No Laying Up - Golf Podcast - NLU Podcast, Episode 591: FedEx St Jude Recap

Episode Date: August 15, 2022

Will Zalatoris is now a PGA Tour winner after claiming the FedEx St Jude in a wild three hole playoff over Sebb Straka. We review the week in Memphis, shout out the US Women's Amateur at Chambers Bay and - with the help of our friend and lawyer Job Fickett - do our best to make sense of the legal proceedings this week in the LIV-Tour lawsuit.   If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, crisis counseling and referral services can be accessed by calling 877-8-HOPENY/text HOPENY (467369) (NY), 1-800-GAMBLER (1-800-426-2537) (IL/IN/MI/NJ/PA/WV/WY), 1-800-NEXTSTEP (AZ), 1-800-522-4700 (CO/NH), 888-789-7777/visit ccpg.org/chat (CT), 1-800-BETS OFF (IA), 1-877-770-STOP (7867) (LA), visit OPGR.org (OR), call/text TN REDLINE 1-800-889-9789 (TN), or 1-888-532-3500 (VA). 21+ (18+ NH/WY). Physically present in AZ/CO/CT/IL/IN/IA/LA/MI/NJ/PA/TN/VA/WV/WY only. N/A in OR, NH, or NY. Risk free bet paid out in the form of non-withdrawable free bet token, max. $1,000. Min. $5 deposit. New customers only. Eligibility restrictions apply. See draftkings.com/sportsbook for full terms and conditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm going to be the right club today. Yes! That is better than most. I'm not in. That is better than most. Better than most. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the No Laying Up podcast. Sully here back in the Killhouse. We're back TC. Hello TC.

Um, excited. I'm ready to roll, baby. So much to talk about. DJ Pai is calling in from Milwaukee. Hello, Pai Man. Hello, guys. Great to be with you. And then guests spotting tonight

for the first time I think in four years, if I remember right. He is our friend, Job Fickett. He has been a former contributor to the blogosphere of No Lang Abmosto on a Ryder Cup front, European Tour Front. Many moons ago, life has gotten in the way I believe and from you contributing over recent years,

but he's a lawyer in his own right, gonna help us break down a lot of what is been going on in the world of golf, hello Joe, thank you for being here. Joe, I'm gonna have to start by saying nothing I say today is legal advice. I am not your attorneys. There we go. We do not have a attorney client relationship,

not just kidding. It's great, thank you guys. And can I say, once a contributor, always a contributor. It's true. No former contributors in the no leg up you guys have never made me pay for a t-shirt and for that I will always be and once a once a member of team Europe, always member of team Europe. No, I was always on TV. Maybe you're just the only one

following. I was writing about the European tour, but when it came to writer couple oil teas, USA USA. I got to first tell you guys about the Calaway Rogue ST3 wood. I've got the Rogue STLS. I've been using it for only about a month and a half now, maybe two months. I was admittedly late getting to it. I love my old one that much, but I have absolutely loved it since I put it in the bag. I just got to say I've never taken advantage of this because we're usually trying to get

this, the club's in our hands as fast as possible, how customizable these things are on the Callaway Golf website. You can go in and you can mess with all the colors, all the blah, blah, blah, tea, so you could probably tell me a bit more than I could tell you about how to customize these things. Yeah, no, I think the customization on the colors and the way it looks, but also the amount of shafts that are available to put in these things as far as, and then they're basically treated as stock shafts that they don't upcharge you for. I love it.

I don't think I've missed a fairway yet with my three wood. You guys can probably attest. Now my driver's another story, but the three wood is fantastic. I love, love, love this thing. Well, in speaking of ways to customize your three wood, you can, if you order it through the Calaway Golf website, you can get a custom no-lang up branded Calaway Rogue ST-3 wood head cover, TC and Neal feel nostalgic for the glory days of high school golf when the Big Birthday Fuzzy head covers were all the rage, we recreated our own, so you

can go to the Call of a Golf website or to your Rogue ST-3 Wooden on the order summary page. If you enter code NLU, you can add the sweet head cover to your cart for free. Can I add something about the head cover? Sure. There is nothing more satisfying than pulling the sock head cover off because for a while there a lot of companies went with the magnetic clasping things which were terrible. The sock head cover, like when you pull it off, you get out of the bag, you mean business,

it's awesome. Yeah, exactly. CowleyGolf.com use code NLU at checkout and you get a free head cover with it. It's a great deal. So thank you to Callaway for supporting that. Oh, weirdly fun weekend of golf. It was, I'm not gonna lie, it was looking pretty bleak as of Saturday afternoon, sitting down to watch really

what was supposed to be the first full field event since the PGA tour and live tour fractured golf. And man, it was a JJ spawn fest as of Saturday afternoon. And I think the tour somehow managed to avoid all of the landmines that were on the top of that leaderboard and got the winner that they would want out of today. Will's out towards. I was thinking at one point, like Troy Merritt was up there. Yes. Yes.

Harmon, I'm like, how much are they going to pay Troy Mollenax? How much are they going to pay these guys to take a dive here? Trey Mollenax. Troy Mullins and Trey Mullinx. We're gonna get, we're gonna get, we're gonna get, we're gonna get, Trey Mullinx, right? You said Troy. You said Troy.

I Troy? We're gonna get this messed up forever. Cowboy Troy Mullinx. I don't really know where to start other than, Will's out to Rys' Iron Play is, I mean, he found the slot, I don't know exactly when it was. And it was just absolutely relentless. He was never going to hit an Iron offline.

The only suspense really came from whether or not he was going to hit the fairway with whatever he was using off the tee. Did not do a lot of that on this Sunday. But gosh, the Iron Play is, it was a total, it was flashing everywhere. I mean, the wedges, the distance control, going after pins that he probably had no business going after pins that he probably had no business going after. It all ended very, very weird, but the point to get it there was just some tremendous tremendous golf from Friday on.

He said, I think in recent, like either this week or in previous weeks that Thursday has been an issue for him. He shot 71, one over on Thursday. It looked like that was going to be the case again this week. Shot 63 on Friday, 65, 66 on the weekend. I thought he was going to get TIO on 18. Why, why were you saying that's a, it's a property boundary? He hits it here.

No, I, because where he was going to hit it up by the green, I thought for sure that there was going to be hospitality and approaching upon that line. Gotcha. But sure enough, he didn't. So no harm, no foul. I want nothing to do with 18 at Southwind. That tee shot, the whole concept of that hole,

you can't just pound driver and eliminate the trouble. You gotta hit the driver the right distance. I want absolutely nothing to do with that hole. Which 18th hole between Southwind and TPC sawgrass, would you think is more intimidating? I would think it's Southwind because the angle is sharper and you can't cut it off. Whereas at Sawgrass, you can pick a line

and try to cut off more of it. Plus, there's bunkers on the outside of the dog like it's Southwind. And it seems, it's seemingly longer. Like, I want nothing to do with Southwind, just in general. Like, I was talking to a couple guys. I'm like, that place looks so fucking hard.

And there's water everywhere. If you're not in the fairway, you're running the risk of going in the water on your on your approach shot. The greens are tiny. There's bermuda grass. It's tough to chip off of everywhere. Like I have nightmares just watching that, please. I was texting you guys. I think if you want to identify a true FedEx Cup champion, you move the tour championship. You whittle it down to the last eight guys and you make them play 18 at Southwind 72 times in a row. And cumulative score, you know, who is the biggest dick player left left in the field? Who doesn't go insane? Who maintains their sanity?

I think that's how you crown the champion going forward. I do have a question as it relates to Zalatoris. He drains a 10 foot putt in the center of the cup on the 72nd hall and screams, what are they going to say now? I just want to know who that was directed at, right? Yeah, probably me. I think I've been the only one at this point. He's still, I still get uncomfortable watching him putt, but he fucking pour shit in from outside of like eight to 10 feet and he poured everything in from inside of eight feet this week too. So I'm assuming that's it me, but it's not like I doubt the guy. It's just a matter of like he's, it just doesn't look good.

The arm lock takes a lot of the nerves out of it. Well, it's also good to say like, well, hey man, like, first of all, there's been a groundswell of support for you in pursuit of your first win. I think for the majority, I feel like a lot of people are like, yeah, it's just a matter of time.

He really is that good. I don't think there's really feel like a lot of people are like, yeah, it's just a better of time. He really is that good. I don't think there's really been much of a knock on him for not winning at all. And I don't know. You got to use internal weird stuff to motivate you anyways, but I just found that funny that he was somebody tweeted that he had that saved in his drafts and I couldn't get that image out of my mind. I think that's a good point.

It's a big week for false flags. It reminded me of another guy that, you've always supported, just kind of said, just stay patient, the wins are gonna come, big time. Oh God, I knew that was coming. I think, no, I'm very much with you. I don't really know who was, I don't really know who was, was Nacken's Allataurus is some sort of choker or something.

Like, I don't know. There's almost like this weird counter narrative building now that like he's a good putter. Like they talk so much about the bad putting that no, no, no, he's actually like good. He's not good. He's not good. Like he's not looking at a fun day to go off right now. It's not like catastrophic. He's outside the top like 100 and almost everything. Like he's he fucking stinks. He's better than than zero strokes gain for the season in putting for the year for 2020 for

2020. Yes. Overall putting. Yes. But like, and I think if speed controls great is lag putting is awesome. We saw a lot of that like on display, but dude, it's not like some made up fake narrative. Like the mid range stuff is is Mucho not good. And it was great today. So it was awesome to see him flip that today.

It was fun to watch. Is it the mid-range stuff that's the issue or the short stuff that's the issue? Well, it's like the mid-range shorties, right? Four to eight feet. Four to eight feet. It's the number. But I think a lot of that was really bad.

And I keep making this point. I swear to God, he's freed up with the Zoro stroke. Whatever, he found a stroke that worked for him. And those plots go in, do they look pretty? No, it is a fascinating band-aid of a Chuck Knoblock situation that he has going on, but those balls are going in the hole now. I mean, there's the videos out there

of the really, really short ones that either missed or barely went in and those are the ones that are kind of trapped at the front of mine, but did he ever miss any one of those that was really, really important? It seems like anytime he has a significant putt late in the tournament, no matter the length, it's either going in or scaring the whole. I mean, the one that he missed on 18 at Brookline looked like it could have gone in for the same price.

And I know that was a little bit longer putt, but the short one. I thought he had a good putt there, too. Right. That's what I'm saying. I mean, it seems like whenever it's late in the tournament on Sunday, if it's not the putting necessarily, that's a liability, although, I mean, obviously every shot counts earlier in the week and that could be what comes back to ultimately make the difference, but the shorties don't seem to be as much of a problem anymore. And it could be a more Kawah situation. I mean, if you look at the his putting stats from the majors, like he was almost two strokes gained in the US open this year, which he almost won, a shot and a half stroke gain putting

at the masters this year, like it might just be like a little bit of a PGA tour, fast greens kind of thing that just doesn't really, you know, suit his eye and it's not going to be a consistent thing week to week. But if you do go week to week, it's a bunch of negative weeks in there, only one really bad one, the Byron Nelson, where he missed the cut. And then the Scottish open was pretty bad too. But the rest are just hovering around neutral. And dude, with that ball strike, he man, you can't hide a pin from him.

You really can't. It's a dream golf course form. It's very much a kneel. It all becomes clear to me after the fact that he would win on this golf course. Because, yeah, it is a precision iron play test. And, uh, I'm, I'm really pumped for him. And that was, you could tell how much it was kind of weighing on him at the end, his reaction at the end was just kind of like, uh, thank God. Finally, which, and he's like really hasn't played all that well since he was open. He missed the cut in, in Scotland, uh, T 28 at the open, uh, T 20 at the open, T20 at Detroit, and then T21 at Wyndham.

So it's not like he's like the floodgates have been open since he's kind of been scuffling a little bit. He also fired his caddy and then immediately won on the first start. So what is well, I thought that was fascinating, especially on that on the drop, just like listening to the two of them go back and forth and talk about yardages and all that when there's really no prior experience for either of them together to draw upon. And so everything's new. You're feeling each other out, Andrew in this spot that, you know, ostensibly tens of

millions of colors are on the line. Like that's a massive, massive, massive spot. Big J. Monahan has to be happy. For sure. I wonder on the caddy front, first of all, do we have anybody have any insight on what happened with the mid round? That's a what a weird thing like this is one of those golf things where if it was any other sport, like different things would be the biggest story in the world. And when it's golf, it's just kind of like, Oh, huh, that's interesting. All right,

well, let's move on. And it's like the guy who won this week fired his caddy mid tournament. And everyone's just like, Oh, wow, that's really interesting. And I don't know why. I don't know what happened. I was mutual. It was mutual. Yeah, totally mutual. That's that was a good one.

That kind of got me. But I wonder, to your point, Tron, like I wonder if a situation like that almost becomes, I don't know, this is unnecessary psychoanalysis. But if it almost becomes easier because there's no built-in, you know, not scar tissue, but there's just no context, right? Like it seems like you're out there almost like truly working together

rather than in the back of your head like, man, this is just like fucking Detroit. When you said this and I wanted to do this, and ball up, like there's no almost like build-up or residue kind of. That's what he said. He was talking about just reading this golf.com. You said this and I wanted to do this and ball like there's no almost like a build up or residue kind of that's what he said. He was talking about just just reading this this golf.com article Nick Pistowski. Basically saying, yeah, it was the toughest decision I've ever had to make in my golf career.

Ryan's brother for life. We've kind of had a rough month together. It was starting to affect our relationship. I know guys say that when they split, but it really was. We were guys that we would love to have dinner together and hang out and it just started. What was going on on the course was starting to bleed off the course and that's not what you want.

