No Laying Up - Golf Podcast - 1197: Neil Learns How a PGA Tour Event Gets Built

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

Ahead of next week’s BMW Championship at Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis, we visit with Patrick Timson - Vice President of Tournament Operations for the Western Golf Association - and a number of members of his staff - to get an idea of everything that goes into the build out and staging of a tour event.  Support our Sponsors: Titleist BMW USGA 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 today. That's better than most. How about him? That is better than most. Better than most. The job I always think is worse, but you can see all these fence poles going up. Yes. And very shortly you'll hear the sweet sound of a fence ponder.

See the guys in a neon yellow over there. Yep. That's the job. I've always like, eh, I don't want that job. See the two guys there, they're going to stand up. They got about an 11 foot pole. They mount their hammer on it. He goes and gets his little step ladder.

Oh, there it goes. And now you'll see and here he's going to get up there, turn on his hammer. Right while this woman tees off. Oh, yeah. There's the jack-in. He doesn't care. It's ladies date on 16. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the no laying up podcast.

Sali here, joined by an eclectic group of colleagues. One Icarito, Neil Schuster, is here. what is going on? Not much. Good morning, gentlemen. Fired up to be here. We got a special one for you. DJ Pie is here. Hello, Dege. Hello. Good to, good to be here. You know, we're recording this at 8.30, my time. We should have done this about 445, 5 o'clock. We got to get up early for a podcast like this. That's right. Throw on the vest. Get to work. Get the coffee going. Get a breakfast sandwich. Our esteemed colleague as well, Charlie Van Kirk is here. What's going on, Charlie? Hey, Sally, who's the eclectic one in this group?

Everyone. The whole everyone. Yeah, everyone. Neil, what are we doing today? What would you say we're doing here today? It's a little different episode. Yeah, it is. This is one that's been on the like kind of brainstorming board, the jam session board for years.

Charlie and I are going to take in a little audio journey of the job site. We're going to explore all the stuff that goes into hosting and building out a successful PGA tour. golf event in 2026. And specifically, we're going to focus on the build out for the 2026 BMW championship that is taking place next week, Belrieve Country Club in St. Louis. So if you take, I guess if you take anything away from this podcast, I hope it's an appreciation for all the little stuff, just the amount of stuff that has to get done in a very specific sequence and amount of time. So like the next time you're on site, you know, rope and steak. Why don't you take a look? Take a look at those knots.

This is this has been a dream of yours for a long time. I would say this is a, we've leveraged our BMW relationship to really get behind the scenes. This has been the, an open door in terms of, hey, we'd like to, you know,

interview a bunch of people. We'd like to come on site. We'd like to really dig on on some finances, a lot of background. We're going to get into a lot of stuff of like, because I'm the same way you are. Maybe not as entertained by this whole thing as you are. But you get to a tournament,

you're like, man, triple-decker, you know, hospitality thing. I'll just, I'll just play golf for a few days. And then just going to tear it back down and all go back to normal. It just, it never financially adds up in my head to work. But they must if they keep doing it. We're going to get there.

Where does it all go? We're going to get there, too. I'm excited for this, Neil. I, uh, I worked to the PJ tour for a long time. I got to know a lot of the operations people. They are, they're fascinating people. It's a fascinating job. You know, I feel like a lot of the player relations stuff is just like,

you think that's the sexy job. And it's like, no, they're just pissed about like, whatever, the locker room set up this week or something boring. These guys are just like, you know,

how do we get that huge thing from there to over there? I don't know how we're going to do it. Do we got to take out trees? Do we got to bring in machinery? It's just problem solving all day. So I love this topic and I'm pumped to dive in. A lot of craftsmen, DJ.

That's right. That's right. Before we get there, Neil, I don't have a good transition for this one. You're doing, you're doing the intro in the read here and usually if I'm doing it I got a good transition here but do you got some some title of stuff do you want to tell us? Yeah just you know shout out to

titalyst sponsor uh and I want to give a massive shout out to Austin Shackleton. He's the New Jersey area title is fitter. I worked with him about a month ago, uh, getting fit for a three wood and a seven wood. He's awesome. So if you're in the area, go see and I would say that like local fitters for titleist everywhere. Uh, put me in a GTS three three wood. Uh, I've always like being able to turn a three wood right to left. I've been turned a three wood right to left. I've been turned it way too much right to left. He was kind of set up for that. And so he kind of neutralized the right to left ball, put a little bit more weight in the toe for me. And since then, I've had three eagles since that fitting. Similar setup in the seven wood. So we're hitting par five's

two, gentlemen, and starting to really attack, surprise the golf ball DJ when we have a chance to score, getting the ball up in the air with those fairway woods. So GTS, fairow woods have been great. Still loving the left dash golf ball. Highly recommend the left dash if you're struggling with the spinny T-ball, as I tend to do. And if you have, you know, full swing wedges that zip off the green, that is neutralized both of those issues. And then I put the, uh, 2026 Scotty Cameron Phantom 7.2 in the bag in May, plumber's neck.

That's the story here. Guys, I've resisted it forever. Uh, it's just like having. Craftsman that water had a little bit behind the ball. It's coming out, but I don't know. Maybe honeymoon, maybe not, but the plumber's neck is, is hot right now. I love it. That's my bag update.

Neil the plumber, the tradesman. The I-Bod member, the local 908. Put your pants up, Neil. I was wondering, because you and I may or may not play a alt-shot event later this fall. I was like, oh, man, do I need to get in Neil's golf ball a little bit? A little time in with Neil's golf ball. Good point. I literally got in bed last night.

I was like, I got to play a different golf ball. We're also going to get to people waking up at night and making notes of themselves. That's that's in this episode as well. So, let us run a show. What do we, what's, what's,

what's the kind of, run a show, spoiler, caveats real quick. There's a lot that goes into building a tournament. And Charlie and I captured an overwhelming amount of firsthand audio interview content. I think the hardest part with this stuff is like, selecting what,

you know, all of it's interesting, you know, but it's like, okay, we got to tighten this up. So this will not be a complete list of everyone and everything. that makes a tournament successful, we had to focus.

I hope it's a good overview of how it works on a macro scale. So we'll go through some of the big players early and kind of who does what. But from there, a lot of it's a collection of things that said, you know, made us say, wow, or just made room for wow and some stuff that just made us laugh. So we interviewed about 15 people on site and from home, tried to break it up into a few different sections. We'll talk about the why, like, why are we doing this? Quick run through of who does what because there are a lot of stakeholders. We'll profile the conductor.

I think the main character. I'm going to call them the conductor. What I'm going to call the big ass jobs. We'll laugh about some of the smaller, more unique jobs, walk through the financials and then run through some stats. And then as you guys have questions, maybe we have answers. I don't know. If you don't, I don't know anybody who does at this point.

A 12-6 curveball a couple weeks ago. Scheduled to go to St. Louis, meet Charlie there to do the hit the job site. Complete bone zone. flights ground stop at newer couldn't get out next night couldn't get out thunderstorms in the area f aaa just choke points everywhere so charlie did make it so a lot of the firsthand stuff charlie captured on on his end i was able to work the interview stuff from home but uh charlie anything to add there yeah i mean solid this was whiffs of rider cup last fall when neal's alarm didn't go off and you and i were sitting on the bus at four in the morning and neal's just like

ah fuck guys i did it again and i spoke this one into existence i'm like i i'm like i'm missed You know, I haven't had any flight issues in a while. Back to back, canceled flights. I'm over to this summer. United both times. But thunderstorms. I mean, like, the whole airport shut down. That's not, you know.

No, no, that's, that courtesy is always extended to American when flights get canceled and delayed, too. So that's, yeah, that's great. Yeah, I mean, my, I have to sneak this in there that, that our idea for this was to put Neil in a microdirty job situation and just, Neil, make you suffer as much as possible and let that carry the first-hand audio. And I am, I am gutted that that didn't get to have. happen, but I'm kind of holding out hope yet. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like I've not given up on that conceptually for for something. So we got to, you know, maybe it's, maybe it's next year at Liberty.

Yeah, M.W is in my backyard next year. And then when these flights, I'm sitting at Newark, you know, for four hours and then I go home at, you know, 1 a.m. I'm like, it hit me. I'm like, God, BMWs at Liberty next. Why don't we just do it next year? Oh, you know, so I had a lot. There's just been a lot of, a lot of angst and stuff. So Charlie also took some awesome pictures while on site. So if you're watching this on YouTube, we'll flash those when we play some audio clips. And we'll try to get those out on social media as well. I got a million things we want to get through.

So please be patient if we get lost on the trail here. But otherwise, you guys ready? Yeah, I have one question. I mean, you kind of, we kind of danced around this, but just a lot of topics we could do. There's a lot of stuff on our brainstorming doc. Sure. You've talked about doing this for literally years. What is it about this that makes you want to dive in?

It's a couple things. Every time I go to any professional tournament, but especially the ones that bounce around, Ryder Cup last year, U.S. Open this year, and then BMW, the last three or four years, I just, I'm always blown away by the operation. And then I've also started to realize how it's grown. You know, how it's kind of, and in talking to everybody on site, like these buildouts have doubled. And so the idea of building a temperate, city for a 130,000 plus people to come and enjoy themselves over the course of a week is fascinating.

I find myself wondering about like little stuff. And so, you know, it's just always been a curiosity. And I used the word city intentionally because like again, the last 20 years, these buildouts have gone from like county fair style open air tents by the putting green to three story buildings, like legit buildings with AC, couches, kitchen, sound systems, chandeliers. The list goes on. I have never worked in construction, but I'm fascinated by stuff getting built in the real world. Dege, I know you're a lover of guys building cabins on YouTube. You know, just the sequencing for this stuff, venue selection, how it's laid out, the financing, custom build, logistics of 50 different vendors.

And it's not on an empty lot like it is with a permanent building. This is a, you know, most of the time, a private club, people paying a lot of money to be a member at that club. You got to avoid shutting down the course. So it's all very confined. You can't push the open date. You can't have a soft launch. You know, it's like we got one week. If we don't hit these deadlines and if we don't get all this stuff done in the next, you know, week now, it's a hard deadline. So all of that is really, really interesting to me. And then like the relationship with the local community, the neighborhood, the government. We're going to talk a little bit about that and just like what, you know, like what you have to do,

not just at the course, but like to move, you know, 15,000 additional cars on the road in a, you know, an old school neighborhood is, is something that needs to be thought through. As a member of a course that has hosted a Champions Tour event for the last five years and is now no longer hosting one.

