Yeah.

It's all his. It's all his. It's been taking care of his mother and father for, for what, three years now? Yeah. Four? Yeah, three. Four. Well done, Ben.

Yeah. That's awesome, Ben. That's awesome. I'll give credit to Heidi. She's like, we need to keep this. You have to figure something out. So we did. We did.

Good. But I would not be able to do it without Heidi because she did it with me for seven years after we left the Seahawks. And she was doing the driving. We were alternating. She was loading, unloading. And, I mean, there would be times where CT would want to play Monday afternoon. and Heidi would be having to finish the unload. And I go caddy nine holes on Monday.

But yeah, she was a grinder. So when I'm on the road, she knows exactly how hard the work is. So she's not like, hey, can you get home earlier? Like, no, she gets it. You know, it's no secret that, like, inflation exists. So when you guys, like, ever decide to jack up prices, like, how are there, like, any sensitive conversations you have with people or is they pretty just like, whatever it is, it is?

extremely rare. I mean, they know how expensive things are getting. Like flights, hotels, diesel. Right. Just cost of equipment. Like, a truck is $100,000 these days. So it's a sure. Yeah, it's nuts. So, like, there's never really any

pushback, and I don't, I don't think there will be. Also, the purses have gone up. So, like, when I raise things by a thousand bucks, they're like, okay. I have a, I was going to ask this earlier. I, I, I used always laugh when your dad would bill me on like, you know, December 15th.

I haven't played a tournament in two months and I've just spent all of my savings on Christmas. And then he's like, yeah, I'll give you a discount if you'll pay me by January 1st. I'm like, dude, why didn't you ask me like a month ago when I was cash flush? I used to give him grief on the West Coast. Are you still billing right around Christmas? It's probably early December, late November. Yeah. Okay.

You moved it up a couple weeks. Oh, yeah. But last year, last year, it was, it was pretty rough last year because the truck was unfortunately stolen in Houston. Not the trailer. The truck was stolen in Houston. I was cat in for CT. We missed the cut. And I go out until Saturday morning to work out and I walk in front of my hotel.

It was parked right by the awning of this fairfield in and truck's gone. And I'm like, what the hell am I going to do? Like what what? So I got the police on it, everything. And I'm, I go back to my hotel room, just shocked. And I'm like, how am I going to get the trailer to San Antonio? And I start Googling Chevy dealers in the area. There's one that has a 3,500 left on the lot.

And I'm like, I have to get it. So I go and buy this truck, go to Home Depot. Like, by the time all the paperwork's done, it's like 8 p.m. Or whatever it is, Home Depot closes an hour. I have to go buy a hitch, get it on the truck. and get the trailer move that night. And then five days later, I'm in my hotel room in San Antonio. And the police call me like, hey, we found the truck.

And I'm like, so they found the old truck. And it was like torn up on the inside so they could hotwire it, whatever. And so it gets shipped to Arizona. Insurance fixes it all up. And then I have to sell this old truck. And it was just a nightmare. Can't imagine. Yeah.

It was brutal. Anyway, like financially late last year was a little tight on money. So I think I sent the text out early November. Hey, boys. Time to pony up, boys. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man.

Yeah, you just got a stressful gig. It's like you have a strict deadline like twice a week, you know, which is crazy to think about. Yeah. And if I got a guy that told me Sunday morning like, hey, can I send the clubs? And then all of a sudden he's in a playoff. I'm like, because I promise I was going to wait. And sometimes you're fighting the golf's fighting darkness,

and you're just sitting there waiting on the last set of clubs. Yeah, he doesn't always just have his regular guy. So he also offers if the trailer has room, like if I'm in the last group on Sunday and I'm playing in the next week and I don't want to travel my clubs, I can just pay them to take them that one week. Yeah, walk-up business. Yeah.

Get a lot of suitcases. A lot of suit. Cases for guys. Like caddies, caddies players, trainers, rules officials, they all send stuff

if they're traveling pretty heavy and just need like a suitcase taking, that kind of thing. And caddies these days, they're all traveling with golf clubs. Yeah. Makes sense.

They're all ex players, man. They all play. Is that why? Yeah, yeah. So everyone's trying to get lean enough to not have to check a bag

when they fly. That's pretty much what they're doing, right? Yeah. Yeah. And just the luxury of not having to deal with it. is just so nice. It just saves you so much on both ends of any travel, you know,

just like not having to check a bag, not having to go through that process, not having to wait at the carousel, not having to risk losing anything. It's just like so much cleaner when you travel a lot. And you've got to think about the guys flying private. Like a lot of them will team up and fly three or four guys private and you just can't fit all the stuff on the planes.

