No Laying Up - Golf Podcast - 1093: Life after Pro Golf with Steve Wheatcroft

Episode Date: November 20, 2025

Soly is joined by former tour pro Steve Wheatcroft to discuss his professional career and his recently released book “Cocktails and Range Balls: One's Too Many, Ten's Not Enough”. The book is a blend of memorable stories from his career at all levels of professional golf and his struggles with alcohol and what life on the road can become amidst the pressure of competing at the highest level. We’re incredibly thankful to Steve for his willingness to share his story and his foundation’s efforts to assist others who struggle with excessive drinking. Join us in our support of the Evans Scholars Foundation: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://nolayingup.com/esf⁠ Support our Sponsors: Rhoback If you enjoyed this episode, consider joining⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ The Nest⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: No Laying Up’s community of avid golfers. Nest members help us maintain our light commercial interruptions (3 minutes of ads per 90 minutes of content) and receive access to exclusive content, discounts in the pro shop, and an annual member gift. It’s a $90 annual membership, and you can sign up or learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠nolayingup.com/join⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to the No Laying Up Newsletter here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://newsletter.nolayingup.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to the No Laying Up Podcast channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@NoLayingUpPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Be the right club. Be the right club today. Yes. I mean, that's better than most. How about him? That is better than most. Better than most. Expect anything different?

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. to the No Laying Up podcast. Sali here, got an interview coming shortly with Steve Weecroft. He's got a book out. It's called Cocktails and Range Balls, Not Enough. If you'd like stories from the many tours, from the Corn Ferry Tour, from the smaller levels of the PGA tour, Steve has lived it, and he has written a book about it. And he's here to tell a bunch of those stories as well. Steve is also very open and honest about some of the struggles he had with transitioning out of golf and what life has been like after golf.

and the depression he's faced and alcoholism and rehab. And he's very open with all of that. And his goal in writing this book and doing this podcast and starting the foundation that he has started is to help anyone, anyone that might be dealing with something similar or know of someone in your life that is dealing with something similar. And I'm really proud of Steve and really happy for him for how he's turned things around and how vulnerable he has been in this entire process. You will see exactly what I'm talking about in this interview. And I greatly appreciate you tuning in for it. I know Steve will as well.

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Ro-back has you covered. Without any further delay, here is Steve Weakcroft. You know what's funny, Weedy? my first ever like memory of you is well before we met we probably met seven eight years ago now at this point of you know i just finished reading your book and you write about this this birdie fest you have you winning a corn fairy tour event by 12 that was the first like memory i have is like this steve wheatcroft guy this guy can fill it up and you fast forward i moved to jacksonville within the first three or four months of moving in jacksonville i'm teeing it up with you and like witnessing firsthand just like just how

fast this guy could fill it up and man it's so interesting reading your book and just like hearing the backstory of your career your i'd fair to say journeyman is that fair to describe yourself and your path to get i never even knew your path to getting to professional golf and it's just a really interesting story yeah it's uh it's a very interesting story that's part of the reason i wrote it is because you know for instance i was given a golf lesson to a just a family friend the other day they've got some young boys and you know they're seven 11, 13, and the mom said to me, I want you to go out and watch the boys and just let me know if they have any chance of moving to the next level. And I just looked and I was like, okay, I'll go out

and give me my thoughts. And I watched it play nine holes. And when I got done, I said, Mrs. So I'm just going to let you know. I played 20 years of professional golf, seven on the PGA tour, seven on the corn fairy. The best accomplishment I ever had as a junior was qualifying for the state championships as a junior in high school. I shot nine. 9685. That's the best thing I ever did as a junior golfer. And you want me to tell these, you know, a 7 and 11 and a 13 year old, they're not good enough to maybe try, you know, take a chance of professional golf someday. My point is like, you never know what you're going to get, man. You could be a teen, you know, a teen prodigy at 14 years old and never play a lick of professional

golf or you could pick up the game when you're 17. Luckily, I was a late bloomer. The college setting, you know, improved my game from, you know, being a walk on at Indiana, having zero business being on that team to to be in an all big 10 selection a couple times and uh but even then i never thought about playing professional golf i just i knew that the guys that i've been playing with from michigan state iowa penn state uh all those guys that i've known for four years kept saying they were going to turn pro and i would always ask them at what um because i didn't understand and i was like well you suck at golf i mean i've been i stuck and i've been beating you for four years and so that's the only reason i tried it honestly um but yeah it's it's been an interesting

path to say the least well we're going to talk about life is like after golf and the transition from pro golf into uh you know the real world if you will and what has been unique about your particular journey on that front but before we get there it's it's if if your book if your words in the book are to be believed it does kind of seem like a little one year experiment of maybe we let's give the pro golf thing a try i'm in my early 20s i got nothing else to do turns into 20 years of experimenting with like and not only that it just seemed like you were teetering on the edge of wondering if you wanted to continue to do this for such a long period of time. And sure enough, you look up and you're in your 40s and you're still

playing professional golf. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. I mean, they were basically, I had 20 one year experiments. I didn't know what to expect any year, man. That's the one thing about professional golf. You don't know if you're going to be a three-time PGA tour winner at the end of the year or if you're going to finish 220th on the money list and not have any status in the world, especially being the golfer that I was. I was very, you know, you mentioned Maryland earlier. I could go out and win a corn fairy event by 12 and then I could miss the next eight cuts. I mean, I never had any idea what was coming. If I felt really good about my golf game, it was usually a bad sign because things, you know, I was going to miss a lot of cuts coming

up. So yeah, it was a bunch of one year experiments and I just kept going and I just said, look, if I, you know, especially on the mini tours, I said, if I don't get better or if I feel like I've kind of peaked, then I'll walk away and I'm fine with it. But at least I tried it. At least I gave it a shot, and least I won't have any regrets going forward. And I just slowly kept getting a little bit better every year. And, you know, I went from making half the cuts to making most of the cuts, to winning on the many tours, to dominate on the many tours. And, you know, I was always that guy that once I got a little comfortable, it became a lot easier for me to play good golf. Well, how does, you know, I can't, I never tire of hearing people's stories of the, you know,

it is a bit romantic, I guess, of motel to motel, uh, working. in a couple jobs to fund, you know, the college, the professional golf experiment, the, trial to it. You tell, talk to us about how you, you know, maybe pursued, you pursued some investment into your game, how that didn't work out and kind of how you funded the beginning of your journey, because it's a really fun story. Yeah, it's an interesting one. So, yeah, I was 23 years old. I was, you know, I went to college for five years. I registered the first year when I walked on, but I got out. So I was 23 years old, and I was trying to put together a partnership of guys. So I put together an agreement where I would sell shares of, you know,

myself at $5,000 a share. I would try to pull money together. I was trying to raise about $50,000 or $60,000, figured that he'd get me through a year on the mini tours with all the travel and everything that comes with it. But I had a few people starting to bite on it, but then I had this one gentleman that I worked at the country club and, you know, he owned the country club. But he invited me to his office one day to talk about the agreement. And as soon as I walked in, he just said, look, I don't do partnerships. And I thought it was kind of weird. I like you could have just told me this over the phone and uh he's like what if i did the whole thing and i was like the whole thing and he's like yeah how much do you need i was like well i you know i've

i've been hearing from guys that are doing it already that you might need 50 or 60 000 a year or so and he looked at his cFO who was in the in the room as well and he said what if we gave him 80 000 a year for three years and i my jaw hit the floor he's like yeah we can do that we have that and uh i didn't know what to say i mean i was floored right i mean this is the opportunity of all opportunities. And I said, Mr. So-and-so, you know, I, you know, I'm leaving for Q school tomorrow. I've got first stage. I've never been to Q school, but I'm going down to Tampa for first stage of Q school. As soon as I'm done there, I can come back up here. We can go over the agreement, talk about finances, how we're going to make this work. And he asked what my plan

was. And I said, well, I was going to drive straight from Tampa over to West Palm. You know, I worked at Oakmont and all the Oakmont guys get on the Seminole. So I know some people in the area. And he's like, no, just go down. You're good. We have a big hotel deal that's supposed to go through next week. He said, we're going to be busy as can be anyway. But you just head over there and find yourself like a little one-bedroom apartment or something, and we'll be in touch with the deal. So I went down, and I obviously wasn't comfortable because I didn't have anything in writing yet. And luckily, Bob Ford, who was, you know, the head professional at Oakmont and Seminole, said, you know, hey, Stevie boy, why don't you just live here? So I lived in the clubhouse at

Seminole, which is kind of a wild, you know, story now looking back on it that, you know, they let some 23-year-old kid live in that clubhouse, which is like the hallowed grounds of golf. And, yeah, I, yeah, I don't know what I was doing there, but it was great. But yeah, I lived in there for about two weeks, two and a half weeks, and then I just felt like I was over staying my welcome, and it was time for me to, you know, go get that apartment. Well, I never heard from these guys, and they just said, hey, look, our hotel deal is getting strung along.

It's fine. We'll be in touch you. You're good to go. And so I finally get the one-bedroom apartment. About three days later, they called and said, hey, the hotel deal went bad. Unfortunately, we're not going to be able to do the deal. And I said, okay, what's that mean?

Does that mean one year instead of three? Does that mean, you know, $40,000 instead of, 50, whatever the numbers were. And he's like, no, we can't do anything. And I was like, so I got no money coming in. He's like, no, sorry. You know, we just didn't see this one coming. And now we can't do this deal.