It is like, it's never about the week of the tournament, like giving up your course for, oh, you got to give up your course for the week. It is always about the four to five to six weeks ahead in advance. Clanging, banging, noise like you heard in the cold open there of like while you're I get the course is under construction and then it's under construction to tear it all down for weeks afterward and then there's

damage left by everything that's been done there it's like it's just a it's a big thing to give up your golf course for for a professional event and you don't think about that I don't think about that with Wyndham at all which is this week as we're recording this because but somebody's been working on that shit year round all year three years in advance I'm just saying in advance. And BMW Championship, I think, is a really good example. One, because I've met the people that do it, and I've always, we're going to, you know, do a kind of a profile. The people is the other reason for why, Dege, where I've always been really, really impressed when I'm like, man, these guys are super competent and interesting and fun. You know what I mean? So I'm like, I'd love to profile what

goes into the operation here. And BNW Championship moves around. And so, you know, and other tournaments do Ryder Cup, but like the fact that they do it every year, it's not every two years. And it makes it more complex. There's pros and cons to moving around. But as the tour starts to think about moving the tour championship around in a few years and, you know, getting to other markets, I think BMW is kind of the gold standard for how to do that well. So yeah, that's, I've just always wanted to like dig in and see how shit works. Well, another thing is we have never been shy about offering our critiques of where the PGA tour maybe get some things wrong or where we might have different personal taste and blah blah blah blah they'd never mess this up they'd never mess the operations up they

never don't have it built in time they're never behind schedule on any of this stuff they don't correct me if I'm wrong to remember they don't run out of food they don't run out of water they don't have massive parking problems like they did their ability to put this part on always amazes me and it's yeah and it's not all the same and it's not all the same organizations and that's also important to note so like that's why i'm fascinated by it it's not like it's not a copy and paste model across every tournament kind of has its own different setup and personality so we'll get into that too and to be honest this was like going back five years ahead of it in advance i was like oh this will be things that live screws up like it's not as easy as the pGA tour makes it look to their credit

i would say live has had equal amount an impressive amount of competence in the setup and the build out and all of the logistics that go into that. Like that was where I was expecting things to go wrong and didn't. But again, this whole part does amaze me. Not at the same extent it does do you, Neil, but I'm very curious to dive in. Just a matter of whether those people get paid, but that's a different conversation. That's a totally different conversation. I think the different organizations is fascinating to me because I think a lot of people very,

very understandably would be like, oh, it's the PJ Tour. The PJ Tour has a rope guy. The PJ Tour has an op, you know, and they do have ops guys, right? Obviously, that do this stuff. But BMW is an interesting one, you know, I don't even totally, I mean, it's Western Golf Association. It's BMW. It's like there's a lot of different cooks in the kitchen. So maybe we start with like a little rundown of that.

Let's let's start there. I'm going to lay out. Let me just do a quick overview, macro. So host, so kind of players and organization, host organization. This is not the PGA tour. This is the Western Golf Association, WGA. They've, the mission for them. They were found in 1899.

WGA exists to conduct championships for professional and amateur golfers, promotes the use of youth caddies and supports the Evans Scholars Foundation's efforts to award full tuition and housing college scholarships to high achieving caddies with limited financial means. Basically, they are the, they run the tournament, right? So they are responsible for everything that goes on outside the ropes. Big hand venue selection. You know, I have to work with the PGA tour on, you know, what courses. But like they are, they are the ones building.

the tournament. They are doing all of the stuff that we're going to talk about. They conduct four amateur tournaments annually and two professionals. One corn fairy event that was in Chicago a couple weeks ago and then the BMW championship, which bounces around. They're based in Chicago. They're going to Liberty next year. I don't know if they've announced it, but Olympia Fields was a location in the past and probably one in the future as well. Obviously, we're biased. I think they are the gold standard. We partner with them to work towards a named Evan Scholarship. Shout out to Abby Boyer, our first scholar. But this is when we talk about the history of the PGA tour and the nonprofit stuff,

this is the nonprofit component. They have 1,260 Evans Scholars enrolled in 27 universities for the 2025, 2026 academic year. And they've 12,575 young men and women have graduated as Evans Scholar since 1930. So that's the charity component of this specific tournament, the Western Open, which is now the BMW Championship. Can I pause on this? This is something that people do, Neil, that I don't want to pick on you for this, but I just want to clarify.

You said we're biased based on this. I, this is something, I feel like I've gone through in the last five years of like, I would say we would be biased if like your brother was running the Western Golf Association and we felt the need to steer out of our way to say nice things about them. We have chosen because of the great work they do with the Evans Scholars Foundation to be closely tied to that. Right. Well, just like we did work with ESPN. about seven years ago.

I just want to say there, you know, just to acknowledge there is a partnership with the, I would not say we are biased towards the Evans Scholars Foundation. I'd say we wholeheartedly endorse the incredible things they have done with that. Knitpicking your words there, but I think there could be a little confusion on that.

And I think what I would add here is there's a host organization most weeks. Sometimes the PJ tour pulls tournaments in, in-house to do like, I'll get there. Okay, cool. So, but this is like, if you go to Phoenix, this is the, when you hear about the Thunderbirds. If you go to Dallas, the salesmanship club, there's, there's different organizations like this kind of scattered.

And there, some of them are struggling. Like they're getting, I don't want to say, you know, the ones that aren't, it's like anything. Like the middle's getting hollowed out a little bit. So the best host organizations, I think they offer a tremendous value both in the, the clarity of the charity component, which is really important. And we'll talk about in the finance section and creating differentiation, having a personality. Like for Western Golf, the WGA, like being like, we want to bounce around because like not every tournament makes as much money for the Evans scholars, but those are important markets and places where they want to start a scholarship or make sure like, you know, all these scholars spread out. It's a way for them to bring the alumni back together. And so there's a lot of different success metrics for them and how and I think if it, you know, the PGA tour does a really good job with their championship management, but they're going to systematize it and it's going to be a lot more uniform. And they're not, you know, they're not going to want it to, they're not going to go out of their way to make it stand out. No one's going to care. Yeah, yeah. It's not there.

It's kind of like, hey, we're doing 10 of these or whatever. It is more efficient, though. You know what I mean? Totally, which I think we don't have to get into it now, but it's worth keeping in the back of your head. Like, that's the push and pull between all these changes on the PGA tour, right? Is like what you just said makes complete logical sense, right? We want to move around. This is our fundraising engine.

We have people all over the country. we need to go to different markets, yada, yada, yada. If the PJ tour is moving towards being just a pure entertainment product and there's somebody on their couch being like, I don't give a shit, just go to banded dunes. Like, there's a real push and pull there between how the tour was set up and how it used to operate and kind of where it's where it's headed, which I think there's a lot of healthy tension in that, but it's tension nonetheless. So, and the WGA, their P&L, they get everything outside the ropes.

They get the money from tickets. hospitality, not the title sponsor, but the hospitality, you know, the, whatever, it's a package of tickets or, you know, a 400K, big ass tent, concessions and merch, right? And so that's where, you know, they're running this tournament and they have to make sure that that number is a lot bigger than what it costs. And then the, whatever the profit is, that goes, you know, for the most part, we'll talk about some details that have changed. But that's going to go to the Evan Scholars. That's the money that we are raising to send men and women, guys and girls to to school.

I'll be honest, I didn't even know that. I thought, I assumed the PGA. It's a little more complicated in that, but that's where the majority of their money is going to come from.

And also, but then, you know, this is an event and an experience. They're going to generate more donations from this. You know, so there's all, like,

but from the actual P&L of the tournament, that's to keep it simple. So second, second stakeholder. Go ahead. Quickly on that. The PGA tour, though,

helps them sell the hospitality, right? Or they're not necessarily in charge. I guess I'm thinking of like players, which is chant, management. That's different. And that's one of the hosted ones. So that's going to be a little different. And tour championship, they're going to help sell the hospitality. But, but for this specifically, WGA is responsible for the local market sales. Right. And I think, I think, you know, you could

probably think of the PGA tour as like a channel partner. Like they're, they might be funneling like an OMP official marketing partner. I was going to say, Grant Thornton has a big office in St. Louis. Can you guys hook them up with a, with a suite? You know, like, of course they're going to send inbound that way. But as far as like who's, you know, where is that check being signed to? That's going to WGA. Whereas next stakeholder is going to be the title sponsor. This is

BMW. BMW, this is the 20th year that BMW has been the title sponsor of the Western Open hosted by the WGA. The first year they were the sponsor was a Cog Hill. Who won that tournament? Tiger Woods. The cat, baby. I was there, baby. Let's go.

Who was a runner up, Dej. Mark Leishman. I think Aaron Badley. Oh, okay. Leashman was running up there. Or no, Leachman won one of the East. Well, I'm worried.

Somebody check me on that. If you're going to ask it as a trivia question, I thought you knew the answer. I think I saw Aaron Badley. Hold on, 2007. Why don't you look that up? And you made a great transition here. Second place, Aaron Badly.

Okay. Yeah. All right. Listen, I've been doing a lot of research. So my own research. You know, so it could get a couple of things wrong. Okay. Goal, mission.

Like, what is BMW getting out of this? First off, I'd say, let's just call out the Denny Cash episode. Salli, I just listened to that a couple days ago. I can't remember what number it is, but we should link it here. But if you want more information on title sponsorship and what the big name title sponsors are getting out of working with the PJ Tour, that's going to be a better resource. But they're trying to create an annual experience that represents the BMW brand well to both golf fans watching and then provides them kind of a physical experience for different stakeholders with BMW.

and talking to some people that work there or work with BMW. It's a physical product company. They make cars, right? So hosting a real world event allows them to get creative with touchpoints, not just for customers or for people watching. You see the cars displayed in the lakes, all that stuff. But also like dealers, you know, you've got to take care of your top dealers around the country. And then other channel partners, there's just a lot of, there's a lot of stakeholders in the automotive industry.

And so this is a great, like, center of gravity for them every year. Two things, Neil. One, that is episode 879 of the No Laying Up podcast, how sponsorship works on the PGA tour. And I think you've already taken care of most of this part of the episode for me. But this episode is brought to you by our friends at BMW, proud title sponsor of the BMW championship. They're celebrating the year, the tournament's 20th anniversary and we're reminded of what

makes this event so special every year. Thousands of people come together to build an entire city around a championship golf tournament, creating unforgettable experiences for players and fans alike. since BMW became title sponsor, the BMW championship has been named PJA Tour tournament of the year six times, a reflection of the incredible work that goes into every detail. For BMW, it's an opportunity to connect with passionate golf fans, share their latest vehicles and innovations,

and help support something even bigger. Every BMW championship is played for the Evans Scholars Foundation, helping provide life-changing college scholarships to deserving caddies across the country, BMW, the ultimate driving machine. And shout out to them for helping us, you know, making intros, getting us, set up with, you know, access to do this. So as I said, it's not just customers, dealers,

partners, you know, and good center of gravity for them. Reference, again, reference to Denny Cash and specifically the workday example in that episode, Salio, I thought was fantastic. Just quick recap of that. CEO, Workday, lost a massive deal back in the day because of SAP was able to set up a pro-am experience with Tiger Woods with a big prospect. And they're like, we're, you know, we're going with Bob Sugar. And so he was kind of like, you know, F this, man. I'm going to get into this golf, you know,

sponsorship thing so I can do the same thing. So the point being, there's a very human and memorable experiential piece of, of these event sponsorships. It's not all about the commercials. You know, they're measuring all of that stuff. But there's a kind of a hard to quantify piece of this,

which is just like, you know, human like, hey, if something's going wrong, if I hosted them and they had a great experience, I'm going to get a call. At least I'm going to, you know, I'm going to get, hey, we're going with Bob Sugar. You're going to call me before you do that is the idea there. So we'll get into a little bit more like the finance stuff later. But third stakeholder, PGA tour, specifically for the operations, the competition committee.