So they have to use Ben or they wouldn't be able to fly private. Yeah. Have you ever lost anything where you showed up? You opened up the trailer and you're like, oh shit. In the last 10 years, I think it's been two, maybe three times where I left like a massage table in the training room. Like a guy wasn't there that week and I forgot to grab the massage table. And then I'd have to pay to get it overnighted and profusely apologized. But I'm like usually steal trap on everything that I have on the trailer.

I'm like, I got to go check for that, check for that, check for that. But it's been pretty rare. It's a lot better than me leaving David DeBal's clubs in New York. I would say that's a better track record than me, Ben. That's good. Oh, my gosh. What's the store behind that, Steve? I just pulled a major bogey and he left him and didn't tell me.

And the locker room guys didn't tell me. This was at the Westchester Classic. I forget where we were going. And I showed up to the. the next tournament. Deval comes over looking for his clubs. I said, David, I don't have your clubs. He goes, well, I left him in the locker room. I said, well, they didn't tell me. I'm sorry. They must still be there. And of course, you know, FedEx got them there the next day. But, yeah, New York. Don't, don't give me start with New York. Steve, I'm curious in all your years of caddy, and I don't

even know the answer to this. How many wins do you have on tour and who are some of the players you all caddied for. My Hall of Famers, David Graham, and just this a couple months ago, Mary and I were proud as could be because we got invited to his induction ceremony at Jack's Memorial, and David become the 51st recipient of Jack's gray jacket, and his name's up on the wall now. But I spent 14 years with David, eight on the big tour overseas. We won in Melbourne. Melbourne in his hometown. Eight of my 14 wins were with David. Two on the big tour, four on the senior tour, and then all over the world,

which is why I'm sitting in front of this map on the wall where I'm, if you look up here to Vancouver all the way to Sydney, Australia, and Melbourne, my career was pretty amazing, and I was truly blessed. won twice with Pat Bates on when it was the buy.com tour. And that was, I didn't win the first one with him. He won three that year. And it got him the battlefield promotion to come back and play the big tour the following year. And this was early 2000s.

As I said, I was on Pat's bag when 9-11 hit. But, yeah, I had, in my career, you guys are all sitting down when you hear this. I've caddied for over 150 different players in my home. Oh, shit. Off and on 42 years. I was 19 years old, fresh out of college. I tried to walk on the Illinois golf team, and I didn't make it. And I got disgruntled with school, and I went home and I told Grandpa Frank, my dad, Frank,

who was a golf coach and basketball coach in the Chicago suburbs in the high school level, I said, Dad, I'm going to give this tour caddion a try because I had gone. down to a little tournament in southern Illinois about an hour from champagne and caddied in the Robinson Open, a town of maybe 7,000 people in the middle of South Central Illinois. The two major industries there were the Heath Candy Bar Company and a Marathon Oil Refinery and everything else was corn. And I caddied in a $100,000 purse tournament that offered 20 to the winner in 1971. And the following year, I went back to it. And that's when I withdrew from school and I came home, I told Dad, I said,

Dad, I'm going to go to Napa next week and start caddying on the tour. And he goes, go for it. I did. And I go, what? What do you mean you did? He goes, yeah, I caddied on tour right after I got out of the Navy in the mid-40s. And I'm like, you never told me this? And he said he and a fraternity brother, who was the captain of the golf team at Northwestern,

decided to take a semester off from school and they barnstormed the southeast in the summer of spring of 1946. And when they had money, they played golf. When they needed money, they went to the next tour event that they could find and they got a job. And he did this for a while and then came home, went back to school and finished school. We never told me that until I said I was going to try caddian on the PGA tour and he gave me his blessing. So, 1973 was my first full year on tour.

I got to tell you a story about how I met Arnold. And I ended up actually caddying for Arnold one week. That's another story. But the first time I laid eyes on Arnold was on the putting green at Indian Wells Country Club at the Bob Hope. And the guy that I started my career with was not in the tournament. So I got, I had to caddy in a little satellite event later in the week. but I went out to the Bob Hope just to see guys tee off. Arnie's on the putting green and eating wells with James Garner,

who he was going to play with that day. And I was by the ropes between the putting green and the first tee, knowing he had to pass me. And as he passes me, there's this Palm Springs debutante to my left, and she's standing there waiting for Arnold to come by. And he actually winked at her. He went like that, and she goes, oh, Arnold. And just absolutely loses it because he winked at her.

And I'm like, this guy has got some serious charisma with the ladies. I mean, the experience of that, and then being around, later on that year, I was fortunate. caddying back at that tournament in Robinson, I was caddying for Steve Melnick because his caddy went home for three weeks to be with some family affairs that were going on. And I covered for him. And I'm cadding for fluff, the original fluff, Steve Melnick, and he comes out of the locker room after lunch, we're going to practice.