So now I'm, you know, in West Palm Beach, a strange place. I've never lived in Florida in my life. And I have a one-bedroom apartment. I've got bills. I've got tournaments coming up and I have no money coming in. So I started working at Seminole. I was caddian in the mornings. And then I was going to wait tables at a sports bar called Duffies

in the afternoon and evening. is it still there is duffy's still there ironically enough i met bob ford yesterday morning for breakfast and it was about 500 or about 300 yards from duffies and it did just closed um they closed that location there's still plenty other locations down there but they just closed it within the last couple months uh they must have got word that i was writing a book and talking about it in there so but no so duffies was there and i remember actually i brought this up to bob yesterday i said i remember walking over and they said hey steve you got seated on table whatever and I looked over and it was Bob Ford and his family sitting there and I was like I told him I said Bob I'd never felt lower in my life I was like that you know there's the the head professional at Oakmont and Seminole the guy looked up to my whole life and there you were and I was about to go wait on you and your family and I you know waiting tables three weeks after I got done Monday qualifying for a PJ tour event and here I was but yeah so I did that for a little while and then I realized I was never getting to play golf so I started working as an assistant professional at a place called Jonathan's Landing and then I

I would go wait tables at a nicer higher-end restaurant called Waterway Cafe where I could make a little bit extra money and higher tips. And then I would go down the street to the North Palm Beach driving range and hit yellow strippers under the lights until about 1130 at night. Because, you know, God forbid, I was still professional golfer, right? Well, and this, we skim past the part where you live at Oakmont as well. Yeah. Like what years, this is during college that you did that?

Is that right? Yeah, greatest summers of all time. So I was at Oakmont for three years, or three summers. I'd come home from Indiana and I was working there. So the first year I stayed downtown in Pittsburgh, and in the last two summers I stayed, I literally lived in the top floor of Oakmont's Clubhouse. My bedroom window looked straight down onto the 18th Green down the fairway.

It was unbelievable. I had a good friend that worked there with me. We'd roll out of bed, hung over in the morning after a long night out, you know, grab our caddy assignments. We'd be out on the course by 9 o'clock or so. go caddy 18 holes come in one of us would pick the range one of us work out there on the porch take care of the members we'd be done by five o'clock grab our bags go walk 18 holes at oakmont walk right off the 18th green run up the stairs shower head down into either oakmont or downtown

pittsburgh depending on how we were feeling and uh you know get after it that night and then do it all over again the next day it was the greatest summer in the world man that's the especially when you're in college that had to yeah you know your body will let you do whatever you want to it. Yes. 21, 22, 23 years old, man, just living your best life. Single as can be, just having a blast, man. It was so good. Well, okay, so you go out on the mini tours, though, and is it, are you, are you desperate to make the corn fairy tour? Are you, are you seeing a PGA tour future? Or are you just seeing like, I wonder if I can even beat guys on the mini tours. And kind of take me to what that environment is like. And, and, uh, and, and, and did you

enjoy that time period yeah i mean the first year was what the hell am i doing i mean i'm staying in alabama in these you know 39 99 a night hotel or motels um and you usually have a roommate of some kind i had you know roommate from ohio state that i was kind of traveling with and you know he and i would share rooms a lot of times but it was just kind of get your feet wet you know they don't have yardage books you're out there kind of creating your own yardage books and trying to do all these different things just learn how to be a professional golfer um and like i said i i didn't make many cuts. I made about half the cuts the first year playing these developmental players tour. And, you know, looking back now, there was guys like Boo Weekly and Bubba Watson and Heath

Slocum and Ryan Armour and some really good players that were out there, just getting their feet wet too. But, you know, at the time you don't know any better, you're like, hey, there's some guys trying to make a cut like I am. But I slowly started to get a little bit better. And then I was down in West Palm Beach, and I was playing on what's called the Gateway Tour or the Golden Bear Tour, they kind of combined after a while. But there was some better money on those tours. And then by 2005, I, you know, I'd won a little bit in 04, but then in 05, I was just dominating. I was winning. I won the money list playing nine of the 14 events is all.

You know, I won back-to-back weeks, had a second, a third. I mean, it's just, you know, they were paying $35,000 a week if you won, and I won back-to-back weeks. I thought I was the richest human being in the world. And I remember Steve Marino and I, Steve Marino was a longtime PJ tour player as well, super successful. But he and I were dominating on the mini tours down there. So we partnered up to play in an event out in Vegas called Big Stakes.

big stakes golf and it was a hundred thousand dollar entry fee which i had some businessmen that kind of threw the money together they got eight of them and i called him about it and i said he's like who's your partner going to be i said it's going to be marino and i and he's like let me make some calls he called him back 10 minutes later he's like you're good to go so it was in vegas and this was that summer like he and i were just on like we were on a different level our confidence was through the roof we both thought we were going to win every week and we showed up in Vegas it was just two-man best ball and it just drew ping pong balls out at night team 17's got going to play team 43 tomorrow and it was you know 64 teams and the winner got three million dollars

and i just remember playing that and i had so much confidence going into that event and if you won your first two matches you got your hundred thousand dollars back and then you won your fourth match your third match you got another hundred thousand and then 150 then 250 then 250 and it just kept growing the better you played but that was just having that experience of winning all year i went into an event like that and normally i would have been terrified and steve and i had this side bet going like who could make the most birdies in a round and we're playing for our own money because we were both that confident and no we didn't end up winning we lost our third round match and it was still to this day probably the most heartbroken i've ever been on a golf course because i knew that

every team there was scared of us and we just uh we had one bad nine hole stretch and uh but anyway the point of the story is like i i never thought about going to the corn fairy tour i never thought about playing on the pj tour like guys like tiger and vj and phil mickleston i mean those guys were in a different stratosphere. Like I was a good mini-tort player. I could slap a slice around South Florida and be fine. I could, you know, I'd get the putter hut and win an event here and there. But just all I was doing was basically killing time.

I knew I was going to end up a head professional somewhere working in the golf course, you know, realm or sports world somewhere. I just wanted to be involved in athletics. But yeah, so I don't know. I got through Q school finally. Well, yeah, take us to Q school. So are you doing Q school every year? Oh, yeah.

When is the first time that things go a little bit differently for you at Q school? Yeah, it was later that year. Same thing, 2005. I was just super confident all year. And I thought that I was going to kind of breeze through. And I did for the most part. I went to first stage and I won first stage. I went to second stage and it was in Tampa.

And I think I was in, I don't know, 12th or 15th place or something like that on the last hole. And I remember playing with Kevin Johnson and Tripp Eisenhower and two like wily old vets out there. And I hit it in there to 20 feet. or so and I lagged it up and I mean I couldn't have been 12 inches and I just walked up like I was going to mark it and I looked over and KJ kind of smiled at me and I was like do you guys care if I go like I'm I need to if I mark this there's no chance I'm going to make this if I sit here and think about this for a minute I didn't know if it was to get through or not get through I knew I was probably safe but I was terrified and the second that put dropped I knew I was through and like that's

the big break everybody needs that now you have a a sang a PGA sanctioned tour to go play on you have a set schedule. You don't have to play the mini tours. You're not putting up your own money every week. Now you're going to go play and you can actually get some contracts. You can get benefits. You can do stuff like that. So that was the big break for me. But that being said, you know, you think I'd be riding high like I'm playing the best golf of my life. Here we go on the corn fairy tour. And as I wrote in the book, I don't even really remember much of that year. All I remember is being in different cities and traveling by myself and feeling lonely for the first time. It's like, God, I've spent eight weeks on the road by myself. I don't have friends around. I don't have family around. I'm traveling through the

northeast, then through the Midwest. But I finished like 85th on the money list. And I just remember like, okay, I gave it a shot. You know, I'm just not good enough. That's fine. I'm okay with that. I'm not going to, you know, I'll walk away from the game and be fine with it. And I's like, I'll give Q School one last try. And if I get a like a full time nationwide tour card, now I can set my schedule. Now I know the golf course is better. Like maybe that's my Avenue. And yeah, so I went to Q school, kind of one last shot. And I shot 73, 71, 75, something like that, the first three rounds. I was in 110th place. But at the same time, like, my goal was top 75. That's all I thought about was like, just get inside the top 75 number. Never thought

about PJ tour. Never. Not once. Like zero. Just find a way to get onto the nationwide tour. And I shot 65. I remember on the Nicholas course and moved way up. And I was like in 49th or something. And I was like, all right, just try to keep your spot now. And I shot 65 again, moved up to 22nd. And then shit got real. Now I'm like, okay, I'm in 22nd place. And I know they give 25 of those things out tomorrow. I don't belong there.

But, you know, this is going to be weird if that happens. And sure enough, I went out the next day and I was nervous as hell. I didn't sleep. And I remember thinning a nine iron that I was like, oh, my God, like my hands were shaking. And I just came out of it, hit it thin. it landed on the front part of the green, ran back to this back right flag and was four feet underneath the hole. And I was like, oh, my God, did I get away with that one? And I was just like, all right, I got somehow snuck out a birdie. Let's see what happens. And I mean, I just played

flawless golf the rest of the day. I was five under going into 17, which is the island green. And I just, I, it's still to this day, it's the most nervous I've ever been on a golf course. Because I walked up there and we had to wait because their group was just now getting onto the green. And I looked at my catty Ernie and I was like, buddy, if you ever had a joke. If you ever had something to lighten the mood, now's the time. Like, and he looked at me like, I was joking. I'm like, no, no, I'm serious. Like, what do you got?

Because he always had jokes ready. And, but yeah, when it came time to pull the trigger, it was like a seven iron into the wind. And I hit it. And I just remember pan in the sky, just trying to find that golf ball. Like, good Lord, just find green. Just find grass. Because I knew if I could bail out on 18, I could play it safe, make five, six, whatever. And the second that thing hit the ground, I was just like a relief came over me.