I don't know, just kind of a weird, like I would be very curious to know what, like where specifically it came to ahead. Was it a number, was it a club selection, was it a, and it could be as simple as like a chemistry thing it could be as much on will as it is the caddy right it's just like It's just not quite working for me right now and it might not be your fault like put the way I And executing things what you know with you out there for four and a half hours five hours at a time

It's just not a great match for me right now and a change of pace Can can be a great thing. I think it's a really tough and mature thing to have to do at age 26 to like, and also just pointing out like it seems like almost every player, really good young player around this age makes a big catty change. At some point, I mean, Tiger made it, it was much younger when he made a catty change, but you look at Scotty Schaeffler, made an enormous caddy change. I mean, just I'm drawing blanks on a lot of other guys that have JT's a little older. But, you know, he had that

one. Yeah. And doing it, it's such a, you know, late point in the season to where normally it's a, you know, I guess it makes sense because it's that stuff builds up during the season. Yeah, it's just the very, I don't know, I'm very, very keen on the tower is because I think he's, he's obviously got the ballstrike striking chops to be a top one top to who player in the world. And it's just a matter of figuring out these little variables along the way. And yeah, I think like the PGA Tours got to be just overjoyed with, you know, him of all people winning this week where he's been one of the vocal ones out front talking

about this and getting up in front of, pressers and in front of reporters and going to ride for the tour, which also maybe point out of all the close calls he's had. Maybe this was the tournament he deserved to win the least. It was a, a, this ball should have gone OB and the on the second playoff hole was it where it hits the cart path and it got caught up in a tree. The only thing to prevent it from going OB. He made a great par save as to do that to take care of that. And then steps up on 11 and just blockquees one right at the hole, which is not the right play on 11 and the ball holds up on the bank or on the rock, which really didn't do much for him because he has to go back to the drop area anyways, but

Seb's trucka always got to do always got to do is Zalatoris in the water basically all you got to do is hit the middle of 11 green and he just goes at the flag after the two drives on 18. Yeah, he tried to go the water twice. What is he doing? He also plays he plays so fast as possible. He hit that before Zalatoris, his ball even like came to rest. Maybe he didn't even know where it was. I was so shook by how fast he was playing. It was crazy. It was just reckless. I said, he's like a, he's like he plays blackjack and he hits on 19. I mean, you just, some of the, you said he's got some

liberal shake in his head. Yeah, he just stops. All right. Well, Zalatoris doesn't matter. I'm doing this and here's how we're going to do it. All right. You got to play close to the water to win one of these things. You got to play close to hazards. I got a confession. I think I might be a huge step-stroke a guy after today. I think all the zebra putter, the square shoes, the Austria to Valdosta, the fire at every single flag. I think there's so much bad. It's good that I was like,

man, give me this guy every week. This is kind of great. His family's still living in Valdosta. Yeah, I'm shook by that. And it would have been really, really, really poignant and tough for Fowdo to stomach. The guy wearing squares won the week after he retired. I will say, uh,

Strockover reminds me a little bit of, of Sungjae in the way that like he, how aggressive he plays when in contention in terms of, I mean, he went after, what's the part three on the back that nobody should be going after that pin? He just like stared that pin down, went directly after all the putts on the back nine.

He's running six, seven, eight feet by because he's trying to make everything he looks at. I just had respect for somebody that, when it gets in contention, I think we said the same thing at PGA National this year. He just steps up, plays fast, and goes for the jugular. And maybe you don't need to do that in certain situations like this playoff.

I think both the par three's on the back. You don't really go for like, 14, the seven, the, the island island won and then 14s like fucking nasty 220 yards and you know water cutting in all down the right. The Salator is a quick player too. I just want to say that so that it makes it so that watching the playoff was actually like it had it was exciting. Yeah, it had pace. It had you know exactly you weren't waiting like a minute between every shot because both of those guys just step up and hit it.

I think what's what's hard to is, I don't know, this is kind of speaking out of both sides of our mouth because all we do is kind of talk about the game theory and what does it all mean and all that stuff, but most of most of most golf tournaments are so boring, right? That it really takes until those last like four or five holes when the picture kind of starts to crystallize and you can kind of see like Okay, this guy's actually in it. This guy's not in it. This guy needs to do this on this hole But once you kind of remove yourself from like well, you know What does it really mean for the PJ tour of Sepstroca wins a playoff events? Like who fucking cares man? Like what once you can finally kind of free yourself of that stuff is like Wow, this is a delight to watch and it's, it's a little harder to do that these days. I think what everything is, you know, what does it all mean?

But it was, it was nice to finally, I think everybody kind of collectively felt that click in right around that, that first time they got to like 17, 18 and, and Strockett started to continue like, oh, that shotty hit into 18 and regulation was, Oh, the rough. It just like stopped me in my trash. It was unbelievable. It was sitting down in the rough.

194. 200 yards. Yeah. That was one of the best shots I've seen all year. To hold that green out of unpredictable room, you know, to over water into the 18 that I think it lands into the grain, which makes a huge difference when, you know, the middle of summer on on grainy, bermuda, but still, that was,

that's what I'm saying. Like every single shot was like, well, I'm going to take the maximum amount of risk going that I possibly can. How about him, like, taking the drop in the playoffs? And I'm like, he must just really like this fucking number because, you know, and have it only he did because he had it to what, five feet after taking the drop. So he basically, he's in the rough. There again, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he basically, he's in the rough there again. He was taking his... Which that ball had no business staying up either. Like, he ended left of the fairway and stayed up. And he's already taking his shoe off.

He's already rolled his pants up or whatnot. And he says, you know what, like, very adult, like maybe the most adult decision ever. Somebody tweeted that earlier. And I'm like, you're like, what's he like, at least advanced it up there, 50 yards and be 50 yards closer. He must have just really liked that number. Yeah, I guess it's you know why take the risk on a next shot if it's just going to be a layup,

right? It's like the caddies will tell you if you can get the ball on the green this might be worth the risk of doing it. But if the best option is to get into the fairway with it, like let's just take the drop and then try this stuff one in there. Also, probably feeling pretty good about four might win it. Five is definitely gonna be good enough for a playoff. The same thing applies to Zalatoris on the last playoff hole where, you know, you hope the caddy looks at them and says, do you feel better about this shot than you do

from 93 yards in Zalatoris's position or whatever it was, 165 or whatever for Strockett? It's like, which one is gonna the the greater outcome most of the time like Variables. Yeah correct It's how tourists wanted to hit that ball off the rocks so badly. I'm so convinced it was a it was a foot joy FedEx St. Jude activation activation to show the shoes which the shoes are fire I felt like after after he said like okay, you've already committed to go to the drop zone. This is purely for practice.

Does everybody want to see him hit it? Just to see what would happen. I feel like they should have let him do that. Does not get a count, but please hit it because we want to see if you can pull it off. It was crazy that then, then, then, Stracco was still away as well. So I feel like that, that kind of made him even revisit a little bit more. The only other shot I thought Xalatoras may have wanted to give some thought to was flipping the toe of the putter over and hitting it with the toe, but he doesn't have a blade.

Yeah, but he doesn't have a blade putter. So it's not flush. It's not straight on the end of the putter. So, you know, but, you know, how do you had a normal blade putter? You could flip it over on its toe and just kind of pop it down into and it would get up over. It's like the old VJ. Exactly. But it felt like honestly, it could have jammed under the grass.

Absolutely. Oh, yes, absolutely. That's where it was. I could see exactly what he was thinking of. If I literally just get this ball move forward a foot, like I'm gonna win it off-term. It's like something kneel it. Yeah, or you belly it with a wedge

and it goes in the back bunker and then it's like, well. Anything, yeah, just truly anything could happen or it's like, hey dude, 90 yards wedge shot, you're one of the best wedge players on earth. Like let's just go do that. We're not going to lose the tournament right here if we do that. And gosh, that was just chaotic finish to that golf tournament. I can't tell you guys how hard came Smith would have hit that shot. Did you see a flop on three today? The the par five. Just a complete lunatic. He missed a bad line.

He missed it 60 yards left in the kit. Like he's like looking up over a tree just to fly. Everyone's like, I don't even know what he's really looking at here. And of course, he actually pulled that one off. But yeah, that was that was very penalized. Penalized me to strokes better get them all back right now. Better make this one. Can I go back to what DJ was talking about a little early about what does it all mean?

And just kind of interject with a question I had about, would we care more about the FedEx Cup generally? Would it have more juice if it was not purely a brand exercise for FedEx? Which obviously, we know that they have to get something out of the hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars that they're putting up year over year. But if it was just a non-branded event now that's got a little bit of history, would we care about it more or would it still just kind of lack the juice and feel like every other PGH war event?

It's a great question. I think when I hear FedEx cup, I don't hear the sponsor part of it anymore. It's kind of the same way, like with the Genesis or whatever. I just hear, you know, I don't think that much about it in that term. And I still don't know if I, how much I really care, just because, just pretty easy to gain a sense

of how people feel about it, right? Like, if I asked you right now, who won the 2019 FedEx Cup, like, could you name it off top of your head? That's right. You think it was Rory? I think it was Rory, wasn't that? 18 was Rows, because that was the time I had to see.

Yeah, that's what you can. Yeah, that's exactly. JT, maybe. Could've been. See, that's what I'm saying. It's like, you could tell me who won the 2019 Open Championship, right? Off top of your head, pretty easily.

Is that Mollin' Rory? Mollin' Rory Mollin' Orange. Okay, maybe not, that was Chain Lowry. But the point being, like, it's not a Super Bowl. It's not a champion. Mollin' Orange, 18. It's not the one winner of the year is the FedEx Cup, but that was Rory in 19.

Okay. The fact that FedEx is, this is the 16th year of it. The fact that the tour has kept FedEx, not only sponsoring this for 16 years, but doubling down and quadrupling down. And Phil has the balls to say that the tour is not doing a good job bringing money in. I mean, like, that's insane. And just like almost to the point where everybody golf fans almost despise FedEx instead of feeling gracious of, hey, you know what, like props to FedEx

for supporting our game, it's like, don't fuck FedEx. I think it's all I go into your point about, you know, you don't really hear it anymore. I think that's because you made up your mind like 15 years ago, how you feel about it, right? And part of that is like, I'm with you, Job, that I think if it was not a, like,

you can't name the trophy after a shipping company. Like you just, you can't do that, man. They should name it. Fred Smith Memorial Trophy or something. I just, I, I am just, I don't know, maybe, maybe this is totally, totally wrong marketing people can absolutely shoot me in the face regarding this idea, but just how much of a difference would it really make for FedEx if you had called it the PGA tour playoffs presented by FedEx? Like, would be so much different, I feel like people would take it so much more seriously. I feel like FedEx is mostly there for a hospitality play anyways, and like hosting people and doing B to B stuff on site at events.

And I mean, I always I bring this story up all the time, but I remember when it's beef one in 15, I was following him doing like the, you know, it's doing like social media stuff and taking photos as he was doing his trophy, like all the different things that you do before you go to the media tent or before you, you know, from like the point you sign your scorecard until, you know, the point you leave the property basically, I was just like following him on all that stuff. And watching him come into the FedEx party

and like the champagne toast and seeing all the executives up on the day as like, oh God, I'm about to fucking hang out with Jordan's speed. It was like, oh, that's why they do it. Like it has nothing to do with impressions, it has nothing to do with any of that. It's just like, because these guys are dorks

and they wanna like hang out with golfers. And that's where I come back to like, man, it would be such a different thing if it was just the PJ Tort Playhouse presented by a brand. And then also to your point, and John, like if the gravy train ever stops, like what do you just rename the trophy? Like how fucking stupid is that?

They do that in a lot of other events, yeah. Which, but I'll push back though, because I think if FedEx just wanna, like if Fred Smith or whomever wants to just hang out with, you know, pro golfers, hey, like his son is the Atlanta Falcons head coach and be like, they could just sponsor an event. They don't have to spend, you know, 10 X or 20 X

or whatever they're spending. I think what they're buying as well is, if you just call it the PGA tour playoffs, it's like what FedEx is buying is all of those FedEx cup, like they're getting promo every single day of every single tournament. And it's access to the entire network of other sponsors on the PGA tour and their businesses

and using getting FedEx involved with their businesses that they are other, you know, we're have shipping needs. Because part of it is like, if you're gonna, like if you're taking it back to, all right, like the PGA tour playoffs, the PGA tour wouldn't have playoffs because it wouldn't- It's also not playoffs, it's just-

Exactly, it's just like the, like the, they've like gerrymandered this entire thing to make it work for a title sponsor here. One really like this whole fucking thing is stupid and shouldn't exist. It's the gravy tank train ever did dry up. There can't be that many other companies that are totally liquid enough to sponsor something like,

I mean, we're talking about. They're betting against themselves, right? And honestly, FedEx's stock was like, in the tank the last few years to the point where people were wondering if Walmart or Shopify was gonna buy them. The other thing is like, at some point, right, Sep Shroko was, well, like,

hadn't made a cut in a couple months and he's all of a sudden gonna be. He's in the top 10 now. I mean, he's, yeah, he's like top seven or top eight now. It's like, but, you know, those guys that were on the leaderboard on Saturday, like if one of them wins. Like what a farce.