So I spoke with Stephen Cox last week, one of the lead tournament officials for the PGA tour. Also kind of what used to be the advanced guy that would go around to different events, make sure. And their role here is like, yes, they, they, They are responsible for sanctioning the event, handling all the media partnerships, the TV stuff. They handle the media rights and the check that BMW signs goes to them. And then they do, you know, support the host course with whatever renovations need to be made. And they make sure they help out with agronomy.

But specifically, they are responsible tournament setup-wise for everything that goes on inside the ropes. So that's agronomy, course setup, course improvements in advance of the tournament. they handle the title sponsor money, as I said. And Stephen said, I was like, give me some examples of like what you're working on on those advanced site visits. He's like fairway width, line patterns, width of intermediate, height of rough, height of fairways, collar width, what sort of green speeds are we prepping for? You know, I'm looking at the site map and I'm just making sure everything's far enough

away. Are we going to have any TIO stuff? Hold that thought. We'll get there shortly. And I've seen them come into our course and they'll dot the fairways of, you know, we don't typically have an intermediate. rough at Timmaquana. They'll come in a couple months in advance and put green lines in the fairways of like,

here's where we're going to grow up the intermediate cut for this tournament. Like they'll just make little kind of tweaks like that in a lot of places. Almost the way they work as a rules officials is it's similar here. So an example that Stephen gave me of for coming up is on one of these advanced visits, they actually talked to Sellershye and Steve Milton of CBS and they want to put a new fly cam in. I think it's between 17 and 18 this year. the, you know, Steven's like, hey, we're worried, we were worried because looking at the shot link data from the PGA championship in 2018, a lot of guys dumping it left on both holes. And those wires are going to be running down the left side of both holes. And so they're like, we don't, you know, he's like, last thing I want is someone hits that wire and gets a favorable drop. You guys are going to jump all over me. That's a problem. We're trying to get, make sure that though, but we also want those guys to use their bells and whistles, you know, so we're calling for more like cool shots. And, and this is where the PGA tour will weigh in and use some of the data. from an experience they have to be like,

all right, we got to make sure we put this in the right place. We don't want a Norway versus England goal kick situation at all on 18. Yeah, that's right. And then last thing here, Dege, to your point earlier, it's important to know the tour is getting deeper

into championship management and, you know, hosting, basically the WGA in this case. And right now they host the cognizant players, Truist, FedEx, Tour championship and President's Cup. And I think there might be one or two others I'm missing.

But that's where they have two separate teams, teams. You got the, so the internal teams at the PGA tour are working both sides of this. Yeah. It's, it's kind of, like I said at the beginning, it's kind of a fascinating, a fascinating thing. It's one of those where it's like if you, if you blew everything up and you restarted, would the PJ tour run everything? It's kind of the TPC idea that Brian Rolap talked about at the players, right? Where it's like if, you know, if we could, don't you think we'd want to control all of our own venues so that we're not pushing a membership out and so that we're not, we're not doing. X, Y, and Z, but also that's a whole other undertaking. And it's, it's, there's a lot of positives to how it works now. So I, I just, pros and cons, man. I mean, that's, there's no right answer.

The more people you talk to, I feel like the more, you know, not as a cop out, but the, the more people you talk to, the more sympathetic you get to just like, wow, this is, this is complicated. It's not quite as easy as just like, like, so that we figured it out. Or we felt that. It's very easy. It is. We felt that when we were doing the schedule, uh, the schedule podcast, right? where it's like, okay, although the governor's off, you can make the 2028 schedule anything you want. We got, I think we all got like halfway through. We're like, I mean, fuck. It's just like it's just like how they're doing.

Now I figured out why. Now I get why we're in Memphis in August. Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, it kind of, you know, it kind of makes sense what they're doing. I think they've thought about it. Real quick, Neil, I believe Truest in Miami are both chain management events as well. And I think it's also where the.

PJ tour, you know, they can be a little bit of a backstop for some of these tournaments, you know, like, because not every, again, these host organizations, not all of them are, are excelling. Um, you know, it's, it's, it comes down to people, which we're going to get to here shortly, but a couple more stakeholders. Host course. This is Bel Reeve this year. They have experience hosting a ton of high end, um, golf vet PJ championship. They have a history of hosting high end amateur and, uh, you know, professional events. Um, but they haven't done it in a while. So it's still kind of like dusting off the, you know, the playbook. And, you know, I think what's important to realize here is it's just they have a lot of stakeholders in the membership, right?

So how do you work with a course like that to make sure that this is a win for them? They're trying to celebrate St. Louis and, you know, kind of the local flavor, but also, you know, just kind of put on a good event and have a party. And again, as I said, Liberty National next year. And they're already ahead of like the whole buildout site maps all built. So they're working on, you know, almost in tandem like getting ahead of next year as well. I just quick run through TV partners. That's CBS this year. Normally NBC.

And we're going to talk about how that creates some complexity for the operations team here shortly. And then you've got a ton of vendors, local government, local HOA this year. We've been, we're having some HOA meetings about parking and access. You got all the local sponsors. And then, of course, you got the fans, which will be kind of around the estimates, probably 130,000. That was the number given for Castle Pines,

which was a high water mark out in Denver a couple years ago for BMW. So, sorry, that was a lot, but that just stayed a play here. Okay, all that, all that makes sense. And it, again, is bewildering that they're not only doing that for this week, but they're doing that for 30, 40 events on the PJ tour. and then a bunch more on the corn fairy tour and a bunch more in the champions tour and then the DP World Tour, the LiveGolf,

it's just a lot of moving parts in pro golf. But who's the conductor? We talked about the maestro at the beginning. Who's leading the ship here? Well, as we talked about a lot of, like, I'm fascinated by the size and how many stakeholders are involved need to collaborate. But I think what's unique here,

maybe it's like this in construction, but as far as I, the way I look at it, in a large company, very clear hierarchy. You know, this event is an amalgamation of like disparate organizations, vendors, freelancers, government officials, volunteers, a lot of volunteers as well. And oh, it has, it changes cities every year and it like literally can't have delays. So you need a conductor. That guy is Patrick Timson, vice president of tournament operations for the Western Golf Association. Patrick has worked at WGA, his whole career. I think he's coming up on 25 years. He was initially an

intern or crew guy at the Western Open during summers in high school. And then he went to college and came back to Western Golf and has worked his way up the ladder to basically run shit. So Charlie, here's a clip. Let's just, we'll let him introduce himself. Patrick Thompson, Vice President of Tournament Operations for Western Golf Association. And where are we standing right now, Patrick? We are standing. Golfers right of 18 approach behind a huge scaffold deal that's the size of a football field, 100 meters long, just about as wide as a field. And we're going to walk in here to check out what's going on status-wise to make sure the next vendor can get in on time.

And how many days until tournament week? I don't count that anymore. But let's say it's three weeks from Monday. Okay. Oh, I'm sorry, two weeks from Monday. Next Monday is advance, advance week, we call it. Okay. And as you can see, there's a lot to be done.

standing on rough plywood guys are painting polishing shining but the the biggest project was getting these walls done the interior kind of divisions so that uh that vendor can vacate the space and our next guy can roll in literally so they're going to roll out the carpet i'm stressed yeah well he's not though and i know we're going to touch on that but i've met patrick previously it like three years ago and I see him every year at the BMW and he's he's awesome and I've always thought he'd be a fascinating guy to profile I remember at Castle Pines I was walking with him he's like oh you see those port-a-potties up there like yeah we had we brought a crane in overnight and put those those went in late it's like three stories up he's got the porta potty you know and it's like

you do that man uh so a few like things jump out immediately when you meet him first he sounds like the actor jk Simmons uh the whiplash guy kind of looks like him too you know it's just a great voice for radio, which is awesome. Bald fit, just a positive force of nature. Every time I've called him to interview him or, you know, ask a question, which is probably like five or six times at this point, he picks up the phone on the first or maybe second ring, but like always, this Patrick, you know, it's just like, and then you hear what, what Charlie's captured. I mean, he's just constantly talking to somebody. And it's never like he's, it's just like part of, it's like, so natural. You know what? I, I, I, I,

There's not one single, like manual labor job that I haven't underestimated the amount of time by at least three X one. Yeah. Not one single one. Uh, even like knowing going in that part, I will still underestimate how long stuff takes to not be stressed to have everything be in that state of those photos that Charlie just showed as well. If you're watching on YouTube, oh my God, that is a different. You're wired different. So he just embodies like competence and he's extremely calm. In short, Sali, put him on a list. All right, we've got Rory, we've got Scotty, maybe Rom, and Patrick Timson.

He's a dude. He's an absolute dude, okay? He is a dude for sure. Charlie, you spent a couple days with him. What were your takeaways? Yeah, I basically just followed him around at work for two and a half days. Spoke to some other people as well, but, you know, he would have a vendor meeting maybe at eight in the morning for half an hour or an hour with a dozen or so of the folks who were out there building stuff. But then he would just cruise around the course. He was putting spray paint down. If a line that was marking a flag got a little dull, he would just touch up the line. He would have 48 new urgent emails in his inbox that would show up between 9 and 11 a.m. And he would like handle all of those by 2 p.m.

For example, he's just like going out. We would be solving something or he would be solving something as I basically just pestered him with questions the whole time. and three people would come up to him from different departments while he was solving that one problem and he would solve three more from those individual departments over the course of that. And he was just so, like one of the biggest takeaways for me was how calm he was, as Neil mentioned.

Granted, there's so many problems that have to get solved, like someone drives the wrong kind of vehicle or forklift without tread tires over the golf course in the wrong spot and ruts up the golf course or someone literally crashed into a bridge of scaffolding and messed up the mesh. Like if you got flustered by all of that stuff over the course of these months,

you probably wouldn't survive. So he's just like, just mowing him down, just, you know, task by task, no problem. Everything's fine. So I asked him about, actually, I teed up Neil and Neil asked him about his management style here in this clip. You got something, Sally?

I'll just say, compare that with, here I was last night, maybe stressed about playing a different golf ball four months from now on a golf tournament versus all of that is that's not lost on me. All right, here we go. All right, I'm going to switch gears, management style. You've got 95 things going at once. Charlie's telling me he doesn't hear you raising your voice.

You've got great vibes. Like, you're not stressing out. Is that how you're wired? Is that or is that 20 years of experience? The latter. You know, the stressing out thing has definitely gone. downhill because at the day we know we're giving out a trophy. We know the folks that we've got under working with us, whether it's vendors or our staff, they've been doing it. They know the

drill. Everybody's working towards a common goal. So that end of it, stress has left my system a while ago. Now I still, you know, can't sleep because I, you know, all these things are running through my head, but it's not like, oh, I can't get it done. I just got to remember it. So there's a lot of, a lot of, you know, last night I probably wrote six notes to myself in between, you know, going to bed and waking up where I woke up and said, oh, you know, got to check on this permit. Oh, got to check on this. So that's the nature of probably the closing weeks.