And he goes, hey, I was just talking to David Graham, and he's looking for a new caddy. Are you interested? I said, the guy from Australia? he goes yeah i go sure yeah i'd talk to him and so david met us on the range and he goes stephen i'm going to take three weeks off and i want you to meet me in in hartford and i said okay david i'll be there so i get to hartford first hole Thursday morning the the tea is it's a short par four guys hit iron off the tea in a wedge at at wethersfield this is where bruce edwards grew up Dennis Turning grew up.

All the guys from the boats grew up. All these guys from Weather's field became tour caddies. Well, here we are at their home course. I'm on the first hole with David. He hits it right, hits a tree, drops down in knee-high rough, lost ball. I'm like, this is not going to be my job for very long if I don't find this ball. And sure enough, he had to make, had to walk back to the T and reload. And we made six on our very first hole.

on a two iron wedge hole and I'm like, this isn't going to be my job very long. No, it worked out. It worked out very well. I was very fortunate to hit my Hall of Famer among those 150 players. Wow. It's an amazing career. That is amazing.

But the one time I did caddy for Arnold was the same tournament in 1976. We got a pickup softball game going on. because the caddies used to try and get a game with the press and everybody, you know, we would always be playing softball. Baseball was my first love, as you can see. But we're at Weathersfield again. And what happened was at that softball game, I Pete rose Arnie's caddy at home plate.

And I broke his collarbone. I was on second hit to the outfield. He was Muff. His nickname was Muff. Mark Barnes from Terre Haute, Indiana, waiting for me with the ball, and I smacked him so hard. I broke his collar bomb. Put him on the shelf for six weeks, and I got the caddy for Arnie, cover for Muff at the Hartford tournament. Arnie shot 66 the last day for me, and he made about, oh, $2,500 finish in 25th. Yeah.

And they said Arnie was cheap. Well, he wrote me a check for $300. I didn't think Arnie was cheap. That was a lot of money. That's a lot of money in 76. Unlike Bruce, who I think he never cashed his first check in his career with Dick Lotz for $40 or whatever it was or $400. I should have put that check like Roger Malpe did with his $40,000 winners check. It's at the bar there in Pleasant Valley up there.

Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Ben, I got to ask you about this Utah course, this Black Desert. I mean, is it an insane walk for you guys? Honestly, no, because they, that it's so spread out on some holes, they have shuttle carts between. Okay. I want to say like four, maybe even five greens, we get a shuttle ride to the next T-box.

But it is so gorgeous out here. It looks insane. I caddied the first year, two years ago. It was a newer course and it was like so firm, but they've had some rain the past couple days, and it's a lot softer. It's playing very long. This is always a really fun one to watch

just because the visuals are so unique to what we see, we can, a week out, out there. Yeah, yeah. I was watching the last episode, and you guys all seem so dejected that the president's cup was over. It's like, when are we going to get some real golf again? I'm like, hey, Black Desert, come on, guys. I like it.

Rally. We're rallying right back on the side. I was shocked that Coyvin and some of the international guys were playing this week from President's Cup. But I think they're all playing Tokyo next week. So it was just easy to come here and then get on the charter. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. But yeah, I'm excited.

Amazing. What a pair. What a family business. You know, just a classic American family business. Exactly. father son, your best buddy helping you out when needed. It's just as good as it gets.

Entrepreneurship, baby. My three and a half year old is an absolute tank, so he's in the running for next man up. You're already grooming him up, huh? He's got the Hulkca calves already going. It happened to the perfect family. Like, the Hulkas are big bodies, deep voices.

Like, you guys were born to do this, to just lift heavy things, move them around, logistics, grind it out. Dream job, just manual labor. Yeah. Drugworth. I'm a mute. You know, kudos to the tour

for protecting us to be the only game in town and to the players who have always supported us. And, you know, we love them all. That's awesome. Halka, Inc. baby. That is just as good as it gets. Hope.

Started with hope. Just because you hope it works. Incredible. So good, gentlemen. Well, we really appreciate the time. like I said, this is a part of the PGA tour behind the scenes that very few people it feels knew about at all. So hearing the stories and the details is just as good as it gets.

So we very much appreciate the time. Yeah. Thank you for having us on. This is so cool. Yeah, man. Happy to do it. You guys are the best. I took care of my family and my life for 15 years on tour.

And when I brought it up, I just assumed everybody knew about it. So it's hilarious whenever these boys are like, what are you talking about? and then all the interactions on social media were like, what are you talking about this service? I'm like, well, I'll tell you. I'll just have them on the podcast and they'll let them tell you what they do. Yeah, that's great. It's so great.