Like I'd never felt before. Like, it was like, holy good God, this. is happening. And I made par there, made par on 18, shot 67. I ended up finishing seventh after all that. And, uh, you're off to the PGA tour. And again, again, it's like, I should be brimming with confidence, right? Like, oh my God, I just finished seventh. I had the lowest last three rounds of anybody in the field. Like, I've been, I've been trending the right direction for years. I'm, I should be ready to go dominate. And I just remember one of the, uh, the woman from the golf channel came over and interviewed me off air. And she's like, are you ready to go play on the PJ tour?

I said, I'm about to get my shit kicked in next year, like really, really bad. Like, I have no business being out there. That's all I could think of. Like, I wasn't ready. I knew I wasn't ready. And it was all my list of questions to ask you. It was like, what does it like to make it on tour and realize you don't belong? And I have in parentheses, he's like, these are your words, not mine, all right?

No, 100%. You say this. And I, I think there's a case to be made that you are one of 0.01% of golfers, maybe less than that lives the most tortured. existence in terms of like if you're listening at home i've seen this man play golf you have no idea how good steve wecroft is a golf like you have no idea yet you just hear yourself talk about like i'm not even close to pGA tour i'm not you just live in this existence of like you can't even you're not an amateur golfer you're definitely not an amateur golfer

but are you good enough to compete on the pGA tour well you played seven years out there so it's impossible to say you're not good enough for that but this you i feel like you have constantly had this weighing over you in reading your book of in this 20 year career of like what your identity is as a golfer because there's times where you were just brimming with confidence and you feel like you're a world beater and it's it's not i'm not saying this as in like your your mental weakness held you back in any way like you're just very self-aware of like what your physical abilities are compared to like the best of the best yeah i think it's a great way to put it and you know growing up in a you know small town outside of pittsburgh

you know, professional golf wasn't anywhere around us, other than Arnold Palmer was, you know, nearby in La Trobe, and Rocco Media, it was from that area, and he got on the PG tour. There was no professional golf. It's not like you grew up in South Florida, and everybody's playing golf. And so I just think that watching guys on TV and knowing how good they were, and these best of the best in the world, that in the back of my mind, I always just assumed, like that was not attainable. That was for different people. That wasn't for guys like me. That was for these phenom athletes, the Tiger Woods of the world that, you know, are just worshipped in every golf circle in the world. and, you know, I was barely making a high school team.

I was to beg for a walk on trout in college. Like, no part of my path said he should be on the PGA tour competing with the best players in the world. But again, I had that brain that my mind was always a weird thing and that I always thought I had the strongest mind out there. But I was also very self-aware of who I was. And I never felt like I belonged. But at the same time, if I faltered, if I failed, if I did something poorly out there, I got over it pretty quickly. And I was mentally strong enough that I could get over things and come right back and be like, nope, can't keep me down. I'm coming right back.

And I would get up and fight again. I'd get up and fight again until I couldn't. But yeah, it's just my mind was a really strange thing because I was so hard on myself while I played, which is probably the worst thing I did. But it was probably the best thing I did as well because it kept driving me to come back and do it again. As strange as that sounds. And I mean, even now looking back on it, man, I don't know where I fit in the whole grand scheme of things. I know I was a good golfer. I know I, you know, yesterday you and I were texting about this interview,

and I was down at the park in West Palm Beach playing. It's blowing 25 or 30 miles an hour. I'd never seen the golf course before, and I shot 64. And I get done. And it's like, yeah, I mean, it was fun. I shot 64. And like, in the grand scheme of things, shooting 64 on that golf course, the first time you see it is unheard of.

So, like, I know there's talent in there. And I know I have potential to do a lot of great things in the game of golf. But I just never, you know, Tiger could have. been beside me and shot 73 and I still wouldn't think that I was a better golfer than he was as weird as that sounds and I just I don't know I was never I never gave myself enough credit for the stuff I was doing while I was out there you know looking back now to think like hey I played seven years on the PJ tour I played 350 events on this you know PG and corn fairy like that's I never thought I'd play one event and I played 350 of them but again I never gave myself credit because you get so lost

in the moment out there too it's like all right what's next lost my card where I got to go going back to corn fare. I'm going back to mini tours. All right, that's fine. Let's go. What do I got to do better? What do I have to practice? You know, where am I lacking? Where are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? And it just you get so lost in the day to day that you don't enjoy it while you're out there. You know, I tell all the young guys now, just whatever you do, man, I don't care if you play one event or a thousand of them. Just enjoy it because it's going to be over so fast. Well, I think it speaks to, you don't hear a ton of guys with long careers or even medium-length careers that just are raving about how much fun they're having doing it, right?

Because, yep, which is wild. When I was a kid, all I would have ever wanted to be was a pro golfer because it looked like the most glamorous lifestyle ever. And, you know, reading it, reading about like your story in particular and just hearing from other people, it just doesn't seem like you're having the most fun out there. I'm wondering what you could speak to on that in terms of the pressure you're playing under. and again to somebody sitting in a cubicle probably saying man I would love to be playing golf for a living

that sounds like the most fun ever we've probably touched on that over the years as to some of the not as fun sides but what can you what's your perspective kind of on on you know the years you spent out there and what it has done with to you and your life the best way I can put this and I've said this I've told this story a couple of times I was interviewing Jay

Billis for a podcast that I was doing as well and I interviewed Jay Billis ESPN announcer college basketball but he played two years of professional basketball overseas in Spain. And I asked him, I said, what was it like playing for those two years? And he's like, honestly, I'd never had more fun playing the game of basketball. Like, they were paying me for the game I loved. And I just, and my brain started working the opposite. Like, I started thinking about that.

And I didn't say anything at the time, but more I thought about it. I was like, I never hated the game more than when I played professionally. It wasn't a job. It was a job then, right? Like when you play in college, when you're playing in high school, when you're playing with your buddies, when you're playing on the mini tours even, it was like, it was enjoyable. You loved it for the game that it was. You didn't worry about cuts.

You didn't worry about money. You didn't worry about what you looked like on TV. You didn't worry. Like, you just loved, you, you played the game for the love of the game. And I think the more you play on the professional level, the more it becomes a job and the less you love the game. And you can see that now with, you know, especially the older you get out there when I'd have to go back to the corn fairy tour.

I mean, obviously, you know, for those that don't understand the PGA tour going back to the Corn Ferry tour, it's a normal step everybody just talks about like oh you had to go back down to the corn freight tour it's a 94% pay cut 94% like so if you if you're doing your daily job now and you're getting $100,000 imagine your boss walking into you know December 31st and saying you're doing a great job we love having you here we need you do the exact same job we're going to move your office down to the janitor's closet and now we're going to give you $6,000 a year instead of $100,000 but keep it up though you got a place to work good luck to you that's basically what the equivalent of going to the corn fairy tour is, right? So nobody coming from the PGA going to the corn fray tour is excited about it. So you show up at the first event in Panama and you're like, okay, yep, I'm in Panama. I'm going to play golf again for a living. And you have these 23-year-old kids that are coming out of college that are so excited to be there because it's their first event.

Now they're playing professional golf. They're so excited to be on the corn fairy tour, the 30-year-old that's been fighting through the mini-tours and he finally got his corn fairy tour break. He's out there. He's so excited to be there. I can't wait to get off that tour, right? So now you start to hate the game a little bit more because now you're doing the same job for 6% of the pay. But you have to work just as hard, if not harder, to try to get back to that old life. And it's when it becomes that mental grind of going up and down and up and down, and it's just, it's hard or it's easy to start to hate the game because it's not enjoyable like it used to be.

Now it's, you put the time in on the range because your stats. are terrible and you're missed three cuts in a row and like you have to go practice instead of like no i want to go hit balls i couldn't tell you the you know in those two or three years that i finished my career i don't know if i hit balls one time where i actually wanted to go hit balls uh it was because i kind of had to go hit balls or i felt like i needed to go hit balls for you know my career but yeah there was no you know when i was younger i just i was dying to go hit balls i was dying to go chip and put i was dying to go do all these things because i just loved the game and loved learning about the game. It's definitely not what you watch on TV, as all I'll tell people. And that's why when

you're, for the younger guys that are coming up, 100%, it's one of the greatest careers you'll ever have. And I wasn't even that good at it. I was out there for a long time. I was the journeyman. I had staying power, but that was about it. I didn't make me rich. It didn't make me, you know, lifelong friends out there. It didn't, you know, but the experiences and just the journey of playing professional golf is something I, you know, I never would have traded for anything. I want to get into, again, a big core of your book, and I want to get back into a lot more fun stuff about professional golf in there. But you've detailed in the book, and we're going to break this down here,

some pretty severe struggles you've had getting out of professional golf into your transition into the real world. And before we get to that, can you talk to me about what your relationship was like with alcohol specifically during your playing days? And kind of, you know, we were all partying in college. And, you know, as you transition from the very fun Oak Monty summers into being out on the road and whatnot, what your relationship was like then towards when golf gets higher up and more serious, kind of what your relationship is like and kind of how that transitions into your post golf life. Yeah, of course. I didn't even have my first drink until I was, I think, 17 or 18.

Just never drank at all. All my friends were going to high school parties drinking, you know, in the fields or on bonfires, doing all this stuff. I never did any of that stuff. It just wasn't for me. I didn't enjoy the thought of drinking. I went to college. I did what everybody else does. You go to fraternity parties.

You go to the bars. You do all the stuff. You start drinking beers and having some drinks. But like I never, I was never the guy that was out of control. I was never the guy, you know, throwing up in the bushes. I was, you know, usually in control of things. When I was playing professional golf, I'd drink on the off weeks for fun, but it was always in control.