So is there anything anyone could do to give this juice or no? Is it just, it's just doomed to be what it is for? Well, I think it's gonna change for the better. I mean, having 125 guys getting the playoffs is just like having all 30 NFL teams or 30, however many it's 32 NFL teams all make the playoffs. And like, a couple of them get to start

a little bit of a head start in one of the games. When in reality, like even 70, which it starts with next year, NFL teams all make the playoffs and like a couple of them get to start a little bit of a head start in one of the games when reality It like seven even 70 which it starts with next year is not enough of it whittled down to like here's the guys that made the playoffs If you want to make some actual that's actually I mean probably there's there's how many guys with like legit cards probably 160 that like between all the different exemptions and get out of jail free cards and everything that they have So let's say 170 out of 160 feels like a similar proportion to, you know, NBA or NFL or something like that. But yeah, it's crazy to see like a Tyler Duncan up there and be like, dude, like he finished like well outside the

top 100 this year. Like get the fuck out of here. Like you shouldn't be on the postseason. Yeah, I definitely, definitely agree with that. I also think I know we talk about it every year at match play. I know all the inherent risks, but this thing got exciting today when it was mono and mono also. True match play situation. Yeah. Like a match play, a match play final would be so much more interesting. And you might have to do something like weird for that to happen, right? It might need to be like a start the tour championship final round with a certain number of guys and slowly whittle it down or something like that would be phenomenal. But then there's all the like people coming to, you know, coming from the other side of like you're giving away so much money that you can.

It's the same thing with the Olympics. Like you're trying to crown a true champion. Like you can't do some fucked up format. I still love the fact that I think they're still scarred from the whole like Kevin Sutherland. For sure, he ruined the match, they ruined the match play. I never got Pierre Fulke who we talked to in Sweden. I will say, yeah, it just, you know, some of the sponsor stuff can be, you know, a little in your face, but I don't know,

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The red line. They are throwing just mogul's obstacles, anything they can at me and the legal ease there. But we rocked them, baby. We rocked them. I was in New York this week. I had a little coin. I had a feeling I'd call him more Kawa, got a plus 5,000. So appreciated the to finish there from him. The missed shorties and the, the

bogey to finish that was, it was getting a little tiny bit exciting there for a minute. Can I just give the tourism props? It's, it's eight, it's eight 11 PM here on Sunday night, maybe an hour, hour and 15 minutes after the conclusion of play. I click on the FedExCup standings, which are the headline on the website. They're not updated.

They're updated. These are the ones prior to the tournament even starting through August 7th. Where's the tour props that you're giving here? No, I was being facetious. Okay, gotcha. I'm just waiting for the catch here. It's like tour props that you're giving here? No, I was being facetious. Okay, gotcha. Just wait for the catch here. You guys want this to mean something. You have projected standing's official standing's. Can you make these the official standings? Just bugs me. Any other house keeping from

the same, like from this week? Probably cam Smith ruling. So for those that we're not familiar, this came out this morning that cam Smith upon an official's viewing of the replay in the hotel the night before saw cam Smith drop on the fourth hole on the part three. He took a drop after hitting it in the water and the ball dropped and rolled down and was touching the red line next to the for the water hazard or the penalty area next to the fourth green. He played from there, nobody thought anything of it until this

official saw it on the replay. And as of this morning, after the fourth round had already begun, had a conversation with Cam about it and then decided to penalize him two shots. So he saw it last night? Yes, on Saturday night. And then weights. So everybody locks their lineups, gets their bets and all that stuff. So we're gonna treat this like a, we're gonna try to treat it like a real sport most of the time. We're gonna weight almost 22 hours to penalize Cam. Which Cam and Sam need to be better.

This is like the most basic simple rules. It's three, it's very easy three steps in my mind. Cam broke the rule, should have been penalized. That's what I've no issue. Should have known the, you know, should have known the rule. One, that's another one. And the third is like you, what point are rounds over? Man, if you want to, I hate to tie everything back to gambling and betting and everything. But there is a whole slew of people that are interested in this sport based on the fact that they can game on it and have fun.

And the tour is pushing that angle really hard. Really hard. And how is he not disqualified for signing an incorrect scorecard? They changed that rule to the point where if you got something after you sign your card and video review changes a ruling, you did not sign an incorrect scorecard. After you sign your scorecard, your rounds over like that. You would think that's where I would agree that it's like, hey, all right, first of all,

like the all of the, these results are official. Everything is moot at this point. That's how it should be. The play is not governed on the PGA tour and that's my issue, but like how I don't expect a rules official with every group.

I don't expect every shot to be, you know, like tracked by a rules official, but I do expect a rules official to be watching the telecast. And that should, I didn't expect every shot to be, you know, like tracked by a rules official. But I do expect a rules official to be watching the telecast. And that should, I didn't know this rule. I really honestly didn't know this was a rule. But that should have jumped off the screen at a rules official that was watching it to say,

like, hey, wait a second. I'm gonna ask. I'm gonna ask Cam about this after the round, because that drop on four did not look like it was right. And the fact that it took until that night for someone to see it is, that's a problem. But then he watches it that night and then waits another eight hours to even service it.

And then another, it was what, one o'clock by the time, it was like one or two Eastern by the time all this was, like that's, what the fuck happened in the 16 hours, or the 12 hours from the time that this guy ostensibly watched it at 10 p.m. that night to even 10 a.m. that next day. It just doesn't make sense to me. And it's also like, if that happens in round four,

it's not gonna come out tomorrow, then they're not gonna go back and change it as all to the tournament. So it just makes it all feel so, like just arbitrary. Yeah, it's just, ah, it's like, like when is the tour ever been

adamant about like the rules, right? Like I mean, they've given Patrick Reed the benefit of the doubt on every possible occasion in lieu of this. Like the timing of this, after all the cam live stuff this week, it just, like, you know, it seems like everything was above board as far as, like, this is the right ruling, but the whole timing of it

and everything just sucks even more. It's a very convenient connecting of the dots of, like, this seems pretty vindictive. And I don't, I don't necessarily disagree with that. It certainly looks worse. I mean, it had been any other player. It's a story but it's not a big story, but because it's Cam Smith. Yeah. And I mean, look, some of this stuff has happened. I don't

remember what the timing was of Dylan Fratelli's penalty from the, I think, in Hilton head when he hit the ball out of the tree, but he was straddling his line. But that was a video review of some kind. So it's not like, you know, only cams getting singled out here. I just, yeah, I don't know what the actual protocol is for like, yeah, the cards are signed and I'm a rules official, but I saw this on TV later. But I didn't say something immediately like that. Like to me, like that rules official, cool, like you're suspended.

Like straight up, like you 12 hours won't find you didn't say anything and then finally, and maybe they did and that was like a, we can't do anything to we're back on site. And maybe they tried to get a whole can. I don't know that and then finally and maybe they did and that was like a we can't do anything to We're back on site then maybe they tried to get a whole can I don't know that but it it just not it's not great It's it's it's it's really not We thought about Brian Harmon's outfit Sure black shoes with like the rumbled up Cackies

Like it's just like it's really bad That was a hundred and eighty degree turn. I'm just I'm getting I'm looking I'm trying to get all the because I know we've got so much other stuff to talk about here I'm trying to get some of my I have to keep in the I appreciate you getting that in. Yeah. Well, it's like hormone used to care so deeply about What he was wearing and how he dressed to where now it's like like the guy looks like he's He's going hunting right after the round.

I know we got to get to a lot of stuff, but this is gotta get priority in the top half of the show. How about the group at T5, by the way? Adam Scott, John Rom, Colin Work, out with Tony Fetal, Matt Fitzpatrick, I interviewed him in Traymolo Nax as well. But how about Big Tom, give you another scare, Dege? No, I know. It was thrilling to watch, man.

Just really, really fun stuff. No, I don't know. I will take this offline. I gotta figure out which way we're gonna take the big tone bit. I haven't really decided yet. So just give me some more time. Happy one year anniversary, though, by the way,

of you not paying off your debt from last year's first playoff event. Oh, Mahalo. Thank you. Yeah, well, listen, man, we're penciled in for the NIT. I'm already, Ialo. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Well, listen, man, we're penciled in for the NIT. I'm already I'm growing it out. You got the second bet. The first bet is that's the one we're talking about the mutton chops. So, oh, well, I'm going to try to pay them both off. If we're talking about guys, T3, Lucas Glover went from a

hundred and twenty first in the in the Vonset FedExCov to shouldn't be in there. Exactly. Exactly. Because guys dropped there. Exactly. Exactly. Because guys dropped out. Exactly. Now he's facing me. Under me. You know, he's probably a shitty. He has a good week at BMW next week.

He's a shoe in. Yeah. Adam Scott went from, you know, outside the cut, potentially going into wind him to 77th to 45th now. Shot 66 today. T31. Who and or what is a Taylor Moore? I've never heard of Taylor Moore,

but apparently he is not only a professional golfer but playing the class. Honestly, Joe, that one's news to me as well. It's a very serious golf event. I feel like I think I played ping pong with him a few years ago at the Corn Ferry Championship. It seems like did they just slot him in a Taylor Gucci spot in the give him a why?

Can you? I know we don't need to get hung up on this with purely because it's fun. Just imagine another sport like looking at the at the scoreboard at the end of the day, you're like, huh, you never heard of that team. Who is that team? They're in the playoffs. Huh, the cleaks and fairness I do have for the wild cats. I know who the fuck are the wild cats? I never heard of them. The cleaks. I will say though, look, we had an exciting finish today, but also if I haven't made this point enough in recent weeks and months,

like I don't wanna give off the impression that we're pretending like the dudes that have left for live don't matter, because like this tournament missed, like pricing would have done some dumb shit this week. He had done something weird. Brooks is like at least worth checking in on to see how he's doing, DJ is another name that like,

it just kind of feels like, I had this thought today, when you think back to 2014, 2015, when we started this show, how rough of shape the PGA tour was in. I mean, it was a lot of white, not only was it a lot of white belts at this time, but it was just like a lot of like sung-yel-no

and Camilo Vajegas and like Matt Kucher's stuff going on that was not that exciting. And it seemed like there was, but the farm system was really good Right, and we got a lot a lot of prospects graduated up and we've had a pretty good run of solid tour golf And then like salary caps hit and we had to offload a lot of the players and now it's like times like Yeah, now we're kind of stuck in between like between like, four aces are the only team spending money now. Exactly. And we're kind of stuck between like,

are we rebuilding, are we mining for prospects, or are we kind of embracing this window to compete? And. Player to be named later. Yeah, that's the feel like I had watching this week. It was like, man, we lost some talent. It's gonna affect the viewing. And it's not even necessarily the talent

as it is the entertainment value that some of those guys brought. Have a lot of guys left, I don't really care to ever watch Play Golf again, yes, but there are some that I will miss watching them compete in this realm, like Bryson especially. I'm curious too to know,

like how they go about it with the 125 versus, I know, you know, with bubble resigning and all that stuff, like how much deeper they're going to need to go if they need to make any changes to the priority list as they move forward, whether it be, you know, letting more corn fairy guys in or more guys down the list beyond the top 125 and the FedEx cup as far as cards go, because I think that's going to be a very real consideration as we move forward here. I think on that front too, Sal, I think just, you know, I don't know what they'll, I'm

sure more structural changes will be coming and the playoffs is a good start, but just continuing to make sure that, you know, the studs are put to the front of the line as much as possible, right? I think is just becoming more and more ever important because the farm system is good, right? I think is just becoming more and more ever important because the the farm system is good, right? I mean, I think probably highlighted by no one better than Zalatoris. If you want to even call him that, I mean, I know he's kind of been in every big event over the last couple of years, but it's not just him. Cam Young, Tagala, I think there's a bunch of a bunch of dudes that are like, how do we, how do we not rig the system, but let's make sure these guys are not having too much food

taken out of the mouths by Tyler Duncan's and things of that nature. But Zalatoris wasn't even the fucking playoff last year. Right, that's what I'm saying. We need to, we need to figure this out. And then, and then like, you know, you know, he wasn't on the 60 man by September 1st. You know, you can't, I see.

You can't put a playoff for him. I see something about like about the. It's thrown 102. I mean, the bullpen. What he just did hit the deadline. They didn't use an option here on. They didn't want to start a service. Start his clock on the arbitration and all that.

But no, it's like I was kind of reminded of it this year with like Roy Savitini. They're like, oh, he finally lost his car to whatever. But check it out. He didn't because he cashed in as, you know, top 25 or top 30 career money. How's he not in live, by the way? That's him for sure. That's an upside of the century. Live might be like, yeah, we're good, man.

I'm just a lucky team. TC, I think Jimmy Walker might have lost his car. Did. He did. I appreciate it. I wanted to congratulate you on that. I know that's exciting for you. Andy Johnson harps on it a lot though about how a promotional relegation system would be very, very exciting and give more meaning on a week to week basis for the guys

that are closer to the cutoffs. And that's one thing that the PGA tour could realistically do to beat Liv to the punch because Liv is talking about, well, we've only got 48 spots in, so that we, who knows exactly how those last, bottom 12 guys are gonna shake in and out. And there's obviously a need to bring the corn fairy guys up sooner and give them more opportunities where you have all these fields where not to beat a dead horse, but like John Husson's getting in like regular PJ tour events. And that's

something that the tour doesn't have to go way out of its way to do. Like the infrastructure's already in place. Why don't they do that? It seems like a merged point system would make so much more sense. Exactly. There are times when it would make a ton of sense to call up cornferry guys to play in PGA Tour events, but they don't want to do that

unless they have status retained. Even if it's only like quarterly, or you know, like it doesn't have to be every single week, but the guys that have been playing the best for the last three months should be playing on the PGA Tour. And then figure out how to give them, you know, equivalent points for the corn fairy. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, you gotta give them some kind of some sort of special temporary membership where like once you get caught up to the tour, it works like a major medical and you need to get this number of points to stay there. Okay, well, if they're

already playing better than most of the guys on the bottom 70, you know, in the points anyways, then they'll figure it out or they'll go back to the corn fairy tour. It doesn't matter. Guys, I feel like we gotta give JJ Spawn a shout out. 78 today. He'd respond a lot, but he eventually ran out of lives. That's totally.

