No Laying Up - Golf Podcast - 1199: 1995 PGA Tour Season Deep Dive

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

Neil, Soly and DJ are back for the second edition of our week by week review of a historical season on the PGA Tour. This time we flash back to 1995 and learn just how much time is truly a flat circle, with many familiar themes emerging that sound an awful lot like the current state of the game in 2026. Show Notes: Ed Dougherty - The Golf Engineer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNTSHRD_tMU 1994 PGA Tour Deep Dive - NLU Ep. 11117: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3XP_Oua8-g 1995 Majors - NLU Ep. 669: https://nolayingup.com/podcasts/no-laying-up-podcast/nlu-podcast-episode-669-1995-major-championships Support our Sponsors: Titleist Rhoback Pinehurst East Sands Golf Co.  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? It is better than most. Better than most. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the No Laying Up podcast. Sali here,

1995 PGA tour season, deep dive. Don't need to do a big intro of all that. We're going to get right into that. I want to give a shout out, though, to our friends at Titleist. You've heard me talk a lot about it. I have gone out 24 times since I've taken the GTS3, put it in the bag, played some form of nine or 18 holes.

Usually it's just nine holes chasing daylight at the end of the day. I am gaining 0.9 shots per round against a plus two handicap with the GTS3. That has been a dramatic, dramatic turnaround. My driving has been a weakness of the last several years. As soon as I put this head on the shaft that I have, GTS3, I use it in the D4 setting, 11 degree. My accuracy has gone up a ton. I'm getting more spin on the ball. I'm not hitting it like a crazy far distance.

I'm just so much more accurate. It's actually let me take the long, the driving iron out of the bag, put an extra wedge in the bag. I Rikos was also telling me that my short game was, was struggling a little bit. Put a 60 in, a 56 to help my gaping there. There's been a lot of improvements on that part of the bag as well.

But man, I am honestly just having so much fun playing golf again because I'm in the middle of the fair way a lot more often. Play a course here quite often that has, you know, OB water all over. the place and I still pull driver and I don't even fear it. I don't think about it anymore, which is just, man, golf is a lot more fun when you look at it that way. Go to tiles.com,

find a fitter near you. Give the GTS a try. I'm telling you it's awesome. My buddies that I play with frequently down here are commenting on how much better I'm driving it and I can't shut up about it if you can't tell. It's a very, very real thing. And there's a reason why I've gotten out to the golf course 24 times here since mid-May, which might be a record for me in this phase of my life. Thank you for tuning in. Enjoy the podcast. Titleist.com to find a fitter near you. Episode two of our PGA tour season, Deep Dives, or PGA Tour Simps, we are obligated to go through these year by year,

spend hours talking about this. DJ, how are you? What are we doing today? Hey, I'm great, man. We are going to be diving into the 1995 PGA tour season, a season I know very, very little about. Obviously, a lot of these, you know, you know, who won the majors. That's kind of about it.

You know, the rest of pro golf, it's pre-Tiger. There's a lot of sands shifting. It's kind of a blank space for me. So I'm looking forward to filling it in. I've done no research on this. I'm here. Audience, I am your proxy. I'm your avatar.

I'm going to try to ask the questions that you're sitting there asking. You know, Sali just made me smash a protein bar before I got on this. I don't know if it's enough. I'm just, I'm reeling right now, but I'm excited to get going. I'm going to be covering the first six months of the year and the back six months of the year is going to be covered by Mr. Neil Schuster. Hello, Neil.

Gentlemen, poking my head out of the wormhole, the deep, dark wormhole that I've crawled down the last three days. Wormhole or rabbit hole? Because wormholes are like how you time travel. A lot of people mess this up. Well, it kind of felt like time travel. Yeah.

Yeah. So I'm going to say wormhole. All right. We will go through the minds. Yeah, turn it up, Dege. I got some action for you. I'm going to put you on the, spot, dude. You led this with, everybody

knows who won the majors? Who won the majors in 95 without looking? Can you, can you rattle that off? Ben Crenshaw, won the Masters. The U.S. Open was Leroy Jansen. Is that right? Not, no.

95. Where was it? Well, if that would give it away, I mean, that would give it to you. A lot of references to it very recently. Shot of his life! Oh, wait. Oh, Corey Pavin? Yeah. Yeah, okay. I thought that was 94. No, that was early else.

Okay. Corey Phaven, of course. PGA, yeah, I don't know the PGA. And then the D-Open was John Daley. Correct. Who won the PGA? Elk. Oh, right, Riviera.

Yeah, sure. Exactly. Everybody knows that. Everybody knows that. Not a man alive can clip me on the back night after eating a custard like that. So some backstory here. Again, we're going to dive into 1995. I always wanted to do these deep dives on just like a year in golf.

And we're kind of focusing on PGA tour or men's professional golf. And back in the day when we started this, I threw a dart at the wall, landed on 95, you know, when we started this. We started doing the research for that one, quickly figured out that like 1994 would make more sense as a starting point. And if you want, and I would recommend this, episode 1,117. That is the 1994 deep dive. Because as soon as we started researching 95, you're like, you're picking up some major story. lines mid story, which we're going to continue today, but it was helpful to go back and get to 94.94. Finchum steps into the PGA tour job. Greg Norman's trying to start his world tour.

The FTC is sniffing around the PGA tour's restrictive release clauses. Things are just happening. All right. They actually relate kind of a ton. I would say that a lot of things mirror what's happened in men's golf the last five years as well, which was what makes this conversation made it quite fun to dive into 94. Everything we've done, Neil, and everything we will. do time is a flat circle i will say over and over again not to spoil anything but uh things get wrapped up a lot quicker oh my god in 95 finchum so we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna get into that another theme that i'd say 94 was a international takeover i think at least six of the top 10 like the top six guys in the world were internationals which kind of was some of the reason norman was able to get a little

momentum on the the world tour idea u.s golf was just kind of in a uh transition phase And then that starts to flip over pretty quick in in 95. You start to, you know, see some some names like Furek, you know, some guys, some dudes, some guys start to show two tendencies. Others to hear. Others. Yeah. So I would say I don't think you have to stop this right now and go back and listen to 1994.

You can do them out of order. But if you're looking to pass the time, I see no reason why you wouldn't start with that episode and then and then do this one. But you can also just pick things up because we're, yeah, we're going to get things running full stride. You know what? I'm not going to produce this episode, but I'm going to say,

let's drop the link to the, what episode was it? It's in the description. 1-1-17. It's in the description, hopefully here. Linking bio, Dej. That's right.

It'll cost nothing. Throw that link in there. Hopefully you guys know where I was going to start this episode, same way I started the last one. Going into 1995, how many can you get who are the top 10 players in the world going into 1999?

Should I let DJ answer this? Let him get. Yeah, let him get gone a little bit. I'll try to help fill it in. Because I probably get five of the 10. These are in no particular order. Greg Norman. Number two.

Tom Kite. Not on the list. Oh, tough start. Steve Alkington. Not on the list. God. I'm so bad. I don't know.

Corey Paven. I'm just going down the major. Corey Pavenance number 10. Again, beginning in 95. You got to think about what just happened in 94. Like, Dominance. Nick Price is number one player in the world.

Yeah. Ernie Ells. Ernie Ells is number seven. I don't know. Help me out. Faldo. Faldo's number three. Yeah.

Bernard Longer still? Bernard Longer's number four. That's right. You got the top four. Best American at this time. Davis Love. Not Davis Love. That's a good guess, but not Davis Love.

Tom Lehman. Marco Barre. Fred Couples is number six. And then who's a habitual. He was struggling at this point. Habitual manipulator, the one most infamous WGR manipulators, the original manipulator. I mean, it's not jumbo Ozaki.

It is Jumbo Ozaki. I was like there's no way to still be him, is it? It's still him. And then one more, one more European, Scottish, big order of merit guy. Monty. That's it. That's the top 10 in the world. Price. All right. Listen, I let you down. Those of you who are driving where I'm supposed to be your proxy, maybe you did better than me. But this is hard. You know, it's hard for somebody turns the lights on you. How many did you guys get? You know? So hard. Look inward. I'm curious how many you got as you're driving your car to work there. The themes. A couple of themes here. John Daly, still everywhere. The needle. I mean, just a bunch of stories about his return to golf after some time off in 1994. Again, history of repeating itself. world tours, greed, legal troubles for the PGA tour.

Is the players a major? That was a conversation in 1995. I don't think it's that wrapped up. New PGA tour leadership. Structure changes as it comes to exemptions and the overall number of cards on the PGA tour. TV contract is coming up. Negotiations are set to begin at the end of next season.

A ton of parallels to 2026, if I may say so. So, like, can I also just a little, a couple stats. So like just a growth like kind of good overall growth in progress check before the tiger boom and as Fincham's taking the helm. So in 1984, you know, kind of in the prime or early part of Dean Beeman's leadership, 72 sanctioned PGA tour events. So they didn't count the silly season back there. Some of the fall events didn't have like world ranking and count towards like moneyless stuff. 72 and 94, there's 100 at the end of 94, 125 events. So that's Champions Tour.

They started to expand out Nike Tour. So more playing opportunities, which is a mandate of the, you know, of the organization. Purse money for the PGA Tour. In 84, it was 26.5 million. That would be 85 million adjusted inflation in today's money. 94 is 107.3 million, which is about 235 million inflation adjusted. And then total annual charitable contributions, which is going to be important as we get into some of this stuff. in 84, 9.4 million, so 30 million inflation adjusted.

And then in 94, 31.7 million. So 71.4 million dollars raised for charity at the inflation adjusted number. So big takeaway. That's for all the tours. That's for all the tours. But just to show you that business is booming. It's getting bigger and this is pre-Tiger. So that's some people are starting to take note of, hey, yeah, maybe a little bit,

a little bit, maybe I need a little extra, huh? I'm carrying this tour, you know. Maybe some sharks circling, if you will. You know, maybe some, the government like, hey, wait a second. We're giving these guys some breaks. Maybe we shouldn't be doing that. So anyway, back to you, Sally. Well, to your point, 62.9 million is the actual purse total on the PGA tour for 1994.

And we are going to more than double that in the next four years. That's what's coming around the corner. But if you remember back to 94. The more things change, man. Again, again, like Tiger helps a ton with that. But there is this, a massive just sports labor theme going on as well. We are in a strike right now at the PG. Yeah, I didn't think about that.

Oh, yeah. That's, and there's a, the, the NHL is playing a lockout shortened season at this moment as well. They do not have baseball figured out by the beginning of the 1995 year. Replacement players are potentially coming and just there's all kinds of legal shit going on with that. you know, hearings, blah, blah, blah, with baseball labor. So like the attention on the labor aspect as it comes to golf kind of stems out of that. Like the big American sports leagues need to get this kind of figured out. And it does, we have cabled sports getting, like, is about to take over.

That was a big thing for Fincham as he kind of sees around the corner of what's about to happen with cable sports. The golf channel begins in early 1995. There in January, it's not in many homes early. We'll get there. but we're about to enter, again, a new TV deal, corporate America's sponsorship of American sports and just 24-7 sports is about to boom.

And I would have to say the PGA tour had the right guy for the job to put them in a position to succeed and capture that boom. Because Fincham came in last year. If you remember we talked about that on 94 pot, he's like, I'm promising purses are going up. The money is going up. We're going up here. Mark my words.

Which is important and he delivers. Also, no new taxes. delivers on a lot of this stuff which like really, really, really helps him. When Greg tries to pull people away, like people do not want to give up their PGA tour status. Like there's no reason to jump off this, this boat. And yeah, man, I walked away from all of this with an even bigger appreciation for Finchum and how he handled all this. A couple things. One, I got to quill the amount of times that I'm like, wow, that sounds just like 20,

26 because I know that's going to keep keep popping up. But it's you talked about all those increases without necessarily even mentioning where we've gotten to today. And it's like, you know, what did you say? It was 20 some million for the for the season or adjusted to 60 something. It's like they're playing 20 million dollar events 12 times a year, 15 times a year at this point. I mean, it's insane. And the other thing I would say, just if you don't know anything about the PJ tour and the structure and the how the players are organized and. not organized. In that regard, I think it's just worth counting out or calling out that there's no player union either, right? I mean, it's the PJ tour is set up very different than the NHL than

Major League Baseball, where there's owners and there's players at the PJ tour. There is, there's just players. The players don't go on strike because they'd be striking against themselves, you know? And so that's why I just context for why you see like, well, maybe we should just start a whole other league rather than like, fuck it, we're not going out there. Well, I'm not playing until we fix this is like not really how it how it works and the just the idea that one anybody that ever said in the last five years we need a union uh and pgator players have said that one of the dumbest possible things you could say like it fundamental misunderstanding of the situation and a fundamental misunderstanding honestly if i may like there are tons of beefs and qualms we will have with the pGA tour

and have had with the pj tour in the past they do not do things perfectly but as a professional golfer and a player in this the idea that you could do it better than they do it is a complete fallacy. It is the best like use of a gobbling up all the possible market value you can out of a sport that's not the most exciting thing in the world and sharing that with the players. Like it does not go to anybody else

other than employees of the tour, charities, and to the people that go out on the course and earn it. Like that, it's incredible distribution model for that. Which if I may, again, flash forward to 2021, call it. Also easy to see how the hubris builds up. right of a lot of like what do you mean do it better what do you mean iterate what do you mean change the product like we're you have any fucking idea how good we are at this like i certainly you know i felt a lot of that when i worked there there is a lot of like you know we're so dialed

look at our balance sheet look at our retirement plan look at our pension look at this is the best pension yeah but what about the nfts did i came after i worked there but there's a lot of uh There is, it's easy to, it's not, it's not excusable for the hubris building up, but I do understand how and why it did, you know, and I think, again, it's just kind of table setting for what happens in this time period and then what happens again 20 years later. Neil, I'm curious where, what you think of this. I remember a takeaway from 94 was just like, hey, every time I encountered a newspaper, like this senior tour was sometimes more prevalent as the PGA tour certain weeks,

felt a little less so in 95. I didn't feel like the senior tour was making. And a lot of my research is just kind of going through all the newspapers and things like that, trying to get a vibe for how things stand. But just felt like less of a upfront thing in 95 than it did in 94. I'm curious if you had felt any of that in your research. I would agree with that. I tried to, in service of my time and my sanity, I tried to focus,

Dege, how we did it with the project annual pod. Like I got to pick some one or two tent poles per month instead of like, I'm going to go, you know, if I start searching like what happened in Palm Springs in August, I'm like, oh, God, I don't know. But the czar is only one man. But it's, I think it's important with those stats I pulled up. The Champions Tour was still new and it was a big expansion of revenue. You know, like these Nike tours and these Champions Tours were like, I think still,

they weren't like tired entities, if that makes sense. like they feel like now like now the champions tour feels a little tired and dated and an afterthought but you know and i think the fact that a lot of the top golfers were international and not so much american made those you know older big names were still driving a lot of attention in in the mid 90s yeah and just the golf world still clinging on to the you know jack nicholas lee trevino arnold palmer era and there's not pre tiger there's not that one dude that soaks up and takes a lot of that energy. But we all,

Jim Colbert did make $1.44 million on the senior tour in 1995, which is just $210,000 less than Greg Norman did as the eventual money winner in 1995 on the PJ. What a stat. Wild. Good stuff. We have the return of Michael Jordan also coming in March, which is creates a little bit of an issue for the PJ tour

around one of their, one of their big events, which is interesting. But a couple of quick. highlights we did this last time as well from the 1995 media guide these are some rules officials do you recognize anyone uh in these pictures of course there's some names there but bottom right corner is slugger white live golf's slugger white in the bottom right mark russell is also there uh on that bottom line but uh it's a very interesting um just moment in time there again not going to do all these again but There's Brandel Chambly in the media guide.

Christa Marco, just a picture I've never seen of Christa Marco in 1995. He's got some. Neil, are you ever wearing the turtlenecks underneath the golf shirt? I feel like that's a very mid-90s thing that needs to come back. As we get into the fall for mock neck point. I think we can start to experiment. Didn't realize he was Huntington, New York, DeMarco, Long Island, man. And went down at University of Florida.

Good stuff. David Ferry is now a full-time member of the PGA Tour. Jim Furek had a good rookie year the year prior. Bill Glass and our hitter. He's back. Still same photo as last year, but... It's so much like Gary Busey. It's Gary Bucy Charity Hoffman Cross is what you guys described it last time as.

Roger Maltby, still a PGA tour winner at this time, using all of the life of that 1985 NEC World Series of Golf Victory, which did have a 10-year exception in it. David Duval is a new member and a rookie of the PGA Tour listed in there as well. 44 events

were getting ready to play. Also have notes, Sam Sneed no longer listed as a full-time PGA tour member. If you remember, he was in it basically from winning like the 1942 U.S. Open or something like that. He's not listed as a PGA tour member

anymore. I know what you're thinking. Did he die? No, he did not. He died in 2002. I see exactly what you're thinking there, DJ. End of an era. Either other way. End of an era. Somebody had to make a tough, tough call. Yeah, you're no longer exempt on the PGA tour. Sam, this is the hardest call I've ever had to make, man. What? Who's on the phone? Netflix was there for all of it, too. And he got to be Ryder Cup captain. Who's this? Oh, yeah, okay.

Still should have picked himself, I think. but that's another story for another day. We're going to play 44 events on the PGA tour this year. Did you ask about this last time about what did golf on TV look like in 1995? And I have a confession to make on this because as Neil noted, you can go down a lot of different rabbit holes. You can spend a lot of time doing a lot of things. One thing I did bypass discovering and going TV guide week by week in detail on was this distribution.