I did it for fun. I never did it for any other reason just to go out and have a few beers with the boys. and things like that. I guess later in my career, towards the end of the 20 years, I started to drink more on the road. You know, I never went out and partied. I was getting to that age. I mean, I'm late 30s, early 40s at the time.

You know, you're not going to bars, party in late. I just, that was never my scene anyway. So, I mean, I'd go out and have dinner and have a few drinks, have a few cocktails, things like that. I started, you know, 2016, 17, maybe if I was on a really bad stretch, I started to drink a little bit more out of the, you know, kind of drink the sorrows away drink whatever you want to call it away but again i mean i was in control with everything it wasn't like it was a bad a bad issue um and then i guess my last year

2019 when i was on the corn fairy tour i probably drank a little too much that year on the road traveling like trying to and i say that not like i was a full-blown alcoholic on the road or something but it would you know i'd get into a town i'd you know grab of something for in the room to have you know a couple drinks here a couple drinks there when i probably didn't need it because I'm trying to go, you know, I'm in Springfield, Missouri, and it's 113 degrees. Do you really need to be drinking the night before and getting more dehydrated than what you already are? But again, I wasn't doing it for a negative reason or it wasn't, it was just kind of normal

stuff that, you know, probably a decent amount of the guys out there are doing, but did I need to do it? No, probably not. But again, like, the big thing was I was always in control of it. It never, it never controlled me. I could stop drinking the next day if I needed to. I could stop drinking for a month. I could take two weeks off while I was on the road playing.

and big tournaments that I wanted to focus on, whatever it was. Like, it wasn't an issue then. Well, because I think what is, what's interesting here, and what a massive takeaway, I think, is here from your story. And one, a takeaway I had from Chris Kirk's story as well was it was not necessarily the alcohol as it was, the alcohol was in your mind or, you know, again, I've not gone through struggles like this. So it's always hard to find the right words of this.

But the alcohol is, is the cover up for a bigger problem you have going on. right he was you know he in his words he was anxious he was going through depression and drinking alone in his hotel rooms before he realized he had a problem you seem to be kind of struggling with the idea of transitioning out of professional golf again kind of where i wanted to start with the one year experiment 20 years later here we are figuring out what you're going to do with your first real job when you're in your 40s i imagine is is leading to some anxiety and some stress and you know you're constantly the ups and downs and the emotions of figuring out if the next year's going to be your last if this year's going to be your last talk to me about your decision to hang it up to be done and

what the transition into the quote real world was like yeah it's funny because i almost had about 12 of those transitions where i was like all right i'm done with the game you know 2006 i could go back to like that the year that i got the pj tour card like i was transitioning out of the game i was already looking into what job i was going to go to and then i went to cue school and things changed obviously, 2013, the end of that year, or sorry, 2014, I was playing after two years on the Corn Freight Tour. I was done. Like, I was interning with the Golf Channel and with CBS for trying to build tape for CBS. But I would play in the morning on the Corn Fairy Tour and then I'd go out and walk with Rich Beam and try to build tape, you know, so that I could go into my broadcasting

career the next year, right? So I was, I had gone through numerous episodes where I was like, I think I'm done after this. But then when I played the PJ Tour, in 2015, 16, 17, 18, had to go back to the court ferry in 19. At that point, I was, what was I, 41, 42. And it's just like, I got two kids at home, man. Like, I don't, I'm, you know, in Boise, Idaho, hiding behind a leaderboard trying to face-time my kid at his birthday party. And I'm like, this isn't the life I want to live anymore. Like, I just, I can't do this. I'm competing against 22, 23-year-old kids that are, you know, absolute phenoms. They have no responsibilities in the world. They're just out here freewheeling. They're happy to be here. I'm not happy to be here. I'm tired of

the grind. My body's starting to hurt. Just old man problems, right? So 2019, I kind of saw the writing on the wall. I got off to a good start that year. I made some, some, a bunch of cuts early and was making good money and was thinking, okay, here we go. And then I went on a run where I think I missed like eight and nine cuts. And at that point, it's like, okay. And I started making the phone calls, like trying to line up for what job I'm going to slide into next. And I pretty much had most of the things figured out. And then I went to Springfield, Missouri. I flew in Wednesday afternoon. This is how much I was carrying. I withdrew from Omaha because it was 115 degrees. I think I'd done like four or five in a row. I shot 77, knew I wasn't going to make the cut. And I was like, I'm not going to go out

and do this to my body again the next day. Like I'm mentally spent, went home, didn't, didn't even pull my clubs out of the travel bag. They just stayed in my trunk in the travel bag from Friday morning until Wednesday afternoon. I got in the car. I drove to the airport, flew into Springfield, Missouri, landed at 5 p.m. They had already closed up registration for the week. I had to register Thursday morning, and I was the first tee time out. So I had to go in there, make sure I could sign like, hey, I am here officially. But yeah, I hit 30 minutes worth of golf balls Wednesday afternoon, putted for 20, 30 minutes, went home, and I was the first tea time out the next morning with a caddy that I'd never met before. He was a college kid that they had.

lined up for me and Sunday afternoon I finished second I shut 20 20 under 21 under 22 I don't even remember 20 something under uh finish second and jumped to like 35th on the money list I was like here we go again um I mean I can't even retire correctly right so I was all excited I was like okay maybe this is the push I needed like we only had we had San Francisco the next week and then the final event was in Portland and then we were going to the playoffs right after that so I was like I got two tournaments here I could make a big push here and try to get in this 25 and I remember I went to San Francisco and I hate that golf course I'd never played it well and I shot five under in a nine hole practice round on Tuesday and I shot six under in the pro M nine whole pro M on Wednesday and I was like my god am I

ready to go like I'm just playing good golf we're back we're back I'm so back and then I woke up Thursday morning and I couldn't move my neck. And I had done something. I ended up eventually getting an epidural in my neck, but it was locked up. My right arm was half numb. I could get to impact, but then after impact, like my whole body had to rotate up and out of it. I mean, I couldn't even swing golf club. If it was any other tournament, I would have withdrawn instantly. But I had to try to play through it because I only had two tournaments left. And I shot 76 or something like that the first round and 66 I think the second round when it loosened up finally but it was done and I knew like I wasn't going to be able to make up enough ground in Portland so I withdrew from Portland went home went to the

playoffs which was just a like I knew as soon as I woke up with that neck problem I was done and I went to the playoffs but it was I mean pointless I didn't even need to be there um but yeah I just said enough was enough and I truly like I end up finishing 43rd 44th in the money list as I tell people I made $108,000 that year. It probably cost me $108,000 to do the job for the year, roughly. So I haven't paid a bill at home yet, right? So I've got a wife, two kids, a life at home. None of those bills have been paid. So you can imagine how much money I lost on the year, playing a decent year on the nation ride or corn fairy tour. So I walked away from the game with, you know, with COVID. I ended up getting like 35 or 36 starts because they combined them.

And so you had two years of starts and I never used any of them. Didn't want them. Just let them all go. they expired last year after five years but yeah I was fine with it I didn't mind like I truly didn't miss it I thought I would but you know six months after I was done I was watching golf one day and my wife's like how bad do you miss it I was like I don't at all it's weird I thought I was really going to miss this but I don't I think I just I knew I was burn out um and this was kind of the validation that I needed like I knew I was I was done and uh so that was the good part I mean I didn't I didn't come you know a lot of guys are forced out of the game like they lose their status and then they they miss it what if what if what if and i was like no i did

things my way like i i was tired i just i didn't want to do the grind anymore you have to be you have to be ready for the grind because if you're not you're going to get past especially now with the game the way the game's changed it's it's so different than what i got started and unless you're out there just banging balls all day every day getting better you're you're going to get passed so so what is are you rolling right into a job do you have you know you've you've, you've, you've, you've met all these people from, from all over the world. We'll get into some of those fun stories as well. I'm sure you've made connections in, uh, in your year.

Can you talk, tell us about what that environment is like. I mean, you know, this whole time, especially if you're wondering if every year is the year, are you, are you keeping close contacts with a bunch of your pro-am partners and stuff over the years to see what you might be able to do? What are your skills that you can transition, uh, into something? So you get a six iron really, really, really well. How does that pay off in the business world? Yeah, that's the fun part.

When you say, what are your skills? I had no idea, man. Like, you know, I'm on resume.com or resume builder.com going, what the heck do I like skills? I don't know. I was proficient and not three putting. I led the tour in putting from 25 feet now at one year. Like, is that a skill? Like, you know, references, do I put my caddy down?

Like, is he the best reference for me? I don't know. Do I go back to my Duffy's days of waiting tables? Is that, like, is that relevant at this point? I don't know. I had made some great contacts. I had a good friend that was a kind of a higher up at Northwestern Mutual. And, you know, most athletes get into either insurance, investments, something along those lines or real estate. So that was kind of the insurance, the investment space. And he's like, look, you'd be great at this. We'd love to have you. Come work with me in D.C. And I didn't want to go to D.C. so he hooked me up with the people here in Jacksonville. And so I kind of had that job not lined up, like ready to go. but it was more or less a foregone conclusion. I went in for the interview and did all that stuff and got hired immediately, had to go get all my licensing credentialing done, and I did all that quickly.