It was like one of those glitches where he kept respawning right in front of the, you know, the thing that pulls you. Which, by the way, like, if you're playing a video game, where's allotaurus was? I was like, is he actually in the hazard? Cause I could see that being one of those glitches to where like, you can't, like, you can't even take a unplayable from there. Cause there's no way to drop.

Speaking of video games, I did have that on my list to bring up. Traymoll and Axe might be the most EA sports, uh, create a player golfer on the PJ tour. As kind of what it was feeling like for a while there of just like, oh, my like, create a player avatars in the final group with, with, uh, wills out towards like this is pretty cool. When spring or mountain farms chicken on a shirt, Alabama grad, you know, yeah, I'm good.

I'm good on that. I'll say I'm back and forth on does the playoff point system make sense? Like does it make sense for for guys to make to make as big a leaps as they are in the playoff events? I think they probably have to do a system that is possible to do that or else it's really not a playoff. It's just kind of, I think it's gotten better. Yeah, I think it seems about right.

I think you could always tinker it, but like does it a little weird that's upstruck us now in the top 10? Yeah, but like he wanted to tournament this year and got second in a playoff event. That kind of adds up to me. Has he had the best season? No, but if you want any kind of level of suspense and these playoffs,

you need to have the opportunity that that can happen. Otherwise, it becomes like the ATM line, or lining up the bank teller to collect your money. So the ball goes farther with more humidity. They could not understand this concept on Thursday. It was insane squared that way. I think I finally switched him on that one. I think he kind of realized,

hey, I'm not really arguing with Sally here. I'm arguing with science and I don't want to lose that battle. And the FedEx plane fly over on Saturday, that got my juices flowing. I mean, I just was feeling just an outpouring of passion for this country and the FedEx servicemen. That was a bizarre, bizarre, I don't remember, like that was tradition, I do not remember that being a tradition.

They needed orange and purple chemtrails, it would have gone way cooler. Flivers are sick. Like they've had a few at the heritage over the years, or they're, you know, owing to one of those. They have the monster planes. Yeah. Giant planes, I'm over. But yeah, it's, I don't know.

It was just kind of a weird, a weird wrinkle. Something else I had was just, GSC Big Dick Rick is nine. Yeah, that was tough. He was, he was in the hunt before that too. Not really. I mean, he was, he was top, like, he was top. He was he was in the hunt before that too. Not really. I mean, he was he was top like he was top first day. He was 15. When he made a nine, I don't I think he was already he was

in a pretty good shape. He was in the top 20. For sure. And Randy had that top 10 bit. Not to not to just take us completely off track of this very important conversation, but Saki Baba is nine up through 25. Oh, she's nine out. She was eating right now. All right, so She was eating right now. All right, so. When we started, she was back to five up. I was like, oh man, you know, I thought we thought the hay was in the barn here. She has not just a pulp.

She doesn't blow like this massive, massive lead in here. She was seven up after. She's not be doing that. After the initial 18, she made seven birdies on her first, first 18 today. What a name. Saki Baba. Can we just get the list of women's am?

That was the best golf I watched all week. I had a lot of fun. I was like, I'm today. What a name. Saki Baba. Can we just get the, the West women's am? That was the best golf I watched all week. I had, first of all, shout out to NBC, or golf channel NBC, whatever the hell we're calling it. Those guys, yeah, golf, sorry. Rich learner was on the call. Steve Bercowski, Morgan Pressle, K. Cock Cocker. I really like Morgan Pressle as an analyst.

Jim Gallagher. Jim Gallagher was out there. Julia Johnson did a great job. Like the camera angles were awesome. When you give them a chance to get out and run without a ton of commercials, it's amazing what they're capable of. The Wednesday, Thursday, like each night, it was in prime time. It was, they, they bobbed and we and weaved with with they had a fog delay.

They went an hour or two hours longer than they were planning on with the TV schedule. They didn't make any compromises. It was awesome. I loved it. And when there's that many like there's that much character development to where I didn't know who 95% of these ladies were going into Wednesday night or Thursday night. And when you give them a few hours to tell the stories and when they do the research and Talk to the college coaches and talk to the swing coaches like you know, Berkowski or learner They're talking to you know, Chris Como or they're talking to Jam Dowling from Michigan or Justin Silverstein from USC like it It's truly like they're they're truly trying to educate the viewer and it makes a big difference. And then you add Chambers Bay to it,

which like holy shit, man. Like, even the little stuff like the hard camera, because I'm watching right now, and they're on the eighth hole, and have a camera that's set up behind the green up at the top of the hill, and it shows they can zoom in, it shows the entire hole,

and then they can pan it over and show the rest of the golf course, they can show the ninth. I mean, it's little things like that that go the extra mile to make the broadcast really good and worth watching. And I couldn't agree more to see like golf did a great job this week. Well, it makes the venue matter that much more. Exactly.

If you can give people a sense of place, go into chambers and not really doing it justice and make you want to go play it and give you a sense of what the players are dealing with some of the shots. The pins at times were like ridiculously hard but really interesting for match play. They're like, and they did it like the quarter, like the round is 16 or the round of eight instead of just saving it for the finals, which I thought was cool. Yeah, it was like, dude, this is up on a knob. But like, hey, one of you two is good. Just figure it out. Like, is this a stroke play pin? No, but just don't aim at it But try to figure out how to get up and in and course play it awesome. I mean the new greens are great. It was planned

You know mega firm like the lag putting you had to be creative as hell. It looks both crispy and green at the same time Which is wild I kept I kept text or I told you guys before we came on, there's been like 14 different times this week. I was kind of constantly headed out of the background where I look up and I'm like, whoa, where is that? Oh my God, it's Chambers Bay again. Like this looks like the coolest freaking golf course

in America. It's unbelievable. It's gonna be a tragic situation. I think if Chambers Bay becomes a one and done on the, at least in the men's pro game. They're booked up to like 2075 though. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. I think US women's open there.

Maybe I, you know, I know the USGA tends to do that on the men's side at least. Kind of have the USAM 6, 7, 8 years before they announce like a men's US open at a place. And obviously with them booked up in so many different places, maybe they're thinking that on the US women's open side, which would be really cool. But yeah, I don't I don't care what tournament they play here. They just need to play more televised golf here because I will watch all of it. Yeah. And it's also, you know, I know the answer to this of, you know, you need to pay the players, but also a big question is why is Amitur Golf that much easier to watch than Pro Golf?

Like, easier to produce, like a really good quality product. And I know you got to sell commercials to pay the person and all that stuff. But it just was a question of like, dude, this is amazing. What they're able to do storytelling wise with a... With shout out Rolex for giving us uninterrupted coverage all we can. That's what I was going to say. Yeah, I know. It's impossible to overstate the effect of that. Still have a lot of Rolex yet,

but super thankful for them every time they do that. We could all pull our money and maybe get one to share. And also, just, I mean, some of the, you know, I thought the semis and the finals were probably the weakest golf of it all. Like I thought the round of 32 or the round of 16, round of eight, like there it's just some tenacity out there.

Monet Chine, like her story is unbelievable. Kind of like was in deep, deep, deep in the wilderness, you know, almost like quit the game basically. And then I loved watching them are avery, like she's, I guess, the next big, big thing. Once she learns how to control her spin and just clean some things up, she's got power for days. Catherine Rau was awesome. Brandon Averosa. Rachel Cune's mom was a bit much for me. There it is. But, but no, I mean overall, I don't know. I just, I thought it was, I thought it was such a, I go such a credit to golf, right? Like I was on the fence. If we've got some friends having an event on our message board, having an event out there next month, and I'm like,

fuck, I'm going out there. Like that's like no brainer. What are the dates I would like to go? We can talk about that in the flight. Yeah, that's a fantastic tournament, and now we're rolling right into Men's USM. And they had a bunch of local caddies, which like a place that like so bow the caddy that we had in our group. He was unbelievable. And like that's the kind of place where you want to have

a local caddy. Well, I think it's, it's probably right time to transition into, uh, not that we didn't bring Jobin for, uh, for what he's contributed so far, but what, there's a reason we, we're making the call to the bullpen. If the trumpets are sounding and Diaz is coming in from the bullpen, before we get to that, uh, when personal finance connects you to both your funds and the stuff that matters, that's money and that's cash app. You know what else is money? Choosing your own cash tag. I had a buddy once that sent

me, we had a $10 closest to the pen bet and he basically was like, I bet you this other guy hits it closer than you do. And the other guy was like a 20 handy cap and as soon as he hit the shot, he sent me a $10 request for the money and it rattled me. It absolutely rattled me. So that's gonna be my move. For bets now is to send the request in early. The chloroform ball off the first tee,

Neil submitted that one. He said, that's money. I'm not quite sure that one adds up for me. That's money for the other person. Yeah, it tends to be. Cam Smith leaving for live. I believe money's involved there. That's money. Hendrick Stenson monetizing the Ryder Cup Capptons Sea.

That's money. This is actually not the copy this and over, but they gave us a leeway with this one. Patrick Reed flying around the world for a T31. That's money. That's probably a lot of money spent there. Lawyers charging and Joe might be able to fill a cent on this product $5,000 an hour to live.

That's money You guys have no idea the invoice. You're getting at the end of the square Sending spending you need to wrap up these examples. Joe's joke is ticket Sending spending saving investing splitting tipping donating gifting or just typing numbers all in a single finance app That's money. That's cash app. It's fantastic I use it every single day, multiple times a day, download cash app from the app store or Google Play Store today to add your cash tag to the 80 million accounting

using the app when you use code. And on you get a free $15 plus $10, goes to youth on course and thanks to cash app. Helping us raise a bunch of money on top of Niels 100 whole hike that was a donation to youth on course as well. So, appreciate their support. All right, Job, what the hell are you doing here?

And I'll admit, I sent Job the agenda earlier this week and kind of said, you run the show here. You point, you point us where we need to be. You're taking a lot of pressure off us in terms of delivering the goods on what went down this week. Wait, wait, that hearing was like three weeks ago, right? It seems like it was, of course. But first question,

after you kind of give us some background in yourself, first of all, is Judge Freeman the MVP this week? Oh God. All right, just quick intro. I am a business litigation attorney in Florida. I don't practice in California. I do not practice antitrust law because the companies that care about antitrust law

are the same companies that can pay their lawyer thousands of dollars an hour to argue about antitrust law. It's crucial that I give you guys a little bit of context that I'll be critical of what I saw from an advocacy standpoint, from a lawyering standpoint, but I'm not going to be overly critical of the credentials or qualifications or accomplishments of the lawyers who we saw arguing this week, because all of them are far smarter from, you know, and far more experienced. I think where, you know, what's important to begin on Tuesday, the TRO hearing, temporary restraining order, let's distinguish between what we saw on Tuesday and then what it means for the overall case, right? Motion for temporary restraining order is essentially the opening salvo of what is going to be a year's long legal battle.

Unless the live, I'm going to call them the live lawyers, the live players lawyers dismiss this case and try to start over somewhere else. This is, this is the only question that was before the judge was can Taylor Gooch, Matt Jones and Hudson Swofford play these three poor kids, the three poor kids, these poor boys, can they play on, on Thursday, this week in the FedEx Cup? That's it. And so from there, it has implications for the larger case because you have to get a little bit

into the weeds of what the likelihood of success of the merits of the overall suit will be to make a decision for the judge. But what we saw on Tuesday was just the very, very narrow issue of the, could those guys play. So your question about is Judge Freeman the goat, the MVP? I mean, she certainly had a very good grasp of the facts and more than that, the stakes. I thought that her grasp of what it meant, even though it was a smaller issue,

it was a smaller issue for the players because it was limited to only those three players. But for the tour, you know, had the judge granted the TRO motion and essentially told the players there's no recourse. The tour has no recourse. If you want to play in both sides, that would have been a nuclear bomb for the tour. So her understanding of the facts and what was at stake was was very good to see. Well, and I don't want to gloss past that because with the timeline at which this was brought to her attention and they made the kind of joke to start off the hearing was basically like she had this weekend, the weekend and rolling it to Tuesday on top of what I would imagine a very to be a very full docket and schedule.

And how you made it use some posts on our message board that was kind of going through the play by play as well. How not easy it is to get this in front of a federal judge and express the emergency that was at stake here, which is these three poor kids might not be able to play the FedEx cup. So in federal court, much like, I mean, in state court too, but especially in federal court, you are not entitled to a hearing on anything. Certain local rules, especially on a civil trial, right? Especially in, yes, let's also distinguish

between civil and criminal. Criminal, there are more constitutional due process concerns. There's still due process and a civil litigation as well. But in federal court, you often don't get hearings on anything. You can submit, I can submit an emotion. My opponent will submit a response. And then we might not hear anything for months.

And then one day we get an order in our inbox and that's what it is. You can always request a hearing, but they're not always given. And then more than that, for the judge to give them a hearing and to give them a hearing within several days, and then to understand that she had to make a decision within a day, and in fact, she ruled from the bench, which is also quite rare. That, it goes, and we'll get into this, but it goes to the advocacy, the quality, the advocacy for the plans, attorneys, that you are telling this judge that it is such an emergency that you hear what I have to say, that, you know, you have to have a very cogent and persuasive argument.

If you're going to tell a judge, clear your entire calendar so that you can hear what I have to tell you. So you can make this decision on behalf of these plaintiffs. And so it kind of goes into the plaintiff's argument just really not being particularly persuasive in the advocacy, not being particularly persuasive. Which they are coming in and the plaintiffs have to, what do they have to prove, right? I hear a reputable harm was used a lot. And I was, I don't know how these things go, but I was, for one, I found this entire hearing to be incredibly entertaining.