Hey, Ben, what's on the back ramp door? I think we need Barstool on that back ramp door. Yeah, that would be great. That would be great. It's turtobox speakers right now. They got the full wrap on the trailer. Oh, so you guys wrap the trailer for sponsorships as you drive it around. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Plus, they get the Primo parking. spot every week to unload and load. So, you know, they're showing off. Riggs, Riggs, I don't know if you remember this, but I met you at Wingfoot at the last US Open when Bryson won. And I was trying to pick your brain on the putting green on like Tuesday or whatever it was.

And I'm pretty sure you said El Presidente. He's like, yeah, I don't think that's the sponsorship or like marketing that he's interested in. He doesn't do billboards. But, yeah. I was, uh, well, I mean, we might. You know, it's been six years now. We might have to get into this, into the wrap of the truck game.

Yeah, exactly. We're always up for a revisit. I love it. That's great. Yeah, Wingfoot was an interesting one. That was like our, we were like Patrick Reed's media arm that week. Oh, is that right? Yeah, he was like in contention.

And all of a sudden he went from like, you know, never talking to anybody to be like, I just want to do interviews with you guys. It was a while week. It was a hard time. Yeah. And then I think we'd go back there in two years. So that'll be exciting. Yeah, wingfoot's awesome.

Steve Rabadoo and that place is really good. But, uh, all right, jents. Ben, good luck this week. Yeah, thank you guys. Have fun at Hollywood. Yes, sir. Great to see you, man. Yeah, thank you guys.

Go white socks. This episode is brought to you by Woop, the wearable device that gives you personalized insights into your sleep recovery and the strain you're taking on and how daily choices may be influencing your overall well-being. We kind of touch on this at the very end. of the show in terms of personal choices and well-being and where we're at. I've been a proud whoop user for like five, six straight years now. I have a streak.

I will update that streak. 1,593. Great days of logging my personal data. Incredible. I was actually just clicking on, you know, I was thank you. I was trying to click on some of my fun all-time stats. My lowest resting heart rate, gentleman, 46 beats per minute. My highest resting heart rate, 109.

I think I had the COVID, which is probably not great. My highest HRV, which is insane, 117. I think I hover, you know, I know. I think I hover around like that 60 or 70. If you click on yourself, so like your little picture of yourself in the top left, and then it gives you a bunch of like, I have achieved, you know, in the other side of the spectrum, my lowest recovery, 1%, my max. heart rate ever 190 beats per minute that was during an ice hockey session so uh you get all these

insights all brought to you by whoop which is a fantastic wearable device i'm a guy who doesn't play ice hockey and who doesn't get the heart rate going high that often but my max heart rate is 192 what i would have been doing wonder when that at that point in time who knows but that's a high that's a high one i got 192 as well i think that first who knows maybe the first year the internet invitation or something. Maybe some intercourse. Wow. Oh, there you go.

Yeah. Always getting laid. It's the only way I could think of their hearts rates. Getting high. That's cool. Let's go. I'm going to go with that. You know, it could have been any of those things.

Woop empowers you to make better decisions by providing you with actionable insights into your sleep, your recovery, your training and your overall health. I'm always amazed that Woop can like tell when I'm playing. hockey versus when I'm playing golf, it will log an hour and 20 minutes of ice hockey. It'll log, you know, four hours of a golf session. If I hit the range for 30 minutes, it's like that was golf, wasn't it? I'm like, yep. Make sure you join whoop today at join.wop.com slash bar stool.

You're going to get your first month free. All right. Woop's been great. It's big part of our life. We've got the community. I'm in a handful of communities. My Arizona group, my St. Louis group. We've got a four play group that's got 500 people in it that you could check out.

Again, make sure you get involved to get your first month free. That is join.wop.com slash barstool. All right, folks, that was the Holka Boys. What a great business. What a great family. Just a couple fantastic guys who could tell you good stories. So, kids, thank you for setting that up. And like, you know, that's just like, if you're going to do that business,

those personalities were made for that business. Yeah, it's hilarious. We just finished the interview and I looked down at my phone and already both of them texts. Thanks so much, kids. you're the best love that we got to come on and tell our stories. So things like that that I don't even think about are interesting to the world are fascinating. And I will continue to keep looking around for stories like that that people don't know about because those are two of the salt of the earth guys you'll ever meet.

Their wives are incredible too. And family business, you know, entrepreneurship, you touched on it at the N-Riggs. But made in America, man, those guys are just good old American dream right there. And they love it. You can just tell by the energy and the voice how much they love it. Yeah, we had them on for an hour and there wasn't a second where I didn't find what they were saying interesting. They can tell great stories. Steve has stories for days.