I am relying on some AI help here to help me sort this out. I spot checked a few of these and it looks right. All the details of here might not be exactly right, but here's what it looks like overall. CBS has 17 events, NBC has seven, ABC has seven, ESPN has six, and Golf Channel has six events. So CBS gets a lot of recognizable ones and a ton going from spring through summer, Pebble,

Nissan, Dural, MCI Heritage, Greensboro Open, Bell South Classic, Buick, Colonial, Kemper, Hartford, St. Jude, Western, Buick Open, Sprint International and World Series of Golf. NBC's got the Buick invitation on Torrey Pines. They got the Bob Hope Pricer Classic. They got the Honda Classic, Bay Hill Players, and Neil's favorite Freeport, Mick Moran Classic, which is in New Orleans. So they also have the U.S. Open for the first time here in 1995, taking that over for ABC.

ESPN has the early round coverage of that. That's a landmark change on the U.S. Open. I mean, that ushers in one of the great eras of golf on TV, I would say. Yeah, the U.S. Open on NBC. ABC has the Mercedes, has Houston, Byron Nelson, Memorial, Milwaukee Tour Championship, and the British Open. Weird kind of collection here, which I think things are going to get sorted out here in the new TV deal here shortly.

But ESPN has the Northern Telecom, Phoenix Open, Anheuser-Busch, Canadian Open Buick Challenge, the Las Vegas Invitational. Golf Channel is getting scraps in their first year. Deposit guarantee golf classic, New England Classic, BC Open, Quad City Classic, Disney Golf Classic and the Texas Open. These are all following in my part of the calendar, baby. Caffeine TV. Also, TBS had the Hawaiian Open and also early round coverage of the PGA.

So speculating here, but I wonder how much of this is, I just wonder why. Right? Why is all of this spread out so much? Is this TV not quite, or a big network TV, big sports property is just not quite willing to fully optimize into live sports is the thing. You know, not willing to take big enough swings trying to, you know what I mean? It's got to be these people trying to diversify a little bit. And it's just interesting to see. I mean, you know, sitcoms are money, cash cows in this time.

I think some of it's just the high cost. probably of like, you know, a CBS, like, man, I'll do X amount, but I can't take the whole calendar. You know, I don't think it's, it was any easier to broadcast golf in the 90s. Yeah. And, and then they also had this, these other, this other programming that was a lot more lucrative than it is now. Which is just got to be, yeah, it's got to be fascinating to, and I guess I don't know how much talent crossover there is. I don't know how many guys were doing stuff for Golf Channel and ABC or, you know, whatever, but it's got to be so hard to get, I feel like you get a critical mass going.

I feel like you get your feet under you when you're only doing a fourth of the events or whatever. It's just a big challenge. And it's also worth noting this is, there's a ton of hour expansion going on in this time. Like that's a huge thing too in Finchham's like, you know, entire thing. I think they went in 15 years they've gone. This was before 94.

They'd gone from 110 hours on TV to 617. in 94, which is a massive expansion in there. So it's probably just kind of bolted on, right? As they're expanding hours year by year, it just gets a little bit more bolted on. And there's just a ton of also moving parts of like other sports, you know, like the thing with we're going to get into the players potentially moving, beginning that conversation in 1995.

But the issue with that, it's an NBC product. NBC had NBA. NBA is going, is in the playoffs in May. And that was just a massive hindrance to, to all of that. So as a Chicago sports fan in 1995, I'm just glad NBC got, they got those right. You know, that was, that was dialed. We needed, we needed them there.

We didn't need them at the players. 95 was it the best for Chicago that Jordan does return, but they don't. They didn't win that one. I know you're not allowed to mention the years that Jordan didn't win the title. I know that's not allowed. It's true. And it's better to have lost early in the playoffs than to have lost in the finals as we've Exactly. I can save those legs.

Little other world stuff. OJ Simpson trial is beginning in the beginning of January. Alanis Morissette released jagged little pill. The macarena is beginning its international spread. Pogs are taking over. And the internet is beginning to enter ordinary everyday life. Pogs getting a good slammer. God, I was living in Canada at this time.

Pogs were hot in the streets outside Toronto. Play for keeps traded. Yeah, playing for keeps, baby. I don't know, man. I don't know if this was the peak, but it, you can make the case. I don't know. The internet is getting started.

It's like, oh, fuck, maybe we should have just. This was it. We should have just paused right there. That could have been, I don't know, there's a lot of like it there. I don't know how our jobs would have, careers would have worked out if that was the case to each. There have been professional Pog players. Yeah, that's true.

Pog collection. All right. We're going first tournament of the year. Do you know where we're going and what it's called? Do you remember? Mercedes. Do you remember where? Oh, is it at La Costa or something? You got it. You didn't get it last time, but you got it. It's still a dual event with the Champions Tour? It's a great question, Neil. The Senior Tour, of course, that was the story last year was they didn't like being treated like second class citizens. So they wanted, the senior tour wanted their own event to start the year. They're going to start the following week in Puerto Rico. And that is going to kick off the senior tour season. If you remember prior to the, This event was a dual event where they played the same teas. Their groups were intertwined on the T-sheet as well.

They almost in 1994 had a senior tour beat to win the overall event, which was causing a lot of beef between, you know, just some controversy. Sick. Yeah. I kind of miss. It was definitely missing a little bit of drama in this. But John Houston had a four-shot lead disappear in a brutal three-hole stretch on the front nine. Steve Elkington ended up winning it in a.

playoff over Bruce Litsky. Houston hit one in a creek, made a double. Bogey the next then putted into the water on seven. It was an uphill putt that he putted into the water, which is also sick. Scatty's telling him, hey, man, you can give this one a little like it's up. All right. Get it to the hole. Especially tough as earlier in the day, it looked like it was going to get called for weather.

Like Houston's just like waiting it for it to get called for weather and he would have won. But they'd sloped it together and went out and did it. And he ended up gagging it away. Elk said everyone in the locker room is like, no way we're going to play today. Sure enough, Elk comes back and goes. They moved T's around and the grounds crew worked overnight to get it ready. Our friend Craig Stadler got a two-shot penalty for showing up late for his tea time. He finished two shots behind Steve Elkington.

That was a tough break. Elkington hit a wire on the second hole and got to replay the shot. The same thing happened to him. It looked at a lot of when he won. Of course, he spent seven thousand yards. thousand yards and was completely soaked in 1995. So she. Trevino did,

Lee Trevino traveled for the PGA Tour awards dinner in Carlsbad that week to accept his senior tour player of the year award. He had recently ruptured a disc in his neck, had it repaired. He went to a bone donor bank and secured part of a kneecap to repair the ruptured disc in his neck. I didn't know any of those things were a thing. God. too many questions. Keep moving.

Can't pick just one. Silly season events, same as last year, are causing some issues for Tim Fincham now, who's the, you know, he was not the commissioner of the year before, but the PG,

he says the PJ tour has to reevaluate some of the competitions in the fourth quarter. Scheduling is getting a little crowded. Basically, no one knows what to do with the competition of the PGA tour season and the sometimes bigger money guys can get in November and December.

Like, how can Fincham deny players the opportunity to go make money and argue that it hurts, you know, the other players. But again, on the flip side, guys are skipping more events in the early part of the year because of how busy their November and December are. And it's hurting the TV package, which is up for negotiation after next year. So Finchimp's got to do a little bit of threatening to deny some television releases at a

tricky time of doing that as well. So just, and you can kind of sense it in the fields and the news stories of the early part of the year and kind of where. Some other guys are popping up in different places around the world. They're not playing the PGA tour in the early part of the year, and they're gobbling up appearance feeds in other places. And it's not a ton of momentum in the early part of the year for the tour. Are there any YouTube channels popping up at this time?

Anybody trying to put content on their channel? I haven't seen that. That might be in part two. That might be in Neal's section. You just said the internet was getting going. No, but Deeds, they were trading tapes at this time. So guys out there with camp quarters, you know, like at the concerts. You know, okay, here's all 18 from, uh,

Here's Litsky at LaGausta, man. Here he goes, he goes nuts. Bart Bryant's all 18. It's a deep cut. Filmed outside the ropes, uncut. Bart Bryant goes low. Miced up. At the ID on Classic at Pleasant Valley.

Got that Pleasant Valley tape from, from 95, man. Oh, God. Forget it, man. Did you find any YouTube? I couldn't find Jack's shit on YouTube. YouTube from 1995 PGA Tour. The best one is the PGA Elks. Yeah, the PGA, that's on there.

Talking through his round at the PGA is the best one I found. So we're picking back up again at the end of 94. Norman tries to roll up the world tour at a, you know, at a meeting at Sherwood in November. Fincham front runs them, you know, warns people that, you know, they're not going to be able to do it. Arnold Palmer shoots it down. People, you know, Finchum basically says out loud,

I'm highly paraphrasing. You can't do both these things. Blah, blah, blah. A reminder of what the World Tour is. It's eight events. It's guaranteed money. Top 30 in the rankings plus 10 sponsor exemptions. $600,000.

We go to the winner of each event and a million to the overall winner of the series. It was Norman with the gentleman in the name of John Montgomery Jr. And David Hill. David Hill is representing Fox Sports, which had just launched months earlier. This is all backed by Robert Murdoch, of course. Rupert Murdoch, excuse me.

there's going to be four events held in the U.S. one in Canada, one in Scotland, one in Spain, and one in Japan. And attentive schedule reportedly include WGT tournaments before each major kicking off like the March 30th through April 2nd week. So basically running up against PGA tour events right before majors. It does not get off the ground well. He gets absolutely eviscerated in the press. And of course, this would destroy the PGA tour.

it's it's everything it's against everything the pGA tour is about he Norman the big mistake he makes is does not get the support of the players prior to making it public uh which absolutely kills him he accuses the pGA tour of releasing its propaganda machine against them getting all the media and the sports writers to say bad things about him uh in doing it and it's it's a mess right right from the jump uh his time a couple things to add now you know when i get to the back half of the year we could dive back in. But important to understand the context of like we talked about the other sports. So a lot of the articles that I read, it's like, you know, every other sports sucks, strikes, lockouts, like golf's the last bashed in this. And here's this egotistical, greedy, you know,

international pro golfer trying to mess up, you know, the tradition. You know, so it's a little on the nose with like good versus evil. But yeah, he doesn't, he doesn't build consensus is basically how he just didn't give his you know compadres any info and it's just a half-baked plant so he just you just he probably honestly the more i read about and look at it's like i could have gotten a lot closer to getting it done uh if he just wasn't like such a like megalomaniac yeah i mean the whole thing here is and again it's the entire concept of the pga tour is like hey we need you to to follow our rules and regulations if you're going to be a part of this tour, but like, hey, we're going to, us that worked here are going to go out and we're

going to market your guys' collective rights to a bunch of sponsors. We're going to organize it. We're going to find the venues for you. We're going to put up the tournaments. We're going to find the money. We need you guys to just agree to our rules and that you're going to play on this tour. You're going to play 15 events and you're going to do this so I can sell that to TV, blah, blah, blah. Like, that's professional golf. That's just, that's what that is. To go outside of that is never going to go over well. Like, of course, you have to go through the PGA tour on this. And we all know where this leads to WGCs here in a few years. And it's not a clean path to getting there. And the Norman Finchum riff, you know, even expands from here. But

there was just no way of getting this off the ground against the same chicken and egg problem Andy Gardner, the PGL talked about of like, we want to work with the PGA tour. We are proposing something drastically different here, but we have to work with you or else you need everybody to jump all at once. And that's a really, really, really, really hard thing to recruit people for as Norman found out and did not handle it. Well, they slipped contracts under the door to people at an event in Jamaica. The Johnny Walker classic. Just like, hey, sign these and Fadda was like, no.

What the fuck? And I mentioned that the timing was, it was both bad and it was actually impeccable because in the fall, late fall of 94, Fincham's taken over the job and a four-year FTC investigation into two specific rules of the tort, antitrust investigation was the first rule is forbids golfers to play in a non-PGA event without commissioners permission, which is still the case. Even if they want to come play Wild World of Golf, they got to get a release with, you know, with,

with George Truly here. And the second gives similar veto power over appearances on televised golf programs. But, you know, they were, the Skins game falls in this category, the match, like, you know, case by case, the tour relaxes this. But like, if you're going to make a, like a hostile league, this is where Finchum, then lays the gauntlet down and says very directly, if you play in this world golf tour, you are suspended. So that, he lays that down in late 94.

And the player, you know, so it becomes a bit of a showdown. And then that's, that's all the Norman stuff. And then separate from that, he goes to work on the FTC situation, because that's separate there. But the timing of Norman's thing kind of makes this an existential threat. And it's the combination of both that I think it's important to realize. One of the things that hits me as you guys are talking about this, and I'll say up front that maybe probably the PJ tour is restructuring

and the way that they're doing equity now to the players and changing their structure of how the business is set up, maybe this doesn't happen again. But if it does, I'm just thinking like hearing everything I've heard about 94, you mentioned Arnold Palmer. I've heard Peter Jacobson talk about that meeting. You know, Arnold Palmer came in, and once he said that this, we weren't doing this, we weren't doing this.

His voice carried the day, yada, yada, yada. I think you can say a lot of the same about Tiger in the live stuff. I think a lot of like, oh, if Tiger thinks this is lame, I don't want to be lame. I should, I should try to win the tournaments that exist. Like, I'm not jumping. I need to stick around. If this came up again in 30 years, who's that person? Because I don't think there's going to, I don't know if there's going to be another one.

Is it Rory? I feel like Rory took battle, like took, you know, just barrel fire and all of this. Is it Scotty Sheffler? Is Scottie Sheffler interested in doing? Like, I just think it's an interesting, those icons of the game. I don't, I don't know. There can always be another one, but it's like, I don't know that they're churning those out the way that they used to. And I just find that part of this.

Well, and then the play, I want to double click for a second on the players meeting, closed door with, with Paul Morgan got up there and like eviscerated Norman. Yeah. From, you know, everything I've read. And then Norman, you know, comes back in an article from 9. 2019 and Sports Illustrated talks about how it was a conspiracy because Arnold Palmer and IMG and Norman had broken up of two or three years ago. And so I golf channel was was totally corrupt. And it's just like, you know, it's, it's a who do you trust situation. But yes, Palmer in that room. It sounds like, could I answer that question by the way. Who do you trust? Paul is not Norman. Yeah, but it's just funny. You know, you get you get these quotes from Norman. You're like, oh my God, you know. Yeah. So anyway, Sallie, keep going.

I don't want to get too bogged down here because we'll get back to it. And I forget what a, oh, your point. Like you mentioned, you know, like, hey, there's the Skins game and there's, you know, guys are getting their beaks wet in the fall and things like that. But like a big part of this and it's a big part with the match and a big part of why Phil Mickelson got pissed off was like for their $10 million match, Tiger and Phil had to chip off the PGA tour a million dollars out of that. And that's the whole thing with like with these skins game is you guys,

got to chip off the PG8. Like we're collective rights group. How do you want me to sell this to the rest of the membership? You guys are getting your, your money over here, but I'm not in charge of like getting a small amount of you guys money. I'm in charge of getting everybody money. So something's got to come into our coffers.

It's going to help top up some of these other purses if you want to play outside the rights of this group. Like that's kind of the whole thing that like Norman and Phil just are unable to wrap their heads around because of, to use some Phil's words, obnoxious greed. that's like the root of the problem in a lot of this stuff. So to your point, in this week, opening week, again,

we're hitting everything right from the jump. The FTC on Friday said it will seek a complaint. Officially, so this is rumbling in 94, but officially in 95 kickoff the year, the Federal Trade Commission, which has been investigating the PGA tour for possible restraint of trade practices, has decided to seek a complaint against the golf organization.

The PGA's conflicting event and TV release rules per hearing. inhibit a member from participating in any other golf event on a date when a PGA tour co-sponsored event is scheduled. Under PGA rules in exchange for TV coverage of most tour events, members agree not to appear on other live or recorded golf programs unless approved by the commissioner. PGA commissioner Tim Fincham has estimated that the legal matter could take as much as five years to resolve. And he says, it's our position that our rules are expansive rather than restrictive, who cites an increase of TV televised hours from 118 in 1979.

to 1,000 in 94. He said that could not occur if we were restricting output. So this is like, like this is Fincham just being a total boss and making a very convincing case of like this is not a restrictive tour. Like look at how much money we're paying these players. One, we're making a ton of money for charity as well. We're putting them on television, blah, blah, blah. That we are not doing, this is not like a, a restriction of output.

And the article says, Finchon was not merely a sports administrator. he had worked in the Carter White House, served as a national staff director of the Carter Mondale campaign, and founded a Washington consulting firm. The FTC fight was almost perfectly suited to his background. Train the swap. Just fucking bring it.

So of note, like on the convicting events releases, like Jack Nichols Productions had reason to, and this is written as well, had reason to resent the television release system because it produced independent made for TV golf. Company President Terry Jastro described the Tours regulations as stringent, sometimes arbitrary, and difficult for businesses operating in a free enterprise environment. Yet he also accepted that some centralized order was necessary and that universal restrictions at least produced a predictable marketplace. Nicholas voluntarily spoke with FTC attorneys, but publicly supported the tour.