One because I think it was like the culmination of pretty much everything we've talked about on the show for the last two years of watching this debate happen in real life and watching the lawyers argue their side and and things like that. But I was surprised, I guess, that before the lawyers had even presented their cases based solely on the complaint that was filed by the live attorneys and then a response that was filed by the PGA tour attorneys as well, that the judge walked in and basically said, like, I don't really see a reputable harm here to start with before even have tried your case here. I the first five minutes was electric. It was, she just was, and I, the command, I guess I was also just in awe of the command

that she had over the case that had been at just come to her desk and her ability to, I don't want to say pay attention to the whole thing, but to understand the, the, like, literally every single word that was going on, it's big. Oh, wait, do you mean seven C or seven E here, like blah, blah, blah, to be able to run the show. She could have made the case, both the plaintiff and defense case better than either those attorneys did.

That's true. I mean, it's very likely that Judge Freeman is either a golfer herself or she has a golfer on her law clerk staff who's been following this or someone in her social circles is a big golfer, a professional golf fan and could give her some background on this. She's also very smart. You know, most federal judges are. She went to Harvard Law School and she's probably a very adept at speed reading at this point and she has a team of law clerks that would give her really the meat potatoes of what she needed to know that could get kind of weed through the 106-page complaint and the motion for TRO and then the thousand plus pages of exhibits that were filed with both of those. But not the footnotes.

But I'm still in that point. That's really not the point. Oh my god. You know I don't read footnotes. You know I don't read footnotes. All right. So Gibson Dunn was on the plaintiffs. Correct. That was the plaintiff. One of the like one of their five firms. Gibson Dunn, on the plaintiffs. That was the plaintiff. One of their five firms. Gibson Dunn, Quinn Emmanuel, I think they heard McKenzie. Told that the big dick players from Quinn Oil or on the bench kind of.

Well, so Quinn Emmanuel is known as a litigation powerhouse, but they do, they're a full service. All these big, quote unquote, big law or white shoe law firms, they're all made up of very, very good lawyers, very experienced lawyers that are, you know, the partners that are going to be the ones that are actually litigating these cases. I mean, the associates do a lot of the leg work and a lot of the drafting and research,

but it's always going to be a partner that's quite experienced and particularly an antitrust law because it's such a niche practice area. And it's, so there's's there's only really like a handful of big firms that are really have partners qualified enough to handle these sorts of. But I guess based on like the people I've talked to, like it's shocking. All the lawyers are reaching out and like, well here's my thoughts. Here's my thoughts and sussing through some of that.

You're welcome. Sussing through some of that and be like, hey, like I my thoughts. Here's my thoughts. And Sussing through some of that. You're welcome. Sussing through some of that. And be like, hey, like I know like a few people reached out and they're like, hey, like Rachel Brass is on the team. Is on the, you know, kind of the second or third chair for Gibson Dunn on this case. She's practices in San Francisco. She's extremely well qualified.

She probably has argued in front of this judge before. And seemingly the guy that they that they had arguing the case started following golf two weeks ago and shit down his leg a little. I thought he was going to talk his way into his, the plaintiffs going to federal prison. I thought I thought I went that terrible. I thought I went that poorly for it. It's certainly not something that he and his partners are glad was on video. Let's put it that way. I mean Here There was a lot that you asked in your previous question. So I did I kind of want to back up and it'll it'll play into this

so It goes back to you know, what is it stake in this hearing and Rob Walters was the attorney for the plaintiffs that was arguing he is not actually a barred California lawyer He is barred in Texas and DC so they actually flew him out to California to make this argument, which was a little bit surprising, because he said to the judge, I'm not much of a golfer, and it's like, yeah, we know, because you don't think, you don't even know the FedEx cups,

the one thing that you are so desperate for your clients to play in, you don't know that it's three tournaments and not one. You know, he very obviously mixed up the Arnold Palmer Invitational and the Memorial. You know, you don't, he, he very obviously mixed up the Arnold Palmer invitation on and the memorial by saying the API was in now. How many lawyers play golf? And you could, you found the one, the one guy to argue the golf case that doesn't play golf. I mean, it was, it was, it was a little bit surprising. And on that front too, like, it just seemed like that was the weirdest part about the beginning

of it was, you know, the plaintiffs are trying to argue how like they're basically what the tours been trying to tell us about the FedEx Cup for the last 16 years. Like, yo, you guys don't understand this is super bowl and the Kentucky Derby and the NBA finals all rolled into one. This is as big as it gets. And then it was so good too, because like the tour on the other side is just like, oh, judge, like we have no chance to look at how many of these big names they did. We can't be, we can't be a monopoly.

Like, it's just so funny to see those two go back and forth at each other. Let's talk a little bit about persuasive advocacy, because when you were in the judge's courtroom, you were there as an invited guest, and the judge is primarily going to rely on the written briefings. Throughout the entire case, doesn't matter what topic is in front of the judge is primarily going to rely on the written briefings. Throughout the entire case, doesn't matter what topic is in front of the judge. But not the footnotes. But not the footnotes. Yeah. So you always have to be very cognizant that whatever you put in writing is going to be the most persuasive thing.

And when you are in court for a hearing, you are there to answer the judge's questions, period. The most persuasive advocacy is when a judge, like what happened in this case, Judge Freeman opens the hearing by saying, here's the way I'm leaning, these are the concerns I have, this is what I want you to talk to me about. And then for both, and this goes to the tours,

lawyer too, for both of them to be like, I have a 60 page PowerPoint slide, Judge, and let's go to page 40, it's like, what the, guys, the judge said she was concerned about, you know, let's just to page 40. It's like, what the? Guys, the judge said she was concerned about, let's just pick a topic. She was concerned about the group boycott aspect of antitrust, which that's not exactly what she said. But for you to get up there and not immediately start answering

those questions to her satisfaction because you want to be so stuck to your notes that you kind of just start talking yourself in circles. And this, the same thing happened to the PGA Tour lawyer, two Elliott Peters, who again, California lawyer of the year, a few years, like very, very qualified lawyers, who should know better than to just get completely

stuck to their notes because they don't have the subject matter expertise, they don't have the business, the inherent business knowledge about how these connections are made within the golf landscape to say, judge, Taylor Gouche. If he doesn't play this week, he's not going to get another chance to play in the majors, and that's what's irreparable.

Don't focus on the fact that he took all those money to not play in the FedEx cup, because that is something you can quantify. But maybe a closer to winning argument would have been, if he doesn't play this week, he may not ever play in another major because of the way the OWGR works because of all these other opportunities that he's not going to get. And- Like a domino effect. That's just strictly monetized.

Correct. But because he doesn't understand, because the lawyer didn't understand how those connections are made, he didn't ever have a chance of making a persuasive argument on that front. And so you get back to, okay, well, what do my notes say? Something about Jack Nicholas, something about API, something about the Super Bowl. Yeah, judge, yeah, these three, the poor boys, they're not going to be able to play next week. Not a persuasive argument. So fast forward a little bit.

Obviously they were denied, or I don't even know which way that goes. They weren't able to play, obviously. Did not. What would have happened if they were able to play as far as the other guys who were not part of the suit? Does that basically just like set the precedent or is that just strictly like those three are allowed to play because they want in court?

How would that work? So it would have been those three would have been allowed to play this week, but then going forward until the end of the case, that would have been the to play this week, but then going forward until the end of the case, that would have been the law of the case. And so any other players that were thinking about considering jumping to live would have been able to do so. And then also play in tour events, at least while the pendency of the litigation was going

on, because the judge has said, essentially, I think it would be irreparably harmful. And we'll go back to, solid, you want to talk about the elements and we can get into that but it would be it would be so egregiously harmful a real cognizable harm for these players not to be able to play in the FedEx cup or in any other PGA tour events and this case is going to go on for several years most likely and so it would have been a nuclear bomb on the tour and I think that the judge understood that. I'm not saying that she kind of backdoored her decision making, but I think she was approaching it from the from the place of the worst outcome

for these litigants without even getting a tour, the tour is actual response to the lawsuit yet, right? They only responded to the motion for temporary resuming order. They have a certain amount of time, 21 days, 60 of the except service to respond to the complaint itself, which they'll probably do by motion to dismiss. And the judge was very clear that she was not going to get into the meat of the antitrust issues, which she thinks may be a close call.

So for her to rule in this way to say, for now, we're just going to keep the status quo the way it is was kind of I think where she was approaching it from and then reverse engineering the legal argument to get there. I don't know if I realized I guess the stakes in terms of how much downstream effect this ruling would have had. I guess I kind of thought this was about these three guys playing the playoffs and that if anybody else wanted to play anything else they would have had to sue on different grounds in a different way But you're saying that if this would have passed the precedent if you will that's probably not the right word. Okay, would have

Allow either paved the way for everyone else to play whatever event they would have wanted or you would have seen a lot more players joining live and then move you know either filing similar lawsuits or moving for leave of court to add themselves as litigants to the lawsuit. The players that resigned did not have the same argument because they gave up their membership. But a player like Cam Smith could look at that and say well as long as those lawsuits going on I'm gonna be able to play both. So I'll just throw my name, I'll move for leave to join as an intervener.

I think you technically being an intervener, but as another plaintiff in the lawsuit in order to preserve his rights to do the same thing. Quick update, Saki Baba just won 11 and 9. Hell yeah. Just kind of bow on that. Unbelievable. I was pissed when the John Deere started catching strays. Yeah, they were firing shots off at the John Deere. John Deere, the Byron Nelson, which wore power to him.

You can shit all over Craig Ranch. Oh, I think the, you know, like it was, it was also kind of, like impressed upon me. I'm like, oh shit, this is like very, very immediate effect. Like when I heard Hudson Swofford, and it was a HUD and Taylor Gooch are like down the street, like waiting from... They were in Memphis, yeah.

And it's like, dude, like they were gonna, they were gonna show up and like go to the range and get a practice, like a nine hole practice loop in. I mean, like they were going to, like, they were going to show up and like, go to the range and get a practice, like a nine hole practice loop in. I mean, it's, it'd be easy to, to armchair this and say that, you know, there was the, the, the PGA tour players have a pretty good argument. And they might on some of these issues, but we should also be clear that it's very, very difficult to get a temporary restraining order in federal court.

It's, it's a, what's called extraordinary relief. I mean, the judges approach it from the position of, you're not going to get this unless you can prove that you have an injury that cannot be compensated by money, period. And junk to relieve is, there's legal relief, which is money damages, and then there's equitable relief. And this is equitable relief, meaning that you have to show

that money cannot compensate you if you lose. Or I'm sorry if you win. And so the reason why it, you know, she, the judge kind of came in guns of blazing against the plaintiffs was to say that, you know, I think that you have serious concerns with your downstream case. And I have to look at those issues to make a determination today. So I want to hear about how you're going to overcome those issues. And we just never really got quality argument from the plaintiff about that. And the other thing is the plaintiff bears the burden of persuasion. So what that means is the plaintiff has to prove their case.

The defendant does not have to disprove the plaintiff's case. They have to poke holes in it if they think that the plaintiff's case is really good and that they've forcefully made their case. But the most persuasive thing that the tour lawyers could have done, you know, could have just basically stood up and said, well, to himself, I recognize that the plan's lawyers flailing around doesn't know anything about this. Make three or four good rebuttal points directly address some of the judge's questions to the other side with what you want to get in and then sit down and don't say anything more because the longer you talk, the more you're going to invite questions from the judge, which really almost got the tour lawyers in trouble

with the timeliness issue and the suspension issue. So take me to what, let's just go back to the planis for now. What's the most compelling argument that they made here? And I don't know if that's a good bridgeway into saying, what is at, what is the deciding factor here? What caused the decision to end up being what it was? That's probably two different questions. Well, so the judge, the most compelling argument

was really kind of made by the judge, but it was that the tour was inconsistent with how it applied its own bylaws in order to arrive at a suspension for the three players that were the TRO planets. I mean basically the Torah used two parallel mechanisms in its bylaws in order to effectuate the suspensions and the the plans are saying and the judge was kind of agreeing with them that the Torah was not very clear in how it communicated how it was applying the laws to Taylor Gooch in particular, and that Taylor was Taylor understood the suspension mechanism and the appeal process, critically the appeal process,

to be one thing where the appeal would essentially stay or invalidate the suspension until the actual appeal was heard and decided. And the PJ Tours said, no, no, no, no, we used one section to punish you for essentially conduct on becoming. And another section to punish you by putting you on probation for being a repeat offender of the rules by constantly playing in these events without releases. And under that ladder section, there is no appeal of the suspension, or the appeal process, there's no stay of the appeal of the suspension, and that's why you can't play this week. Really, that was kind of the most compelling argument that was made.