I would listen to him all day long. Yeah, it's just a great, like you guys said, American family business. And it was just very, very interesting. And I'm really glad we had them on. Great guy. Yeah, it is. There is like such a feeling, too, of like they don't. If they were just given like a bunch more, I don't know that that.

that like Ben would do anything different. I think they'd be like, no, this is like what we're here to do. We are here to run this trailer, run the logistics. People need us. People need us. So we're going to continue to do this. And I just, that grind and making ends meet, making it all work. Like, that is, that's what it takes.

And that's just a good old fashioned small American business. That's what this country's built on. Those guys just seem like as good as it gets. I love them. Just every time they couldn't help themselves. And kids, you brought it up first, but like they couldn't help themselves telling how, you know, Steve's wife this and then Ben's wife that and how they saved the day. And it's just what it takes.

So that was really cool to hear from. That is just such a peek behind a curtain that you didn't even know was there. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating, man. They just lived their life on the tour. Steve and Mary started that. I had more interactions with them.

Ben was later in my career and my kids were already done traveling by the time Ben started. So it was more just, hey, well, you take my clubs for me and my suit. case. But when I had my family, like, you know, Mary would watch Kate for a minute or something. You know, Brittany and I had to go run something at the trailer. She'd be like, just leave Kate here. You all run and do whatever you got to do. I'll just have it right here. I mean, just things like that. I remember Mary doing the, uh, the Daryl survey on, you know, on Thursday to see what clubs guys were playing because they're out there. And it's like, hey, you want to get paid a little extra money to go see what clubs and balls of guys are playing. And I already, you already know all the

guys. So there was just so many different facets of my life on the tour where we interacted with Stephen Mary for the majority of my career. It was like I said, she was like the tour mom out there. Everybody just turned to her, you know, Brittany would, I'd pull up after our walk up on Sunday in the parking lot after around and her and Brittany would just be standing by the trailer talking or whatever. Brittany's waiting to leave to go to the next event. So it was a large part of my life. And that's why I was so shocked that other people didn't know about it. But it's, It's an amazing story that they've done it for 25 years. And I didn't know how it started.

The 9-11 thing really, really was amazing. That's how it spurred his idea to do it. Well, it came from such a genuine place. He wanted to make sure the players could get through. And then it also is just great foresight for business. I mean, he's an obviously very impressive entrepreneurial, entrepreneurial type brain where he saw that this could be a source of income as well as helping, you know, the tour out from getting from spot A to spot B.

But yeah, I mean, talk about, you know, obviously, like, when tragedy strikes like that, like he, like, that's the first thing he thought about was all these players and how they're going to get through. Like, no one else was thinking about that. So it's incredible. Yeah. Yeah. It was like the world came to a stop at that point.

And he, like, was thinking. You know what I mean? Like, he's like, we're going to have to figure out something or else, like, we're not getting back to normalcy ever. Right. It's like if we can't get through with nothing, how are they going to get through? with everything. And it's just like, well, we're going to help them.

We're going to figure out. So, yeah, awesome story. Good job, kids, setting them up. Only other couple things I've got around the golf world. I've just been pretty glued into the to the USGA midameter at the Lido. We played the Lido a couple years ago at San Valley right after it opened up. We've done a lot on this show about the Lido. The original Lido was like right in Frankie's backyard.

We've kind of covered a decent amount, the backstory between the lost golf course and the World War. and it being used for militaristic reasons and kind of unkempt and lost. And then with Tom Doak and the Kaiser family and Sand Valley bringing it back and, you know, like digital video games allowing you to kind of build out the new version of it and then program that into machines that could now just take a pretty flat open field in northern Wisconsin and turn into central Wisconsin and turn it into the Lido. How awesome that golf course is. I think it's C.B. McDonald is all the original holes.

Do you know the history of that Lido golf course? It's really cool. Long Island had the greatest golf course in the world. It was like number one. It was Pine Valley, Augustine National, and Lido. And it was designed by C.B. McDonald. Seth Rainer engineered it and Alastair McKenzie designed the 18th hole. Like it was all, it went from the Bay to the,

ocean took over all of basically that Lido beach area of Long Beach Long Island, which now, like, we have a Borrelli's bar basically, like a mile away from where that location was. They have a Lido Golf Club there now that's town run. It's like half the property of what it used to be. It doesn't go across the road like it used to. So it's only on that like inlet side. And it's just, I mean, I hate to say it, but it's kind of a dog track. They kind of let it go.