And this is where like the important nuance of the entire situation is like opposition to the rules did not necessarily mean there was support for. dismantling the tour as many golf businesses resented Fincham's veto power while also fearing the chaos that might follow if nobody possessed it. So and you use this a lot. We're not tennis. We're not going to, like tennis is at this time is super disorganized and kind of going down this route. Like we are not going down that way and like dismantling all that would mean less money for everyone, both saying that to tour members as well as government officials of like, tear this down, you are hurting the economy. And the American, like, not ownership of golf,

but like the trend going in American golf where the best players in the world are playing here more often. It's very, very well said. It's a compelling case. Yeah. And he opens the year, again, talking more world tour. Basically, it's a, it's up against our official money season. It involves a small number of players.

It's a great deal of prize money. The big quote, and it's kind of moved around a little bit. It's gone from eight. You know, there's some places say it's eight events still. Some say it's four now. Some say it's six. Fitcham's big line that gets quoted a lot is the noble cause of a half dozen events. It just runs that right up against like his charitable stuff.

That's a great line. Yeah. Compare that to, you know, Mottaghan saying a series of exhibition events. Like another point for Fitcham on this. But yeah. And he says like, look, look, this can happen in the market. you can put this up. This is a free country. Anyone can create a new league, a new sport, a new tour. If the Montgomery's and their sponsors want to go out and put on a series of events, they can

do that. And our players would have to choose. But the analogy would be that a new football league has started and rather just higher players, they wanted Troy Aikman and the best players in the NFL to go play in their game. The NFL wouldn't allow that. The NFL doesn't have it has to compete with itself. The NBA doesn't compete with itself. And we shouldn't have to compete with ourselves. What you're probably saying, if you're now pounding on the steering wheel, the difference is those players are not independent contractors. Troy Aikman's not an independent contractor. He's signed with the Dallas Cowboys as part of the NFL to go play in a set number of games, yada, yada, yada, yada. The Tori is trying to have it both ways, right? They're trying

to be a membership organization of independent contractors for tax exempt purposes, but also trying to make sure that those people can only kind of play in one. tour, which as you just spell all that out, I'm like, oh, well, that, it does make sense. I do get why it doesn't work in a different scenario because it is a different sport. It's not a team sport. It's not the same setup. I get how the conversation gets off the ground, though, as well. You know, it's just, it's, it's muddy, and it's why it continues to be muddy for 30 years. It is, but I think it, the through line here, both for players and for just like the government intervention in it is like tearing it down who tearing it down who's that make it that it only makes it better for like

maybe the cream of the exact of the very top and you're going to rebuild and restructure that in a way in what way and that's that's going to lead to a different set of problems and that's just a whole different can of worms that I think is well leave that for me because I got I'm I'm going to I'm going to fucking throw a heater right down the middle in about an hour oh it gets so good it gets so good in the back I accidentally came across I sent it over to you of just like the summary of all that Finchham does. It's incredible. He's a boss. He is an alpha. Only other thing I would add, I don't think this is stepping on anything, is just to underscore what you're saying, Solly, like in my NFL versus PJ tour, there's also no owners, right?

So to your point on like, what's the point of tearing it down? I would understand tearing it down if there's some owner of, you know, there's some stakeholder who's not, doesn't have a golf club in their hands who is making 20 times what the players are making and you're restraining the trade in order to like prop up that person's income but there's not some people like to point at like PJ tour executives and they're yes the commissioner it makes a lot of money in the very very top level brass makes a lot of money but not in comparison to it's pretty commensurate with with what's going on at other leagues with what's going on in what's going on at other like massive charities exactly Or colleges.

I just, yeah, I think that's worth pointing out too. It's like the government doesn't need to step in in order to keep a Jerry Jones from popping up here. It does make sense to more like let the middle hold and make sure that the whole thing kind of stays propped up. Glenn Sheehe writes as well, where's the world torn now basically on hold, hoping to stage an event in late 1995,

but currently possessing nobody other than Norman willing to risk his PGA standing to participate, although the prospect of playing more big money tournaments worldwide, against the best in the world intrigues prominent PGA tour players. The threat of suspensions by Commissioner Tim Fincham is hardly appealing. Did the World Tour presume that a sizable number of top players would jump to its side and force Fincham to either suspend them or look the other way? If so, it badly misjudged the response.

Fred Couple said, the World Tour right now is nothing. That isn't to say in two years it won't be, but right now there is no World Tour. There was some big-time fence sitting from the international players, though. Some quotes. Nick Price, hey, man, I'm interested. but I got to see a lot of, like, keep me posted. Hemen, or no, Ollabel, same thing. You know, so because, and I think it would speak to those guys of like, man,

I'm not even living in my own country. And so, but from the American players with, especially with that Palmer meeting, I think was kind of like, you know, a little bit frostier. But prices was like, hey, you got the, you got Finch and figured out, right? Like, I'm interested in this. Of course, exactly.

As long as I'm not at risk here. And it's like, no, well, you all. at risk. He's like, okay, well, no. Like I said I was interested, but I, I'm not interested in like breaking off with you here, man. I'm not taking that on. Also interesting is that Norman's doing all this stuff whipping up this, you know, this hoopla. He doesn't get suspended. He goes, he balls out. Balls out in 95 gentlemen. So like, this is all going on. And he is just killing on, on the PGA tour while he's trying to blow it up. It's, it's incredible. I think in, in like, my heart of hearts, I don't think Norman's trying to blow it up. Like this time around, I don't

think he's trying to blow it up. I think he is, like, there is more international golf going on in this time period and guys are playing more total, you know, the money is relatively, you know, with appearance fees and places they're able to go outside of the U.S., they're making a similar amount of money to what they're making on the PGA tour, right? So that changes now into the late, you know, current day, like there's just, the most money can be made on the PGA tour. Now the Piff is out of the picture here. And like, to Norman, it's almost like, dude, I don't know if I need you PGA tour. I'd rather just play like these eight events and then go collect my appearance.

Well, no, he's, he's quoted as saying, I, I, I just have to play 15 events to keep my card. I just want to play my 15 and then I want to go play these other eight. Yeah. And, you know, which is like, you know, valid or like makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense if it's like, yo, you, the world revolves around you. Yes. extremely ignorant to think that it wouldn't massively affect the PGA tour and that people

wouldn't have issues with it. John Daly's back after five months off. A picture on the front page of a newspaper smoking a cigarette. Daley is a recovering alcoholic, but he's not going to part with his other vice. He said, I'm not going to sit there and quit smoking just because there's some kids out there. I feel I'm a

good role model. If I'm not one, I want to be one. He's got a new gym in his house and is more fit, but it has a lot of work to do on the belly. He's gained 15 pounds. But he's got a New Year's resolution to forget about the past. That's what I'm going to do in 1995. Undaunted by what has been. Unburdened. Phil.

Phil is there at the Mercedes to defend his title from the prior year. He's no longer skiing, but he's working on getting his pilot license. Says that he should be able to get it the next time he's home. I don't know if I've ever heard that Phil has a pilot license. I don't know if he followed through on this. I don't know. I don't remember this. Passing.

I know he had a good curiosity and aviation, but I'll put that on my takeaways to look into. our header again Larry Bohanan he penned a column this week talking about some he said there's expect more lawsuits than you can shake a three wood at which I don't know what that means the federal trade commission this week

began lowering a potential boom on the PGA tour announcing it would seek blah blah blah that says the tour will vigorously fight the FTC complaint that means Fincham and PGA tour players might get as much court time as Robert Shapiro and Al Cowling. Win or lose the distraction of such legal actions

can't help the tour in 1995. Fincham sounding off. FTC has been looking at our rules for four and a half years. It's taken almost five years now to determine they ought to ask the commission for action. If the commission goes against us, I look forward to defending those rules in court. If we fail in court, I would look forward to asking the Congress to take action to allow us to continue to be structured the way we are. Fendham said it is our position that our rules are expansive rather than restrictive sites the TV hours and increasing, not restricting output as out there. So this is Fincham's play.

Like, hey, we're going to fight you for many, many, many, many years on this. I'm getting out in front of this in public. Not only that, I'm going to be like backroom dealing here with a lot of important people in Washington. I'm going to put a spotlight on this for the American people to say, is this a good use of the commission's time? Like, is this how you want to be doing this? Getting some politicians involved, getting their constituents whipped up as well throughout the course of this. So that's all in the first week of the year, which I promise he's about to go. a lot faster here. John Morse

wins the Hawaiian Open, his first went on the PGA tour. Jim Colbert won the tournament champions there, as mentioned, in Puerto Rico. The Super Bowl is coming up at this time. The 49ers are 17 and a half point favorites in that one. Again, January 17th, this coming week,

the Golf Channel officially launches Arnold Palmer and cable entrepreneur, Joe Gibbs, not the owner of the Washington. Redskins at the time. Flip the ceremonial switch on January 17th. It debuted as the first single sport cable network and initially reached only about 10,000 homes. But it did it.

Its first live tournament was the Dubai Desert Classic. The timing was just perfect. While the tour is, you know, was defending its power to approve televised golf experience appearances, an entire 24-hour channel devoted to golf appeared. Was it just, I mean, it's just infomercials and stuff the whole rest of the time. Peter Kessler. And reviews are good. Golf Central, Golf Talk Live with Peter.

Kessler, there's Golf Academy on there, a lot of reruns of a lot of these, a lot of that infomercials. Cable outlet took three and a half years and more than $80 million in investment capital before hitting the airwaves. 80 million bucks in 95. That's a lot of money, man. The Kessler interviews are electric. I know our guy kind of maybe lost it on Twitter some years ago, but the early stuff, I mean, it's, I miss it so much. I wish Brandl had a long form interview show. Golf Channel if you're listening. Why are we not? Why are we not doing that?

Farity stuff was great, but then it got really goofy and silly. Yeah, it was not the same thing. Just get Brandl sitting down. Like, I don't know. Brando might not be the guy. Or rich.

Or rich. Yeah, yeah, I mean, rich is a pro. Come on. Yeah. I love it.

But just, yeah, I don't know. All the tiger ones, like with Butch Harmon in there and they're hitting balls into the net and talking about, oh, it's great.

And Norman stuff was really good on golf talk. I think Kessler has all those on a website somewhere. I don't know how he got the actual rights to those. But anyways, they are airing the Dubai Desert Classic. It's like the first time the American audiences have gotten, you know, their eyes on Dubai in the 90s and what was taking off there and whatnot. So it was, that one hit pretty hard. Northern Telecom Open.

Phil Mickelson wins this to become the first player to win at the event as a pro and an amateur. He beat Jim Gallagher Jr. by one stroke as Gallagher Bogie the 18th. More on Gallagher later. Jim Gallagher, Jr., that boy was him in 1995. It was. Fred Couples becomes the first American to win the Dubai Desert Classic. He's over there playing on the European tour. John Daly had a shot strike an official that left him bloodied.

He missed the cut, which was getting everywhere in the papers. Vijay Singh wins the Phoenix Open on January 29th. In a playoff over Billy Mayfair, he credits his swing coach Mack O'Grady for the victory. Gotta do a Maco Grady deep dive. That's, that's, I'm itchy for that one. Articles written about how the Phoenix Open keeps getting bigger and bigger. Weeklong total of 392,000 people attend here in 1995. It is well over 500,000 now, just a few years later.

But all kinds of stuff about the Thunderbirds, what they've done to grow the tournament. Again, all still the same here in 2026. So during this week. No, no stadium at 16 yet. Still just very informal, informal gathering. Come through. Come through. This week, January 26th through 28th, Tim Fincham meets for two days with members of the Senate

and House of Representatives regarding the FTC probe into the PGA tour release rules. January 28th, Tim Fincham is photographed on a four-mile run with President Bill Clinton. The only picture I could find of this is super distorted black and white picture from a newspaper and I couldn't find it anywhere else. But come on, Timmy, let's go full run. But the optics of that of like, yeah, I'm going to win this. Like I'm literally, you know, I know everybody in Washington. I know how this city works.

I'm going to take care of this. Fred Couples wins the Johnny Walker Classic in the Philippines, back-to-back international wins for couples. But again, you can sense the slow start to the year. Couples, the top-ranked American is playing internationally instead of a lot of these West Coast events. Pebble Beach, Peter Jacobson wins his fifth PGA tour event. If you haven't noticed yet, we are on a heater of winners that's going to go on for a long, long, long time.

Basically through my entire section of this show. Jacobson's in his 40s. He had tried TV a bit and 93 didn't like it. This is only win number five in his 17th year on tour. Jacobson, a popular player. He's been on the policy board for six years. He's got quote, unquote, aura, according to the press. Democrat.

Yeah, he does have the Riz. He got fluff on the bag. Fulf's been on the bag for 17 years now. And David Duvall played as in the final pairing for the first time

at a PGA tour event. Shot 67 in the final pairing but did not win at. Duvall is 23 years old and a rookie on the PGA tour. If you remember, things weren't going great with Dean Beeman and Bill Murray

in the prior year. Bill Murray had called the PGA tour a Nazi state among other things. Finchham did write two. letters to Bill Murray to persuade him to play in it. Murray, of course, dragged an elderly woman into the bunker a year prior and

dance with her until she fell. Finchard would describe it that he's using his artistic capabilities to create interest. This is just another, I've fallen in love with Tim Finchard, by the way, if you can't tell. Nick Fowdo is here this week and is now a full-timer on the PGA tour for the first time since 1989. It's found an interesting. Jack Nichols and Tom Watson are set to play as Shell's wonderful world of golf the next day at Pebble. The public was free to come out and watch.

Parking was like $6 for it, but you can just come watch them play a wonderful world of golf on that Monday after the Pebble Beach Pro. That sounds great. Simpler times. Yeah. John Stockton passed Magic Johnson this week for career assists as well. I think they passed away.

I was like, I don't think that's right. That might be to chat GPT thing. I don't think that's right. John Stockton got HIV. I told me. Oh, God. Peter Jacobson wins again the next week at the Buick Invitational of California, going back to back as at Torrey Pines,

picks up his wife afterward, and like the jokester that he is, acts like he's going to throw her in the pond at Torrey. But he doesn't do it. And don't get that that Buick Invitational confused with the Buick Classic or the Buick O'Nock. Duke open, Duke invitational. Don't get him twisted.

It almost reminds me like, remember when Stu Sink, unfinished business went on just a weird heater? You know, what was that? Five, six years ago? It was just like, man, it's kind of like the best player in the world at like 49, 51, whatever he was. Yeah, something's similar. What's going on?

Yeah. He won by four over Calc and Mike Holbert. Well, more on Holbert here in a little bit as well. He said the pebble victory had allowed him to recognize he was operating in a completely new competitive reality. Next week, Bob Hope Chrysler classic Kenny Perry wins just two weeks after he blew a three shot lead

at Pebble. Duval finished his second again. Of course Duval is going to make some history at this event a little later. He is knocking on the door. Kenny Perry's building a golf course back home in Franklin, Kentucky County Creek Golf Club. He says the debt from the course has him rededicated and focus

said when you borrow a million and a half dollars when you borrow a million and a half dollars it gets you focus that he was signing the check away right away over to the bank. The course concept sounds cool. It does exist till I look this up as well. The Greens, greens fees at the course will be $12.

The cart will cost eight. So it's a public golf course despite it being called a golf club. That the Kenny's building back in his hometown. How about that? You would double click on that for a sec? Can you imagine? I don't know who would be Russell Henley or someone just being like, you know what?

I'm going to build a affordable public golf course in Columbus. It's like Zach Blair. You know, I think I could see a lot of players building like a high-end retreat. But shout out to Kenny Perry. I had no idea he did that. I'm going to check that place out if I'm ever in. I don't know the full history. Maybe it was supposed to be a country club and didn't end up working out.

I don't know exactly. But it does still exist on Kenny Perry Lane or drive or something like that. Oh, that's convenient. He found that. Yeah. It's great luck. Duvall's second on the money list. Again, as a rookie on the Pedy tour, T-14 and Hawaii, T-6, the northern telecom runner up at Pebble and Bob.

Hope had T-17 at Dural as well. I'll say it. Get them on the team? For sure. Maybe. Not the charisma, not the Riz, but wiffs of the kid coming from Duval here. 1995, they were not looking very fondly on rookies. Unfortunately, I think, for our guy a little later on.

That's still. Play the same. Steve Sneed for that one. One of the groups at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic sitting president, Bill Clinton, Former president George H.W. Bush, former president Gerald Ford and Bob Hope, playing as a fivesome with defending champion Scott Hoke. George Bush hit a spectator, Norma early in the face, breaking her glasses and requiring 10 stitches. Also hit another spectator in the backside. Gerald Ford hit a woman's finger as well. The group took six hours to finish. Tom Kite was in the group behind them and laid down in the fairway in protest.

And officials tried to bribe the 91-year-old. Bob Hope with some ice cream to get him to leave, but he insisted on finishing if all the presidents were going to finish as well. So, Jesus. And worth noting this does cut. We're recording this the week after President Trump's 70 at the, at the member guest,

where he was apparently playing off a course handicap zero. So, you know, maybe, you know, maybe you could have got him out there to speed things up. I could see him and Biden playing together. I mean,

say what you want, but did you see that, Do you see the spinny put on that wedge shot? Sheesh, I was saying what if he was, yeah, we don't have to get into it. But what if he was just playing the golf course? What if he did shoot 70, but he was playing the golf course from like 900 yards?