You know, my wife will tell you I, if I am fortunate enough to be at home and I'll wake up in the middle of night and just say stuff and kind of like sleep talk about it. Backstopping on six. We've got to look at that. Exactly. And she's like, go to sleep. Oh my God Yeah, so that's the stress end of it

But you know the whole you know Getting angry screaming at guys I think I got turned off from that early on So back when I started It's just kind of grunt work at Cog Hill They had a superintendent Who was great at growing grass But bad at interacting with folks

That were disrupting his golf course So we got yelled at a lot You know for a carts are off the pack or, you know, why is this guy here? Or, you know, you guys are, whatever it was. And early on, I'm like, well, that's, that's not very motivating or helpful. Like, I get it. Like, we shouldn't be there, but no need to scream.

So there's, I'm generally not yelling at any vendors for doing a bad thing. I'll certainly talk to him about it and get them straight, but don't need to yell. So why, so why are you always yelling at us, Neil? Exactly. Can you learn something from this? No, I think, I was trying to come up. with a way to describe his job because I don't think operations it's too too broad I came up with a disruptive term dege it's problem solving as a service piece ass all right uh and just over the course

of 10 weeks leading up to this championship it's just he's rolling around on on site sunup to sundown solving problems and here's a little taste of that problem solving salve left two openings in the rail but there's only going to be one right in the middle right the middle mother okay so you've got two missing in the Yeah, I got a 10 in the back row, so now... So you'll have 11. One foco! A sliver! So you want us to follow that line?

Follow this line. Let me show you what I'm thinking. So you want trailers to receive deliveries. Yeah. What I was looking at yesterday, these orange marks, they go out 48 feet that way. that way. So this would be the ass end of your trailer.

You should probably educate them. The Tita Tower Gosh? No. Our guys on rope and stake. They busted a whole spool of yellow rope is just sitting in the trunk because they tried to unreal it and came unraveled and then... When you order some more yellow rope? Well, one spool is definitely compromised.

And then they don't know how to tie the knots. They don't... They need education. All right. Well, I'll get up for this. Hello, this is Patrick. That was probably me calling. That's just the whole day, basically.

Oh, my God. Hey, Patrick, it's Neil. I can't figure out how to open these peanuts. You can't give me a hand. There's no paper towels in the bathroom. Yeah. So it's like, I mean, and what shines through there is it's patience and it's clear communication, right? It's just like people skills, which I think is awesome.

Well, and competence, right? I mean, it's like, I always think this is a weird analogy, but I always think about this with like video stuff in our business for a long time, it was like, oh, just let's delegate the business stuff. It's like, I don't even know how to do it, let alone like delegate it to somebody else. Like, I don't even know how to ask them for what I'm, what I need because I don't really know what I need until I just kind of futs through and figure it out. For something like this, it's like, no, he has to have the answer to every question, which means he has to know the ins and outs of every single thing that that goes on. You know, that's just a. such an impressive breadth of knowledge. You know, it's not just management. It's like, no, it's also extreme hard skills and knowing where to point different things. I think that's important to like clarify. I don't manage, it's not management. Like Patrick, he'll tell you like he's only as good as his team.

Well, he's only technically got three guys working for him on site. I mean, more folks are going to arrive for for advance week and tournament week. But it's Mitchell, who's kind of another Mr. Fixit. He's a tournament operations manager. And he's got two paid interns. He's got TJ and Jack. And I want to play this. A lot of its collaboration with like external vendors.

So like, yeah, he's their customer. But it's like he's got to, he's still got to direct them. And yeah, coordination would be a good way to put it. And so I do want to play this clip of kind of how he manages because I think it kind of highlights how clear of a thinker he is. This kind of came out of a conversation that he and how we're having about food, which is, you know, as one does. He was talking about a cookout that they do with a bunch of the crew and making fresh sauces and, and five gallon barrels and all this stuff. So you'll hear how this develops.

What are you eating during all of this? So leave the hotel at, you know, call 545-6, get your coffee. I'm not a breakfast guy. Lunch is a high note here. I try to make it that. So we've got a couple interns in here now, TJ and Jack. Those guys are great. We can get into their stories later or chat with them.

But, you know, this office will have probably a dozen, 15 people working in starting like middle of next week. And I told those guys day one, you know, Jack and TJ, I'm like, there's a couple rules that we need to abide by here. Number one is your radio. So always have your radio on you and on. So you're prepared. Number two is always have your, we give them like a Leatherman multi-tool. Always have that because you never know. It's a box or, you know, you need the pliers to fix something, whatever.

and number three is lunches here at noon. Because if it's not, you know, when everybody's running around, everybody's got a schedule, everybody's got calls, everybody's got meetings, everybody's got walkthroughs. Everybody usually clears 12 to 12.30. Everybody comes into the mess hall, you eat, you break bread, you laugh a little, and then you go back out and do it again. So occasionally we'll have some folks in town and we'll go out to a nice dinner or something,

but even those, it's like, I'd really rather spend those two or two and a half hours you know, we've got whatever we have left, you know, less than 30 days to do this, it's going to start to be like, oh, I've got less than 10 hours to do this. I wish I would have had two more hours. And that's all cumulative as we go. So that's why we try to keep lunch timely. And, you know, for me, I just stay here and eat here. God, the repetitive, like the repetitiveness as a comfort, sign me up for that.

When there's chaos, you got to keep it. And so just like, hey, I got three things for you. Here's your radio. You know, here's your gun. Here's your tool. And do not. And the interns are ordering lunch. You know, so it's like in lunch better be here at noon.

Otherwise you're good. I'll tell you everything else as needed. It's just like, we can't plan for all the rest. You know, it's like let's plan for what we can plan for. And then we'll take all the rest of it as it comes. I just, I love. I love that. Love that ethos.

Yeah. Before we get to the next step, Neil, I want to give a shot to our friends of the U.S. At some point, golf starts to follow you home. If you own more golf polos than T-shirts, if you practice your swing with an umbrella, or if you find golf teas in the laundry, this is a sign.

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Get a handicap index today. Visit get a handicapped.usga.org to get started. Again, get a handicapped.usga.org to get started. Okay, Neil, so you said if I'm tracking, he's got three people on his team, he's got vendors constantly coming in and out. Like, how do they break down? What's the division of labor here? How do you kind of like, how do you figure out who's doing what?

Who's triage in? What's coming in? Who's focused on one thing for six weeks? You know what I mean? How do they kind of break it down? So I went into this project wondering, like, kind of curious about the vendors. and there's probably 50, 70, but I was like, are these national? Are they local?

Are you working with a new tent guy every year? And so I asked Patrick, one of the first things I asked him in our interviews, I asked him, all right, I'm planning a new golf tournament. Who's my first call? Who's my first draft pick? And this is the clip of him walking through the big stuff. Who you're drafting is tough because there's only probably two or three to choose from. You know, for the big ticket items that events like this do it,

whether it's golf or big music festivals, things of that nature that need a big temporary footprint. Probably only two or three players in the big structure game, I'll call it. Okay. That do scaffold, understructure, the tip seats, kind of grandstands, tenting, etc. So you've got to pick out somebody to handle that. But in our scenario and what I've liked, and we've done for about 15 of those years,

is we've got vendor A that does scaffold everything down, foundation, if you will. And then vendor B is going to come in on top of that and do the tent. So what you're going to learn over the next like 15 minutes is like there's a whole economy to events, concerts, Formula One golf tournaments. And it's kind of a fascinating industry that I started to go down a little bit of a rabbit hole on. So the big ticket stuff is national. But it's important we'll get to in a second is it's still the people still matter. Like who's your foreman? There's a lot of institutional knowledge of guys you want to work with on the specific big stuff. But then the local shop.

are going to be trophy polishing, dry cleaning, porta potty's, buses, like, also very important stuff that like, hey, yeah, there's some, like he told me, we're still using the same trophy guy from 2018, you know, and the same dry cleaning service, you know, so there's some, there's some clues on where to go with this stuff, but not, you know, it would be some, I guess you could say it would be great at this. It was all national, but it's a lot, it's a mix of both. Just real quick, dry cleaning. Is that just for, like, server, like hospitality service, waiters? Waiters, players. Got it.

I mean, they offer the players so much stuff. Like I was talking to Stephen Cox about like during advanced week. I was like, so what do you do then? He's like we, the PJ tour does a full walkthrough. Like we drive, we do like a run of show for the players. Like we drive the courtesy car into the parking lot. We walk and understand how much walking they have to do to get to the locker room and where we've set up the wellness trailers and the massage and how far is that from

the putting green and just. which is like, you know, pampered fucks. But like, I think it's Sergio, I cannot wait to be done with this tour. Yeah, I know. I know. It's like, oh my God, what a life, right? But like they're offered a lot of extra stuff, you know, if you, yeah, dry cleaning. But that's also for the, yeah, service and the hospitality as well.

So that's a big ass job. You don't even think about that. But like they're, they need those, they need the service to look nice, the bartenders. What sticks out to me as well is it's got to be just, I can't imagine how much competence is just the number one, attractive quality that any of these vendors can have. Yeah. If you're Patrick and it's like, okay, I've got 476 different vendors that I've got to figure out here.

If you're the group that's just like, hey, man, we're going to show up on time and do what we say we're going to do is just like, great, can you do this for the next 20 years? I don't want to, I just want to worry about as little as possible. It's just like, it's just funny to hear, I think the trophy polishing guy was the first thing that you mentioned. It's like, yeah, how long would it have taken the thing of that guy, you know? That's the last thing he wants to be like, hey, we got a. problem with our trophy policy guy.

There's smudges all over it. But that's coming to Patrick. Can you please take this off my plate? I do not want to have to think about this. I might be a TJ or Jack issue to deal with. Yeah, that's probably true. Yeah. So one of the guys in the dudes conversation is Salvador Martinez from San Miguel de Allende,

who is the scaffolding foreman. He's kind of maybe the DJ pie of the operation in the sense that like he will build you the city. he will roll with the punches of the topography. And most importantly, he will find his Hollywood hotelings and his Kevin Jackson's who will make something that looks like it was made by 12 people and it was actually made by three. That's like Sal talked a lot about his team and the fact that he's got 25 guys doing a job that's supposed to be a 35-person job.

And he's like never behind schedule, it seems, super relaxed. And he's the one building those football stadium size grandstands everywhere. So here's a little clip of me, Patrick and I talking to Sal. How many guys do you have on your team, Sal? Right now is currently 25 guys. Okay. Apparently this job is expected for 35, but never used that many. You've got to have the right guys.

Yes, I've got to have the right guys. We've seen that a lot where Sal will get, you know, not, they're like more temporary labor, let's say. So they're there, they know I can lift this and bring it from A to B, but they don't have the background. of experience that sales kind of core crew does. How do you find the right guys? It's working with everybody, like all over the place. Is Martin the longest tenured on your team? He's been with me 15 years?

15? 15, 15. He's like three years older than me in the company. But like pretty much everything that I learned building-wise, I got it from him. So he's, I mean, I put my hands on fire for that guy. I like compared to all the, there is good builders in the company, but he's something else. He's the best.