But yeah, I mean, I kind of had that ready to go. I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know anything about that world, man. I just, I knew, and I told everybody that. I was, you know, I'm self-aware enough, as you can tell by what I wrote in the book and the way this interview is gone. Like, I'm not afraid to say what's on my mind. And I told them blatantly, I don't know the first.

thing about this. And they're like, that's fine. As long as you're, you have a good sense of who you are, you can talk to people. We can teach you to the industry. That's not the problem. So I didn't know any difference. I figured I got to do something. So I started that career. And it was going well. I mean, I thought I sucked at it. It's like me waiting tables. I thought I was the worst waiter in the place. And the general manager would look and say, no, you're actually the best we have. And I thought I was doing a bad job at the investment space and insurance investment space and I won rookie of the year for the, you know, Southeast territory. So I don't know.

Was I enjoying it? No, not a whole lot. I mean, I did and I didn't. I knew nothing was going to be professional golf. I mean, that was kind of a dream career, to say the least. But I just kind of did what I did with golf. I put my head down and went to work and wanted to see where it would leave me. So if I understand the timeline, right, things are not going poorly for you. fresh off of this transition mentally from from that standpoint when when do things start uh start not going as well for you and is there is there anything that that kind of triggered that or started that that part of the process yeah probably about two years after i retired maybe mid 2021 i don't even know the exact date but i just remember waking up and just not feeling right

i just felt depressed and i'd never been depressed in my life and i didn't know what it was didn't know what was causing it i just figured out like every other guy in the world does it's like i'll be fine i'll just you know i'll get through it something you know it'll change it'll get better whatever um but you know a day turned into a week turned into a month and it's just like holy shit like every day i woke up and i felt like there was this black cloud that would just follow me around like something bad was going to happen and um i just couldn't shake it and i had this big case that i've been working on for a long time with one of my partners and uh it was it was a it was a foregone conclusion it was done we were going to finish it up basically just signed the paperwork that morning with the guy and um it was a it was a

it was a very much needed commission for my family and I financially we needed it and uh he texted me at 715 that morning and just said hey we're going to hold off about 18 months on this uh it was you know it was nothing you did nothing we're just we're not ready to pull the trigger on this quite yet i mean just normal business transaction happens all the time but for some reason that one just snapped uh something in my brain and i was standing there you know by myself my kids were in school my wife was i think she went to the gym or something for a workout and i was there by myself and i kind of had like a mini panic attack my heart rate started spiking a little bit my hands were sweating i got flushed in the face and

um i just walked over and i poured a big old glass of vodka and threw a little orange juice on top of it walked over to the the couch sat down turned on sports center and about 20 minutes later realized how relaxed i was and how i didn't really care about that case anymore and um enough so that i walked got back up walked over poured another one and that uh that's where everything changed that during because I said in a letter that I wrote a while back, like that drink is where part of me died, and I found a new best friend. And it got real dark after that.

So I just, I didn't, you know, it's not like you love alcohol, the taste of alcohol, that much. I just loved that it would kill and numb everything inside me. I didn't have to feel anything. I didn't have to feel joy, pain, worry, anxiety. I mean, I didn't feel anything. I just, I would get drunk enough that it would numb everything. and I was never sloppy drunk.

It's not like I was, you know, falling around the house, doing stuff like that. You know, my own family didn't even know what was going on. I hit it that well. But, you know, I would get up and I'd start drinking at seven in the morning. I'd have a drink then. I'd have a drink throughout the mornings. I'd drink in the evenings. I'd drink in the evenings.

Whenever I wanted a drink, I went and poured one. And, again, it's not like I love to taste that much. I just love what it did for me. And it would, you know, as I try to tell people, you know, you don't drink because you love it. You drink for a reason. And my reason was I just started to hate myself. And I didn't know why. I started to, you know, I was just miserable all the time.

I hated who I was. I didn't know why I was feeling those ways. But instead of picking up a phone and calling somebody and trying to talk through those feelings, I picked up a bottle and just started handling it a different way. And, you know, when that fork in the road. came, you know, I could have easily made one decision. I made the other. You know, do I regret it? Yeah, of course. I would have loved to have not gone through all that, but it's also led me to a pretty good place now. But I just, I had to go through some really nasty dark times for the

better part of two, two and a half years of just nonstop drinking. Did you ever experience any of this, you know, as you call it, nonstop drinking during any phases of your golf career? And I guess I'm somewhat trying to draw the link of, did this come from a place of, you know, was golf filling a void for you for so long? And is your, you know, maybe this is a little bit too movie scripts. But like, you know, with that out of your life, was there a void in your life that you were looking to fill in some way?

No, you know what it was? I mean, this is after a lot of self-reflection and time in rehab therapy. It was just an identity crisis. I didn't know who I was without the game. of golf. And not that I missed playing the game, I just missed being the person. You know, I had been Steve the golfer since I was 14 years old, probably. Everybody knew me as Steve the golfer. Like, I was playing junior events. I'd play college events. I'd play mini tours. Like, I was Steve the golfer. I'd move houses around Jacksonville and my neighbors would come down,

like, oh, you're the golfer, right? Yeah, yeah, I'm the golfer. But that's just who I was. And all of a sudden, I was like, Steve the insurance salesman or Steve the investment guy or, you know but and not that anybody looked at me poorly or differently because of that but i looked at myself differently and i just i didn't know how much that persona weighed on me and how much i needed that in my life or how much i thought i needed that in my life um but yeah it just that was the part that drove me off the edge is that i didn't know who i was anymore without that game of golf and without that structure around me and i you know knowing now uh what i know and um being in the space like I am it it's you watch it we watch other athletes go through it and it's the same way it's like when

football players get done with football they don't know what to do they've been doing one thing their whole life and now somebody's going to tell me hey you're not you're not allowed to do this anymore and they're just they're left standing they're like well what do I do like there's no playbook there's nobody to tell you hey here's what here's what here's the next step of your life here's what's here you know we're here to help you on the next phase like no no one's here to do that it's you got to do all that stuff on your own and and when you don't know any different you don't know any better um i think that's what caught me the most is just i was caught off guard and i was very alone and i didn't like who i was becoming and not that like the industry was bad it's you know i'm

still friends with everybody that i was working with and it's they didn't do anything wrong this was all in my head um but it was just it was hard for me to to try to live the same life in my own head not being the golfer that i was and i liked i guess i guess i for as much as i fought being famous and you know, didn't think that I ever belonged out there. I guess what little bit of fame and notoriety status that I had, I really, really needed that. And I really appreciated that more than I thought I did. If that makes sense.

It does make a lot of sense. It does. And it, I mean, gosh, again, if I, if I, from reading the book and going on that journey with you, you're living an annual anxiety of having no idea what's coming in the door, which again, is fine when you're 23, 23, 24, 25, when you're married and the diapers are coming. and, you know, thinking about how much my life has changed in the last several years, like if I did not know what was coming in the door at all, that would, there's, you know, there's high upside in there.

Sure, but the anxiety of that is real. And that, again, it probably doesn't quite literally work this way, but you build that up over a decade plus time period. It had to have, you know, taken a toll in some capacity with you. And I think that, or I guess I don't know, I'm, I guess I'm projecting a little bit and trying to piece all of this together to say no you got it right well you don't know who there's not like um you don't know who is going to be going through this you know especially that's where i was a part of your story that i guess was um somewhat interesting or intriguing to me was just the fact

that you you you weren't going through this while playing professionally but it happened after in this transition in the real world what was so i mean it's a long couple of years what what's the breaking point what what what leads to change change and when does change happen and what did that look like? Yeah, change happened kind of early in 2024 where my body was given out. Like it had been doing this for about a year where I was in and out of the hospital and I knew what it was the whole time. Like I knew it's drinking excessively, but nobody else around me knew that. It's like, man, why do you feel this way?

Why are you having these reactions? Why are you doing this? And it's just, it was my body shutting down. But yeah, the one last time I was. Are you being honest with doctors in this time period? hell no i'm just like every other alcoholic hey did you uh you know did your your liver numbers are kind of high did you were you drinking last night yeah yeah doc i had a few last night she didn't know that i had three this morning you know i basically was drunk while i was given blood probably

uh no i did what every alcoholic does i lied about it i mean i lied you know in your power of three you know do you have how many drinks do you have last night i don't know three all right that means i probably had nine like right i mean it was just i i did whatever i could to keep my secret was the most powerful thing I had in this world and I would do anything to keep it. I would lie to anybody, as long as my secret was safe and then it wasn't and everything came out. And it's, uh, it was like the most freeing feeling you can imagine because I had heard somebody say one time to being an alcoholic is exhausting. And I laughed. I'm like, how hard can it be? You sit around drink and you're passed out half the time. And then once you live that life,

it's like, oh my God, I spent my entire life lying, covering things up. lying on top of lies and it's like you're so worried that you know i mean anything you were just afraid your secret was going to get out you know hey is somebody going to find a bottle that i left somewhere is somebody going to find the the drink that's not what the drink's supposed to be and you know my kid's going to accidentally get into something that they shouldn't get into i mean one thing after another after another but i was like it was so exhausting keeping that life going um that once it was finally over and that secret was out i mean it was the one of the most freeing things ever.

It was terrifying because now it's like, okay, now I can't hide anymore. Now I've got to answer all the hard questions. Now I've got to face all the stuff that I've been drinking away for years. None of that stuff got better, by the way. I mean, all I did was just drink on top of it. Now I've got more problems on top of it. So, yeah, I mean, it was a time for self-reflection to say the least because I didn't want to, I didn't want to end up in a box,

and that's about where I was headed. I mean, I had a doctor tell me that if I had another drink that I was, you know, It might be the last drink I ever have. I was that far gone, and I made it about a month and a half, and then I went back drinking harder than I'd ever drank before. So that just goes to show you how stupid people can be sometimes when alcohol is involved is, you know, I've got a wife and two kids at home. They're great, and I was basically choosing death over them.