Like, what if that was his T shot? You know, that little green side pitch. I don't know, I don't know, I would like to explore the space. Summer golf is here. Our closets are looking a lot like the Roeback website. Right now, this lightweight technical hoodie is another one of my favorites. Great for summer. Robeck's lightweight looper short.

This is exactly what you need for hot weather golf. It feels exactly like a gym short, but it looks like a proper golf short. It's got a stretch waistband. It's got belt loops. It's got a real button fly. It's very lightweight. If you got a swamp ass problem, these are for you. They got a ton of different colors.

I haven't found a bad one of those yet. We have also fall as quickly approaching. That means it's time for Robeck's Game Day collection. Same favorites as well as new styles available. They got some new schools added. Boston College, UC Berkeley, University of Central Florida, Creighton U, Oregon State, Rutgers, USC, Stanford, University of Washington, Washington, Washington State, University of Wisconsin.

You can check out all of their official licensed offerings at rowback.com. If your school isn't on the list yet, just use their selector tool. Let them know. They will get on it. That's a eclectic list of schools they've got there. Roeback.com, R-H-O-B-B-A-C-K.com, code nLU, R-H-O-B-C-K-K-K-K-K-K-N-L-L-U. Roeback, we thank you, back to the pod. This week was the Alfred Dunhill Challenge.

It's a team event. In this team event, Greg Norman and Nick Price are playing each other. It turns into a little bit of a joke because they both conceded long putts to each other on 17, so their TV match would reach the 18th hole. Ken Schofield from the European Tour, not happy about that. It becomes a pretty mocking line.

Lanny Watkins started railing on it of like, you know, how important the Ryder Cup is and how silly a lot of these team events are that are popping up. So more on the FTC investigation this week. Fincham calls it the bureaucratic momentum at its zenith. He's expecting a ruling within days. He said if the commissioners vote to continue has already been a five-year investigation

could start another legal proceeding. They'll stretch three more years. If they lose, they'll appeal drawing out there two years. This is the rhetoric that Fincham's going on with. We are going to drag this out if you rule against us. He that week defended the rules by saying abandoning them could mean an explosion of big money, limited field events that would help a handful of players

and promoters but hurt the game and a majority of players. Hmm. Sounds familiar. He also says in recent interviews that the investigation is making conversation with sponsors much more difficult and that they use the rules to maintain the allure of the support to their sponsors and their networks. And he said that Norman is the only one that has called him to say, hey, maybe we should think about these rules, as in all the other players agree to the

rules and Norman's the only one that is spoken to. finch him about maybe not agreeing with them. Also an interesting card to play of like, yeah, you are hurting our industry by looking into this right now. Like ramping up the pressure of like shit or get off the pot here. You doing this or not. Like we, I'm ready to take this head on. But you guys got to make a move here.

Nissan open. Corey Pavin wins for the second consecutive year. He wins by three over Kenny Perry, collecting that money to turn over to the bank. And Jay Don Blake. Of course, the PJ championship will be returning to Riviera in August as well. Greg Norman's in South Africa this week. he says about the world tour, it will happen. The majority of the people around the world

would like to see it happen, which, yeah, that would mean I don't know how many, there's 8 billion people now, maybe there's 6 billion in 95. So over 3 billion people want this world tour to happen is kind of Scott O'Neill rhetoric that we've heard recently. So next week, the Doral Rider Open.

Nick Fowdo wins for just the second time in an actual PJ tour event, ignoring the five majors that he's won. Fowdo drives it in the water on 18 leading by a shot, but he saved boge with a miraculous three wood and a hold a 20 foot put. Norman just needed a par to tie, but hit it six iron from 179. And again, this is heavily emphasized. He hit it into the middle of the lake. Like he didn't just hit in the water.

He like chunks it out of the rough into the middle of the lake, 50 yards from his target. And articles are written afterwards about how Foutto is trying to work to change his image in the U.S., blah, blah, blah. Peter Jacobson almost made a 60-footer on the 18th to tie as well and go into a playoff. would have been his third win of the spring or of the winter. Honda classic little drama. Marco Amira wins the ninth. His ninth tour event is at Weston Hills, wins it by a shot.

O'Meara played out of turn to finish up on the one foot putt because he was so nervous and didn't want to wait for it. O'Meara wouldn't have played this week had he not forgotten to enter the Nissan Open two weeks earlier. He showed up at Riviera ready to play a practice round. Problem was he had not. phoned in to enter the tournament and it was too late. Thaldo finished runner up this week as well.

Mike Holbert finishes 13th. Mike Halbert, he puts one-handed. He's got the yip's so bad. He is on the PJ tour putting one-handed. I can only find one clip of him doing it at the memorial later that year, but he puts his left hand on his hip and puts entirely with his right hand, which is, again, his second top finish of the year so far. Something to track the whole bear report.

That's jarring. Okay. File that under the, you know, when we compare eras. It's not the entire thing. Well, some of those guys were putting one-handed. I got to remember, firemen, one-handed putters. They're really good. They're really, really, really good. I promise. But like, you know, some of them objectively were putting what a hand-ins. Glenn Day is assessed a one-shot penalty. This is my trivia question.

Is assessed a one-shot penalty for slow play in the third round earned him the nickname. is going to be the trivia question. Glenn all day. And that was the last slow play penalty issued on the PG. It's crazy. Nobody has played slow since then. I was getting ready to say it. Last, like finish that sentence, Neil.

I was getting ready to say it. The last penalty stroke given out on the PJ tour for blank years. How many years? Until the 14-year-old at. That was the master's. That was even count. This is a major. Yeah.

Dude, I don't. 12 years? 22 years. it came in 2017, the Zurich, I think, in a team format. And I don't, again, that might have been bad AI if I remember right. But I think, I think it took until 2017 for the next slow play penalty to be dished out, the PGA tour. Hand for Fox.

So questions loom about where the tournament's going to be played next year, whether it will stay or move to its new long-term home in Coral Springs at Harron Bay. It actually ends up going to TPC Eagle Trace for a year before going to Harron Bay. They claimed Harron Bay was going. going to be ready, but the golf course was not ready in time. It was brand new golf course, and they didn't get it built in time to host the Honda Classic in 96. Bay Hill, Lauren Roberts wins his second PGA tour event defending his title.

He won Bay Hill the year prior. Former club crew. Every situation. Yeah, exactly. Just like just a horse for the course, man. He had to go back to Q's school three times. Again, wins at Bay Hill again. The field had the top 24 players in the Sony World rankings.

Palmer had that Riz, man. he was getting people to come to his tournament. During this week, Palmer does call his own meeting when the tour arrived at Bay Hill, summoned Norman. Davis Love recounts that he's, I was told to go tell Greg he had to go to the meeting as he was afraid to do so.

Norman couples love and Fincham huddled in Palmer's office that overlooked the putting green at Bay Hill. The line was drawn right there. Arnold said, look, it's over. This is not the way we set the PGA tour. Jack and I set this up to run the way it's run. We could have taken ownership, but we set it up to benefit everyone, not just certain players.

If I was in that meeting, I would have maybe reminded Palmer of his breakaway attempt in 83 that Jack tried to talk him into. It's a little bit of revisionist history from Palmer, but he stood up and said, you don't think Jack and Gary and I could have done this once those guys stepped up and they were against it, especially Arnold, it was over fast. They left the room and it was over. It brings us to the players.

March 26th, just two weeks before the Masters is when the players was at this time. and big, like, reviews are in for Finchum. This is a big, you know, it's kind of a state of the union week, always for the PGA tour commissioner. He is in every newspaper I could find just getting rave remarks in public as most of the first time commissioners.

Get communication skills, openness with the players, handling of the world golf tour, elisting a strong foundation of support among the players. That's the Jacksonville Times Union. Even Greg Norman says, I've probably had more communication with Tim in the first five or six weeks than I had in Dean.

Beeman in 12 years. He said since November, he and I have had wonderful communication. There has never been any animosity between the two of us. Neither one of us wants to see anyone get hurt. We'll see about that. Which again, sounds a lot like the roll-app stuff. I mean, it's just a lot. We've got to finally an adult in the room here.

But sounds like Monaghan's first year too. Everybody's the greatest guy ever. 100%. Pursed up to $3 million for the players. Winner's going to get $540,000. David DeVall, not eligible for the event. as Nike tour graduates were not automatically qualified, but he gets a special exemption.

The hometown kid gets a special exemption into the players. It was not very controversial. It was a player's decision in this. And the players on the board were like, this dude should be in the tournament. Like this is, it was an easy one. Davis Love, Brad Faxson, I think are on the board at this time. And they were like, let's get this guy in tournament special.

There was five other special exemptions as well. So it's not just a completely special thing for him. but I'm fine for it. Sounds great. I want to find some footage from this Thursday. 41 balls in the water on 17 on Thursday. The wind blew Tom Watson's hat into the lake. O'Meara and Fowdo each put two balls in the water, both made sevens.

There's 23 scores in the 80s and only 20 subpar rounds. PTI. Randy would have loved this day. 50 scores of double or worse on the last two holes alone. Jesus. And Corey Pavin shot 66. with 22 putts. Syringes were brought out with a cooling spray

on the greens at one point because of how hard the wind was flying. It's like those soccer injuries. It's cooling off the earth. So not a fan, bro. It's not a fan. Who won? I'm trying to remember.

Lee Jansen wins by one over Bernard Longer, big win for Janssen. He'd been mocked for changing equipment and caddies after, quote, flukeishly winning the 1993 U.S. Open. It was just his second win since then. A little full circle moment, three years prior at the 92 players, Jansen had chucked his putter into the water on the sixth hole.

He had, you know, the wherewithal in that moment after the round to go back out and fish it out of the pond. And wouldn't you know it that week he used the same putter to claim a $540,000 prize. What a story that is. Fifth Major Talk, really ramping up. There's an article in the Palm Beach Post that also says the players, has an identity crisis. But a lot of articles saying, like, why isn't this a major?

It's got it, blah, blah, blah. And again, what's not helping this year, Michael Jordan is returning this week to the Chicago Bulls. And so Fowdo shoots 80 in the opening round. It was asked about it and says, I've got your fucking story. Bridgestone put the wrong balls in my locker.

The driver sucks. Yeah, that was going to say. That sounds familiar. Fado uses Rekstar 40 balladas, but was accidentally given 50s, which do not perform as well in the wind. So that was the reason everybody shot 80s. So again,

talks of it moving to May, not immediately, but the advantages of moving the players to May. One is it would better align the players with the four recognized majors. It would shift the players away from the master's shadow. Again, the disadvantages are that television,

NBC's got the rights to the players and the NBA. The NBA playoffs are going on in May. It would take another 12 years before the players would officially moved to May in 2007. Of note, Dean Beeman's back out in the senior tour. If you remember, Dean Beeman, part of the reason he rolled off of commissioner

is he wanted to play, get back to playing golf. He was a great player in his own right. Great player in his own right. He's made four starts so far, T72, T29, T64, and I think a T14, if I remember right, I messed that up. But he gets two top tens on the year.

It makes $154,000. They should make Bonnet and play the champions to her. No, man, you got to play. Same T's, same things. It's part of the job, man. You got to go and play for a full year. And then you could get this exit, this exit package. Then you could have it.

But you got to grind it out. No cut either. God. Those tapes of Beeman's 95 campaign, D. Killer stuff, man. I just listened to those while I was mowing my grass the other day. Neil, did you come across? cross anything on the Anderson Consulting World Championship of Golf?

I didn't. Okay. I flag this because I it's it's I don't really remember this. But so this is a this this event is announced. I remember this name Anderson Consulting World Championship of Golf and I remember the commercials for it. I remember the sound of that. I didn't know what it was though, but it says the run to the title starts April 10th and 11th just after the masters. The fake turn of it was all just on the ballot sheet. It might have been. This is AI. It's Arthur and you know the yeah it was complete Ponzi scheme yeah of Enron fame it could be it's 16 players eight americans and eight representing the world all matches are single elimination match play and so the first match is going to be right for the masters layman against mark mccumber and fuzzy zeller

against paul a zinger and then frank nobelo and uh is going to play steve elkington vj is going to play robert allenby uh and then tuesday tom kite against loren roberts corey paven versus phil Mark McNulty against Craig Perry and David Frost against Eduardo Romero. And from there, this is again played right after the Masters, Monday and Tuesday, I think, after the Masters. From there, the foreign survivors are going to play in Oxfordshire two days after the British Open. And the Americans are going to play on July 31st and August 1st in Kohler, Wisconsin.

And I didn't know if you came across. I don't know if that was Black Wolf Run or if their Whistling Straits didn't exist yet. I don't know what they were doing up there. I didn't know if that came across your desk. But the golf, four golfers are going to advance to the finals, December 30th and 31st at Greyhawk. ESPN televised 49 and a half hours of this event. This is just a special made-for-TV event that I,

if you'd ask me what the Anderson Consulting World Championship of golf was, I would not have been able to list it off for you. No, I mean, I was focusing my research on like PGA tour. So that's what probably, you know, fenced it off. But yeah. Yeah. Intrigue. Interesting foreshadowing here.

The heads of the five families meet in Ponovidra this week, the U.S. tour, the European tour, Australasia, Japan, and South Africa to celebrate the death of the World Golf Tour. No, they formed the World Forum of PGA Tours, which would, of course, later become the International Federation of PGA Tours. The League of Nations. You can see where this is going to be heading towards the events. They're going to put together here.

but this is the first meeting of all of them here. And an offshoot and takeaway from the World Golf Tour talks of like Fincham's trying to get his arms around to basically all the other tours as well. WGCs. I wonder where they went. Sierra Grill? Two dudes?

There weren't a lot of dishes yet. That's a very regionalized joke there. An article from Ron Syrac highlights how America is where the big money is in golf. Clearly, he says, quote, Clearly the European tour is serving as a very nice developmental league for the US PGA tour. Sort of a AAA in Knickers. Bolt in the 90s. Again, I really kind of associate that the tours being somewhat even at this time,

but it's kind of fading pretty quickly for the European tour in the mid-90s. All right. I'm pausing the PGA tour action here to give a little bit of an update for the golf world as a whole. You guys have any guesses as to what this might be? Any developments? It affects pro golf as well. It's going to affect the recreational golfers as well. But do you remember kind of what happens early 1995?

It's not square grooves, is it? It's not square grooves, but it is you're fishing in the right pond. It's not really rules related. It's just a big development on the equipment front. Not the ProV1. It's not the ProV1. Something similar, new innovation? Something great and it's big.

Oh, sure. a great big bertha. Yeah. Okay. So titanium drive, we're brought to by titleless, by the way, if you can't tell here,

but we're going to cover a little, a little news here. Titanium drivers had been in existence since the early 90s, but they were expensive, availability wasn't high, and it just really hadn't caught on yet. And Calloway breaks through

with the great big Bertha. This is from Golf WRX. This is the full titanium construction allowed for a significantly larger head at how many CCs was a significant, significantly larger head. It's like 370 or 39 years. 253. Oh my gosh.

253 cc's for more forgiveness, which must have looked huge compared to the original big birth of a driver at a mere 190 cc. It is now twice the size of a conventional persimmon driver. What do you think the cost of this was in 1995? I want to say $150. Yeah, I had $199 in my head. $500. Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. Whoa. Serious. It's expensive now. GTS is a good deal. People get out and buy a title of GTS. The cost is driven by the Ruger titanium clubhead made exclusively for Calloway by

Firearm Maker Stern Ruger and company. The Ruger titanium head costs more than four times as much as Calaway paid any foundry for any other clubhead. The titanium weighs weighs substantially less than the stainless steel drivers and with over 250,000 drivers sold in its first year. It became the best-selling driver of its time, proving the titanium wasn't just viable. It was revolutionary pros like Phil Mickelson, Onika Sorenstan, put it in play. What made it great was how well it worked for the average golfer. Calibate turned titanium from a cool idea into a category disruptor and the ripple effect was immediate. Competitors scrambled to catch up. Titanium quickly became the standard

and driver design would never be the same. It changed the trajectory of modern driver technology. Taylor made hustled and launched the burner. The burner was out, but the bubble shaft. Oh, yeah. With it, that was also $500. Driving distance is about to increase by 26 yards on average in the next 10 years. Guys are doing sit-ups like crazy. I didn't realize a firearm company, man.

That ballistic face technology. By 2005, 97 players would be hitting it far. than John Daly hit it in 1995, wouldn't you, of course, led the tour. Again, just quick pause here to say, like, Daley was the needle in the 90s for how far he hit it. It was like 289 or something like that,

and everyone was in all of that because, of course, distance is relative, and it doesn't matter if the ball goes 340 or 290, distance is relative, and we lost our way with that one. You think it's cool, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGuire, hitting a bunch of home runs? What have everybody hit home runs?

Wouldn't that be way better? Listen, I've never made it to March in any one year without a Ryder Cup update. So a quick Rider Cup. We're going to be playing the Ryder Cup this fall at Oak Hill. I think it's kind of funny, like the narrative around the event at the time. The U.S. is coming off back-to-back wins at Kiowa and the Belfrey, and they've got a home one coming up at Oak Hill in September, complete opposite of what we've got going here in 2026.

But Bonte says, if America keeps winning, the Ryder Cup will lose what it has gained. Europe must win, and sooner rather than later, If we are not careful, the Ryder Cup will cease to be the great event that it is now. I have to worry about that. All kinds of weird articles written the sparse crowds on the European tour and how big they are on the PGA tour gives the Americans in a big advantage. Some real leadership is shown by Tom Watson early on. Lanny Watkins is the captain.