He's the best the company has. Like, you know, it's not because he's in my team, but it's definitely he comes up with ideas that sometimes I don't see it. And he's like, no, no, we can do it this way. Okay. Let's go. So it's a trustful source for me for, you know, any build. I've set my hands on fire for you, J. I would set my hands on fire for you, guys.

It's so sick. And one thing I'd say here is there's a lot of a rector set stuff and we'll learn like a lot of stuff that gets repurposed. But a lot of this is custom built. You know, And I was going to say, landscape's got to be different. Yeah. And you know,

they got to build like little rooms inside for meetings and, and then it's on the side of a mountain. The slope they built it on a Caves Valley. I remember on 18 was like, oh my God. Yeah. Charlie, we got,

next up, Marty Breen. One more character here for you. This is Marty who, while Sal is building the foundation, as Patrick mentioned, of the scaffolding, Marty's the tent guy. Marty's putting the roofs on. And he's been added a while. It's a very old school character, very pen and paper. Patrick was shocked that Marty dialed into a team's meeting at one point while he was out of town for something. And you'll hear a little bit of that in this clip. Yeah, Marty, can I ask you, what's the hardest part about your job, aside from

dealing with Patrick? Yeah, getting Patrick on the phone is probably the hardest thing. But yeah, you know, just keeping on schedule is probably always my biggest story. And then the things that I forget would wake me up at two in the morning. Marty and I, I think, wake up at the same time every night thinking about the same things. We were just talking about memory.

What's the last thing that woke you up at two in the morning? Just whether or not I've asked for the right parts on the trucks that are being sent from Phoenix, you know. And then it's like- They forget one thing that's not, you know, ship it overnight. Yeah. So it's always those kind of things that irk me.

Or if I forget to ask Patrick something or, you know, those things where you're running out of time. Do you find that your old school methods butt up against any of the new school? Can you coexist peacefully with your paper and your opt-stocks? No, yeah. I mean, we do pretty well together. Me and Patrick have gone through this for a lot of years. So, you know, once I get him in front of me, I can... Yeah, it's easy.

Yeah, it's pretty easy. So Marty predates me quite a bit. My first Western golf summer was 02. And what were you? Like 80? 92? 92 probably? Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah, been doing this tournament for a long time. And Marty going all the way back to the Seattle's Western Open. God, he's got that. That must warm your heart to use the Chicago accent. Oh, that's great. Thick, a, bullish, sausage. I yeah we kind of I mentioned this at the beginning but I want to circle back to it so they're putting up all these tents you know

Sal and the whole gang is is building this city and then it they take it all down at the end I don't know if I'm skipping around but like where does it go to go back to the vendors like how to I just don't know how I can't really wrap my head around how this works so they build all this and then I mean all this is powered right so that's always something I've been curious about like first First off, where does it all go in the other 51 weeks of the year? And there's, I think the best illustration of this or audio of this is Todd Fasano and Woodrow Bosley from Agreco, the tournament's provider of generators, power and AC. The leading provider of climate and mobile climate solutions. Agreco is a power solutions company. We deal in and specialize in any type of major projects, events. power generation, distribution, AC, refrigeration, chillers, things of that nature. Do all of these gens live in an Agreco warehouse somewhere, typically?

Yeah, they go from site to site. Some of them were at the women's KPMG in Minnesota, so we got a lot of those back here. They went from PGA to St. Louis and then St. Louis to Minnesota and then back, you know, so we're just getting them out. Luckily, FIFA's loading out right now, so we did all the broadcast for FIFA. So we're trying to get that equipment here so that we can get it deployed and on the course. Yeah, that's all this stuff, Charlie. Nobody has a warehouse for any of this.

It just jumps from job to job. If a Greco, you know, there was no event for six months for some reason, I'm sure they don't have a facility large enough to put all their stuff. Same with the tenting company and the scaffold coming. It's all made to move. They will start to start moving Gens to the south for hurricane season. for hurricane season. So after we get done with the events, then they go south.

But then we also do other events, Formula One, Vegas, and Mecomato auctions are a couple of things that we're doing this fall. All right. All right. Guys, I know I'm a weirdo, but how amazing is that? It's just all this stuff, the scaffolding generators, the heavy duty, like stuff, they're going to run 25 miles of cable for all the Shotlink stuff

and all these generators. And then it just keeps moving. It's just constant tour of concerts, golf tournaments, car races, boat shows. And then, all right, you know what? Let's go down south for hurricane season. I just, it's like, and then you think back to COVID when everything, you know, comes to a screeching halt. Like, I mean, there's this is a whole economy around any type of live event. And I've just never really dug into this.

So anyway, I just think it. Dude, I can't, I don't know where the TC and I have a one camera set between us here and Jackson. I don't know where it is right now. I do not know where that one pelican is right now. I do not know. And go to their website and look at the size of these fucking generators. I mean, they're basically shipping containers. You know what I mean?

And so it's like, it's not like we're, we're not moving like a mini split here. Like these are on the backs of trucks just crisscrossing the country going to Minnesota coming back. FIFA's here. And so you're planning, FIFA's was kind of an outlier. So then that probably throws everybody off of like, oh, crap, we got to get ready for this massive soccer event around. the country. That's got to throw a wrench in planning for Patrick, you know, of just supply and demand. So all of that just, uh, I love that shit. That's what I was first to talk to this with, I mean, we have the event, the champions event at Tim Aquana and I was asking somebody like,

all right, they're packing up all this stuff. Where does it go? They're like, oh, up to RSM. I was like, oh, shit. Like, I didn't even think about that. Like, and that timing actually works really well, but all the seats and everything that you would sit in at the champions event in Jacksonville are the same ones that just end up at RSM. It was always my favorite example of it was always the Hawaii events on the PJ tour where, you know, I don't know how they were doing it at the end if this was still the case, but it's NBC, Golf Channel, whoever was just like, all right, well, you know, they don't have that stuff out there.

So we just got to put them out a big ass boat. It takes a couple weeks to float all those cameras and scaffolding and towers and stuff out there. Then they finish up. And then we float it back for the West Coast swing. Yeah. And it's just, yeah, it's just surreal. All for just to us to bitch about the telecast anyway.

I thought there was too many fucking commercials. Yeah. So you got these big vendor. And again, let's go back to Patrick. I mean, he, the key here, and I'm sure anybody in construction knows sequencing, right? So making sure this stuff shows up so that the next guy can go. So I want to go back and forth with Charlie here on, on just how Patrick handles this. And a lot of it, it's like John Mason, the plans are in my head.

So Charlie, take it away. Yeah, here's a clip of me asking Patrick about his memory, because as we've established, he's really keeping a lot in there at one time. And he was not hamstrung by like looking at his devices all day. There wasn't a whole lot of, oh, let me look that up or I don't know the answer to that. It was pretty freaking quick. So here's a quick clip of this. How is your memory just in general?

Memory? Yeah. Hopefully very good. Like I, you know, driving around either spotting things like I know that's, we got two 30 by 30 concession stands there. This is a food truck that's about 28 feet long. There's another 10-foot tent down there at the end that's selling milkshakes. Like, I've looked at the map and the planning and all the matrices that go along with it for five, six years for any of these events.

So at some point, they kind of blend together a little bit, and I might be thinking Liberty National or whatever. That's what I was wondering about, with all the change of venues and stuff. Yeah, I guess it's pretty good. And I feel like I kind of expect that out of people, like if I tell them something and they don't remember that conversation, that's always a little disappointing. Yeah, sure. You know, it's not practical to have all that information with me,

even if it's, you know, in the cloud and I got an iPad or something. It's still, oh, hold on, hold on. Oh, shoot the Internet's down or, you know, I'm sweating. I can't work the eye. Like, you've got to know those things. So here's one of near and dear to our heart. Patrick, kind of outside his purview, but just kind of like reading the need and getting ahead of a developing TIO situation. There's a clip from the 8 a.m. vendors meeting on my second day there, and I'll explain what happened after this meeting once I play the clip.

Anything else on your guys end? We're good. Mike, you're good? The scoreboards. So we're moving one from seven. I don't know. I don't know. But I have a feeling that Peter and Paul will not like it.

What about Mary? I don't know if this is there a Mary coming so Paul didn't like it but he said he can't step on Peter's toes there's a hierarchy there against him and Peter won't be here until the 10th where is it on 7-0 it's right at the like the cart turnaround

yeah it's a great spot for the people sitting in the trophy club so it sits right here they don't want to have to make a ruling right they don't want the guy that well because it could come in place it would be a line of sight to so where would you move it Where would I move it? Probably over there.

Yeah, and then if we move it there, like that's where the players walk. So it's going to be a conversation. It'll be a conversation with Peter. So that one, and then. Can you move it on the other side of the creek? Yeah, what about? Why not any other side of the creek?

You got to get it over there with a tractor. I don't know if that tractor can get back there. I've never been. I've never been back there. We'll figure out what it would make more sense to me. Be driving really close to the T-Box. We'll take a look at it. Okay.

So that one and then you remove the one on 18th Fairway. Are you putting that in a new location? A lot of moving parts. So kind of unresolved there. Basically what happened is I asked him about this after the meeting. I said like out one of the unresolved things was this leaderboard, what's the deal there? And he goes, you want to go out there? And I'm like, yeah, of course.

Let's go take a look. So this leaderboard on the left side of seven, it was going to almost certainly lead to line of sight relief from players who blew their drives left. The generator was already in place for this leaderboard that hadn't yet been installed. And so we drove out, waited for a group of members to go through. Patrick kind of surveyed the scene. And if you're watching on YouTube, the previous clip, there's a photo of him spray painting something in the ground. He just said, all right, we're not getting it across that bridge. We're not marking up that ravine with the tractors.

Let's just put it here in the left side. We're going to get it out of line of sight. No one's going to almost certainly be banking it this far out of play off the leaderboard. It's still going to be in view of the grandstand. All right, let me just mark these stakes. here's where the gen goes. Call Todd and Woodrow from McGreco. Tell him to come over here and move that gen.

Solves. So, yeah, just like seeing a problem during it, you know, in two weeks, that's going to be a problem in advance week. Like, let me just knock that off the list now. And then one more for you quickly. Just this tower problem kind of sums up the detail that goes into things and the nuance of working with CBS versus NBC. So, Charlie, why don't you play this clip?

Yeah, this one kind of tickled me because, as you can probably tell, Patrick is a perfectionist. And this particular problem really graded on his perfectionist sensibilities, you'll hear. Another boo-boo by the Tower Boys. Tower boys are on a heater right now? What's going on? Yeah. Well, this, so you learn something new. NBC and CBS have different tower layouts, which they haven't agreed on how staircases work. So this one you can see, as we'll call it external. So the tower is twice as deep as I'd say it technically needs to be.

And I finally learned out, learned why. I always thought it was just their preference. And it turns out it is their preference, but it's their preference based on how they set up their labor. So NBC, when they build a tower, they have a little pulley system. A guy goes up to receive whatever they're receiving, cameras and equipment. And a guy at the bottom is working the rope, and up it goes. Here, they hand load it all up.