It doesn't make any sense, right? I mean, but at the time, it was the only thing that helped me. But I think, too, if you don't, you know, if you'd ask me this when I was 21 years old, I wouldn't be able to explain this. And again, I haven't gone through something like this. But if you've not gone through depression, it's really, I think it's hard to understand, right? You can't, you can't really describe the feeling. I can somewhat picture kind of this, this overwhelming thing that's coming on to you. But I can't sit here and describe it.

yet you make a choice to put this out into the public, what is, why do that and what has the reaction to that been? When you posted this on social media sometime in 2024, what happened when you did that? Yeah, we probably got to go back because you would ask another question. I probably did a bad job of answering the last one. But in that the spring of 20, 24, I kind of had that last trip to the hospital. And enough was enough. I was going to treatment. I had to go check myself into a treatment facility because obviously my best thinking wasn't working, right? So I needed somebody else to help me. So I went to a treatment facility actually here in Jacksonville. I was in there for 35 days. I knew quickly that alcohol wasn't the problem, but I needed to get to

the problem of what was the real issue here. And so while I was in the treatment facility is when Grayson Murray took his own life. And I had reached out to Grayson probably two months before that kind of when I was at my depths and I was like, I need help. And I went through all the PGA Tour resources online that they had for us, and I closed my laptop because I wasn't ready to call any of them. And I grabbed Instagram, and I reached out to Grayson, and I said, hey, dude, I need to talk. I think you can probably guess what this is about, but please call me ASAP. And unfortunately, he never got that. But while I was in the treatment facility, he'd passed away and took his own life. And I knew what it was immediately. As soon as I saw that, I was sitting in the

treatment center watching golf on a weekend, because we got a few hours where we could watch TV. and we had Colonial on and I couldn't figure out what the ribbons were. Everybody was wearing on their hats and all of a sudden they put his face up there with the years of his, you know, when he was born when he died and I lost it because he was kind of my, in a weird way, he was kind of like my beacon of hope, right? Like he had beat, he had taken on depression, alcoholism, all this stuff. He had, now he's back on the PJ tour. He was engaged to be married.

He was happy. He just won Sony. He was, you know, made $3 million or something that year. I mean, this guy had it all, right? and now he took his own life like what's that say for me like is this what i have to look forward to when i get out of here you know are the demons just waiting for me because you know i'm in here working on myself and i think i'm in a good place but gracing thought he was in a good place too and look you know look what happened to him so uh that one that one weighed on me a lot and that one

really shook me um and it's in it was one of those things that it's always kept me on my toes because don't ever think that you've got this stuff beat and don't ever think that you're out ahead of this and that you're safe because you're not you it's always got to be on the forefront of my mind and it's always got to be something that i'm aware of but yeah so i was in the treatment facility i came out and about i spent about two months feeling very uncomfortable about who i was because i had to learn who i was again um but you know driving through jacksonville it felt like a foreign town because i'm driving by all the liquor stores all the restaurants all the places i used to hide out and drink like just random places that's like oh my god there is that place there's that

place. I know what I used to do there, there, there. And it's like, it's a different world now. But I finally got to a place where I was at peace with everything. And I felt good about, you know, my role as a husband and a father and a friend and everybody, like I had a good circle around me. But I just had this weird feeling and it's hard to describe. I didn't know what it was, but I just felt like I needed to do something else. You know, we had had three suicides on the PGA tour and a three and a half month stretch. And I just felt like there was a real problem out there. So I had, for those that are unfamiliar with, you know, people are familiar with Grayson's situation, but the other names.

Yeah, Ray, I apologize, I don't have his last, I think it's Ray Scott. He was a caddy on the, the Corn Ferry Tour for Jared Wolf, and then Rusty Estes was a club, was a club manufacturer and rep, but he walked on the range. I mean, he'd been on the range with us for, I don't even know, 12, 15 years, but I knew Rusty really well. And I'd spoken to him two weeks before he took his own life. He was at Bay, or he was here at the players, and we were on the range just talking because, you know we were friends just from being out there and seeing each other every week and

but yeah i had a nice long chat with rusty and i mean obviously everything seemed normal and fine and two weeks after that he took his own life so i i knew that there was a growing problem on the tour and i just felt like i needed to try to help so i reached out to a few caddies a few players and just said hey look boys here's what i've been going through here's been my last couple years do you think it would help if i shared this story with the players or you know with the with the caddies out there. Do you think it would kind of maybe open people's eyes to, you know, hey, this, you know, he's out there. He went through this. He might be able to help me if he was struggling in silence, right? So without a, you know, everybody to what he said the same thing. Yes, you have no

idea how bad it's getting out here. They need to hear your story. So I wrote this little letter out, took me a little while to do, but I did, it was probably like a five-minute read. And I was going to send it to the PJ tour to have them send out to all the players just as a, hey, look, man, I don't know if this helps anybody you can delete it if you want read it if you want but you know if you're struggling with anything just read my story and if I can be a resource in any way just I'm here to talk and for some reason at the last second I decided to put it on Twitter instead you know that's a nice safe place so I put it on Twitter and I I had that kind of same flush feeling like what the hell did I just do and I told my wife I was like I'm going to go take the dog

for a walk I need to get out of the house took the dog for a walk came back an hour later and I walked by my phone and my wife just looked up and she's like you're going to have to look at that at some point and I said has it been ringing she's like it hasn't stopped since you left and I looked down and I had 400 and some texts and voicemails um emails you name it I had you know calls from golf channel from ESPN from NBC um just looking for some kind of a comment on this But after scrolling through Twitter, I didn't have one piece of negative feedback. You know, over 100,000 people had read it in that hour. And there was comment after comment.

And I mean, you of all people know how toxic Twitter can be. It's, you know, I could have told people I, yeah, I saved, you know, 10 dogs out of a burning building. Like, what, you don't like cats? So, yeah, I mean, that's just there wasn't one piece of negative feedback, which told me that, like, this message hits home to a lot of different people. and so yeah it was it was great for me to see that even trying to put something out there and I had I got all these private messages over the next month I would say from random people that I'd never met and they would divulge everything in their lives to me that they've never told anybody in the world you know I've been an alcoholic for five years I know I needed help your your letter moved me to to look into a treatment facility or to call a therapist or my wife and I sat down together read your letter and cried together and now I'm signed up to go get help and And, like, I got a lot of those messages, and I got back to pretty much everybody and, you know, thank them for it. But, you know, it was, it was cool for me to see that just even my stupid little words could make that much of a difference in somebody else's life. And I'd been in the darkness.

I'd been looking for help. I was, you know, if Grayson had called me back and said, hey, look, dude, you need to call Dr. So-and-so over here. She was monumental for me. I would have picked up the phone instantly and called her. I just needed, like, that warm hand. off, right? I just needed somebody to go, do this. And, but when you're hiding and you're, you're so afraid of letting your secret out, like, that's what, that's what America does, right? They just keep everything in. They don't talk to people about things. And I wanted to try to get people

to know that it's okay to talk about it. And that's the only thing that saved me. So what comes, who comes next? Now there's a, there's a book and a foundation. You didn't stop it, just, uh, just, uh, no. No, I tried to work with the PGA tour to be a resource for them and just basically told my story and said, hey, look, I'd like to, I know I'm not a licensed clinician. I'm not trying to be one. But I feel like I can help kind of be the bridge between the players and the mental health resources that are out there and just try to help people kind of see that it's okay. And unfortunately, you know, or fortunately for me, I guess that the tour decided to go a different direction with how they handle this. And so I started my own

foundation. As a friend of mine said, he's like, quit asking to help people. You don't need permission to go help people. Just go do it. And so I started a foundation nonprofit and I've got a good board of directors. I've got some some great people on our advisory panel that they're willing to help. And we're taking more of the grassroots approach rather than start with, you know, 35 year old men who have had this stigma ingrained in them their whole lives about not talking through feelings or substance abuse issues, things like that. We're going to start at the the grassroots level with the first tee and the AJGA and you know, ages groups like that and try to teach them in an early. age the importance of working on your mental health and so that by the time they get to the

the nca age range or the pGA tour age range that like they've already had some some you know preemptive work done on the mental health side or they've been working with somebody for a while or like they understand that it's okay to you know if you get yourself in a bad place to to go ask for help and that's okay um so i can't announce too much now we're getting ready to announce something huge probably right in the beginning of the first quarter of next year. But it's going to be, it's... You can tell us the name. You can tell us the name of it.

That's one thing. I know you're doing some promotion here, but you have to give us the name here. I can't tell you the name yet. I've been put under strict over it. I will tell you that I am working with another PGA tour event. We're kind of heading the whole thing up, but we're bringing in the best mental health resources from around the country

to help us with this so that we're not building something. we're just pulling resources together and we're going to create a massive mental health pipeline in the game of golf. So it will be, it'll be very cool once it comes out. We want to make sure we got all the pieces together. But that's about all I can tell you for now. But yeah, we're excited about it and we're excited where it's headed. How are you doing today? Like how are things for you as we record this in November of 2025? I'm doing well. I'm doing very well. I don't, you know, A lot of people are thinking that the, you know, I'm 18 months sober. It's not like I've been sober for 10 years.

It's, you know, I've hit 18 months, what, 12, 11 days ago. I don't miss drinking. That's, you know, I'm one of the lucky ones that came out of this thing where I don't miss the drinking. It doesn't bother me. I don't sit here and crave drink, you know, a drink now. So I never had a problem with the alcohol side of this thing. It took me a little while to get my brain right and to ask my, you know, to keep working through. I had to learn who I was again.