It's just one of those places on the water that are super soft and it's never really maintained correctly. But anyway, it was the number one golf course. Guys from the city would go out there and the pictures are out of control of what it used to look like. And yeah, I think it was World War one or two. They had to turn it into a kind of a military zone where they would like pour concrete over it. They had to sell the golf course because it's just like at that point, I think during the Great Depression, they couldn't keep the golf course running.

And then the war struck. And I'm not sure like what happened. My American history isn't the best, but I don't know what happened first. I think it was the Depression and then the war. And they basically sold that land to local government. And they turned that into like barracks and runways and everything. And it was just forgotten for forever, which is just outrageous with how much good golf we have out here.

Right. You think of Chinnecock and National Golf Links and all the places out east. We had a place that was less than, I don't know, how far is Little Beach from the New York City? Like 10 miles away from Manhattan. Like we had an unbelievable location for what would have been the greatest golf course on the planet. So yeah, just an interesting thing.

And then the story goes that somebody, we did a whole video on this, but somebody on PGA 2K where you're able to build a golf course. I built a couple golf courses, Knives Creek and Butter's Bay. They're out there on the 2K Metaverse. Shout out. The 2K verse somewhere. Incredible golf courses.

One day I got to give you a spin around Knives Creek. It's unbelievable. Butter's Bay actually was my, Butters Bay was the number one because it was a real water feature. but some guy used the building feature where dude in 2k on on Xbox or PlayStation or PC whatever they give you a plot of land and you can start with whatever type you want you want like highlands you want water golf course do you want mountains however you want tree lined and you just start off with this plot of land and you build out a route and then it just gives you

the routing of a golf course and then you start to literally lay the grass you put you put where the rough is and you can move mounds to exact dimensions of what you want, right? You can have a mound pushing the ball from right to left. I'm telling you, you have the most, the most hands on experience of building a golf course, aside from actually doing it in PGA Tour 2K. So this guy got all of like the data. And I forget what the word was, but like what's a LIDAR. It's a LIDAR data where he was able to track exactly where LIDAR, the original Lido location. He found all these old photos. He even did shadow referencing where he saw a shadow from a photo got the data on how high the plane that took

the photo was and was able to see what time of day it was taken and that shadow that was getting casted off that hill would tell you how high that mound was and he did it to the exact fucking millimeter of what the original leader was built built this out and then I think they used that data to build the Lido Golf Club at Sand Valley so they used all the data from the video game that he built. And they sent out AI robot Elon Musk excavators. And they shaped the ground to the exact

LIDAR specifications that this guy built. Isn't that outrageous? And we played Toledo and it's fucking insane. And when you're playing the Lido at San Valley, which I guess now the midam is at, like you can picture it being one of the greatest golf courses ever, especially if there was like ocean right there. Right.

Like they don't have ocean in the middle of Wisconsin. But like it's really cool to play a, refabricated lost golf course. It's like if we lost Pebble Beach and someone built it in fucking Idaho. Right. You know what I mean? It's outrageous. Right.

You know, we just opened a new golf course in Aiken called the 21 Club that was a friend of mine bought the lost Alistair McKenzie design that was supposed to go in Argentina in an auction. And he put it right here. It just is opening like now. No way. Yeah. I've heard about this. I haven't played it yet, but I was just, that rang my bell because it came across my desk this morning. A Alistair McKinsey historian went to the 21 Club as it's now done and like talked about it based on all the history of he knows about Alistair McKenzie and how they did it and how he didn't try to make it like LIDAR like yours is saying exactly. He just took the holes and routed with the piece of land that he had.

And the historian was quoted on there saying he thought that was the right way to do it to justify the architecture. So if we ever, if we ever all get together down here again, let's go play it. Oh my God, that'd be a dream. Yeah, it's unbelievable. We actually kicked around that idea. When we were at Lido, it amazed me that people like are there trademarks and copyrights for golf routings and architecture? Like, can someone just copy Augusta National? Oh, yeah.

I think there are because, yeah, I think there should be. But I don't know to answer that. But like, can someone just build the exact same golf course somewhere? Yeah, it feels like they could. I mean, people try to make the twelfth of Augusta everywhere, you see. Yeah, I don't know. Like the whole golf course. If anybody would have a patent and their trademark, it would be them.

Right. Yeah. I feel like people do it. You know, there's like replica courses in Myrtle Beach and stuff, aren't there? true it's amazing that that doesn't take off you know like there's just these incredible courses out there just copy it just build sane it kind of has in the middle of iowa and like the o g of golf architecture i think it kind of like did you know where they would just like go to scotland and be like these are the sickest holes we're going to build those in america it's like kind of what they did

with like national golf like the template greens by c b mcdonald they're everywhere on long island and the Rayman and the Brits and all that, the punchball. Yeah, right. But yeah, it is, it is it. I would wonder if there's trademarking. That's something I've never heard of before on like golf course architecture, on designs, right? Like you created and designed something that's unique.