And because they hand load it all up, those staircases that go to the top platform are a little bit wider. So now we have this protrusion, which is an aesthetic nuisance relative to the flushness of the grandstand. So what's going to happen now? Well, it'll look neat and tidy because what we do is we have very specific tower banners, we call them, that are built out in our all BMW gradient branding. And it's cut to fit that tower perfectly. And generally what we do is run what we call our logo mesh on this structure, and it would run in front of the TV tower.

be just one clean line. Okay. So now it's going to have that little jagged bump, which will drive me crazy for the next three weeks, but probably only two or three other people will be driven crazy. So this needs to be flushed with the front, and it looked like, and now I don't have my tape, but Salvador just measured it and said you had two and a half feet here, and you got two and a half feet there. I get it. And it'll all still fit. So we'll manage the handrail. but that'll just keep our keep the rules guys happy keep us happy so there are two clips there the transition is him deciding no i don't want this to drive me crazy actually i'm going to go back and get them to move this whole tower that's protruding like a foot from the rest of this spectator area and slide the whole thing i want it flush thank you very much i'm going to go find that uh next week at bmw for sure and and and yeah just do a quick check matters it matters to this one yeah it does so yeah that's just you know a little little clips that that pop the up that we loved. So what happens they get all the blocking, tackling,

done, all the grandstands are set up, all the towers are set up, all the tents are set up, like what, what's next? Yeah, so again, it's all, it's a big race. And it's one of my questions in the first interview is like, well, why don't you just do it earlier? So obviously post course, you know, and so it's all very condensed. And it's a big race to advance week. And there's just certain things you can't do until the week before the tournament, because

that's when the shot link, PJ TOR sent in all their stuff, the broadcast. they, you know, they're a traveling circus, so they can't set up cameras four weeks in advance. So there's like the last 5% of the job. I'm just shocked by how high, how intensive the labor is. There's like, there's no shortcuts to this stuff. So first example I'd give is ask Patrick, how much fence, you know, you got to put fence around the property so that nobody can, you know,

basically enforce tickets. Secure it. Yeah. There's four miles of fence that will be set up. Temporary fencing. tough like gnarly job that was going to be the dirty job that that i was going to be going to be doing and and that that job stinks but then not only the fencing the meshing if you go look at mesh fencing it's like zip ties man it's like it's to do it like there's just no shortcut on that stuff and it's pretty analog situation yeah and one of the and you can do that stuff early but then the

meshing internally there's a lot of fencing internally and that's you know so there's just a lot of detail that goes in the week before another one that goes that that happens it's always it seems like a little bit of a fire drill is rope and steak. The next time we're at a tournament, I want you to take a look at rope and steak, and here's Patrick on rope and steak. This is good stuff. So back when I was an intern crew guy,

the rope and steak job, that was like the bottom job, because I assume you guys have never pounded rope and steak, but it's no fun. Yeah, there's 2,500,000 stakes out there. Yeah. And don't hit a waterline. You're pretty much defining the,

the stadium, right? You're saying, here's where the gallery goes. Here's how players move from green to tea. And then we have, you know, there's a guy named Bryce, who's our lead. And the way our rope and stake process works is pretty good. So he's, he's the driver, right? He's going to, he's going to be deciding where the lines go. So he'll get a, you know, carry-all golf cart and load up as many as he can in the back there, usually, I don't know, 50 or 100 at a time. And he's just driving the line and he's going to one-handing it in the ground just so it stands up. then there's, you know, the labor kind of following behind. They'll come out, pound the steak.

So steak pounder, you know, you've got your big pipe handles. It's, I don't know, 20, 30 pounds. Boom. All right. So you've got to do that 3,000 times. You're following Bryce as he drives around the golf course. Guy, so Bryce is throwing the steak. Guy behind him is pounding the steak.

And then in a perfect world, conditions are good. And we've got the right amount of bodies. There's another cart behind him with, you know, 10 gallons of Hunter Green paint. So this guy has got a. A paint mitt dips his hand in, goes to the steak, boom, boom, it's green, keep going. Steaks are that you can't just buy green steaks? I wish I could buy green steaks. And that's the other thing.

You know, states like a business opportunity. Yeah, every good rope and steak guy has what's effectively known as a rope rig. So in the back of his cart, build a little apparatus that holds two spools of 5,000 foot rope. And he'll, you know, leave one end with some of the labor and just start driving and kind of slalom through the, through the stakes so that the line doesn't get lost. And then you've just got a guy or two walking behind him, tying a double clove hinge knot on the deal and off you go. We say the rope's perfect.

And we always ask the guys send in a picture if you see it. But if you get a bird landing on your rope, that's when you know it's taught enough. I thought you'd like that, Sali. And I got to follow up on a bird pick. It's advance week. We might have to dig that up. But, okay, so I mean, a lot there.

But I was also interviewing a couple other tournament directors. And this job makes people love, oh, rope and steak. And it's a good indication of how this is kind of a cottage industry. He doesn't do it for BMW, but there's this Argentinian guy named Kiku that is like the rope and steak. He's a specialist. And he does a lot of PG. He just travels around, does rope and steak. And I asked Patrick about it.

Oh, yeah, I know Kikki. We don't, you know, we work. with Bryce, but, you know, so it's just like a very specific job. Like the CBS spotter that the guy I love, you know, you're just like, oh my God, there's just like guys that that do these kind of unique golf tournament jobs just all over the place. And again, this is stuff that just has to get done three days before the tournament starts. And like he said, it's defining the arena. You know, and don't hit a water main. Like there's just a lot can go wrong. And it seems like such a simple thing. I can't figure out why, you know, once you paint the, you know, everything keeps getting moved around.

You paint the post green. What happens to the green posts? I think they rust, rain. I think it's just like they just get beat up and it's weatherized. So anyway, as you guys are probably feeling like it's stressful. So let's just especially, you know, we asked Patrick about this, but you're doing all this and he's got a handle on it all. But then there's still inspections that have to go on. So Charlie, let's cue this one up. If you think back over the last 20 years, what's the most stressful event? You know, I know it might be weather related, but when can you think? When does that stress level the highest for you?

So inspections can be super stressful where, you know, we go through all the proper procedures to get everything engineered, stamped out, drawn properly, executed properly. But at the end of the day, there's a little bit of, you know, opinion. from the inspectors, whether that's a fire marshal or a building inspector or health inspector, that sort of thing, because we kind of live in this gray area where not permanent infrastructure and generally municipalities don't have codes that specifically address what we're doing at this scale. So it's in between, you know, state fair where there's a 30 by 30 tent selling corn dogs and, you know, building a house. We're in the middle somewhere there because we do have, you know, we've got air conditioning and we've got elevators.

got all these things, but it's a temporary event. So I can remember the first year at Crooked Stick 2012 inspections, you know, four days out. And the list we got from the building inspector was something that would take a month to execute to, you know, get the doors open. And we did it. And that was a challenging advance week, I'll say. But it was, you know, taking down structures, rebuilding. And I'm not talking, you know, 10 by 10 tenths. were, you know, grandstands that might have been, hey, they forgot one thing in the foundation.

Now we got to start it over. So, man. Those are never fun. But, yeah, weather is weather. And the worst case was here in 08 where, you know, flood and all that to deal with. But that's, you roll with the punches there. God, that inspector thing is talk about something I'd never thought about. And that happens during advance week.

So you do all this work. And, you know, because the inspectors don't want to show up until it's, you know, like, They got a million other things to inspect. Again, temporary thing. So just kind of drilling down on this isn't a backyard party. You know, this requires civic stuff. So in my research for this pot, I came across a permit and variance approved by Baltimore County last year right before the tournament, an environmental easement at Caves Valley

ahead of last year's tournament. I asked Patrick about it. He chuckled and said, yeah, we wanted to put a TV tower. I think it was left of one or two green. and it was down by like a creek or a marsh. Turns out that was a protected like environmentally protected wetland. And that guy, he was like, oh, God, you know, like that. And he was like, it got caught ahead of advance week, but he had to go through the permitting process.

Guys, I have a protected wetland in my backyard. I can't imagine navigating environmental variants like that while trying to like not puncture the irrigation lines and getting the fire marshal to like approve my points of egress. Should ask you die for some strategy? on how to get around some of those programs. Yeah, exactly. A lot of people just do it. Yeah. So then, and then this is one of my favorite clips.

So throw that stuff in, like heavy duty civic stuff in with a very relatable, very avoidable problem. Let's cue this one up, Charlie. It's got of a digression question. How many typos you take care of on an annual basis? The, well, a lot, but the most memorable typo that comes to mind is at Crooked Stick. So a crooked stick right outside of Indianapolis. There was a lot of tie-in with the, um, most of the most of the most of the most of the most of the most of the most motor speedway there, BMW had players test drive cars, all that fun stuff.

And there was this enormous banner behind the first T that made it pass every possible approval from our side and BMW of the tour and this and that, that, you know, had a picture of a couple of hot players at the time in a car and said, you know, gentlemen, start your engines. But nobody noticed until the 20 foot tall thing got installed and said, gentleman, start your engines. So the E and the A was an overlook. That was a, you know, then we, we learn. So good for us, bad for the sign printers,

but we learned that they can produce that in an hour. And it doesn't really take them the 10 days that they tell us it takes. Gentlemen. I was at that tournament too, and I vividly remember, vividly remember that sign he's talking about. Do you remember who was on it? Who was on the poster? I remember Rory won the tournament.

I'm guessing he was probably on there. One of the U.S. open the year before. I'm sure it was like Rory, Dustin Johnson, Tiger. Sounds like Crooked Stick was a, we caught some curveballs. Yeah. With the inspector and with the typo. Yeah. So that's why it's one they, what, they haven't been back there since, right?

They probably hadn't been there before. Probably maybe for like a senior something or other, but it's kind of a random, yeah, kind of a random one-off venue, circling all the way back to like this event moves around. Well, and that's another thing I've always known. There's just so much signage and BMW does such a good job with the branding, but there's just a lot of approvals on. On typos, man. And so that was one I was curious about. So last one, unrelated to Patrick, but I learned from some conversations with Patrick and

some other tournament staff, like the nuance, like in complexity, how nuanced and complex the title sponsor branding can be. So there's this German guy named Clemens that works for BMW, and he's based in Munich. He's based based out at the mothership. And his job, he cites the branding and car displays for all BMW golf events. around the world. So he has, as I was told, he has a wizardly eye for how on-site signage and branding and product placement will look specifically for TV and, and basically maximizing exposure. So his job is to like frame up the car behind Nance in the, in the tower on 18 and make sure

the car, the camera like shooting back from the green picks up the car behind 16T. And what's interesting about this and talking to Stephen Cox about this is it becomes a massive factor for the competition team, if they want to move the T's up one day or change, you know, kind of flex the course, they have to plan for that because so and no, is this just a sign we're moving or like, and he, this guy's like, well, hold on just a second. We have a camera over there on 13 that's going to shoot back. And that X7 is in the background because, you know, BMW's measuring how many, you know, how many minutes of exposure like, and they, they should.