But Watson says, quote, he said that if he qualified for the team, he would want to play as well. I told him no way. I thought the same. But when I got into the job, I knew that to be captain. and play well was impossible. It wouldn't be fair to them, nor to his own golf. Just interesting. Presented without comment.

It's interesting. That's all. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm sure the Rider Cup's gotten is a much smaller deal now. It's probably way easier to be captain. Rider Cup prices are $200 for general admission. It's not a new thing that Rider Cup tickets are very expensive. And they're expecting 1,500 media credentials to be issued.

Tickets are hot there just eight years after they, fail to sell out 25,000 tickets at Mirfield Village in 87. Hospitality tents are up to 56 from just the 15 and 87. Golf's booming, man. Golf is booming. Yeah. I'm going to move quickly through this next is part. Davis Love wins his ninth PJ tour event at the Freeport McMorrin Classic. He needed to win to get in the Masters, which kind of amazed me for Davis Love, but he did it.

Duval, another great finish. He finished third. Duval at the fifth on the money list of weird note that we, Tim Fincham stops by Springfield, Missouri to present John Q. Hammonds with an artist's rendering of the World Golf Village, which is set to be the new international home for the game of golf. For the love of golf, you need to go. How many fucking hours I spent in the car because of that meeting? Driving down to St. Augustine to that hellhole.

Not a hellhole, Deach, not a hellhole. Hammonds will be building a massive resort hotel and convention center at World Golf Village, just outside St. Augustine, which will include a 75,000 square foot golf Hall of Fame. Construction to begin in September is anticipated to open in September 1997. And Fidgham says, it's not going to be a static once you've seen it, you've done it kind of facility. It's going to be a living, breathing, highly interactive audio visual experience, which everything I've ever heard about that is literally the exact opposite of how that ended up working out. God, it just, it could be. It is a good idea, genuinely. Like golfers love.

golf. They would love a space like this. It's just not that. Didn't get the didn't get the critical mats in the middle of nowhere. You know, it's just hard to, hard to draw people in. IMAX theater was sick. I did go there a lot. Similar to how we did 1994, we're not going to be covering the majors in detail here. You can check out the 1995 major championships in episode 669 of this here podcast going to great detail of all of those. But of course, Ben Crenshaw wins the masters the next week in 1995. Tway wins the MCI Classic at Heritage at Harbertown, seventh career title, defeats Nolan Henke in two playoff holes.

First win for Tway since 1990. Jim Gallagher Jr. Breaks through, wins his fourth PJ Tour event, wins by one over Sleman and Peter Jacobson. Again, Jacobson, absolutely fucking people up back then. Gallagher was seven shots back, shot 66 to win the Kmart Greater Greensboro. Some world news that week. That was the week of the Oklahoma City bombing.

and players were wearing pins on their on their hats, or ribbons on their hats for that one. Neil, we were surprised in 94. The name Payne Stewart didn't come up a whole heck of a lot, kind of struggle with his game in this time period, but he wins the Shell Houston Open. His ninth career PJ Torvent came from six shots down, beating Scott Hoke in a playoff.

It snapped a four-year win-the-streek for Stewart. Hoke had a seven-shot lead at one point and said afterward, quote, you can print it now. Hoke, as in choke. That's good stuff. Oh, man. How about that? I mean, he was already called that after the 1989 Masters.

His lead was six shots with seven holes to go over Stewart. He also made a 35 footer for Bertie on 18 just to get into the playoff. That's how badly it went on the previous five holes. Fulton Allum. Do we have less chokers in golf these days? technology man I right yeah I think I truly like I that's downside it's just less downside yeah right I just as every time we go through this I was like man people used to and putter technology load do you remember trying to make three footers with like a ping answer like back in the day oh my god you could not

close the club face on that it was a disaster yeah so it's a very good point fulton allen was decued he did not show up for his tea time did not get his wake up call um that was tough come on Calc wins the Bell South Classic by two shots over. Jim Gallagher, Jr. Who would win twice this year, two runner-ups and a third all in 1995. One of the third round co-leaders was Stephen Kepler. He was bidding to become the first club pro to win on the PGA tour since 1974. Played a good final round finished in third place.

Kepp was a British citizen played college golf at FSU. Ernie Ells wins the GT. Byron Nelson. Golf Classic is just his second PGA tour win, but it's his 15th worldwide victory. This is at TPC four seasons. VJ Singh wins the Buick Classic the next week. His third career title, second of the year, five whole playoff over Doug Martin. It's his second one in three years at Westchester for Vijay.

VJ is 32 years old. A lot here about only 70,000 fans showed up for this week. New York golf fans are just taking a beating for this one. The schedule change, which we talked about in the 94 episode. going from one week before the U.S. open to mid-May, absolutely crushed the field. That switch came after Jack Nicholas pressured the tour

for, led to the memorial, and the Kemp were open, who wanted later dates on the calendar as well. Trivia question again. The Buick Classic, what tournament is this now? Truest?

It's not. You got to think outside the box of this. I know. I'm trying to trace all this. It wouldn't, I mean, it's not like the, like the rocket. No, it's, it's trying to think like did it move to higher level than that. And then, oh, well, that's what I was going to say. Is it like, was the Barclays and then the Northern Trust and now FedEx?

Is that exactly right. God, I should have went with my gut. That was my first, my first thought. Weirdest tournament Wikipedia page ever of just, yeah, that was, those two do not feel like the same event from Big tone. Yeah. But there is a like my, my section. kicks off if the FedEx St. Jude Classic.

Say what? My section kicks off July 2nd FedEx St. Jude Classic. But different tournament. That's Harrison Frazier and, you know, things, Daniel Burger, things of that nature. Different,

different tournament. Because, yeah, that turn. I don't know why you think the two tournaments in Memphis would be the same tournaments. That are both sponsored by FedEx. Yeah,

I don't know why you would think that. Oh, my bad. Also, just another little, you know, from 30 years ago, look at big markets. We're all chasing big markets.

Here's an article about, oh, man, there's just a lot more to do in these big markets. It might not be the only game in town this time of year. Yeah. Yep. On to Colonial. Tom Lehman wins a second, just his second career PGA tour event makes a 24-foot birdie on 18 to win by one over Craig Perry.

It's just the third birdie on the 18th to win the tournament in the event's 49 year history. This is where I'm going to pause to just call out the consecutive winners on tour that we've gone through this year. Phil Mickelson, Vijay Singh, Peter Jacobson, Peter Jacobson, Kenny Perry, Corey Paven, Nick Fowdo, Mark O'Meara, Lauren Roberts, Lee Jansen, Davis-Love, Ben Crenshaw, Bob Tway, Jim Gallagher Jr., Payne Stewart, Mark Kalkavakia, Ernie L, FJ Singh, and now Tom Lehman. 14 of those 19 events were won by major champions, and we're not done with this run as well.

to start the year. Heavies. Right. And for, you know, the majority of the top 10 being international players, that's a heavy duty list of Americans. So what's, we credit that to strength of the Euro tour, but also just like, maybe not brand names, but, but, but still it's a lot of depth in the the U.S. ranks this year. This is the only event. Duval also, sorry, but Duval is a 23-year-old guy that's like about to break the door down. This is the only event, the PJ tour counter that's not sponsored. Southwestern Bell declined to renew its agreement after the 94 tournament.

But the tour is committed to Colonial through at least the next three years. It would eventually be MasterCard that takes over in a masterful sales job. Time is a flat circle. Shout out to Dean and DeLuca. Shout out to Schwab. I mean, good Lord. Chrome Plaza. That's incredible.

This is, I'm curious if you found a follow up to this part, Neil. In this time, Berndt Fincham said he would support a trim of exemplary players on the tour from 125 players to 115 for the 1997 season. It will be voted on here shortly. I mean, I think that vote does eventually pass here in just a couple of weeks, but needed to go. I think I'll get there. And this would basically the idea here to help more graduates from tour school. The policy board has as passed the three changes on the meeting on the six, which

proposed reducing those exempt cards, restricting graduates from the from Q school from top 40 and ties to just the top 40 and reducing PGA section openings in each tournament from five down to three. But it's to be reviewed by the pack and membership before a request is made for board ratification later in this year. Because I don't think this ever happened. I don't think they moved down to 115. I didn't see anything here.

Okay. Memorial tournament, I would have been here for this. Greg Norman wins his 15th PGA tour title, second Memorial. He won this after a six-week layoff with an injury. He won by four over two. Val, Calc and Steve Elkington, a big rain week in Dublin, Ohio, as you might imagine. Chief Leather Lips. Curse of leather lips.

Were the cicadas out? No. Every 17 years, it was 04, and I guess that would have been, what, 87 before that? Yeah. Where the cicadas, yeah. So my graduation summer was filled with cicadas. That's how I remember that. Lee Jansen wins his sixth career.

He went again, won the Kemper Open, second of the year, wanted a playoff over Corey Pavin at TPC, Potomac. Fincham in this time here, talking about the Philly market. Love to get an event in Philly. Found that pretty, uh, roll-ups saying the same thing. Love the Philly market. Love to get an event there. So takes us to U.S. Open. Corey Pavan wins that at Shinnock. And then the last event in my coverage, Greg Norman, again, wins in Hartford, uh, wins his 16th PJ Tour event after finishing runner-up the previous week at Shinnecock, won by two over Kirk Triplett and Dave Stockton and Grant Waite. Chipped in for an eagle on the 15th hole. I could not find if he was stopped by the rough left of that green or not but did chip in for eagle on 15

rider cut points in at this point corey paven tom layman davis love phil mickleson robert's ben krenshaw peter jacobson joss mark calkeveckevac kenny perry faxson and jansen are tied at 11th curtis strangers in 20th fred couple's not in the top 20 at this point um and what's the uh selection process at this time sally top 10 on the points list get in and two captains Picks. Captain's picks. Okay. Yeah.

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Let's go. Good stuff, Solly. You know, listen, there's going to be some patterns developing. Some names we're going to see early. Just some scene setting for what's going on in the summer in 1995. biggest movie of the summer. What is it, Dej? I don't know.

Jurassic Park. No, that's too late. Or two, uh, Independence Day. That's too late. Batman forever. Oh, sure. Tommy Lee, Joe.

Al Kilmer. Jim Carries, the riddler. Tommy Lee Jones is two-face. Open June 16th. Then record 52.8 million dollar weekend. Uh, 184 million domestic hall. Good stuff.

Song of the summer. It's all I tipped the mock arena earlier. No, it's, it's not yet. It takes off in 96. Oh, duh. Is it a kiss from a rose? That's one of them.

It's another song in the summer. I mean, that's from the movie, right? Yeah. Sealed, don't call me sting. Yeah. From Batman, but Waterfalls by TLC. Sure. E-Boys left eye and chili were kind of, we're doing it.

A lot of people thought it was about a guy named Jason Waterfalls, which it was not. Yeah. Best selling book. There's got to be Michael Crichton. Close. Close. Close. You're in the right pond.

John Grisham, the rainmaker. The rainmaker. Okay. And then Windows 95 was launched August 24th. Amazon.com sold its very first book. Developers. Developers. I love this company. Amazon sold his first book in July of 95. Jerry Garcia dies. Grateful dead August 9th, 995 at 53. Just a cultural gut punch, Dej. Yeah. No doubt. So yeah. And then sports backdrop, we're talking about baseballs just kind of in the throws of a of of labor disagreement so that's that's kind of the the background so start in july uh as we just learned fedex st jude classic not the current fedex st jude classic but there was a fedex st jude classic uh it's won by jim galliger junior just a quick apology jim was not familiar with your game i see you ball in in 1995 and this is this is now we're into what july july second yeah second sounds hot as hell yes it does uh this is jill uh this is jill

Jim's fifth and final PGA tour win. I had nine total professional wins, one tour championship in 1993. I need to give TPC Southwin some credit here. I was thinking about it as like some course that was built 10 years ago. It's been around a while. For sure.

Kind of an OG tour stop. TPC Southwin was designed by Rob, Ron Pritchard with consulting from Hubert Green and Fuzzy Zeller. Is that Guy Berger's 59? Was there, I think? Was it I think it was in Memphis? We don't have to spend a lot of time on that,

but I was going to reinforce your point that the place has been around for a while. It was the Memphis classic in 1977 at Colonial Country Club. Ah, Dova, Tennessee. Close. If, if, if,

throughout my whole overview of Google is correct. Yes. Throw a whole testimony. And I shouldn't preface this by saying, you know, shout out to Dan Carlin. I'm not a history. Sure. You know,

so I, we're approaching two hours. It's going to start to get loose here. I consult Tuckman on the Great War. All right. So next up, Motorola Western Open. Don't call me the B&W championship at Cog Hill. Up in LeMont, Illinois.

Shout out to the WGA and Evans Scholars Everywhere. Billy Mayfair wins by one at minus nine on the 72nd hole in a five-way tie. He stuffs a seven iron from 178, hold out a five-footer to win, closing with a 67. Despite winning one of the oldest non-majors on tour, or maybe the oldest. Um, Mayfair was not exempt into the open. Um, so he skipped St. Andrews and he says quote after the round is, yeah, good, good week for me to take off. Uh, more on Billy. Uh, just keep him in mind as we, as we keep going. Say what you will about the problems of pro golf these days. I don't, I feel like we've squashed a lot of these qualification issues. I'm trying to remember the last time that we really had it like, how is that guy not in X, Y, and Z event? I feel like we've, you know, we don't shout out a lot of the, the slow progress, but, Shout out to that one. I thought you were going to say squash a lot of the Billy Mayfares because that's also happened to.

No, I was going to. We had Glenn all day. We had Billy Playfair. We've got all. Yeah, there's a cast of characters popping up right now. Moving right along here into mid July. We've got the Senator I like beer classic. The Anheuser-Busch golf classic in Kings Mill.

Kingsville. Yeah. Williamsburg, Virginia. Ted Treba, Breakthrough win for the big hitting Pennsylvania. His first of two career titles. It's a birdie festival. week before the open. Kind of the original,

maybe John Deere here. I would say legitimately the first quote, like I know the name Ted Treba, but the first quote, no name winner since, since January 15th with John Morse winning the Hawaiian Open. That ends the run of like extremely recognizable names. And if you listen back to the 94 pod,

very different year. 94 was just like all these olds winning and some really random stuff. Like 95 was like, dude, we got some dudes now. So then we're, right along to the open. 124th Open Championship played at the old course, St. Andrews, July 20th, 23rd. Winner is John Daly, score of 282, 6 under.

One in the playoff, four-hole aggregate playoff over Constantino Roka. For more on this, reference NLU deep dive. We can dive deep into this one. This one kind of had everything. Home of Golf, an Icarito, a reverse Icarito, a playoff, memorable pair of butt cheeks. You know, a lot going on. Good interview, just just good stuff at this, at this open. I was, I was thinking about this as during research.

Is there a bigger contrast in winter vibe and course vibe? You know, you got the home of the RNA and then he got daily recovery alcoholic, but cheeks, all that stuff. It's an interesting contrast there. It is. Gosh, I feel like I had something. Patrick Reed winning the master. Yeah, I was saying like Zach Johnson laying up at the masters, but Patrick Reed's probably a better example of that. But this one's up there, I mean.

But it's funny. Bryson at Pinehurst a little, but also kind of not. If you've been to America's hero that way. Yeah. It's a really interesting, interesting question. I also think that I'm, I'm thankful we did the 94 episode and you guys reheated it at the beginning of this one. But, you know, I'm seven years old at this one. I know John Daly. I know he smashes it. But like, I didn't remember the leave of absence and like all that stuff just to set that context of coming back and winning at the, winning the fucking open at the old course. And kind of validating the like Cinderella overnight drive to crooked stick.

Like, you know, more, that's almost more of like a, who the hell is this guy? And now it's like, oh, now he's got two majors.

That's real deal stuff. Always noted too. I think he's one of it. And I have to double check this. But I remember looking this up at some point, like one of if not the only American to like win a major in a rider cup year and not make the rider cup team. And he did it twice.

I have to double. check that but there's something a lot maybe he's the only one that had done it twice but yeah i mean there's one more i can think of recently somewhat recently what was that phil oh yeah i think that was ahead of that i might have looked at up back in the day i think it was yeah uh and just yeah the icorito so constantina roca salli refresh my memory he he chunked a chip chunks the chip and then he makes a long put from the valley of sin yeah from the valley of sin uh so a reverse it career to go into the playoff uh michael campbell 26 year old from new zealand was the 54 uh whole leader shot 76 on sunday uh tied for third with mark brooks and then norman kind of favorite fowdo fowdo t-39 never really in it this was also

arnold palmer's final open championship and tiger woods his first open championship as the reigning uh u s am champ he was t 68 plus seven as the, I think he was the low AM, though. Again, go back to the 95 majors episode, episode 669 for a ton, ton more details on 95. Michael Campbell got boned by a helicopter issue. And like it was almost late for the tea time and ended up him contributing to him not winning the Open Championship. So episode 669. All right.

So that's the open. We're going to spend more time on the opposite field of it. The deposit guarantee golf classic in Annandale Golf Course. Golf Channel, as we remember. Mississippi. Winner is Ed Doc Dordy, first and only Torwin. Do you guys know anything about Ed? About Doc? No, I can't. Zero. 0.0. All right. Good. The event spent 26 years kind of on the JV squad. It was nicknamed the Mississippi Masters before it became a fully sanctioned tour stop. As I said, opposite field event. Kirk Triplett was T4 this week, and he was quoted as saying this money spends the same as the stuff won at St. Andrews.