Is it yours? So you submit the plans. Yeah, you'd think it'd be similar to like construction, right? Like you submit the plans. They're out there. They're on blueprints. I would assume that there is some sort of, jurisdiction that that looks over all that stuff i recommend for folks over the next day or two there's

some good social accounts out there the us gauges putting some of out there of like these intense midaminer matches at the lito and it's awesome to watch because the golf course is so cool it was it's probably a top 15 for me that that we've ever done that we've ever been to i thought the lito was so incredibly cool um and i got to give a shot to drew kittleson who's a good buddy of mine in Scottsdale. He played in the Masters, the U.S. Open in like 2007 or 2008, maybe. And he's like my age now. And he's in the quarterfinals. He's down, I think, three down through nine right now, but he's in the quarterfinals at the midaminer. If you win the midameter, you play in the Masters in the U.S. Open. So Scottsdale guy, Whisk Barack guy, great, great buddy of mine.

And he's well known in the area as like the best golf. I don't know how anybody can be better at golf than he is you know and he's he's playing really well he won i think in 23 holes in the round of 32 um to advance so uh rooting for for him but uh overall just the lito getting the midaminer and seeing a bunch of the footage has got me pretty fired up because that golf course is awesome um otherwise gentlemen i think that's all i have uh speaking of taking things from people kids i'm taking rang my bell you said that that like yeah you took came across my desk. We're taking rang my bell.

I like that. You got it. Yeah, you can have that one. I'll agree to a co-share on both things. Love it. That rang my bell. It reminded me of something. That's a winner.

I said something yesterday. I hit a good drive. We played yesterday. He said it rang your bell. You ever hear that, Kiz? What? When you hit a good drive, it's in the mayor's office? Oh, yeah, all the time.

I never heard that. I don't think that's, that one's come across my, I hadn't ring my bell where I say it, but I hear a lot of other people say it. It's coming across my desk. At the RBC Heritage Pro Am on 18, I hit a great drive. And he said, that's in the mayor's office. And I had never heard it before in my life. And now I just use it.

And I was using it yesterday with Frankie, hoping it was right. And we looked it up and it was right. That's a boy. Yeah. Because when you look down the fairway, when you are on a T-box. Yeah. Oh, on a fairway. When you're on a T-box and you're looking to hit a drive,

what are you looking at when you look down at your target? The target? But like what is your target, I guess, is the question. Like, are you looking at something with the sky? You're looking at a tree. Yeah, I'm looking at a tree limb, an edge of a bunker. I'm pretty precise on that. It's not just like, hey, in between those two bunkers that are 50 yards wide.

Are you looking to land it there or start it there? Finish target. Finish target. I can't do a start. If you tell me to start it at a tree, I finish it on that tree. Yeah. Because I see the whole curve. Remember I was talking about linear and nonlinear? And when I putt, I see the whole curve when I, like if Dewey ever told me to start a ball at the flag and draw it to the middle of the green, I always just started it right to the flag and drew it to the flag.

Sort of like Jackson Coyvin did on the last hole in that match with that. Stripe that eight iron right at it. Do you approach the ball, you look up, you look at a limb on a tree and you're like, like I can vision this thing. Finishing right and landing on that spot. That's correct. And you just and you look up, you look down,

you go. Correct. Interesting. All right. Yeah, I just, I was, I don't know,

because yesterday, Brendan was flying the drone. And he flew it kind of like, let's call it 100 yards in front of the T-box, right in my line of sight. And it was like hovering right over the fairway, the beginning of the fairway, staring at us,

trying to get the shot of the ball, kind of launching. And I just stared at it and I'm like, I'm going to try and hit that thing, right? I'm just going to launch it right at that drone. And something about it. I just like went after this ball and I launched this like rising dead straight missile.

And it got me thinking about you, you see the tiger videos of all the windows he hits and stuff and how he can hit the nine windows and all the different shot shapes. I'm like, am I supposed to be trying to launch this ball through a certain part of like my window? Because I don't think about any of that. stuff you know i just kind of look down at the ball and try and make contact i'm not thinking about like where it's going where it's flying i don't know if any of us us amateur golfers are

thinking about that um and then i try it on the next hole and i duck hooked one but yeah it's something i'm working on keep grounding on it's the way to play look at your target try to figure out how to get it to that target and use one key in your swing to help you get it to that target and it sounds like kids you're saying the more specific the better because everybody gives you like between those bunkers and you're like, okay. All the time. Anywhere right of that tree is good.