I had to kind of recreate who Steve Weakroft was because I knew there was somebody good in there because I'd loved myself my whole life and then all of a sudden I just absolutely hated myself for a while and I knew it was in there. I just needed to figure out why I went down a bad road. But no, I'm in a really good place. I'm working with one of our partners on the initiative here

is a company called Onrise. I'm going to be working with them as a peer support specialist on the side just for something to do. I'm doing this on my own where I, I wanted to be able to help give back to some college athletes that are struggling with a lot of the same things that I went through. So I'm going to do that a few hours a week. I got asked to be a golf ambassador for Greg Olson's company Youth Incorporated as well.

Then obviously we have the foundation work, which has been very time consuming in a great way. And then I decided to write a book out of the blue, didn't tell anybody. Just, you know, my wife and kids would go to bed at 9 o'clock and I'd stay up writing every night from 9 to midnight. And all of a sudden I said, hey, would you take a look at a picture? picture. She's like, what's this for? You thinking about writing a book? I was like, I kind of already did. She's like, you've been writing a book? I'm like, yeah, I know. I just, you know, I don't do well with idle time. I need to keep myself busy. So yeah, I wrote a book. And I wasn't

sure how it was going to go over. I didn't even, you know, I've been told for years that I need to write a book just from the golf stories that I'd accumulated over the years. And I understood. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, nobody wants to hear from a washed up journeyman. And then I had heard from another friend of mine who was more on the recovery side. And he's like, you need to write a book. and I thought it was like everybody else. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I know. I got some golf stories. She's like, no, no, no.

He's like, you need to write a book for someone. And I was like, who's that? And he's like, you won't know until you write it. And I didn't know what that meant. And I learned quickly. I won't dive into too many details, but I'll just say that somebody reached out to me with about 12 hours after I released the book looking for help.

And I'm like, that's why I wrote the book right there. I mean, the book can go away now for all I care. It's like, it helped, you know, it helped. it's all it matters i'll say this the book's called cocktails and range balls one's too many 10's not enough i read it last night it's an under two hour read and it's not all about the things we just spent a half an hour discussed there's great stories and a ton of fun anecdotes uh throughout and i'm going to ask you to spoil some of these here because we've got to end this on a on a more fun note you got to tell me about the shot bubba hit because the way you describe it doesn't sound like it was

possible yeah it's it was a weird one so i we're playing in these mini tours called the d p development of players tour, Heath Slocum's parents actually would run it, Jack and Kay. And, you know, it was my first year playing on the tour. And it's, you know, it was fun. We were playing all the, we're traveling through Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, North Florida. And we're at this one course. And I'm paired with a guy named Billy Montgomery and the guy named Bubba Watson. And I'd heard, you know, Bubba's a good golfer or whatnot.

But I mean, at the time, we're all just, you know, if he was that good, he'd be on the PJ tour already, right? So. But, yeah, we get paired together in the first. final round and Billy comes up on the range and he's like man man he you you excited as I am for today I'm like what are you talking about? He's like oh we got Bubba you've never seen Bobba play Bubba's unbelievable I mean this is the you're signed up for the show here right we should have to buy tickets for this stuff I mean he was just I was like come on dude we're all here we're playing

golf to you I mean how good whatever so I'm watching you know I'm playing my own game right I don't care about these guys and I just want to go try to win the golf tournament and I remember we get to about it's like the fourth or fifth hole it's his par five and kind of the t-shot go straight away and hit it down the middle you know billy hits down the middle we both lay it up and bubba's in the left rough and he comes billy comes over here we go here we go you're ready for this and i'm looking at the hole and it's this quirky little hole it goes up and kind of dog legs left but there's trees up there on the left side kind of fronting the you know the left side of the green there's a creek that runs through the middle it's the most obvious layup of all time it's like you just throw it over

there in the fairway and then wedge it on the green and i was like look bill you know with all due respect like i've seen baba play here for a few holes now he can curve the crap out of it there's no doubt about that but like he can't slice this thing enough off this downslope in the rough like there's no way he can slice this thing around these trees and get it to go on the green and i'm trying to downplay the whole thing like dude just go away and he's like no no no he's not going around he's going over i was like what do you mean he's going over he's going over he's telling you right now he's going over and i'm looking at i'm like it's impossible so baba's like looking around can't figure out which club to pull, and he pulls driver out.

And I'm thinking, oh, my God, he's going to try to slice this around the trees. And, like, this is impossible. He goes, no, no, I'm telling you, he can get that over the trees. And this is the equivalent of me trying to hit probably a pitching wedge or a nine iron up out of this rough to get it high enough to get it over these trees that are, you know, 100 yards ahead of him or something. And sure enough, he takes his lash at it, like only Bubba can hits this, you know, the ping, ISI driver, whatever that thing was, and pops it straight up in the air. and it's almost like a high draw with a driver off a downslope in the rough. And he pops this thing up and it goes up over the corners of the trees.

And it's like a high draw and it lands on the front corner of the green and rolls out to 45 feet or so in the fringe. And I just, my jaw was on the grass. Like I'm like, I've never seen a ball with any kind of a fairy wood pop up that fast. And I mean, he just pops his driver straight up. It's a high draw. And I will say, yeah, to this day, that was probably the greatest golf shot I'd ever seen hit. I just, it wasn't even, like, you know, you can see it, like, okay, maybe this is possible. That wasn't even a thought in my brain.

And then even when he presented the thought, it still wasn't possible. Like, there was no way I could see that. I mean, I played enough with Mickelson, you know, you've seen his imagination. It's like, okay, I could maybe see this or maybe that one, nope, never. I mean, you could give me a billion balls today with technology and I still couldn't pull that one off. tell us about the shitting bandit I couldn't believe this one yeah and for the listeners

I didn't want to bore you guys with all of Steve Weakroft stories so in between each chapter I would put a kind of a tour from the tale or tail from the tour I would put something in there just one of the weird stories that I came across during my time out there

so yeah the shitting bandit my first year on the nationwide tour 2006 I remember hearing rumblings about midsummer that there were a few guys out there on the tour that were just not everybody's favorite. They weren't the most well-liked, and somebody needed to tell those guys that they weren't real well-liked and do it in a fun way. So somebody decided, so every week we get like three dozen range balls and, you know, four or five gloves in your locker. They're just in there automatically.

Well, somebody decided to take one of those boxes of balls, pull the sleeves out, take a dump into the box, take a nice big steam and dump into the box, put the lid back on and put it back in there like nothing it ever happened so that when the guy comes in goes to get his golf balls out there's a present waiting for him so i think it was like julyish probably they get the first guy rumblings are you know going around the locker room going around the golf course about you know oh they got so and so and you know they they're policing the tour so to speak out there in their own way um and then a couple weeks later they got a second guy and we were in oregon and i remember was out on the putting green or on the range and this guy comes running out i won't say his name but

he comes running out and screaming yelling you know i don't know who the hell this is but come over here and fight me like a man one of those things and we all start dying laughing because we know what just happened to him so i'm on the range next to another guy who's a jacksonville native and we start talking and he's the only one that's not really laughing he looks confused and i was like hey bud you didn't see that you didn't see him come running out and he's like we got a copycat shitter like what do you mean we got a copycat shitter he's like i'm telling you right now that we got a copycat shitter because that the guy that's done the first two is not the one that's doing that i was like how the hell do you know that and he's like because i was the first shitter and i didn't

get this guy and i was like wait you're upset that somebody's copying it and he's i mean it's hilarious like you can't make this stuff up but yeah so they um my first year playing a you know, a PGA Tour sanctioned tour, there was a guy walking around, or two guys walking around shitting in golf ball boxes and leaving them in lockers for people, just let them know they're an asshole. Tell us about how you, uh, you

kept your tour card for the 2009 season. Yeah. That was 2008 season. So you kept, it would have been end of 08 into 09. It was end of 08 going into 09. So yeah, I was playing, uh, so PJA tour in 07, uh, spoiler alert, I sucked.

my first year on the PJ tour like I thought I was going to. So I lost all status. So I had to go back to Monday qualifying for corn fairy events. And I had a lot of success doing that. I would Monday qualify into an event and I would top 25, which got me into the next event, top 25 again to get me to another one. And then when that streak would end, I'd go Monday and get into another one. I just kept building these.

I ended up playing like 10 events that year with no status. But I got to the last event and it was in Miami, a place called Miccosuki. And I'd had some success there in the past. but I was looking at the money list. I was like, I think if I finish solo eighth or tied for eighth or better, I'll get in the top 100 on the money list, which gets me some status for 2009, which is all I was trying to do is just get some status back, right?

So, flash forward, I'm staying on the 18th tee on Sunday, and I'm tied for eighth. You can't make this stuff up, right? And it's this quirky little hole. You know, Farrow runs out at like 260, so you can hit like a three wood, five wood, hybrid, something down there. and then you go over the water to the green.

Not a real hard shot, but you just got to get the first ball in playing. There's water right, water left. They're kind of good ways off the fairway. And I don't know why my miss with three wood was left all week, but I still pulled three wood and I hit this high draw, and I know it's going right towards the water. But there's like mounds down the left side, and you can't really see it going to the water,

but you know it's over there and there's nothing to stop it. And I hit this high draw three wood, and my cat and I both know it's wet. And now I'm just fuming. I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to have to get this thing up and down from there for, you know, drop, knock it on, try to make a four somehow so that I can get status. Because I don't care if I make triple, quad, whatever. It's like, I have to make par. And so I go walking up and I walk over the mound and I start walking down towards the water.

And there is this human down there. He's about six foot seven, six foot eight, probably weighs 300 pounds. I mean, the guy's massive. And he's got the tiniest volunteer shorts you've ever seen on a human being. Like these things, they were screaming on him. And he's standing there and he's pointing at the ground. I was like, is that where it crossed there? And he's like, what?