Hell yeah, Kirk. Great line. I like that. So Doherty was a Vietnam veteran and received a Purple Heart and two bronze stars. So he was drafted in the Army after high school and did one tour in Vietnam. And I found two great profiles on him on Doc. One from Trenham Golf History. Shout out to these guys.

This great website spelled T-R-E-N-H-A-M. I come across to him on the last deep dive. Just kind of like fun off-the-wall history stuff about. golf figures. And then another site called hashtag veteran of the day. So from Trenham, after graduating from St. James Catholic High School, Ed Doherty went to work at his local post office in Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania. One day while delivering the mail, he had to deliver his own U.S. Army draft notice. So vet of the day goes on to highlight. He was a stud baseball player in high school, grew up in Chester, PA. Sounds like he was getting

some sniffs and was going to go to spring training, I think for the pirates. He had a try was going to be in 1968. He gets drafted, and by February of 68, he stationed on the Cambodian border at a place called Cumb Duck. In May of 68, his unit was attacked, overrun in a battle that lasted three days. The battle was part of the famed Tet Offensive. Listen, this is a rabbit hole. If you want more, I implore you to go check out the Battle of Cumb Duck on Wikipedia page.

It's robust. Anyway, bed of the day wraps up a quote, in an escape attempt, Doherty found a fallen sergeant, carried him onto an aircraft that was about to take off. The sergeant had been injured without help. He would likely have died. As the aircraft was taking off, was hit by enemy fire, went into a spiral. Doherty miraculously got himself and the sergeant off, carried him across the one way under enemy fire. Upon reaching the medic office, the sergeant was treated.

Doherty suffered minor injuries. So he's awarded the two bronze stars for Valor and Purple Heart. After the battle, Doherty and his squad are stationed at landing zone. LZ Ross, brother. The squadron's been given 144 baseballs from the Boston Red Sox. So in between on-duty shifts, Doherty and his team would pitch into ammo pits. And then his love of baseball is reignited when Chicago Cubs player Ernie Banks came to visit LZ Ross. Mr. Cub.

And one of the highlights for Doherty of his service was playing catch with Banks. So back to my hitters at Trenham, Doherty was sent back to the same. States for duty at Fort Lewis in Washington in 1969. So he did one tour. He volunteered for the baseball team, but he was told baseball required, it was too much time. And since he saw combat, I think they needed him for training

for soldiers heading overseas. So the base also had a golf course. Ed picks up golf. He hadn't really played, so he kind of gets the bug. So he's discharged in 69. And a friend took him out to Edgemont Country Club back home in Pennsylvania. He gets a job at the course and

just starts grinding. him. So once winter rolls around, he lands a job on St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, works for golf professional Mike Reynolds down there, who also kind of coaches him up. And so now he's working on his game 12 months a year. So that's 69. By 74, Doherty became a PGA tour member in March of, I guess he was kind of a PGA professional. And then PGA touring member by March 75. And he began playing PGA tour events, Monday qualifiers. He finished his T-22 at the 1975. 1975.

So we're talking 20 years before he's winning on the PJ. Yes. And five years after he picked up the game, right? So both of those to me were like, whoa, okay. So he hit the end of these T-22 at the PGA championship at 75. Most years he was able to earn enough money to stay exempt, but there were numerous interruptions due to elbow and shoulder surgeries. Okay, so again, he gets his first and only career PGA tour win at the age of 47 in 1995.

opposite the British Open. He did losing a playoff at the Greater Milwaukee Open in 1990. Who is it? And hint, it's very relevant to some names we've been throwing out today. Jim Gallagher, Jr. Boom. Jim Gallagher, Jr. I see you ball it, Jim.

Got a pull. Okay, so he never played in the open, but because of this, when he did play in the Masters in 96, missed the cut. In 1998, Doherty already began to play on the senior tour. He won $5.8 million in official earnings after he reached the age of 50. So he's kind of a, what's his name? Like Scott Perel or someone like that. Yes.

Yeah. And the guy from New Zealander, what's his name? Stephen Alker. Alker. Yeah, just like late bloomer. I love this. So he enjoyed a far greater degree of success on the senior, the Champions Tour senior circuit than regular career.

shares the record for best 54-hole driving accuracy in Champions Tour history. He hit 42 of 42 Fairways at the Ace Group Classic in 2005. Who are the other two guys tied? Who else has hit 42 of 42 fareways? A good guess, but no. Calvin Pete? Yes, Calvin Pete did it at the 1996 VFW Senior Championship. And Hale Irwin did it at the 2010 Insure Classic at Rock Barn.

Great sponsorship by Insure there. Their target market like that. Best season ever of driving accuracy on the champions tour is Joe Durant, 86% in 2014. Think about hitting 86% of your fairways. Golf would be so fun. I don't even, or it wouldn't be fun. It's just, you know, you're just in the middle of the fairway every time. I don't know.

All right. Electricity. Landed in this plane, got a three-point turn out of this digression. After his PGA career, he began a more intentional. He was, he's always been into train, model trains, his whole life. I just when I thought it couldn't get any better. I know. So then he opens up after he stopped playing or maybe during.

He opens up a model train shop in Garnett Valley, Pennsylvania, specializing in Leonel and American Flyer trains. He often runs the largest set with his grandchildren, putting up five trains on the 8 by 16 track. He also has an extensive collection of guitars and pinball machines. And he's still alive. I was like, yo, maybe we could be a podcast. For sure. Yeah. So he, just my new best friend.

He had some issues with cancer, Agent Orange from his Vietnam stuff, but he's still alive. I think he lives in Port St. Lucy now in Florida. And I just kind of to sum it all up, it feels like Doc went pro in retirement activities, like as a 24-year-old. You know, I just got really good at golf, trains, guitars, pinballs. I mean, this guy's, this is my dude. So shout out to Doc. That's one of the best dives. One of the best digressions, I think.

we've ever had on this podcast. That's good stuff. I will send a text before we're done recording to see if we can get in touch with this guy. Sounds like a ledge. All right, moving on. IDR Classic at Pleasant Valley in Sutton, Massachusetts. Fred Funk's your winner, second career tour win. This is New England's longest running summer stop, the old New England Classic.

Win number one of two for Funk in this like back half of the season. So he'll go on a win later in the year. Not much. Didn't have much here. I'm going to keep moving. I'm trying to keep us moving like kind of one big feature each month. So let's get to August.

Buick Open, not to be confused with the Buick Classic or the Buick Invitational, but the Buick Open is in Michigan, Grand Blanc at Warwick Hills Golf and Country Club. Woody Austin, first career tour win in a playoff. The kind of the coming out,

he's the 1995 PJ Tour rookie of the year. So Austin starts to buck his head here up in Michigan. controversially wins it over David Duvall. David Duval, because of this win. Duval had a, it was higher on the money list,

like had better tournaments, but did not have a win. This is like, what would it be? Eric Cole, Ludwig kind of situation. Were they in the same year? Eric Cole and somebody,

I can't remember who it was. Benny Booms. Yeah. Huh. So Woody Austin's on the scene. Quick pause kind of on the schedule here to discuss an Associated Press article from August 8th titled Revenge 8th

8 years later. Stadler hacks at tree. Quote, Craig Stadler used a chainsaw instead of a golf club when he decided to take a swing at an old nemesis, a large Leland Cypress tree which contributed to Stadler's disqualification from the 1987

Leeland Brothers, Solomon Brothers, whatever classic. Tori Pines in San Diego. For more on this, check our rules scandals podcast. Yeah. And our podcast. And our podcast with Craig Stadler. Sadler. And from the Walrus himself, he's quoted in this article saying, it's been eight years.

It's time to put it to rest. So he chopped that thing down. No eye protection famously, you know, but Stadler, you know, he's handling his business out there hacking this tree down in August, in August of 1995. This is the perfect time to tell you about our friends at East Sands Golf. East Sands helps bridge the gap between playing, you know, famous golf courses like World Trune, Brodornick and discovering the hidden gems of Western Scotland or wherever you might be traveling. Haley and Nick, some friends of ours and fellow nest members, they built East Sands specifically to help golf sickos put together the perfect trip across Great Britain and Ireland or any number of places. Whether you want something big and ambitious or small and straightforward, they can build

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Make sure Nick and Haley know that you're a nest member when you book your trip to England, Scotland or Ireland, wherever that might be. Eastsandsgolf.com slash NLU. Go have some fun. great people and they're going to help you have a great golf experience. Eastsgolf.com slash NLU. Back to the pod. All right.

Next up, we've got August 10th Riviera Country Club. It is the PGA Championship. Steve Elkington continues a good season. He wins at 17 under, first playoff hole over Monty. Talked about this one a little bit in our PGA championship draft episode. Elks starts six shots back of 54-hole leader Ernie Ells. And I'm just going to implore people, there's a great video. on, I think it's Elks' secret golf YouTube channel of him just, I mean, talking through, like,

recounting the tourney and recounting his final round. It's like a two or three minute video, but it's awesome. And he's talking about how he's worried about hitting draws on the T shot on five and the T shot on 13. He's just such a good storyteller. Monty, one puts the last three holes to tie Elk, making a really long one on 18. And then they go back for the playoff. Elk decides to walk back. It kind of controls the pace.

And Monty's back there like, what are they done? you know, he kind of flummox his, uh, uh, Ken Venturi's freaking out. I love this move here. I love this move right here. He's staying in rhythm. I love this right here. Yeah, sounds like just an awesome course, awesome finish, awesome tournament all the way around. You know, they're playing RIV twice, but I got to think RIVs a little more interesting this time of year from a condition standpoint. Yeah, this was this year, though, the greens were like completely almost lost them. Like in the cleat marks were horrible. Um, it was a, it was fresh off the renovation. And, And they did not take very well, and they really struggled with the Greens that year. And there was a lot of biching from the players. And Elk won at 17 under par or something like that. Yeah. Well, Elk makes a big boy birdie to win the playoff. It goes out and gets it from Monty.

I still can't believe Rich Beams dog in my PGA championship draft. I mean, this seems like it was a good selection. You're handling it well. Yeah. Yeah. Moving on, Sprint International Castle Pines out in Colorado. This is, of course, Stableford scoring. God, guys, I want to bring back.

a Stableford event. I think it's, you know, if it was, if it had a better spot on the calendar or something, you guys don't, you don't agree with that? I agree in theory. I feel I, I'm hesitant to wait into these waters after being so publicly wrong about the Zurich. I was like, we need to change these formats up. And then I'm like, oh, what do you think of the Zurich?

It's like, I, there's nothing I want to watch less than the Zurich right now. Like, are you kidding me? You know, so I, in theory, I'm with you. And maybe if it's like one of the, if it's one of the signature events or something, you know, it's like, but I don't think they're going to do that. Right. And so I would be with you if it was like, we're making the truest Stableford or we're making the truest a three club tournament. Well, that's what I'm, whatever, that's what I'm getting at. But they're not going to do that.

So the Stableford's going to be like, here's all the worst players that you already don't want to watch playing a different format. You don't actually care about when it's players you don't want to watch. Well, if it was presented properly, I think it's interesting format. That I agree. But the problem with it is when Phil won it, he literally won it like on 16. Right. He couldn't go backwards enough on 17 and 18. As we've learned at the NIT, it is a, it causes problems.

But winner is Lightspeed's dad, Lee Jansen, he popping up again. He wins with a score 23. Popping episode, what, seven of the trap-trough? He'd like a backstory on that one. Third win of the year for Lee Jansen. Yes, exactly. the big sleaze he's bucking and playing well back-to-back weeks. That's Ernie Ells.

This is Jansen's third win of 1995 with the players and the Kemper Open. He and Norman lead the tour with three wins a piece. Norman's about to get another one. So as far as the season goes. So Jansen, eight PGA tour wins, two U.S. opens, one player, 16 professional wins, got up to 13th in the OWGR in his career. Best finish with Masters T-12. I don't know.

that's a really strong career. I don't think we talk a lot about Lee Jansen. I just was kind of, you know, perusing that literature. Wyndham Clark. I've took the words out of my mouth. Really good comp there. Yeah.

Really good comp. All right. U.S. Amateur August 22nd. Tiger Woods wins over George Buddy. Marucci Jr. 2 up in a 36 whole final wins his second consecutive USAM title.

This is the one at Newport? Yeah. Yeah. I hit the shot, which. Did it. Buddy comes out swinging, kind of gets him, you know,

he's up early and then Tiger, Tiger comes back. So by all accounts, a great, a great USM. Of course, that is the year that Earl said, how do you like this,

Bobby Jones? A black man is the best golfer who ever live. Bobby Jones can kiss my son, black ass. I like these out there doing it. I like that he's putting his name on some quotes. Hell yeah.

So next up. This is where things get interesting. NEC World Series of Golf Firestone Country Club up in Akron, Ohio. Sorry, super quick. If you haven't read the Tiger was a Jeff Benedict, Arm and Coutain book, there's great stuff about those USAMs in there. That would be like if you're kind of like, oh, I started watching Tiger in 1997. I know everything about Tiger.

Go back and read that book. It's very worthwhile. And listen, I kind of was like, oh, I should dig in the USM, but it's not the PGA tour. So, you know, just want to make sure we're keeping a, keeping the trains running. Winner here is Greg Norman, one of the first playoff hole over Nick Price and Billy Mayfair.

Sorry, I got you off. Where are we here? We are at Firestone. Yeah, NEC World Series of Golf at Firestone. So Norman wins it at minus two. So play, you know, tough tournament, wins over Nick Price and Billy Mayfair. Norman, who almost withdrew on Thursday,

more on this in a moment, chipped in for Bertie from 60 feet on the first playoff hole to beat the number two player in the world price and Billy Mayfair. He's quoted on shark.com. There's a good write-up of this win. He owns shark.com? Well, I assumed he did because it's just fluffing the shark. What a URL?

Oh my God, it is his URL. That's sick. I did not know that. Shark.com. Good for him. That's good stuff. He is out there doing it. He was visualizing his chipping at his 1990 chipping at Dural.

Which is just like kind of a sick quote of like I was visualizing something that happened five years ago. Like I, it's very specific and that caught my eye. I was visualizing the other time I chipped into winning a PJ tour event. The $360,000 check made Norman the all time leading money winner on the PGA in PGA tour history. So 9.5, just around 9.5 million passing Tom Kite. And again, this is Norman's third win of the year. Kind of got a slow start, was battling some injuries. So they're Memorial, Hartford, and then, and then here.

Here. A 10-year exemption comes with this one. Let's reheat that world tour, baby. You guys can't kick me off this tour. I got 10 years out here. Again, we're about to get in. I mean, while all this is going on, he's trying to build a breakaway tour. And he's like, oh, yeah, I'm just going to like take over the all-time money list, best player in the world, you know, number one player in the world. So again, like I said, shark.com. Good, good source here. And this is from shark.com. Norman said his biggest motivation came from his play Saturday, where he posted four straight bogeys without. hitting a bad shot. I thought that was such a TC quote. I had to bring that one up. And he goes on to say, I said, this is just ridiculous. And from then on, I was very positive and determined. Which is just like, yeah, I made four billion. I just didn't have a bad shot. I didn't even bad shots. It's unbelievable. So then back to that Thursday withdrawal situation, Norman accused playing partner of Mark McCumber of a rules infraction on Thursday. He charged that McCumber pulled a blade of grass away from his ball prior to attempting a seventh foot par put on the seventh hole he reported the incident to a pGA tour's a pga tour official but

mccumber claimed he was swatting at an insect uh norman goes on to say i felt very strongly about the issue and i required it required a lot of convincing not to withdraw norman said everybody around me told me not to compromise myself and my chances to win and it turned out to be the right thing to do it's just that quote it's just big eye roll for me it's like just sounds like megalomaniate Like, I just, I can't compromise me. Just this, the drama of it. And I don't know. So maybe who knows what happened there with McCumber, but he didn't get penalized.

Do you remember the, uh, when I was, we were doing the, the players championship trivia. And I was referencing those YouTube videos, like maybe AI generated YouTube videos of Mark McCumber. And the title was like Mark McCumber names five players. He absolutely hates in all caps. Like a big fiery kind of like thumbnail. Uh, I think Greg, Norma was number one on this list. So maybe this is part of it.

Yeah. And then I think the other video is Mark McCumber's players he quote actually respects. Actually, yeah. You know what? Billy Mayfair. I'm cool with him. All day, all, you know, Glenn all day. Yeah, he's cool with me.

So this happened. Again, this tournament was last week of August. So August 27th. So September 1st. Let's let's tie a bow on the FTC investigation. So just think about this. Norman wins in dramatic fashion. So the timing is almost like a movie.

And then the next week, they kind of other shoe drops and he kind of gets buried by Finchum. So a couple sources here. There's an LA Times article that was a kind of a really good recap and overview of the whole situation that was written in late 95. That's by David Willman. Excellent piece. And then there's an article from 2019, a look back by David Siener at Sports

Illustrated. And the title of that is a man and an idea. ahead of their time. So we're going to reference both of these. But just to remind people, I don't want to, they totally covered a lot of this, but Finchrom had two specific issues with the FTC. The first is the rule that forbids golfers to play in non-PGA tour events

without the commissioner's permission. The second, gives similar veto power over appearances in televised golf programs. So Fincham had a couple options on how he could handle this as the new commissioner. He could quietly plead his case with the FTC directly, which would kind of be the more traditional way that the, you know, PGA tour, like let's do this behind closed doors. or he could launch a more vigorous full frontal attack,

you know, a.k.a. he could lobby, which is his experience. And again, I do want to emphasize this FTC investigation was confidential. It was going on behind the scenes for years. And so he probably knew about it going into the job, but like it's just kind of been in the background.