They're spending a ton of money. So, you know, that, that type of collaboration involves. PJ Tor, BMW. And I just like love it that there's like a guy, there's a guy for that. And so I'm going to see, I got to seek out Clemens if he's there this week. I'm going to go take a picture with him because I want to meet that guy.

Deeds, do you remember Conway Farms 2017 BNW Championship Pro Am? I'm playing with Rahm and we're on the 18th hole. I had like 2.35 in. And I had three iron or worth three wood. And I didn't know what to do. And Rahm was like, you can't get three iron there. Just take it three wood and hit it low and bounce it off the

grandstands and you look up in the grandstand there's an i8 parked in the grandstand like he wanted me to bank one off the grandstand with an i8 parked right there and i was like i i won i think this i might come into play uh this week for the tournament and two i'm not going to do that uh that's not going to be me that puts a so one of you asked how do they get the cars out into the lake i didn't get that i didn't ask this question i think they float them though like on a barge but anyway all those displays have to be built. That's Sal's job and where they're placed. So Clemens, I think he does like a tour where he's in the U.S. for a couple of weeks. He'll make a site visit to Belrieve. Then he's going to go to Liberty National, get ahead of that and start to like put stuff on the map of like,

you know, like I picture him with a monocle. Like, yes, I like this. You know, so anyway, I love that shit. A couple others. Police relationship, something I've always been curious about. So this is dependent on the market, and it's an interesting one for BMW as they move around. Some police departments, the local police have a big enough team. It's usually sheriff's department. It kind of falls in their purview. But like if you watch, there's always a cop with every group, especially BMW, only 50 players. And I've always wondered like, is that, do they select a golfer?

Because it's like, if you don't play golf, like those guys could get in the way. And he's like, yeah, you know what? We try to, first off, if the police. department puts out a call to other departments in the area. Hey, we got this tournament coming up. And they try to say, like, if you're a golfer, we got a good job for you. You could be kind of a, you know, walking security. So a lot of those cops are, you know, it's a good job to have. And, you know, then WGA is responsible for all the other security, metal detectors, all that stuff. And then the last one, just HOA. Patrick was at some

HOA meetings, making sure neighbors have tags to get through barricaded streets that are shut down, parking passes, you know, you got to make sure all of these. And that's just like a thousands of people that have nothing to do with the tournament, but like you can't have them complaining. So there's just so much that goes into like working with the local town and the local services to make sure you got what you need. Yeah. Yeah, it's like running a little city government. Yes. Almost. You know, it's just so impressive to be dialed on all that. All right. Let's talk a little finance. So I'm going to try to do a quick run through this. As we have outlined earlier, we got four stakeholders. You have the host

organization, so WGA, they collect everything outside the ropes, tickets, local sponsors, hospitality, merchandise, concessions. They bear all expenses for setup. PGATor collects the big money. That's the BMW, the check from the title sponsor. They're writing one check. They might be doing some stuff

on this, you know, with Evan Scholars separately, but for the event, you know, stuff, it's one check. They, national TV partnership, official marketing partners, kind of mothership revenue. And then they're working with the title sponsor on funneling some of that money to TV. As again,

reference to Denny Cash episode, go back and listen to that. There's a lot of good stuff there on how that works. And then BMW, they just spend money. They don't collect any revenue. They spend towards the purse. And the host course,

I believe is paid by WGA. I actually didn't confirm this, but I think that's part of kind of the P&L with WGA. I think the PGA tour helps with subsidizing any renovations, you know, making sure that that's done. properly and working with them on agronomy. So a simplified explanation for how it works on the revenue side. Most PGA, like regular PGA tour events, title sponsor shoulders like the lion's

share of the purse. So from research and conversations, typical sponsor fee is roughly like 125, 150% of the purse. So if it's $20 million purse, $30 million check. That money is going to cover pay for all. I'd say most or all the prize money. That's changed a lot. You know, the WGA will it does kick in a percentage of that. I don't know what it is and I wonder if that changes depending on I think it varies a little bit. They're going to pay a payment to the host organization fees paid back to the tour you know the mothership's got you got to pay for the water bill at the global moat and then activation costs hospitality on-site branding marketing campaigns all that jazz in several conversations I did learn that it's gotten more complicated

since the, you know, PGA Tour Enterprises and the purses have gone up significantly. So one thing that's changed, starting in 2025, each tournament post pays an additional purse fee, plus a share of tournament revenue now goes back to the tour. So I think that was 1% in 2025. I believe it's still 1%. And I've heard it's going to rise to 2% in 2027. So, you know, some coupon clipping going on from the PGA tour on WGA, you know. So that's a, that's a thing.

So let's focus on the expenses. Go ahead, Dean, sorry. Well, the only thing I was going to say to draw conclusions and maybe there's an oversimplification, apologies if it is, but I mean, that money has to come from somewhere. Yes. Which if the event is supposedly put on for charity, it seems like it's just coming out of the charity pool. So and I want to get to that clip right after this, kind of the charity component. But I do want to go over to the expense side because a big takeaway.

is how complicated the expenses are for WGA and how important and vital it is to have somebody like Patrick that can manage that because that's directly related the competence is directly related to what the scholars get. So Charlie, let's cue this one up.

All right, so there are 1,770 budget categories. Yeah, so if I look at, you know, want to add six more? So it is the 250th, right? Right. Like some of them, like flags for, flagsticks, that's a one, you know, one invoice. Okay, great. But if I'm

looking at, let's see here, something like main entrance, that big long floor we drove on. Yeah. So, all right, all that scaffold, all the carpet that goes on top of it, all the hand rail that goes along the side of that floor, the tent, the

graphics that go inside that tent, the audio, because we play like a looped Welcome to the BMW Championship, all that sort of stuff. What else goes in there? So, And once you get down to the actual entry, the metal detectors, the signage that is allocated towards the main entrance, power that goes out there for all the ticket scanners and metal detectors, turf repair when we're done, that's all allocated by asset.

So those are all individual within the 1770 categories, yeah. So one of the 1770 is main entrance, and then in that main entrance there's all of those things. Oh, I see. Gosh. So if you look at like that double-decker structure, you can imagine all the all the invoices more or less that are allocated to that structure. So this is not necessarily like a carpet is, you know, all carpets across property are one category. It's like... It's allocated to represent what's used there. So if

that's, you know, that's 400 feet long, that's probably eight or 12 rolls of carpet. So when we get our big carpet bill, I'll say, all right, 12 of these, allocate to main entrance. Okay. 50 these, allocate to Skybox. Ten or of them player movement you know all those all the different areas where carpet is applied we then push the money there accordingly gosh whoa next time randy talks about our our books being too long to close or whatever we're going to play that for them yeah exactly yeah so but i mean that's this again this is the game and so allow me to kind of back up or pontificate for a second something i've come to understand in my old age uh is that you know you expect you have to

create a memorable experience and a good experience to generate like big returns on charitable stuff. And I used to shake my head when I worked at Google and I saw the amount of money the United Way or some of these other big charities spent on like Google ads. I'd be like, God, that's, why doesn't that money go to the, you know, to the charity, you know, and you people, some of these nonprofits get dinged for like how much executives make. But then you hear how complicated it is and you got you, it's all about the people, right? And I think over the last 20 years, these golf events and these buildouts have have doubled as Patrick told us. And it's in some ways kind of become an arms race. Like we got to keep creating a memorable experience for the title

sponsor to keep them happy. You know, it's just kind of the game. The ante goes up. And I think there's some of this too is the economies of scale. So if you're asking someone to pay 300 plus for hospitality package over four or five days, it needs to feel big. And I think with the the Greco's and with the tent companies, it's like, they, they, you know, it's economy for them of like, well, let's just, why don't we build another one? And then we'll sell that one for 300K, right? And so I think the scale almost, you know, it overwhelms me to think about with these budget categories, but the scale, you almost have to go big or go home at this point. And that's what kind of evens it out. So anyway, another clip from Patrick on the evolution of the kind of the

build out over the last 20 years. Can you give me a percentage split on where the revenue comes from for you guys across ticket sales, concession sales, merch sales, and hospitality. And am I missing a bucket there? Yeah. So off the top of my head, I can give you largest to smallest. I need to poke around a little bit to give you a percentage. But corporate hospitality is certainly the line share. So I'd say that's double, if not triple, the next numbers that feed in. So that's selling all the, you know, anything from selling, you know, corporate package of 10 tickets to, you know, the law firm to selling a big sponsorship of a space or a venue or, you know, a hospitality suite that might host 100 people, you know, so that can be somewhere, those units can be anywhere from, you know, $5,000 to $400,000, depending on what folks are buying. So collectively, that's the lion's share of the revenue that we generate on site.

Next is usually, it's kind of like hand-in-hand merch and ticket sales. Those are in the same. realm and then concessions falls below that now certainly there's other buckets that that get fed into that but they're not as uh not as memorable yeah okay and then over the last 20 years have those percentage splits changed has has hospitality like ramped way way up like you know talk to me about that a little bit yeah so our i mean just everything about our event and i imagine that's across the tour has has gone up you know pretty strongly over that the last 20 years, where corporate sales, you know, for us, you know, just related to our build, you know, our builds doubled over those years in terms of square footage. So you've got to imagine

the revenue goes right along with it. Not to mention that, you know, just the way the world works and inflation and things go up, price of doing business, all that. So the ticket to buy those things have gone up and the demand and or our efforts to sell them have gone up to make that grow a ton. Merchandise has changed completely. You know, back. at Cog Hill 20 years ago, it was, you know, a little pop-up tent. You know, they had a couple pro shops. They had two buildings there. It wasn't, you know, a big fan shop or anything like that. It was run-of-the-mill, off you go. People got it if they wanted it, but it wasn't, you know, a beacon. You know, here, you know, we're having this thing on Sunday prior to the championship

that's open to the public just to kind of be an open house. You know, merchandise is open, concessions, come watch the last round of FedEx to see who's actually going to be here. And we've got like 2,000 people signed up to come out here to do that. So at the end of the day, you know, Patrick said this later on in that clip. In the eye, this is a fundraiser in the, coming from the WGA's perspective. So money raised for the 11 scholars, whatever's left after the expenses. And, and player purse. But like the increase in those expenses goes that hospitality is really what's driving that up.

I was surprised to hear about the merch. Yeah. Growing. You know, I'm just like, man. Like anyway, I think that helps them though, because they bounce. bounce around. So it does feel special in certain markets. Totally. But as Patrick said, of tournament profits, three million, he used that as an example. The funding, that's funding for the Evans Scholars. So since 2021, here's the amount that's been raised for the scholars. 2021 at Caves Valley,

5.6 million. 22, 4.5 at Wilmington Country Club in Delaware, 5.5 at Olympia Fields in 23, 10.2 million at Castle Pines in 24. And then I couldn't, the financials haven't been released for 25, but I know Castle Pines was the high water mark. So they're there. then the natural question again back to the earlier in this conversation why don't you just go back to cost of pines and it's like well there's some other stuff about you know the identity of the tournament certain markets uh are important there's some you know donation stuff that happens year round and so it's it's not just a go maximize the the millions that's not like the exact success metric they're looking for yeah there could be a you know a sizable donor in particular in denver that might not get

match the next time. And then the other thing here too is there's variable costs in certain markets. I asked him, what's the biggest variable? And he said, you know, parking and busing in shuttles because he's like, those are expensive vendors and that's gas. So how much diesel do you guys think they needed this week? This is like generators and. Yeah, and buses and all that stuff.