The judge... Where it seemed like the tour lawyer struggled to get that point across. It lost me in that part, and I was like, I'm kind of room for you guys here. You have spun a web that I've been very confused in now. The point was made much clearer in the brief, which goes back to what I was saying about the brief being the more persuasive argument, and the longer the Tor lawyer, Elliott Peter stood there and talked, the more he invited these questions, right? Like, you can't stand up and this was another thing you did, the judge said, what I'm really concerned about,

I can't exactly remember what the issue was, it was one of the minor antitrust issues, more minor antitrust issues. And he said, oh, oh, judge, I'm going to get there. I believe me. I can't wait to talk about that. But first I want to talk about it. Yeah, it's like, the judge is asking you, is telling you, this is the thing I don't care about. Don't grandstand. Yeah. And you're standing here because your client is sitting at the table, paying you an awful lot of money to be here And you want to give them a show and I understand that that's the case But the more persuasive advocacy is always just to answer the question that's asked immediately and then stop talking When you're winning the only thing that you can gain by talking is more questions that are gonna poke holes in your own

argument you know he won before he walked in that day, and it didn't get any better for the plaintiffs while he was sitting there kind of like man spreading, you know, like he was laying weight, it was a whole other visual. Whole other visual, like you're in federal fucking court, like sit there with your hands clasped at your desk

and pay attention, you know, I mean, whatever. So Joe, on the back end, because there's't get this TRO, let's say there's a civil case on the back end, these guys are a party too. Does this create liability for the tour, on the back end, to where monetary damages, to where Gooch, Matt Jones, these guys, the fact that they didn't get into this event that the clock is ticking now, and like they can kind of toll up these fines or these lost wages. Potentially. I mean, it's a fine line for the plaintiffs to tread because they also, the judge denied

the temporary restraining order without prejudice to seek a preliminary injunction, which is another, it's essentially a temporary restraining order, but with more facts and evidence, it's still injunctive relief, and the elements are very, very similar, and you still have to prove that you have no adequate remedy at law, aka money damages. So in order to obtain injunctive relief down the road, they have to kind of tread a fine line between what they believe they can be compensated for and what they don't. I mean, in this case, ultimately, we'll probably come down to, it definitely will come down to whether the antitrust allegations as far as a group boycott. I think you talked about that with Will Barbell last week. I mean, that's probably like the tour,

or the live plan's best argument under the Sherman Antitrust Act, which again, I'm not an antitrust lawyer. Can't emphasize that enough. And to clarify just based on what we just heard, it sounded like the judge was like, put a bookmark on that. Like I'm ready to have that conversation when it gets to it.

We're not gonna talk about this today, but like, that's like, that's love. Yeah, that seems like, okay, there might be something there. We'll discuss that in the future because that's going to take a lot longer. It will, and it provides, and so the other thing about the end of the hearing, which I did not get to watch, I had to leave it, pick my daughter up so I was kind of falling through on it later, but I think she made the point of you, the parties can either try to litigate this case on a fast track within like a year or it's going to be two plus years before this gets a trial.

And ordinarily, the plaintiff wants to get the case to trial as fast as possible in almost every circumstance. But in this case, after this ruling, they probably don't. And it's kind of reversed. And so what I thought might happen is the tour would file a motion to dismiss, which they probably still will do in response to the actual complaint. But it's an interesting strategic thought process

because they could just say, you know what, we don't wanna drag this out any longer. We have a judge that's on our side. And the sooner we answer the complaint, the sooner we provide a response that's not moving to get rid of it. The sooner we can start discovery, the sooner we can start these case management deadlines

and what's fast track, the same trial. And it also makes it a lot harder for the plaintiff to voluntarily dismiss the case and then go form, shop it elsewhere. So the tours got an interesting strategic analysis to go through now. That's what I was gonna ask about. Hey, why the, why Northern California?

Is that just somewhere that has been historically friendly to antitrust or? Well, it's an interesting place to be because there is a lot of antitrust litigation that goes on there because of Silicon Valley. But and it's also you would think typically more liberal judges of which judge Freeman is an Obama appointee and that's not not to say that she's keep your politics. Not in my damn sports. Joe, she, you know, she, uh, she personally has actually made some, some anti-trust rulings that would have been, you know, kind of more negative. It's like in favor of Google or something.

Right. About one. You know, I would have thought that there were been a few, uh, places that might have made a lot of sense. Northern District, California would be one, uh, Southern district of New York, where New York City is, would have been another, the District of Delaware, which a lot of business litigation happens there. And maybe like the District of Columbia,

where you have very high-faluten federal judges that are well versed in federal law, especially anti-trust law. So, Northern District, California kind of made sense. I saw a lot of people saying, well, why didn't they sue the tour in Florida? Well, because they would get home-fielded, most likely in the middle of District of Florida.

Plus, there's not a lot of anti-trust litigation that goes on in Jacksonville or Tampa or Orlando. So, it's not exactly like a place where you're gonna be likely to draw a good judge that has that much of a grasp of the issue. But on that front, like, what's the, so what's their, basically, you're talking about venue shopping

or talking about what would need to happen when they need to come with a different class, like a different class of guys or different class of plaintiffs with the same issue or basically dismiss it in that case. And then... Yeah, is this judge Freeman's case until further notice, right?

That's because it seems like, it felt like that was a bad draw further notice, right? That's because it seems like it felt like that was a bad draw for them, right? It's her case unless the plaintiff dismiss it voluntarily. And they can refile anywhere else. So there's under the federal of civil procedure rule 41, you can, the plaintiffs can dismiss it and it doesn't operate as what's called an adjudication on the merits as long as they do so before and answer as filed essentially. So there's no precedent then set at all. It's basically just wipes it completely off the slate. Other than what people would, you know, any other like pre-determined thoughts or biases that any judge would have knowing what this case is about, but but in fact, no, it would be a clean slate. And then the other thing to discourage this,

you know, they say before the plaintiff can proceed with a different case, they have to pay the attorney's fees for the other side, which for a lot of litigants would be essentially impossible to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to the other side, but with whose funding this case, that's not really consideration. There's no deterrent there. It's crazy like reading about these law firms

to like the, you know, scad and a harp or the one that the Elliot do is. Kekker, Van Nessen, Peech. Yeah, like, you know, like he was, he was Lance Armstrong's attorney. Like the Quint of Manual, like they're basically Elon Musk's attorney going after are very serious law firms with very serious, very smart lawyers, who absolutely know what they're doing, which is again why I wanted to preface this by saying that my

critiques are of the advocacy that I saw, not of their capabilities as lawyers, because the drafting is incredible in these cases. The drafting is actually quite persuasive for both sides. But it to me was, this is again not to speak to the larger antitrust case that is coming down the road. It just felt like what, as soon as that lawyer started talking to the live side, I was like, dude, they had, that's a pretty damn weak case, right? I mean, it was pretty easy for the tour to say like, look, they, they, like straight up took

all this extra money. They, they, the extra money that they were paid to go to live was to help offset knowing that they were going to not be able to play in this. Like it just felt like a lot of the live boasting that has gone on to this point and a lot of what has happened and the success of being able to recruit all these players made it pretty easy to shut down like this hardship case that they're trying to drive of all these three poor boys. Again, those are the lawyers words. What I keep saying that if you don't know that, he said these three poor

kids won't be able to play in the FedEx cup playoffs. And it just felt like, man, it was just kind of walking through a door for the tour. It's also it's like, you know, at that point with with the money, it's like, all right, yeah, there was harm. The money made up for it. It's not irreparable. Well, and I think, but I think they could have made a better point of like this and the majors or what this is all about. And this is our last chance to get into them for next year. Like, that's it. This is it right here. And you can't replace that with money. And that's where you're saying they spun this whole web and didn't focus in on the immediacy of like, yeah, if we don't play these, we're not going to be able to play in the majors next year. Yeah, that's exactly

right. I mean, it's, it really comes down to being able to tell a persuasive story and, you know, being able to connect all those dots, which is, you know, if you have to, if you have to, if you're the plaintiff, that's the one thing you have to do is have a firm grasp of what's at stake. And it never really felt like what was at stake was an emergency or you know like a real emergency and when you're there in front of the judge saying I'm here because this is an emergency but I can't even tell you like how many tournaments I want them to be able to play in it just it falls flat. What also on that front too what's the like like why did Michelson file separately? Like, like, why did Mikkelson file separately?

Or he has a separate, it's a separate lawyer. Okay. I don't know, it could probably just like a personal relation. You could answer that question on your own. I mean, that's the only way that we could go with it. So, like, was there a reason why these guys filed, you know, almost like a personal lawsuit versus having live, like, is that creating more flexibility for live down the line?

I don't know. The live aspect is interesting because I think Bardwell made this point really well. It might be an optics problem for live. The optics for the plaintiffs already are not great because they're like these aggrieved multi-millionaires who are aggrieved because they took millions and millions and more dollars and now they're upset

that they can't win millions and millions more For live, I mean it's the source of the money and the you know the backing of the Saudi government almost looks worse potentially you know live against a American institution for lack of I mean that's really what the PGA tour is This is kind of what it comes down to a It's going to American nonprofit. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Raising billions of dollars. Again, it's not necessarily this rosy, but like in court, we're going to make, they're going to lean pretty heavy on like, we're raising

billions of dollars for charities on behalf of these, like, on the backs of these players. And to go back to what both of you are saying, like, let's not make this sound like this was a great day overall for the PGA tour, because it really wasn't. It was like an up and down for par from the first whole of 70. Exactly. And I posted this on the mesh board like the tour does not want to be in a lawsuit with these people. Okay. Like they know that they had to know that this was coming. But it's not like they want to spend a bunch of money on this. It's not like they discovery. It's not like they want to do discovery. It's not like they want this to be a distraction. It's not like they want people to be talking about it.

And it's also not like they wanted their lawyer to stand up and say, look, our five top players in the pit have now gone to our competitor. Like, that's not a good look for you, no matter what the case is. And it's gonna help us win this case, but like ultimately, it still looks really bad. The house is on fire a little bit over here,

which I think my favorite moment of the day might have been the judge seeing that and then kind of quipping like, oh, you know, a couple more years, maybe you guys could sue them for any trust. It was, it was a ultimate, like, okay, cool. I think I, I think it's pretty clear where this decision's going today. And the reaction of your action of Elliott Peters, which said that was exactly like the Selena Meyer, Jeff from Deepworth, like nervously laughing like, what the fuck? Exactly.

On that note though, I think, so the one thing I think we've heard from a bunch of lawyers and various, you know, various smart people is, they probably don't want to go to trial. This is, you know, I think Barbwell kept saying this last week, like, they want to settle, they want to settle, they want to settle, they want to settle. I think what I can't really like wrap my head around is like, what does settlement even look like in this? You know what I mean, like what is the common

ground or what can they actually like figure out because it just seems like if the tour gives up an inch, like it's kind of over, right? I don't really know if you guys have anything to even add to that, but it's just that kept going through my head all week. I mean, the settlement 99% of litigation cases is the defendant pays the plaintiff to make it go away. I mean, whether they do it because they have actual liability, because they actually did anything wrong or whether they do it as a business decision, they pay a bunch of money and or no money. I mean, who knows how it shakes out, but ultimately most of these things are settled.

And in this case, there's no amount of money that can make no matter how much money the PGA tour can spend to try to settle this case, it pales in comparison to what is already on the table for these guys. So a settlement is going to have to be if it is to occur. Some sort of coexistence where they play on off weeks and the guys could go back and forth or the guys can play a certain number of live events but then not play in the PGA tour playoff

or whatever the case may be. And to DJ's point, it's untenable for the tour. and to DJ's point, it's untenable for the tour because the tour then loses its best fields on these weeks where it has tournaments that it is hosting and nobody wants to play in them. And the value, you can't stress enough how much of the value of the PGA tour is derived from the collective marketing rights. It's all media rights.

It's all, it's everything. And media rights can be confusing thing for a lot of people. And it sounds like NFTs. But it's your ability to play professional, it's your playing golf on television or on some kind of network for entertainment value. And like it's Phil Mickelson for the last how are many years could have played on his own tour.

He could have made his own exhibition series. And he could have made a lot of money doing it. But the idea, like he got on on on free writing if you will Which I'm surprised the legal term. I'm very I thought that was very ad-libs kind of thing No, it's a thing like he got you know He's competed within this ecosystem for a very long period of time and gotten a lot of notoriety Through that and it's just what makes it very complicated. Now, one of the things that the judge said that I think the larger discussion here is still like what is to come and what kind of ground the PGA tour stands on from an anti-trust perspective.

But one thing she said was significant evidence that live has not been prevented from entering the market. Again, not a lawyer here, but that felt like a pretty significant statement in terms of, and I guess I'm asked the question along the lines of asking you to help me understand, what is anti-competitive behavior and what is competitive behavior? At what point is live like a competitor that the PGA tour needs to beat and what makes their actions legal versus what makes their actions potentially not legal.

So in an antitrust case, that breaking into the market is often what kind of what turns the case, right? Like if a if a point if if a competitor can actually gain market share through its own efforts, regardless of if those efforts are just spending so much money that it has, like nobody has a choice but to pay attention to it, then my limited understanding of antitrust law is that that is very, very unlikely that the other party is the defendant, the tour in this case, is exerting monopoly power over the marketplace. It may have the largest or the only market share.

And it may do things that it pretends to have a legitimate business justification for. But if those things are ineffective at actually preventing the competitor from entering the space and taking that market share, then it goes strongly, way strongly against there being an actual antitrust, yourust, viable antitrust claim. Wouldn't it be also like, it doesn't approve, I know the, like the tour raising their purses. Like, if they had a Trumanopoly on things, they wouldn't even have to do that, right?

And that's where I weighed into this category of like, I know what I'm like rooting for in this case, and am I trying to see things through the rosy glasses of, I, I want, I would, I think I want the PJ tour to be able to say to these guys you cannot play on this tour anymore, right? Because they all come scrumbling down. Their whole model comes crumbling down if that's not the case.