And I was like, is that where the ball crossed on its way in? And he's like, no, no, no, your ball's right here. And I'm like, this is burnout Bermuda. It's rock hard over here. There's no way this ball stops on a downslope, right? And I saw it fly over the mound. and so I'm kind of doing like the geometry in my head. I'm like, how in the world did this ball stay here?

And I'm looking all around and the volunteer kind of started to walk away. And I said, excuse me, sir. I said, do you know how this ball stayed here? Like, did you see? Like, did it land soft? Did it plug somewhere? Like, I was like, I'm sorry. I just don't know how this thing stayed dry.

And he's, and he like put his head down like he was pouting almost. And he's like, sir, I'm really sorry. I saw your ball take off. I kind of lost it in the sun. I was trying to like shield my eye. I lost it completely. And then all of a sudden, the thing flew down here. It hit me square in the thigh.

And it bounced right to where it ended up. He's like, I'm so sorry. I did not mean for it to hit me. I, you know, if I would have got out of the way. And he's apologizing left and right. And I looked at him. I said, sir, you just saved my career. Like, you saved my, very well, it's going to save my career.

But like, you may save my year here. And I hit my shot onto the green. I had like 15 feet for birdie or 18 feet for bird, whatever it was. Like, I knew I was safe. And I just walked over to the guy and I was like, here's every golf ball I have. Here's every glove I have. Here's a $100 bill. I was like, I can't thank you enough.

And he was still apologizing. And I was like, sir, I don't think you understand golf. Like you just saved my whole tournament. But yeah, so I ended up two putting. I finished tied for eighth or solo eighth. I think it was that week. And I finished 99th on the money list, which got me status for the cornfrey tour the next year. And I went on to get my PJ tour card that following year after that.

so who knows man one one right thigh may have saved my my whole career what about the whole and one uh on on 17 at tpc sawgrass tell us that story yeah a friend of yours as well josh scoby um kicker from the former kicker from the jaguars down here so we'd been playing these grudge matches all around jacksonville we were trying to get one at tpc two on two he brought a friend i brought a friend it was the same group every time but we've been trash talking this one for weeks and uh so we show up and we're playing the match and you know we got $20 bets going everywhere and it's i'm five under through seven like i just it was one of those days yeah i was dialed in i was feeling it i knew i was playing good golf and um i think i bogeed 11 i birdied 13

some five under going into 16 scobie and i both at it's like 45 feet for eagle on the you know the iconic part five there 16 at sawgrass and he lags it up to a foot and starts chirping me about I'm worth some worthless pro and I'm getting beat by the kicker and yada yada. So I make the 45 footer for Eagle. Now I'm right back in his ear chirping him. And he looks at me and I just remember him going, we want to double press. Can we double press? I'm like, you can double press, you can triple press.

You can do whatever you want. I'm about to be the first guy ever to go 3-1. So I'll take any cash you want to throw at me, right? And it's just, it's harmless chirping, right? Like you know it. Like you're tossed in trash with your boys. You're just fired up. So we go to 17 and I'm getting ready to hit the shot.

I'm up first and I back off because I see these guys moving around behind me and it's Scobie and one of our other friends Will and they're both filming on their phones, right? And I was like, what are you doing? They're like, if you're going to call your shot, we got to get this on film. And I'm like, all right, here we go.

And I hit the shot. And the second I hit it, I just remember mumbling to him. I hope you fucking hit record. And the thing lands like five feet behind the hole and it starts spinning right back down towards it. and I put my hand in the air and I start walking the thing in, right? And Hand of God, I thought it was already past the hole.

Like, I thought I had spun past the hole and I'd missed it. And all of a sudden, the thing disappeared. And we went nuts. I mean, I still have the video. It's insane. You got to send it to me. Yeah. It's so good.

But we all go nuts. We're running around the T-box because now there's two guys with cell phones. They both have it. And they're walking at each other, filming each other while they're yelling. And I mean, it's priceless. but yeah so I ended up I went 3-1 and then I went to 18 and I lipped out a chip for I had this easy little bump and run chip shop for 62 which would have been the new course record but just missed that but yeah 63 with finishing 3-1-4 it wasn't too bad and then I went on the next week I went on to win by 12 on the corn fairy tour so that was dead yeah I was obviously playing some really good golf around that time you keep sprinkling in these stories in the book and I honestly after I read that one I was like oh Oh, God, the Wolfhammer story is going to make it in. I thought for a second, there was going to be an interstitial said,

do not play Wolfhammer with Solly. I can't do it. I can't do it. Nope, I didn't want to give you the satisfaction of that one. That may have been a lower point for me than the drinking. Do you want to tell people that story and we'll close on that one? Yeah. So I think that was the first time you and I ever played golf together.

But we had a mutual friend who was putting together a game. And he's like, why don't you come on out? We're playing at Sima Kwanna. you've got five of us we're going to play wolf hammer i don't know how to play wolf hammer it's like i will teach you no big deal so we get there and they go over the rules and everything on what you want to do so we're playing and i'm i'm playing some decent golf and i just remember we get to 16 and i'm in last place somehow and i think i'm six under on the day something like that uh i was i was deep under par whatever i was you finished at seven i remember you shot

yeah so i think i went par par birdie to finish so i must yeah i think it was six under standing on 16th and I'm in the last place out of five guys. So again, let that sink in golf fans, six under last place. So I don't know, like I thought I knew how to play this game. So I hit and I thought in par three at Tim Aquana and I thought I hit a shot to like eight feet right underneath the hole. Feeling pretty good about things. Don't think anybody's going to make it too. So I go alone.

And you know the point value to five dollars a bet at that five dollars a point at that point. at that point as well, which that plus going alone essentially makes every point worth $15. It does because it triples it. And then if you go alone, it's individually to each other person as well. So really, you made it $45 a point. At this, and at this point, I'm like waving my arms. Like, I need to sign this waiver, this virtual waiver. Like, you're aware of what we're playing for now.

And you were, listen, you were five and you were playing really good. Like, yeah, I got this. I still felt good about it. I'm like, I got eight feet straight up the hole for Birdie. The next closest guy was like 30 feet. Like nobody, one guy missed the green left. I got like a couple of, I got a 60 footer, a 45 footer, and a 30 footer or something like that left.

And like, I feel good. Like I'm like, I'm in great shape. I'm going to get this thing back to, you know, where I'm not down money. So the chip shot almost went in. The 60 footer went in, the 45 footer went in, and the 30 footer went in. Is that right? I think if I remember, I think we were all on the green.

And I think, somebody missed the green left. I do remember that. Well, okay, that's right, because there was five people. Somebody misses the green.

Somebody made a 45 footer, somebody made a 30 footer. And I've got like a 15 footer. And I'm already kind of feeling bad. And I'm like, oh, and it was never going anywhere but the center of the cup.

So we made three birdies on you. And then it got uncomfortable. You missed that put. You missed that put. And, I think you lost $4.50 on that hole, which was just the story I think I'll probably tell until I'm dead of just the most I've ever seen Wolfhammer

get out of control. Yep. And me, of course, being the stubborn golfer, I'm just doubling down. I'm like, all right, same on, whatever it was, on 17, on 18. I didn't care. I'm like, I'm six under par. I'm still playing good golf. And then I think there was, there was like minimal damage on 17.

I might have made a little bit of money on 17 back. I remember you I don't know why I remember this like you lost like 3 30 on the day I think but in 450 on one hole because it was just I think you got a fair amount back at the very I know I birded 18 to really hedge some of it but yeah I still lost 300 and was 33 or something like that something like that I think it was yeah but then we ended up playing and I was so mad when I walked out of there I'm like I just shot 64 and I lost $333 and I just remember walking off going what's everybody doing tomorrow? And everybody was like, I don't know. I think we can go again. I'm like, let's go again. So we ended up playing the next five days. I think you played all five. Maybe you only played four.

I don't remember, but I shot 64, 65, 67, 68, 68 for the five days. And I lost money. And you just kept looking at me with that stupid grin going, well, you're playing golf. You're not playing the game. I'm like, how the fuck do you play the game? Because I'm playing some pretty damn good golf. and I would just get so mad and you'd just keep looking at me

and you'd like you'd shake your head and you'd try to come up with something different to say and you're like, you're just, you're not playing the game and I'm like,

I was so angry. I can't believe you kept inviting me back to play more calls. Oh my God, it's just because I was so angry about it. I was like, I just got to wipe this smile off his face. I guess I got to shoot like 57

to somehow make money in this game, but it doesn't matter what you shoot. You got to play the game. Come on. There you go. There it is. There's the face. there's smile there's all it is man yep i still had fun i didn't care yeah that's uh that was that

was a different time man the next i don't know when i'll ever be able to play golf you like five days in a row again uh will be probably in about 18 years we got five kids not combined they're in the chance in hell we're going to get to do that anytime soon probably not life got a little bit more serious but uh we one uh really appreciate uh i would encourage people to go pick up your book and really appreciate you spending some time with us telling your story and the fact that you've shared your story with the world we've already we already know it's helped people and i know with your foundation you're you're you're set to help a lot more so congratulations uh to you i'm really really proud of you man and uh really impressive what you've done and really happy for

you i appreciate you sully thanks so much for having me on cocktails and range balls go grab a copy it's a it's a fun read i promise you if you're a golf fan if you're uh if you're struggling with anything in your life mental health or substance abuse wise it'll help that too so um but yeah there's a bunch of good golf stories in there i got some more than what we just let on here but I appreciate you having me on, man. I love what you guys are doing over there and glad to be a part of it.