Knowing the fact that most, I think 98% of the power that's used on site are coming from the generators. Yeah. this is this the shoes on the other foot here I know these to you and you say a dumb thing and we laugh at you uh I'm gonna I'm gonna say uh oh my god I don't know five five thousand gallons 30,000 gallons hey and they locked in the price in February before the straight up our moves got closed it was fired up about that he's like oh locked that price in in February So it's a dollar a gallon difference.

I mean, that's, yeah, what, 35 grand? And that's, again, that's the kind of stuff that he's responsible for because and knowing that it's going directly to the mission, you know, after all the costs are done, it's, you know, that makes those 700 and, you know, we're 1,770 budget categories. Like, let's track this shit. So anyway, here's a kind of a, I hit him with some rapid fire questions on, on stats, which is just a good indicator on how dialed Patrick is. All right.

I want to run through like rapid fire. fire section here, some fun stats. How many volunteers? 2,200. What's the busiest day on site? Toss up. I'll say Friday seems the busiest because that's the, all those corporate hospitality venues are humming. General spectators are about 90% what they are on Saturday, but Friday just seems busier. Okay. How many buses, shuttles this year? We got eight routes, I think at peak. We're probably in the neighborhood of, I say, just, over 100 pieces of shuttle equipment moving. Okay.

How many miles of fence? On the perimeter, we're at four and a half five, and then we've got to do the interior, which will be another two. Okay. How many miles of rope? Let's see here. It's a 7,300-yard golf course times 2.14. So call it about 20,000 feet of rope, so about three miles rope.

Okay. Four miles away. How many cars are you expecting? Cars. I'd say 12,000. Okay. How much carpet? 360-ish thousand square feet.

So call it nine acres if you want. How much beer? I can't spit that one out. A lot. Okay. But I can give you that data. Yeah, I was going to say the same with water, hot dogs. Yep.

You know. Don't have it off the top of my head. but I have it. Yeah, it's a test, right? How many porta-potties? 270. I love that you know that number. That's good stuff.

Well, that one is so we're approaching, you know, sellout here for Saturday grounds. And generally all those questions come to me is like, all right, when are we sold out? And that's based on all sorts of things. Some of its parking, some of its assets here at the club. And a lot of it is, you know, porta-potties and concessions. Gosh, just practical stuff.

Yeah. I love that. I just the thought of like, hey, Patrick, When are we sold out? I don't know. It depends. Yeah, right. I've never actually thought about that.

That makes it total sense. So I did dig up a few stats from Castle Pines or Patrick sent him over. More than 25 miles of various cabling for data and video connections. Seven acres of carpet at Castle Pines. 4,000 cases of beer were consumed. 8,200 milkshakes were served. Tasted Jack. Bochra, can you believe it?

8,000. Milkshakes. And then 252 BMWs were delivered, detailed, and decalced for championship usage at the 2024 B&W Championship. So like, last one. People had to drive those. Like, it's just insane. One of the last questions I asked Patrick was, what does success look like? And I loved, I loved his answer here.

What's the success metric you're looking at, you know, after a week of, you know, a BMW championship week? The easiest one is, all right, how much did we generate? for the event scholars. That's dollars and cents and easy answer. For me, if championship week, if I can sit in my office and watch the golf tournament, it's working. That's good.

Okay. If my phone has a full battery isn't ringing, that means there's not problems. So the less people talk to me tournament week, the more successful the event is in my eyes. So I was thinking maybe we try to call them on the last, live show that Sunday and ask him what his battery what what what how his battery is uh I love that that's a great idea a very just a look at I really really liked that answer um so it's like to imagine all this

again the year year round job this is and just ah yeah it rained sorry man oh wind did blow that place sucks no yes today yeah we were asking a lot of staff or charlie was asking like what's what are you stressing about weather was just an easy answer for everybody but even that You don't hear about weather in the leadups ever like, oh, they couldn't build the grandstand because of weather. Like that never, even weather interruptions don't end up with with lack of construction happening there. But, Neil, did you get a sense like, I mean, I know what you said about the charity dollars, but is, is there a preferred venue? Is there a favorite venue? Does it, do they have to, how do they kind of look at that?

I think with BMW sponsoring it like for 20 years, they're starting to become some continuity of like, you know, they've been the Caves Valley. Olympia, you know, getting back to Chicago is important to, to WGA. And I tried to ask, like, what was the most, you know, hey, what was your favorite BMW? And the answer I was kind of getting from everybody was like, it's like naming your favorite kid. But I feel like Castle Pines was kind of the leader in the clubhouse. And that was 2024. It's obviously the high watermark for WGA. It was a great turnout in a golf market that I think is starved.

I mean, you know, the international with the Stableford used to be at Castle Pines. It's a really interesting golf course. it's on the side of a mountain. And so it was a really, it was a complex build for them. Very hilly course. But I think it was a great example from an execution standpoint of they had a really good plan.

And being there, they did a really good job of moving people. And people in Denver like to hike. So they leaned into that. And I think once you get the big stuff, if you're operating at a high level, they were able to do a lot of creative stuff. They customized the course signage to look like ski maps.

That was really cool. Yeah, and so, and I think that's the kind of little stuff that, like, is really what differentiates BMW. And it's because they can do all the big stuff. And they're also not on like, autopilot with like, well, we know where this is going to go. You know, so they're able to, I don't know, it's just a high sign of competence to me. And I think that's, I think that's telling of the, uh, the execution they, they had. So that, that, that tournament was, uh, was kind of seemed like the one that was like that one was sweet. I have never really thought about it that way, but I could see the, yeah, in my head, I'm always like, well, it'd be so much better if you just do it in the same place every time.

But it would be so much easier to get complacent in that way as well. It makes a lot of sense. So the buzz would be different too, you know? Yeah. And yeah. And there's pros to be in the same market. You kind of have your sales dialed. You can forecast better.

You know, it's easier. But there is market fatigue and talking to a couple other tournament directors. Sometimes it's like, like, and we, I don't like the analogy I make is something. sometimes in the in the pro shop for us. It's like, all right, uh, what's, what's going to be the first major collection this year? You know, like it's, it's kind of, you're running the same blueprint. So in closing, you know, we're round towards home here. I want to send it over to Nick White, uh, who was called out by, uh, Carlos Araya, the GM CEO of Belrieve as an unsung hero. And Charlie, why don't you tee this one up? Carlos Arrea. Yes, here we go. Here's Nick White.

As far as just a day to day like standard job that I think is really hard is cleanup. Mowing any cleanup pass. I'm very particular about cleanup passes, whether it be the fairway into the intermediate or the cleanup pass on the green. It's the last pass or two, you know, in front of the collar on the green. So as a mower is setting down to mow his pass, they're late, right? They can't get the very edge. So somebody has to come through with another mower and mow the circle around the green to essentially clean it up. Okay. Well, it takes a lot of focus and precision because you don't want to mow into the collar, but you don't want to be scared to not get close enough for the collar because then you're going to leave, you know, skips.

So it's a really detailed job. So the guy that we have doing it, his name's Austin Kern, and everyone we call him Colonel Cleanup, because he mows the cleanups on the fairways and the greens. And I don't want to mow the cleanup. I mean, I get on that mower. I'll scalp it immediately. Sounds very surgical. Somebody else do it. Yep. I don't have the, I don't have the patients for that. It's like you want your barber with a straight razor to not leave like, you know, little scruffy patches. 100%. Make it look good, man. Leave it.

I always say like, hey, anytime someone leaves a job, I always say, hey, man, that's got your name on it. So if somebody is, you know, weed eating something and they do a, you know, a terrible job and they scalp all around the tree because they weeded it down to the dirt or they, or they miss an area or whatever, and say, hey, man, that's got your name on it. You were the last person to touch that. Is that how you feel good about that? I'm stealing that one. That's important too with like, you know, is the ball on the green or off the green? And if that is a little hairy there,

that could, that could weigh into something. You need a ruling and then it closes that pace of play. Yeah. And so, you know, first off, shout out to Nick. Shout out to the Supers everywhere.

Shout out to Colonel cleanup. But I feel like, and shout out to all the turf heads. I can't wait to hear what, what about Cody's cleanup process down and forth. But I bring this. one up. One, like, we focused on Patrick, but I think Nick White's doing this same thing with his crew. You know, like he, he's solving a million problems all day long. He's collaborating

with the PGA tour to make sure the agronomy's dialed. And then Carlos is doing the same thing with Bell Reve membership, making sure everybody's like on board. And so you kind of have these like captains and then they're all working together. And then just the last line, I think sums it all up like that, that's got your name on it. You know, like I love that. And I think it sums up Patrick's ethos well is also. And I'll say this. You, Neil and Charlie, you got your name on this one. Yeah.

This has been great, man. You guys feel good about this? What else we? I think so. I feel like we were, we were, uh, we were, you're doing it. Well, and also felt like we were working towards advanced week as well. It's like, man, we got to get this one. We got to get this one done.

Uh, so what do we miss? Anything, anything, anything you guys are curious about, uh, or, yeah. I mean, a zillion things, but nothing like, Like it's to your point that it's like, okay, well, this all makes sense for the ops. Like now, yeah, let's do the agronomy. Okay. Yeah, let's figure out how the setup stuff works. You know, it's like I think that's such a good point that you can.

Everything you said about Patrick, I'm like that, that sounds like the most invigorating hardest job ever. And there's also like three more jobs around that are kind of trying to run similar little little kingdoms. You know, it's fascinating. Cannot wait to get to Thursday. All everything that has gone into all this tournament. They're playing, left, clean, in place. It's all ruined. It's all ruined.

Can you believe these guys are playing live clean in place? I can't believe it. I just think the camera angle stink. TIO. They keep having TIO out there, Neil. I wish we could get more worm cams, you know? No, I mean, cool tower. Great job, Sal, but I just wish we could get more worm cams.

Do you have a different opinion on TIO after doing all this? I think there's a lot more thought that goes into it for sure. Oh, really? But now, I do still think, I firmly believe that there should. should be a penalty for line of sight. I really do. I think you could talk me into free or drop zones. I think the current line of sight relief should be. And that's not a, that's not a, that's a problem at the, I think with the USGA. We'll take that offline. I'm not going to, I'm not going to let's not spoil this one. You know what, Charlie, play us out on this last clip.

Hey, what, uh, we got to get a lunch order in. Taco Tuesday. I like it. Let's do that same place. Copy that. Ah, great. We had tacos, man. They were good. I'm hungry right now. That was bad timing.

Bad timing. Good stuff, guys. Thank you guys both. I learned a ton on this. And, yeah, made me curious to do other angles of behind the scenes of professional golf. So thank you. Sure.

Thanks for listening.