And then all of a sudden it's like at this time when this breakaway tour happens, just the timing is really interesting. So I'm a novice on how business gets done in Washington lobbyists. So this was a really good case study. I'm an expert. Ask me anything. So first, here's Fincham's quote to Wilman, kind of about set things up. Quote, we decided to raise the profile a little bit. So he's going the lobby route, said Fincham, a lawyer who served in the Carter White House.

We just wanted the FTC commissioners to understand that this was a very important matter. And again, his argument, as quoted by Fincham, is while the Tours disputed policy controls players, the restraints are necessary to assure TV networks and sponsors are a reliable supply of quality golfers. He also pointed out that the PGA Tour's growth helps charitable organizations, which received $31.7 million from tournament generated revenue in 1994. So laying out his case and we're going the charity route, baby. Great. So what he did, step one, lays down the law, suspension threat with players.

Solly covered that. That's early, late 94, early 95. Step two, messages to the PGA tour, messages the PGA tour's case with the public. And he does this very clearly. Finchum is pretty dialed on his comms here and leaning on some sympathetic arguments. Step three, contact the FTC with an all-star team of lobbyists and PR reps. One of those was a former White House press secretary.

So in other words, let's get the gang back together. We're going to Washington, baby. Step four, go to work. So he leaned on the turn. First, one thing he did, he leaned on tournament sponsors all over the country, the executives of travelers of, you know, let's say modern day FedEx, AT&T. he pressed his, sorry, he pressed his case directly with specific congressmen. Wilman reports that 26, he had all these, these CEOs write letters to their, you know,

you don't like the rule, call your congressman, but they're all sending like, hey, man, this is good for the local economy, you know, just go, go press these congressmen. And then he. Congressman in states that are hosting PGA tour events and, and that there's local benefits to charities and things that it's directly affecting their constituents as well. Yes, and then he and his team of lobbyists, they press specific congressmen who have control over House ways and means, like the specific committees where this stuff could get legislated or that have influence and we'll get to over the FTC. So, Willman reports that 26 members of Congress wrote letters to the FTC in support of the PGA tour, including Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, of Kansas, Trent Lott of Mississippi, Dick Army of Texas and Vic Fosio. not sure if he's related to Tom of Sacramento.

Bob Dole took the extra step of making his point on the Senate floor. I understand that the FTC is considering filing a complaint challenging the PGA tour's rules. Dole said on February 15th, I question whether the public interest would be served by eliminating the foundation for the success of the tour. So there's a new FTC commissioner or chairman coming in, Clinton's nomination, is Robert Pitowski. and he got an earful at his confirmation hearing from Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina. I was going to do a little southern drawl on this one. I think you can. I understand for four or five years now.

You've got a bunch of lawyers wanted to mess up this sport, said Senator Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina, adding the FTC is still fiddle-fatting around, trying to find trouble, and that is what I will be interested in. So he ends up getting confirmed, blah, blah, blah. Another guy, Michael Oxley of Ohio wrote multiple letters and chaired the subcommittee that oversaw FTC budgets. And Oxley was one of 20 members of Congress that was an annual, a mainstay at the Pro Am at the Kemper Open.

Amazing. Come on, man, what do we do at you? Don't mess this up. So the result. This is from Wilman again. Fincham's campaign took several months, but it worked really, and I'm going to add another really, really, really well.

The AFTC announced on September 1st. Real quick. The controversy with Oxley was he also, his spot, which I believe was a $3,200 entry fee spot into the proem was waived. Like they were waiving fees for lawmakers in this process, which also a spotlight was shined on that part as well. But it was also like just really good wheeling and dealing for friendship.

So the FTC announced on September 1st, that the commissioners had voted four to zero to kill the PGA. We're now hosting, hosting like events at the president's golf course. Just, just for what it's, just for what it's worth. I can't imagine $3,200. Can you imagine? It was, uh, yeah, it was, it was,

he's, actually said he did not consider the playing privilege of reportable gift and maintain the FTC intervention was based solely on his belief that the investigation was wrong. So basically it's like, they didn't bribe me with this like, you know, it's that's so small. it's not a reportable gift, but they tried that. So unanimous decision, the commissioners of the FTC kill the PGA torn investigation, rejecting the staff antitrust lawyers' recommendations to take legal action. You're off the case.

You're off to stand down. And that's not, I don't think that happens super often, at least back in this time. The announcement was, this is great. The announcement was made late Friday afternoon before Labor Day and received little attention. So just, you know, that's, that's interesting. FTC investigations are kept confidential, but agency officials said the commissioners in an overwhelming number of cases have voted to follow the antitrust units recommendations. According to the people familiar with the unfolding of the PJTor investigation,

the congressional overtures injected attention that could not be ignored, said an official at the FTC who spoke on the condition of anonymity. I can tell you that those letters were taken very seriously. Just this, like Fincham, I would say expertly, navigating the politics of America and Monaghan going on TV and just being like, yeah, 9-11 families, man. And like his inability to flex, like he said the Senate and everything left him out to dry completely.

We're fighting it all on our own versus Finch's expert navigation of this. That those two parallels were not lost on me. Unfair. But Jimmy Dunn, if any of these guys had anything to do with 9-11, I'll kill him myself. God. That's a lot. All right. You know, it's a, it's different times.

Well, so here's a bit of a scalpel versus a sledgehammer here kind of situation. This is kind of, this kind of ties it all together, though. The FTC, so you got to remember, Newt Gingrich is buck in his head around this, this time, contract with America. We're trying to balance the budget, guys. So the FTC was facing new congressional leadership, uh, in a, uh, congressional, leadership that was eager to downsize and eliminate government regulatory agencies. Legislation approved by the Senate subcommittee threatened to slash by the FTC's existing budget by

20%, so about $100 million. Now, soon after the PGA case died, FTC officials found a new ally as their proposed budget appropriation had moved behind closed doors at the Senate House Conference Committee, Hollings of South Carolina, who was getting up in Potofsky's grill at the hearing. pledged to carry the agency's fight for the full $98.9 million appropriation. So, you know, listen, why don't you kill this case and I'll get you your $100 million? There you go. Kind of how that worked.

So one question I had was whether or not Norman knew about this probe. And if that had, you know, does he deserve credit for the timing? You know, he kind of botched the rollout, but the timing was good. He said to Ciener in that, that SI article in 2019, I knew about the FTB. Probe, he said, I knew about all the stuff going on behind the scenes. And I thought it was kind of interesting to tell you the truth. But I didn't want to get injected into that probe. I had my own battle of the fight.

So, yeah, I guess not. But I find that 2019 interview interesting. People should go read it because Norman reflects in a big way. And I don't want to be conspiratorial. But it's almost like, hey, maybe I should go back to that idea. Because it's like, okay, about two years later. It's like, yeah, actually, you're right. That was a good idea.

And it kind of seems like how Norman just lives his life. Like, yeah, actually, why don't we just wreck some shit again? So I hope he doesn't listen to this pod. I'm like, I'm about giving a third try, you know? I know what I did. There's no way. Yeah, no way I'd make those same mistakes again. So yeah, that's, let's, we tie a bow on the FCC.

But I mean, Fincham, by September 1st, it's like, it's dead. And then, as you said, he starts to be like, Fincham seemed to have a really good ability to be like, I'm going to kill this. But there's also some decent ideas here. And so to make sure it doesn't. come back while I'm running things, I'm going to start to WGC stuff and do like a very controlled vanilla version of this world golf tour.

So which again, back to Norman's thing. Like it was not a bad idea. You just have to involve the PGA tour. Like you can't, you're going to lose if you go up against that machine unless you have sovereign wealth money. Even then that runs out like that you had like they're bullies, whatever. If you want to take that approach into it or that view into it, sure. But like there was just no world you were going to.

going to be able to do this without like approval of the pGA tour yeah or such overwhelming support that every player's on board which i won't even consider being a reasonable option like it just wasn't going to happen so uh moving on here uh greater milwaukee open up in wisconsin uh that's first week of september uh scott hoke wins this one it is not not much going on here this year uh i guess Hoke kind of comes back from Scott Choke based on what Sully went over. Tiger Woods would famously turn pro here a year later. Big one next year.

So you'll learn next year. That's right. You'll learn. Then we got the Bell Canadian Open at Glen Abbey in Oakville, former hometown for yours truly. Mark O'Meara gets it done. Mark O'Meara at this point is kind of becoming the nice guy who hadn't won a major yet.

That'll come in a couple of year, I guess, three years later. But he adds it. a national open to his resume. So TC's got to love that. And then you have the 95 Walker Cup. So the 35th Walker Cup is played at Royal Porthcall in Wales. And the event is won by Great Britain and Ireland. 14 to 10. So the notables on this team, notably gay, obviously Tiger, Tripkini, Buddy Mariucci, Chris Riley, Chris Cox, John Harris, John Kerrville Jr. Alan Bratton, Tim Jackson are on this squad. So a few big names. And then G.B. and I, not a ton. Stephen Gallagher's on this team. Patrick Harrington's on this team. A lot of other names I'm not super familiar with.

But this is from a gamer in The Independent by Tim Glover. Quote, Great Britain and Ireland competed, completed the resounding victory of the United States in the 35th Walker Cup match yesterday. It was made all the sweeter for its rarity value. This was one, this was only the fourth time since the competition began in 1922 that G. G.B. and Ireland had beaten the Americans,

and they struck a. great blow for that unfashionable concept amateur sports uh so you know a lot of labor disputes all the stuff going on the pro tour everyone wants to celebrate uh uh the just tradition and glory of amateur golf another another knock on tiger's team record there so gb and i uh worth noting they were massacred uh according to tim glover in minnesota two years uh before they went in the final session of singles at uh needing three and a half points out of eight to secure a victory and achieve a minimum fuss. Clive Brown, the captain, a Welshman, perhaps deserves as much credit as his team. Brown, the only captain never to have played in the Walker Cup, came up with a perfect

batting order for singles. Downing Gray, the U.S. captain kind of botched this one. He played his two aces, John Harris and Tiger Woods, seven and eight in the lineup. And although both won, it didn't matter. The game was already up. Downing Gray, yeah, need to get up on Downing Gray, Florida Man, Downing Gray. All right, moving on, BC Open, September 14th to 17. Halemone, Hal Sutton is your winner. A comeback market for Sutton. So kind of the former, I never knew that he was branded this, the next Nicholas, but kind of splashy as a young buck. But he was kind of in the wilderness, rebuild his game and confidence through the early mid-90s,

and then kind of has a resurgence in the late 98th to 2000. Enjoy golf club in Endicott, New York, the old IBM, BC, Cod. comic strip event, upstate New York, fan favorite, now home of the Dick's sporting goods open on the Champions Tour. Guys, I didn't know the history of this. This kind of put this on the list of places I kind of want to see. The tournament uniquely brought, this is from PJ Tour's website. The tournament, the old BC Open brought the greats of the comic strip game to the area

thanks to the participation of Johnny Hart. Hart was a native of Endicott and the cartoonist behind BC. One of the most popular comic strips in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. the PGA tour event was named after the comic, and Hart provided logos for the event for free. Hart also invited the best cartoonists of the day to come for the tournament and play a pro-am. The likes of Garfield's creator Jim Davis,

shoe creator Jeff McNeely, were among Hart's contemporaries who visited to swap stories, talk artwork, play golf, and I think they had like a little Comic Con up there throughout the 90s. Can I be honest? I had no earthly idea that that was the case. I just always assumed BC was like an

insurance company or something. Yeah. I did too. And I be I think IBM had a big campus up there. So anyway, an interesting, interesting stop on tour no longer PG a tour stop. Bit of a woodstock for the cartoonists up there. That's right. I don't know what the list of these events would be, but if you would say like name some 90s PGA tour events, I'd be like, oh, Buick, blah, blah, blah, the Bell South Classic and the BC Open. I don't know why. Like that's just one of the first ones that would Booze Allen would roll off the tongue. Disney. I don't know, but BC is on the list of just like, yeah, this should be part of a deep dive in some way. That's a, yeah, that's a good thread to pull.

Rider Cup. This is September 22nd to 24th at Oak Hill Country Club. So we're staying in New York. Europe wins it 14 and a half to 13 and a half. On team Europe, you've got Sevi, Howard Clark, Nick Fowdo, David Guilford, Mark James, Per Ulrich Johansson, Langer, Montgomery, Colin Montgomery, Constitino Rocha, Sam Torrance, Philip Walter. and Ian Wuzman.

For the U.S. squad, you got Fred Couples, Ben Crenshaw, Brad Faxon. There that were taught. I know. Woosom. Woosom. Woosom. Sorry.

Woozy. Excuse me. That's a Wilberg, Walberg. Yeah, listen, I'm not just going to worry about that shit. We're going to be honest. You mentioned to me.

You didn't do a ton of rider cup stuff. It asked me just to do a little bit to top you up. I'd honestly until this morning had never heard of Howard Clark or Philip Walton. And that's on me. That's fine. But to find. rider cuppers than the last 31 years that I had never heard of was shocking to me.

So you got a pretty stout based on this season to U.S. team. Fred Couples, Crenshaw, Brad Faxson, Jay Hoss, Peter Jacobson, Tom Lehman, Davis Love the third, Jeff Maggert, Phil Mickelson, Corey Paven, Lauren Roberts, and Curtis Strange. Interesting to see Lee Jansen's not on this list. John Daly's not on this list. DeVille. DeVille. DeVille. DeVille.

DeVille. Gallagre. So, you know, that's, that was very interesting to me. So it's very controversial. I mean, couples gets a captain's pick. He won a couple times in Europe, which is not counting on the points list. And like he's, you know, still pregnant couples. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, one twice or on the European tour. Curtis Strange gets the other captain's pick. And Curtis has missed four of the last seven cuts coming into this and is like, oh, man, this is, you know, if you thought J.T. and Rome was an issue. This was like he's a little past his prime. it's name only and you're bypassing Duval and a lot of other names here to go down the list here and take Curtis Strange, this better not backfire on you. It backfired big time.

He went 0 and 3, lost his singles match in the U.S. lost by one point overall and lost a 9-7 lead in singles. The quotes afterwards from Strange, sorry if I'm jumping you on any of this, Neil, but it's frightening thought of what I'll face tomorrow. 11 guys fought their hearts out and I didn't play well. I knew what would happen if I didn't perform. I deserve whatever I get in the press the next couple of days, but it won't compare to how I beat myself up. And you mentioned Gallagher captain.

What was he Owen? So Gallagher, he was 0 and 6 as a player in the Ryder Cup, meaning he had been a part of six teams that never won the Ryder Cup. I believe was an assistant captain for two Rider Cups. Both of those teams lost. He was the captain. the most two recent ones in 91 and 93, Europe lost both of those.

He was 0 and 10 in Rider Cups. He was convinced to captain it a third time here in 95. The U.S., so Corey Payvin chips in on Saturday for the last point of the day to go up 9-7 and the U.S. celebrated a bit too much. And Gallagher turned to his wife and has a quote there and says, they were celebrating tonight, Europe would celebrate tomorrow. Turned to his wife and said, I got a feeling.

That was. it's the original I got a feeling kind of thing here. But you never beat Bernard Gallagher 11 times in a row. And he makes it happen. Now the U.S. will be trying that approach with Jim Furek this upcoming year. So we'll see how that goes. Yeah. So as you mentioned, Nick Fowdo beats Curtis Strange deciding point there.

And then Philip Walton, last man to qualify for Europe, closed out Jayhoss on 18. Gallagher's quoted saying, I put my A team right in the middle and it came right in the middle of it and came through. There are also two hole in ones for Europe that week. Howard Clark on Sunday on the 11th and Constantino Roka on Saturday foursums, which is a fun little wrinkle. I'm trying to do the math. How old would Curtis Strange be?

I'm not trying to be in ages tier. But tying a couple threads together. I mean, famously the next year in Milwaukee. He's doing the tiger. He looks old in that video. This is a year before that. 40. There's only one U.S. player.

under the age of 30 on the team. It's of course Philip Alfred Mickelson. I'm sorry. I'm sticking to the Walker Cup. Yeah. And he went three and O. Phil went three and no. One other fun wrinkle I found Lanny Watkins captain. He was reportedly

so stunned after the loss that he pulled out the wrong speech. He pulled out his victory speech at the closing ceremonies. He kind of started down that track and oh, wow, wrong, wrong a paper. Golf Digest calls it the history's most underrated

Ryder Cup, a template for kind of what happened at Brookline in 99 and Medina in 2012. Oh my God. That's bleak. One thing I found during four ball play, Peter Jacobson and Brad Faxson are playing together. I think it's on the seventh hole. Faxon hits a ball. Right. It goes into

a, unbeknownst to Jacobson, it goes into a creek. Faxon takes a drop, ends up holding out, makes a bogey. and Jacobson's in his green side, hits a chip well past the hole, goes up, scoops his ball,

thinking that Faxon's already in for four. He was not in for five. He comes back to him and says, hey, yeah, nice four. Faxon's like, I took a drop. I made five. And they end up losing the hole

and losing that match. And it's noted in there. Ironically, Jacobson had been bickering with golf world writers about what he felt were two harsh criticisms of the U.S.

team, included in that criticism was suggestion that Jacobson's concentration was suspect. So the U.S. has been criticized a bunch leading up into this Ryder Cup, and he just plays directly into the hands right there of, you know, poor communication or concentration, I should say. Ish. So come out of that, back into the PGA tour,

kind of rounding into the Tour championship. So we're in October. Buick Challenge, another Buick event. Callowardons down in Pine Mountain, Georgia. had a good good uh overview of this that kind of remote court but stop on the pga tour um latin on the 94 episode but fred funk wins here so second win uh both in the back half of the year i'd say also there was an opposite field event to the rider cup it was the quad city classic and d a wybring won that one uh so quad quad city was opposite the rider cup in 1995 was a shocker to me yeah uh then the

walt disney world oldsmobile classic we go right from Buick to Oldsmobile. Disney courses down in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. DJ's favorite place got married up on the water slide nearby. Winner Brad, Dr. Dirt, Bryant. First and only tour win. Wins at 18 under range short and 54 whole tournament. Wins over Hal Sutton and Ted Treba. So, you know, some guys stayed hot. Tournament of champion. Yeah. First win for Brian H-40 won in his 18th season. and 475th career start. I think he, we did a profile on him from the tour championship in 94. So he gets it done the next year.