Now, even if their acts are anti-competitive, they've not been able to prevent guys to go in and leave and working for the other employer. The whole thing is like, you just can't do both. So here's the elements for a section two claim for attempted monopolization under the Sherman Antitrust Act. One, the defendant has engaged in predatory or anti-competitive conduct with two, a specific intent to monopolize and three, a dangerous probability of achieving monopoly power. It's that third element that is probably going to be the breaking point for this case one way or another because if no matter what anti-competitive conduct the tour puts forth, live continues

taking market share. It just shows that even if the tour intended to be a monopoly, intended to exert its monopoly power, it doesn't get there because they don't actually prevent the competitor from entering the space. I'm sure my non-existent Twitter will get blown up with anti-trust lawyers after that. But I think that that's what it is. I think it's more that it doesn't, even if the tour intends to act like a monopoly,

if it doesn't actually prevent the competitor from entering into space, then it's not actually a monopoly. Well, I think some of it comes down to, like the tour is a monopsy, which is a market situation where there's only a buyer. Like basically they're a buyer of labor, they're not a seller of labor, and they're the only buyer in that instance.

But I would think that it's almost like the ends justify the means, right? Where the ends are that there's this market that wouldn't otherwise exist for these guys' media rights that is worth billions and billions of dollars for the, you know, the William McGurts and the Tyler Duncan's and all of those guys who are making far more money than they would otherwise. So it's benefiting, you know, like a, a wider birth of these guys be it's it's probably hurting some of the top players, but that's the reality and they're getting there through maybe some, you know, like kind of some

monopsynistic tendencies or actions here, but the ends do justify the means. I guess I think you could see it like that. I don't know. Yeah. I can't believe that this is, you know, the level at which we're having this conversation, but I think it, just in talking with you this week too, I just was, I thought it was very, very, very important to have someone on that was able to digest everything that just happened this week and, you know,

I guess what else, what else stuck out to you from this case that you thought was, you know, I guess what else stuck out to you from this case that you thought was, you know, important or kind of signified what was potentially maybe going to happen down the road? Yeah, so that's one of the questions that came up a lot on the message board because what does this case look like, you know, six months from now, 12 months from now? I mean, it goes back to whether the tour decides to be aggressive and it's defense, and in this case, being aggressive in its defense is filing an answer

and trying to push this thing as fast as possible because they have a judge that they think is sympathetic to their point of view, or at least that they could win over. And if that's the case, you know, federal, even in federal court, the judges are loath to extend deadlines and to continue trials, but it does happen. If the live plaintiffs keep this going, I don't think that there's any chance that this

gets resolved in the next 18 months. It's probably not going to get resolved in the next two to three years. Which seems like a great thing for the PGA tour, because, I mean, even if it, let's say it gets solved a year from now, a year where these guys can't play no WGR events, like they are gonna tank in the rankings. And everybody that's not, have exemptions in the majors is gonna be gone out of majors. They won't even have to rely on the majors

to make up any other rules. And I feel like Liv is waiting to be able to include the majors into this, the cabal of anti-competitive behavior. But like if they needed just weighted out until then, they won't even need that. It seems like to me. And two other things there too.

It's like it's going to give the tour even more time to get their house in order. As far as schedule wise, taking care of top players, other, you know, like it's that many more pack meetings to get stuff approved, to get the structure changed a little bit. And then B, I think there's just the semblance too of like, you know, Fred Ridley and Augustine Ashmore are getting dragged into this. There's other, like he's gonna get deposed if this thing keeps going. Like, Juan's gonna get deposed. Like, these guys don't wanna, you know, hop in front of a federal court and talk about this stuff.

Like it's getting into their business. And Fred Ridley runs in the same circles as all these other big law firms. He's a partner fully and large, which is another huge national offer. And so I think that's where like, you start fucking around with Augusta National and like they're gonna turn,

like they're gonna be even more hostile towards lived than they already have been if you start messing around with their business and all that. That's just how shit works, right? Well, yeah. I mean, there's the legal reality and the practical reality. And the practical realities are going to move a lot faster than the legal reality is just because of, you know, civil litigation being a very slow churning machine. What do you think of the news that the justice department is potentially investigating the tour for this? How much stock do you

put into that? I don't know what level of credence to give it. I mean, it sounds like, you know, there's there's a difference between like an inquiry, like essentially sending a letter saying, hey, we're keeping tabs on this or can you, you know, basically as a shot across the bow, because ordinarily, if the Justice Department is building a case, unless they are telling you, they don't reach out to the person or the organization they're building a case against unless they're like very, very close to the end of it and they're giving you like the one chance to come clean or set the record straight or produce documents that, you know, that's what I think.

You know, if there's, if there's been conversations between Jay Monahan and the Justice Department, I would say that it's either not a big deal or it's not very far along at all. But again, I'm or the or somebody's trying to get it out there showing that the Justice Department is like, you know what, hey, like you're sticking up for live instead of, instead of the PGA tour of this American institution. Like, why would you? I mean, that's a bold blade to look in the face of the Justice Department and like a hungry, you know, A.G. or Assistant A.G. trying to get antitrust stuff, you know, done. What's the like seems like busy times at the Justice Department. So, try to hit the word. So, Joe.

Your thoughts on that, Joe? Joe, also, like what? How does the Espionage Act fit into Liv's claim? Does the tour, like, what would you have told the tour if they were your client? Six months ago, 12 months ago, 18 months ago, like, what's the risk that there's, like, what do they have to do as far as protecting text messages or emails or producing this documentation and communications? Is it going to come out? Yeah.

The fact that the tour pays us tons of money. Is that going to come out in discovery? Well, we can out over here. Again, like I said at the beginning, no, this is legal advice. So, I mean, there's definitely what's, the tours been put on what's called a litigation hold. I'm sure they were sent a demand letter a long time ago that says, you know, essentially all of your electronically stored information, including but not limited to these following

30 laundry list of items. Slack. I'll look at all that. Suspend all your archiving, suspend all your deletion, like that sort of thing. That's a very standard practice. I mean, you get into what's called spoliation of evidence. If you get rid of things or magically lose things that you were supposed to have that are relevant,

and ordinarily what comes out of that is, if the other side can prove that you... Is that like obstruction, man? It can be, well, it's obstruction, if it's a criminal matter, and a civil matter, you get an adverse inference against you, that they can tell the jury. They don't have these documents that they absolutely should have

that we say, say these things. So you can believe those documents existed at one time and that they say exactly what we are telling you they say. But you got to go through a lot of legal mechanisms to get the point where you can actually say that to a jury. We've kind of summarized a lot of stuff of the course of this, but I highlighted a couple of things from the actual decision that I thought were noteworthy. Give it to me.

Yeah. This came from Judge Freeman. He said, the plaintiff's own expert indicated that PGA tour members that have already elected to participate in live golf events required large upfront payments, at least in part because they're calculus included the loss of opportunities to earn ranking points and to earn entry into majors. That's where the case turned. I mean, that's not the case.

That's where this motion decision turned. There was an exchange between the judge and the lawyer for the plaintiffs that basically said, why didn't they just wait till the end of the year? And the lawyer very candidly, in the worst possible way, he could have phrased it, said because they would have foregone an opportunity to maximize their market value.

Like, that's the point. They are being paid a ton of money now because they would have foregone an opportunity to maximize their market value. That's the point. They are being paid a ton of money now so that they would forego the money that's being handed out at the end of the FedEx Cup playoffs. And a true Dodd Draver situation. Both of these pots of money that I think is what the money is for. It's one or the other. And so credit to their lawyer for being candid to the court.

You have to. But I wouldn't probably phrase it that way. Well, how much did that attorney misspeak or not have his facts together? Like, have we solved this yet on the issue of so metting against these bonuses? Yeah. So I think he, I don't know what he meant, but he made a statement about the winnings being recouped against the contract. Yeah. If you guys, if there's one reason why I want this case to go forward other than just like

the courtroom drama, which isn't going to happen again for a long time, it's because there was a question, there was a lot of talking at the very beginning of the hearing about whether the towards lawyer could speak openly about the live contracts. Because those contracts are in evidence, and if you read the response of the tour, there were a couple sections that were redacted, and those sections were redacted because it's talking about precisely how much money

those players are being paid and on the conditions by which they're being paid them. And it was essentially a professional courtesy because the live lawyer said, we think these are confidential and the Torsley lawyer said, we disagree, but we're not gonna risk putting this out in the open and then getting in-monished by the judge

if she's not gonna make that determination today. And so if Discovery goes for those contracts they're eventually gonna get unsealed and we're gonna get to see exactly how stupid or how genius some of these players are for taking the money that would off. And all the escalators look like and what bonuses look like. Because that's the thing.

I mean, talking about cams, for instance, like, I don't, you know, I'm not sure, you know, like let's say cam makes number one in the world before the end of this FedEx cup. At that point, I hope for camsake that there's another escalator in there that has, it gives them another $25 million for being number one. You know what I mean? Like there's just, so the, in the transcript, the conversation I won't, I won't read it all, but it says, well, these contracts provide for the court. This is Judge Freeman's as the contracts provide for payments simply for showing up for the first tournament. And Mr. Walters says, well,

they do, but then they have to have to win money in order to recoup against the contract. So they're a little bit different. And on the hot mic, which I don't know if we're allowed to submit this into evidence, but it sounded like one of the other attorneys that was sitting there was kind of like what you meant to say was, and you get in that, her, her brando, she had a name.

Her brando, she had a name. And then they were quick to, several people reached out to live and asked for clarification on this, and they were quick to say people reached out to live and asked for clarification on this and they were quick to say like no This was not as intended so Brandal of course did another victory lap that he was right on this and he's not almost certainly The the no names that's almost certainly what happened like I would be shocked if chase Keppga didn't have a provision in his that said Like the first 5 million that you earn in tour events is like

an electric contract versus exactly like somebody like Bryson who has owned that, yeah, it's free. But also or it's like, hey, you have to basically have a draw from these tournaments because that shows that you completed the actual event. So even if you get last place money, that's still like that, that almost enacts, you know, like, hey, one of these, let's say you got to play 30 events, right? Like 30 events over three years, this in acts, one of those 30 events, right? And so also continuing on from a group of finances, based on this evidence, TRO plaintiffs

have not even shown that they've been harmed, let alone irreparably. It is clear that the live golf contracts negotiated by the TRO plaintiffs and consummated between the parties were based on the players' calculation of what they would be leaving behind in the amount of money they would need to compensate for those losses. TRO plaintiffs have signed contracts that richly reward them for their talent and compensate for lost opportunity through tour play. In fact, the evidence shows almost without a doubt that they will be earning significantly more money with live golf than they could have reasonably have expected to make through tour play over the same time period.

Further, TRO plaintiffs contention that they will irreparably lose future sponsorship opportunities and career status is undermined by TRO plaintiffs' evidence that live golf offers a refreshing new, extremely fan-friendly business model that will lead to an improved broadcast, output, and entertainment experience compared to the stayed old golf world built by the PGA tour. If live golf is elite golf's future, what do TRO play and have care about the dust collecting trophies of a bygone era?" End quote, fucking sick. That's awesome to use.

All of the shit that live has been pushing out and flaunting for so long against it in a legal case is very much of like, Davis Love was very much of, bring on Discovery. Like, I, we have a lot more to gain and I do not know if this is good advice at all, but they seem to have a lot more, or be of the mind, or he is of the mind, that there's a lot more to gain for the PGA Tour

and Discovery in terms of what else has been going on behind the scenes with Liv. And again, I don't know if that to be accurate, but it doesn't seem like there is afraid of like peeling back some of these layers. So it's also funny they were talking about mad Jones and Hudson Swofford as two of the guys. Hudson Swofford hasn't hasn't made a cut since like the heritage. And then Matt Jones, like it's, it's just, you know, and granted, like, Gucci's had a good year and all that. But like, Matt Jones and Hudson Swoffer couldn't

be more, I mean, I know HUD one, one of the desert, but like, like neither of them has done shit since, since the spring. Right. And the, and the judge kind of made another quip in the hearing about, like, it's not like these guys are numbers one, two, and three. Like what? I think they're like, 67, 67. Yeah. We talking about that. Yeah. Which, I mean, it's, you know, it, it goes back to is the harm,

or, you know, is there a reprobble harm? And for good, it really, Gooch was the best case because he was what, 20th in the standings and actually probably would have locked up all the majors for next year if he would have just been able to tee it up. But the judge is saying you took that into consideration and you took a lot of money to not do that. So. And if I may say the elite rate rodeo case seems to be bad news for live in elite rodeo blah blah blah horses in the back. But basically the finding was no irreparable harm where plaintiffs are unable to compete in the PRCA,

blah, blah, blah, because they are owned and are competing professionally in competing era. Again, these are two different rodeo leagues or whatever, but arguably at a higher level of competition and which they claimed will lead to an increased exposure to fans, improved ability to extract sponsors, better health, and longer careers. Basically, all the things that live is promising, it sounds like has unfolded in a precedent case of elite rodeo. Yeah, I read that case this afternoon,

and it's an interesting comparison because like you said, it does emphasize a lot of the same things that the live players are emphasizing. Not the least of which is that they're earning more money and they're competing less, and that was the exact, well theoretically competing less. And that was the exact same set of facts in the elite radio case. There's also, I think there's two other cases and talking to some other lawyers, there's

two other cases that kind of, you know, specific to this one and very applicable. The US, or this one, the NCAA versus Board of Regents of Oklahoma What went all the way to the Supreme Court back in the 80s and it was all about TV rights For the NCAA and which can this code of the Supreme Court? A lot of yeah several years from now. There's got to be an adjudication of this case So either a motion for some the parties will file was or called motions for summary judgment Which basically say all the discoveries done? There's no dispute as to what the facts are. It's strictly a legal argument judge.