Okay. Right. It's not specific enough. Yeah. And anybody that tells you don't hit it anywhere, don't talk to them anymore either because you'll just hit it there every time. Yeah, every time.

The brain doesn't know. Every time. I'll end the show on a somber note, basically a very sobering note that life sucks and everything. I've been eating healthy and doing all the right things for like two months. My cholesterol still sucks ass. No. So like,

what am I supposed to do? I haven't eaten ice cream in like two months. I'm living life like a boring old fucking loser. I'm not eating cheese. I'm walking around eating grilled chicken. I'm eating oatmeal every morning with freaking with freaking with freaking with freaking with fucking honey. What's in there?

It sucks. I had a thing called called almond malk. It's not even almond milk. It's called almond malk. It's like it's just humans aren't supposed to have this. You know, you're supposed to have just cow. cow teat milk.

That's what we're supposed to be drinking. And I'm drinking almond moth to try and fucking navigate my way around this high LDL and all this APOB bullshit. And I get the numbers back. And I eat clean for two months and it went down 4%. And they're just like, that ain't good enough. It went down, but it's like it's still unbelievably high. So now what do I do?

People say go on a statin. Do this. Then other people are saying statin takes the cholesterol out of your brain. You get dementia. Like I, you know what? I'm going to eat the nerds brie sandwich at the. the Islander game on Friday. That's all I'm going to do. I don't give a fuck anymore.

You're starting to sound like your dad. What's it all for? Yeah. What am I doing this for? I want to eat what I want. Crazy. It's crazy. There I say two monstrous isn't a long time.

Is that? Yeah. I know, but like it's like you know what? I agree with that. You kind of maybe just be cholesterol medicine in two months. But the numbers are supposed to reflect like a more impressive reduction, I think. Like, like it's supposed to be. be reduced a little bit more than that, especially with such a extreme lifestyle change.

Like basically, I talked to chat ShpT, which is going to take over the world. And I was like, is this a realistic like thing if I kept going? It's like, yeah, we'll keep going down. But like if you're at 151 and like a hundred's high, like, well, it's going to go down to 149, then 144 and then one, like, you're still going to be unbelievably high for years. So it's like, you got to get this thing down, dude. You got to get down to like 80. Like you're not dropping 80 anytime. soon. Yeah. Damn.

Yeah. I might just have to stick with the oatmeal and honey, unfortunately. sucks, dude. All right. I'm going to go eat some ice cream, man. I'd have a great day, Frank. Me too. I'm going to have a breakfast sandwich.

I'm going to get a late breakfast sandwich. Don't get me started on these authorized watch dealers. That's a show for another time. To make you feel better, once I'm done with this podcast, I'm just going to go lay on the floor until I can find a local chiropractor that will take me in and somehow get me so I can put my shoes on. Anyone that owns a place that has watches won't even respond to a text message that I send them. So that's another thing that's raising my cholesterol.

Multiple places. All around the country, by the way, all around the country. All right. We got to stop this pod. Yeah. All right. Everybody have a great weekend. You know, make sure you check out the PMT match.

Make sure you check out. If you're in Aiken, go hit up. Southern Strings Festival going to set up right now. Go enjoy your ass. out there, have a beer with kids, listen to some music. And then once again, store it up, Arsoulsports.com. We appreciate the support with any merchandise.

Big thanks to Ryan Richen grinding this week. I think he probably had a late night on Sunday night to get that post-presidents' Cup podcast out. How are your teams doing, Richon? How are your sports teams doing right now? Is I bringing you some joy? Not at all. The Packers are terrible.

It's still early in the year, but we suck. How about the Gamecocks? Gamecocks? Horrible. So bad. I was at a wedding last weekend so I couldn't watch the game. But my friends were just actually in the group chat. Like, we suck.

We suck. We suck. We suck. It's going great. But we got your best player off the team. You know? What about the brew crew? Yeah, no.

I mean, I'm just waiting on that, you know? I will admit I'm a casual baseball fan. So it's hard for me to get pumped about it until I actually had the game on my TV, if that makes sense. Like, once I'm sitting down watching it, and I'm like, all right, let's fucking go. But I'm definitely waiting on it. Understandable.

It's an opening night tonight. Let's go, baby. Let's go blues. Robert Thomas, new captain. All right. Well, thank you, Ryan, Richon. Appreciate you. What a week.

And we'll be back next week. Big thanks, again, to the Hulkca, Inc. Those guys are just the absolute best. So appreciate them coming on. Be safe. Enjoy the weekend. Play some fall golf. It's great.

And we'll see you Tuesday. Hit it hard. Hit it hard. Fuck!