But he was, he was kind of in the running for a win. It was as a heartbreaker in 94. His younger brother, Bart Bryant, also a tour pro, later won the Memorial. Memorial, 2006. 05. 05. Rest in peace.

So Dr. Dirt gets it done. You know, D.J, as we said earlier, those tapes of, of, uh, of Bart and Brad Bryant. Those are, I love trading for those. It was unimaginable that a guy by the name of Bart Bryant could win the memorial.

It was like hitters only that ever won the memorial like in the Tiger era too and he just like won it out of nowhere and everybody in Dublin was completely stunned. It's the original William McGirt. Exactly. Then we go to Las Vegas Invitational

TPC Summerland. Jim Furek, first career PGA tour win. Oh, wins my one over Billy Mayfair, who continues to stay hot. Great photos from that one. Awesome photos. I actually had one dialed up, but it's not not up in the studio right now. But the showgirls with a young Furek, good, good stuff.

Go seek that out. Furek shared the third round lead after 65 and then fourth round 67, tied him with Mayfair before he closed it out. It's a five-round format. So this is a 90-hole event, which I thought was interesting. Yeah. And then Furek goes on to win in Vegas again in 98 and 99. So a happy, Vegas, a happy place for Jim Furek. Yeah.

Desert guy, Arizona State. Yeah. And then La Cantera, Texas Open in San Antonio at La Cantera golf course. Duffy Waldorf gets his first career win. Colorful tie-dye, weird shirts, Duffy. Yeah, he'll be kind of a staple on tour for the next 10, 15 years. Okay, interesting stuff here. Tour Championship.

It is at Southern Hills in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1995, late October. Again, just want to call out. We can move the Tour Championship around. We used to. So let's just get that out of the way. The winner is Billy Mayfair. He wins by 3 over Corey Pavan and Steve Elkington. Guys, absolutely brutal, brutal tournament.

It nobody, so it's gusting up to 40 miles an hour, hard setup. up only 14 of 120 rounds all week broke par. Mayfair wins at even par. He's the only player to reach even par over four rounds, wins by three. An ABC broadcast balloon literally blew into the trees. The field finished a combined 322 over par, 157 shots higher than the top 30 shot at the at the same at the US Open that year. So proper test index is off the chart.

parts here. Mayfair shoot 73 in the final round. As I said, even par over four rounds. He was one of only two golfers who collected more than one subpar round on the week. So guys are just getting absolutely vaporized at Southern Hills. It remains the highest winning score in Tour Championship history. A couple notable things, or one other notable thing, PGA champion, Steve Elkington missed a three foot par put on 18. That cost him $58,500, dropping, him into a tie for second with Corey Pavin. So two major winners, both finished second. I just found that interesting because of my guys do sync unfinished business. Missing short putts on 18. Just time is a flat circle. The win, which is Mayfair's second of the year, was worth $540,000. It bolted him in

to second on the money list at $1.54 million for the year, about $11,000k behind Greg Norman. So I, This took me on a little deep dive on Billy Mayfair. So who won the Publinks in 1986 and the US AM in 1987. So kind of bawled out Arizona State graduate. He won the Haskins Award in 1987 as well. He has a very interesting PGA Tour record. Do you guys know what that is? Record and quotes.

Lowest nine hole score? Maybe, but that's not what I'm going at. Because he's shot. Oh, he one putted every green in nine holes, I think. Maybe, but that's not what I'm going for. He's the only got to beat Tiger Woods in a playoff on the PGA tour. Oh, sure. In history.

Yeah. Out of 12, Tiger's 11 and 1, and he beat Tiger at the 1998 Nissan Open in a playoff. Famously, never won at L.A. Yeah. And I actually didn't realize he got that close at L.A. But that's just, I thought that was just a wild stat. So it's also just weird, Billy Mayfair, this is a me thing. Billy Mayfair is just impossible to picture as a younger person.

Yeah. You know, there's a lot of these guys. I'm like, okay, I see how you, Corey Pave. I see how you used to you used to ball out. Billy Mayfair, like, you just look like you were 50. Like the whole. Well, he's kind of a brand brand name on the PGA tour forever, but I don't know that much about him.

And the highest he ever was ranked was 25th on the, in the OWGR, which I found surprising he won a tour championship. Like whiffs of Ryan Moore. I think a lot of people like to say, you know, similar kind of, uh, junior, amateur career. Yeah, just like an absolute stud college player won everything in amateur golf and then just had a super nice career. You know?

So a couple of other facts. He got testicular cancer in 2006. He had a successful surgery in August of that year and return to the PGA tour two weeks later. Guys a grinder. Ends up finishing as the medalist of the 2010 PGA tour Q school. So loses his card, goes back to Q school, wins his card back. It's back on the PGA tour at age 44, finishes 109th on the money list in 2010, keeps conditional

status in 2011. Okay, so then things get interesting. I didn't know any of this. 2019, he was diagnosed with autism. So stick with me here. He said, and then I watched, I ended up watching like a 30-minute podcast with him on like some autism website. So he's diagnosed, he says the diagnosis changed his life on this 2019 podcast. He said his wife, this is a second wife.

Both his wives were named Tammy spelled differently. First wife, I think, with a Y, second one with an eye. Ron Swanson situation. So he said his wife demanded that he get tested. And then the host, they weren't great host, but they were like, why'd you get tested? And he goes on to say that's unnecessary shot. Sorry, it was just that, the pop was all over the place. No, you're right, that's a drive by.

Sorry about that. He goes on to say that a couple months before- This is your fucking podcast host over here. I know. That's bad stuff. All right. So he goes on to say that a couple months before his diagnosis, he had a situation with the PGA tour rules of fissures. There was a ruling that he felt, and he felt they, quote, he got bullied by them. He didn't understand the ruling or the disqualification. It all happened a lot quicker than his brain could comprehend it. Two or three weeks later, he got tested and a diagnosis brought a lot of clarity to why he struggled in school, why I've been labeled, as he said, weird or cocky or standoffish. He's like, I'm not rain man, but I'm a highly functioning, you know, autist.

So I was like, okay. So then along with his family, Mayf first started a nonprofit foundation, providing support for both amateur and professional athletes and their families who struggle with spectrum-related disorder. I'm like, all right, this is great. So now, then I'm like, well, what was the DQ situation? I've got to go look at this. So it happened in November of 2019.

Michael Bamberger wrote a really long article about this that I would encourage everyone. I remember this being a big deal. Yeah. And the headline is the anatomy of a D&BN. Billy Mayfair broke two rules in seven holes and things got really weird. And it's just Bamberger at his finest. He just breaks this thing down over. It's like 5,000 words. It's awesome. It's a golf.com article from from 2019. So it's on the champions tour, second or last champions tour event at Sherwood Country Club. A lot of finals in Phoenix where Mayfair wins. So Billy, you know,

he was a staple on the champions tour in this during this time. He's tied for the league. lead on Saturday and he's playing with the mechanic. Miguel on hell Jimenez. Mayfair hits a drive in the left rough. They can't find it for a while. Finally they find it. Mayfair is certain that they search for less than three minutes. He tries to get embedded ball relief. Doesn't get it. Ends up making seven moves on. Hits one left. Then later in the round, he hits one left of the green on 17. While addressing the ball, it moves in the rough about six inches, like significantly. He calls in the rules guy, says the ball moved, but he didn't put his club down or caused it to move. Rules guy's like, he wasn't there.

He's like, all right, well, if he didn't cause the move, you're all good. But there's a golf channel camera directly behind him. Lanny Watkins is on the call. He's apoplectic. He's like, that's not what happened. So before he signs, after the round, they call him into the TV compound. He admits that he did cause the ball to move. So it's a two-stroke penalty instead of a one-stroke penalty,

which would have been one-stroke, move the ball back to the original position. Signs for a 74 with two-stroke penalty. By the time he shows up for Sunday's round, a walking score in the group had called in to say that Mayfair took well over three minutes back on the 11th hole. And to find his ball on 11, PJ tour officials review the tape overnight. And they timed the search at four minutes and 55 seconds. So and the rules are keep in mind, Sally, 2019. Rules.

Used to be five minutes. Just changed. Now it's three. Now, Billy doesn't do himself any favors because in the Mayfair arrives about two. hours later on the range. This is all from Bamberger to warm up for third round. Rules guy, Clark goes up and says, hey, Billy, like, you know, did you know the rules three minutes? Like, of course I know that rule. And then it's like, it's, well, you took, you know, took just under five and he's like, it's now three. So that, you know, he's like, and then he says,

well, I have five minutes to search. So he starts to like get his, you know, it seems like it, it starts to get a little messy with the rules guy. And the guy's like, well, the rule changes here. You only have three minutes. I didn't. And he says, I didn't realize that. Then the rules official explained to him that then you played the wrong ball because your ball technically is deemed lost after three minutes. So the minute you finish the 11th hole, the minute you teed off on the 12th hole, you are now like you played the wrong ball and you can't fix it. You were decqueathed like the last six holes don't even count. So I think they even wiped away his score from from Saturday because he was supposed to go back and play from the T because the three minutes were up. So he gets dequeed for this and this is what leads to the the autism diagnosis.

which I just just like, whoa. Now, Bamberger's article is a little less sympathetic. So he interviews Mayfair for this. Mayfair has a lawyer on the phone with Bamberger. You know, he's, it's kind of a, you know, uh, very testy. And to be honest, I, you know, talking to champions Torah, it seems like he's, it's not the first time that Billy's had this situation. I don't think he'd ever been really dinged for, for rules infraction, but it feels like it was there was chatter around this. So I didn't know anything about that. Another little digression that I, I wanted to, to hit on. It's a good. It's a good one. Good dive. Not only that, if you remember, this diet, leading this to this diagnosis for Billy Mayfair ultimately led to friend of the program, Joel Beal. He wrote about this for Golf Digest of like after this diagnosis came out for Mayfair, it led to Joel being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Like as a result of this incident, he wrote about that in great detail for Golf Digest. It was an excellent, excellent eye-opening article of that, but he had not known that to that point in his life until this incident. So yeah, so Billy Mayfair is your, is your tour champion in 1995.

Fall series, November, December. These are tour sanctioned events, but unofficial. So they carry no official money or, you know, wins. Not really a real part of this. Still spends the same. Yeah, that money spends the same, though. So you got the Sarah, a lot of Mickey Mouse stuff going on. Sarah's in World Open at Chateauiland, side of the grape lady.

Oh, I think she's actually heard. Oh, no. So Frank Novela wins this one. So this was a short-lived Gene Saracen branded international event at Chateau Elon. Sure. Lincoln Mercury, Kabalua Classic out in Maui. Jim Furik wins here. So second title of the fall, obviously unofficial, but, you know,

hot rookie kind of rookie or post you know second sophomore season for jim furek and you got the master card pga grand slam of golf in uh on kawaii ben krenshaw wins this so it's a 36 whole exhibition among the years four major champions you got krenshaw paven daily and elkington krenshaw wins this one um maybe a good is a feel good story maybe a good candidate for a little medium dive uh at some point the grand slam golf and especially particularly like when it got off the rails And Shotto hair played in one or something like that. Didn't Wolfie have something like Mike Ditka played in one of them?

Because one of the guys dropped out and he was there on vacation or something. It's some good stuff. Then you've got the World Cup of golf. And this is at Mission Hills Golf Club in Shenzhen, China. Should be a cool event. What about China, November 9th and 12th? This is the two man, right? Yep.

Fred Couples and Davis love the third win this one at 33 under par by 14 over Australians. Ogle and Alan B. First international golf tournament ever held on mainland China, a Newton-Nicholas design. A real, you know, for the love of golf, we're going to globalize. And couples in love won it a record four, four straight times as a pairing.

So these guys used to beat up this tournament. And then you got the Shark Shootout at Sherwood Country Club in California. Mark Kalkaveccia and Steve Elkington win this team event hosted by Greg Norman. That kind of takes us all the way back around to where we started. Zali where with the with the world tour stuff skins game at big horn battle at big horn Fred couples wins this one and then the JCPenny classic is the

Grant Thornton basically at Innesbrook Davis Love and Beth Daniels take this one what a weird year for Fred couples is kind of my takeaway at the end of this two and a half hours it's like so he wins he wins a bunch but just nothing that really matters right I mean wins who wins yeah right wins overseas, wins overseas, wins the World Cup, wins the, you know, it's just very funny. His Wikipedia page is wild of 15 career PGA tour wins, two players and a major in there, you know, gets, gets good there, has the three DP World European Tour wins,

the two this year, Dubai and Johnny Walker. 33 other wins. 33. We have the, we have the JCPenney Mixed team class. The Northwest Open, the Northwest Open again, a Johnny Walker World Golf Championship, the World Cup, Tell us Skins game, Lincoln Mercury, Capulah Invitation, another World Cup of Golf, another Capulua invitation. They're all in November. He is like eight straight wins in November between 93 and 95.

And this is relevant. I feel like couples has got to be saying to Norman, like, dude, just, you can just get the sign off, man. Like, why we got to blow it all up? Totally. his nickname Mr. Skins is also on his Wikipedia page, which is just fantastic. So I try to come up with like, what are my big takeaways? I think I got two of them. I think another year of the shark, he doesn't win a major, but Norman dominates.

Can I close the book on one thing? The Anderson Consulting World Championship of Golf was finalized on December 31st. Barry Lane ended up winning that one, which I don't think he was in the original field that I listed off there. so I don't know. We might need to dive into what happened there. Not to be confused with Kenny Perry Lane, which we covered earlier. Truly, this event only happened three years, 95, 97, and 98. Kenny Barry Lane.

Barry Lane had to replace somebody in the field. I don't know who that was. All right. So I got the year of the shark. And, you know, I mean, it kind of is just a, the shark's ballowed until next year. And then it's just kind of, the shark gets got. What, four months later at 96 Masters. So Greg Norman wins three times, doesn't win a major, but tops the money list, talks to career money list.

He's the PGA Tour and PGA of America player of the year. Won the Byron Nelson Award for the lowest scoring average at 69.06. Finishes the year at takes back world number one title from Nick Price. He lost the U.S. Open by two to Corey Pavin at Shinnecock. So, yeah, balls out. And then I think the other one that's interesting, you have a bunch of guys playing really well. but you've got the four major winners Crenshaw, Pavin, Daly, Elkington. Other than Elk, just those are the only tournaments they won.

It's not like Crenshaw went on some big run after this. Paven played well, had some good finishes, but didn't win again. Elk won twice. And then Pavin and Elkington, these are their only majors of their career. So I just thought that was kind of interesting where you had guys that were really hot Jim Gallagher Jr., Billy Mayfair, but the major winners were kind of one-offs. Yeah. Potentially similar to this year.

Yeah. Yeah. Money list, Norman, Mayfair, Jans, and third, Paving, fourth, Elkington, 5th, Davis, Love, 6th, Jacobson, 7th, Gallagher 8th, VJ 9th, Marco Mirate, 10th. Average driving distance, as mentioned, 262.7 yards. It is 305.3 here in the year of our Lord, 2026. That is up 43 yards in 31 years. 155 of the current 159 players in the PJA tour have a longer driving average than John Daly did at 289. That's Brian Campbell, Andrew Putnam, Davis-Chateville, and Brent, Stenecter are the only ones not hitting it farther than Daly did in 1995. That's a blast, sorry stark stat. Yeah, it's, yeah, I don't know. That's all I got, DJ.

What do you think? I think that's great. That was a whirlwind, guys. Learned a lot. You know, we got, we had lobbyists. We had course building. We had Vietnam dive I wasn't expecting. It's really, it's good stuff.

Really good stuff. Excited for the next one. I got to figure out what the hell happened in this Anderson consulting world championship of golf and how he got. Yeah, I got a little Barry Lane Wikipedia that I'm kind of trying to dive into as well. Yeah. Yeah, he lost in a playoff that you're the Smurfit European Open. And, you know, he didn't qualify for.

for the writer company oh he passed away in 2022 very lane did okay yeah i'll get back to you guys on that one but hey thank you for being with us for another dive into another pGA tour season will you guys join me for 1996 sign me up we must we must we got a lot of years to go a lot of work to do so thank you everyone for tuning in we'll see you back here next time cheers