Please make a decision. And she can either say, I agree with one side or the other, or she'll say, no, I think that there are no facts that this needs to go to a jury, in which case, there would be a jury trial. The jury would render a verdict. Then that verdict can be appealed to the ninth circuit court of appeals, which would take probably another year. And then after that, depending on who doesn't like the outcome there, it can be appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which would take probably another year. And then, after that, depending on who doesn't like the outcome there, it can be appealed

to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court would have to agree to actually look at this case, which they don't necessarily have to do. They can deny a writ of petition for Sergio Rari, which is what's called when you're asking the Supreme Court to do it. God, this is fun. Did you just verse versus PGA tour. Yeah. Well, I want to say the very first thing with the Zoom here was when the, yeah, the clerk was like, Michaelson versus PGA, like, yes, we're off.

Baby, this is gonna be awesome. So, so just just reading through this NCAA versus Board of Regents. It says, uh, the case dealt with television rights to college football games, which were controlled by the NCAA and limited the appearance of university teams in each season. The NCAA believed that their control of TV rights protected live audience, which was disputed by a number of colleges. These larger colleges formed the College Football Association to negotiate television contracts until the NCAA then advised the colleges that they would be banned from all NCAA competitions, not just in football. Then, board of regents of Oklahoma sued

to stop the practice Supreme Court held that the NCAA's actions were a restrained trade and ruled in favor of the universities. So there's that one, and then there's another one, the NFL versus American Needle, which is the headwear apparel company as well. So I haven't read up on that one. Well, and the other thing is that the tour has been sued in antitrust before.

There's a case called Morris Communications versus the PGA tour. And it was a two, as early 2000s case back when the tour, you know, the earlier ages of live scoring on the internet, which has clearly not evolved in the last 18 years. But back then, it was a case about essentially these media companies suing the PGA tour because the tour controlled the shot, well, pretty short link,

but essentially walking volunteer, scoring it, transmitting back to the truck, the truck posting it online, and then doing a live scoreboard and a communication, more communication said, well, that's not fair., and then doing a live scoreboard and a communication, more communication said, well, that's not fair. We have to buy a license in order to do this, and the tour is preventing us from essentially having the ability to also post the live scores.

And there was an antitrust claim there. That was actually in the middle district of Florida and the 11th Circuit. And in that case, the tour actually won on the antitrust claims at the summary judgment stage. Essentially, the court saying, it's okay for the tour to do this legitimately legitimate thing to protect its business interests to, again, prevent free writing your term, which also comes up in the tour's brief in this case.

So it's not like the heaven. That came up in the initial suspension, I think, even. Yeah. So the Tours knows how to, how to argue this. And they have a judge that's sympathetic to their defense. So, you know, you would think the Tours might want to move this thing along as fast as they possibly can to a certain extent. Basically, it looked like the American needle one was, was all about NFL PA or the NFL teams. Can they collude together to grant licenses to say Reebok or fanatics or whomever, or can they each decide upon who they want a license stuff to?

All right. I think that is all the legalese. I think I can handle and probably most listeners can handle, but until next week probably on that one. A couple other items get to before we close out the week. First week of major changes to the OWGR. For those that are not familiar, it is a free riding season over. Free riding season is definitely over. There is no more minimum first place points awarded to weekfield.

So kind of the background on this and something we've been talking about in this podcast for many years now is on a lot of tours specifically on the European tour and the Asian tour. They have a minimum amount regardless of the field strength. You a defaulted amount, minimum amount of 24 points allotted to European tour events to the first place winner, which greatly outpaced the actual strength of a lot of their fields. And we saw basically what that led to

was a bias in the rankings on both the European tour and the Asian tour. This new system is more based on a stroke's gain basis. And the field strength is actually gonna be reflective of everyone that's in the field now, not just a ranking of the top players in the field. And this is another big win for the PGA tour as the Asian tour is going to lose points very fast or not have nearly as many points available, which might be quite important.

As Patrick Reed goes and went and tried to manipulate this week and went and got a T 31 in the international series event or whatever that was on the Asian tour and got he got a T31 in the international series event or whatever that was on the Asian tour and got he got a little bit more points than he actually would have gotten out of the old system ironically but it would have taken he got less points than it would have taken for to finish last of guys that made the cut this week in Memphis and it's not significant in any way and it would be really hard basically so the live guys if they want to try to manipulate and get some world ranking points to Asian tour events, are all going to have to play at the same time and have to do it quickly because they're already falling. And they also don't even have that many highly ranked players to begin with enough to manipulate the fields to get

enough points. But this is a pretty, pretty significant, it's going to have an impact going down the road in terms of how points are given out. And it's quite interesting. I can't remember who I was reading. Somebody wrote an article about Jumbo Zaki. It was Aiman Lynch to the death. He had enough points stacked up on the Asian tour. On the Japan tour?

To where he just, like until he was like 48 or 50, he was like in the top 10 in the world. Right? Something like that. Something that, but greatly outpacing. to where he just like until he was like 48 or 50, he was like in the top 10 in the world, right? Something like that. Something that bit greatly outpacing. Basically, kind of my whole beef with is that you could get very high in the world without actually beating the top players in the world. And that just didn't do it. There should have been like an artificial ceiling or a ceiling of some sort. It just is, it's long overdue to make an adjustment of this kind. Now, is this a very, very bad development for the DP World Tour? Yes, it is.

At the same time, they've been free writing a bit, if you will, on getting way too many points comparative to their field strength. And, you know, I saw some takes flying around of how devastating this is going to be to the fields on the DP World Tour. And to that, I would say, they're not pulling big fields anyways, even with the big points that were available.

Well, and the purses are so small comparatively too. If your option is play for a bajillion dollars to live, play for a shillow to money on the tour or play for virtually nothing in Europe, unless that's your only option, then why is it worth it? It's like it was essentially an off week in Europe this week and the corn fairy, you know, I had a stronger feel. Like almost by double. Yeah. My concern isn't so much about the impact it has on the field.

It's about the impact it has on the connectivity between the PGA tour and the rest of the world or between, you know, the other regions of the world, like the other tours being able to, you know, especially with less, you know, there's like the WGC's essentially going away. These other events going away, it's kind of like, all right, like what are the avenues through which somebody can, you know, advance their career, you know, before they get to the PGA tour, I guess.

And that's where it sounds like. I think it kind of just makes it, not necessarily closed shop, but I mean, I think I saw Megan McLaren tweeing about this, but you know, there's probably some players who don't want to play in America all the time and who would prefer to stay in Europe and and to do those things. And I kind of got to just throw my hands up a little bit on some of this stuff and not

that I disagree at all. And it kind of sucks for people like that. But I think the days of someone just predominantly playing in Europe and becoming a top 10 player in the world are probably over. Like that's probably not going to happen anymore. And which I think there's some negatives to that as well. But I think from a pure competition standpoint, rewarding the best players, I think this is also kind of inarguable.

That's kind of where I net out in that, yeah, is it, is it damaging to a lot of tours, except for the PGA tour? I would say definitely say yes. But at the same time, like, is it the official World Golf rankings job to prop up the Asian Tour and the European tour? It's an acknowledgement of the current reality. Yeah. Right. And that's the crazy thing to me. It's just look at, at how far the whatever you want to call it. DP World Tour European tour. How far they fall in the last decade and especially two decades. Like, you know, I know a lot of this started prior to prior to his tenure, but man, you got to look hard at like Keith Pelley or Scott

Pelley or whatever his name is like. Well, one of those two like he, you know, like, man, like, I think it's probably, it should probably be the end of the road for him. Yeah, it's, I'm not well enough versed in all that to say, but it's very clear things have not gone well for European tour over this time period. But there was the ISPS hand-up mix, which I always want to say Honda mixed.

I don't know if that's the name of it, but the simultaneous men's and women's event between the DP World Tour, the LPGA Tour and the ladies European Tour in Northern Ireland this week, which made for some great TV. Double down the chances of an exciting finish. It was not that exciting on the on the women's side, as Maya, Maya don't call me Arya Stark, wins for the fifth time since September, and gained LPGA torsedats. Did she take it? She could defer until 2023 if she wanted. I don't know if there's a decision. I think I saw a post that she had accepted LPGA. So she's been an absolute killer

on the light of the European tour since. Cowboys, Oklahoma State. That's right. I went and gran played well again as well. The Swedes, the Danes, they're playing well, man. Shout out Lauren Cogland, because she finished T16. Yeah, she was up there, I mean, it fell back a little bit. Not the weekend, she was looking for.

Yeah, a lot of putts in the fall on the weekend. Weird, weird, weird golf course. Yeah. It was tough to watch. Like, there was, it was firm, but narrow, and they were tucking pins everywhere. And weird penalty areas just barely off the fairway. And it was like, it was so narrow off the tee

that you couldn't really shape the ball, or you couldn't really play for an angle, because it was so firm that you just go right through the fairway. And it was just like, it was like watching them try to turn up that, like, just, you know, turn up the dial on a bad architect. Of course, it's a different. And it's like, don't do that. That's not good. So, I mean, again, like, like just turn up the dial on a bad architecture with firmness and it's like don't do that, that's not good.

So I mean, again, like it seems to be an equal opportunity thing in Northern Ireland and Regural Ireland to have the tournaments on bad golf courses. Yes, so. They basically said, oh believe me, we will. Corn fairy results this year. Absolutely no one changed their status in the final event of the year. That's the 25 that we're in are in.

And what we have some time this fall to kind of take a look at. I think overall it was kind of flat this year a little bit. Like there was a lot of, I don't want to call them retreads, but a lot of guys that, you know, just didn't really like that have been on the tour before. They're falling off the tour, you know, Robbie Shelton props to Taylor Montgomery, forgetting and I know he's finished, I think he finished 26. I guess he's in both lists. And the finals last year, uh, Michael Kim.

Yeah, that was all so cool. Mike became a brain of Matthews or two, two big ones to highlight it. Yeah, Justin. Uh, but, but also, I think is dope. Is that dope? Yeah. Marty Doe already. I think there was the most the most the most interesting part was the guys clawing over the top 75, which you know, basically to get into the next three events, the finals events, which local guy filled an old here. Yeah, feeling old Noles got in played his way in this week. So

he said he had a flight book to Boise and a flight book to Jackson. I'm sure that flight that that Boise credits going to be a big one. That's an exact opposite. Little surprised to see Oxhey because was it? Did he win? He won early in the year and was 25 years. Wait, I've deleted board this week and did not get it done this week. It was tough. There's been a few of those here of late, kind of high variance guys. So, uh, yeah, I don't, I'm not, I don't think Oxhey is ready to be down the door on the PGA tour yet. I think he could still use some development. No, but I mean, it's just weird to win on the corn fairy and not, you know, get your

card. Vincent Norman, other suite from FSU, FlushersOnly.com. I'm excited to watch him next year. And then yeah, I guess we this was rumored. We talked about it after the British open, but this was I forget the was it the guardian or the telegraph whoever somebody's been all over it from the beginning finally reported that came Smith. It was during the hearing that the news came out that came Smith is signed with live for over $100 million. Thanks to Cameron Percy. You don't have to timeline of that for the first time.

I was like, I didn't know I was like, I was reported by Cameron Percy. I was like, didn't everybody already know this? But yeah, it's, I don't know. I mean, I've, you know, a bunch of people, oh, your boy's leaving. Yeah, my boy is leaving. It sucks.

I'm not happy about it. I understand leash a little bit more than cam. Leashes probably has, you know, a couple more good years. I don't think Leisha's working too hard in the weight room or, you know, I don't think he's going to be playing well deep into his early 50s. You know, so he's, he's, it makes sense for him to maximize it. It's still sucks. I don't judge those guys as harshly as I do the ring leaders from the beginning of this either. But man, it's tough to square with with cams you know quotes a year or two ago about you know, man like I don't play for the money and I'm just gonna get a bigger fishing boat if I do make more money, you know?

Yeah, and it's what we've been saying over recent weeks. This is a change in basically all the signings that they've had to date. They've not had a player at their peak, you know, potentially number one player in the world that clearly has a ton of great competitive golf in front of them, leave to go play on the circuit. And to that, it is, it's damaging. It's hurtful.

It's not good for what may come after it. And it sucks. There's just no way around it really. It still just feels off to me, like off brand for Cam. And I, you know, it's just super awkward. He gets gonna get asked about it in pressers and he just says, I'm here to win the FedEx Cup. And it just, you know, it's, if you're gonna hear it from me

and not from Cam in Percy, it's like, well, actually Cam and Percy said it and he's right and that's where I struggle a little bit to where in that same, like, you know, at the almost exact same time, like the tour, like they're talking about it in the trial about like basically suspending guys for recruiting other guys or for guys

publicly talking about live and it's like, I know he can't publicly say it. Like you can't go to the FedEx cup playoff and say, yeah, I signed with Lib. I get that, but's like, I know we can't publicly say it. Yeah. You can't go to the FedEx Cup playoffs and say, yeah, I signed with lib. I get that. But it just, I don't know. It's still a little bit shitty to go play the FedEx Cup playoffs. And just bounce just bounce. I mean, I get it. Like these events are lined up intentionally, you know, to or the live events are lined up opposite, not playoff events for reasons. You know, they maybe thought they could

play them. And I guess the way that he would justify it would be that, you know, he's earned. It's like part of his bonuses that have been earned throughout the course of the year with with his open championship win and with his players win and all that. Like, that's, you know, he's earned at least some semblance of however many millions of dollars. It's not to start another legal conversation though, but it's actually probably quite hurtful to live's case that they're signing like the number two plan. Again, if your point is that you're

having a difficult, and I know it's not a live's case, the live plaintiffs case is that the point of it being anti-competitive, but you're able to sign the number two player in the world is seeming contradiction. And you know, I think with Cam too, it's just, it gets down to like he's, he's exactly, he's probably the perfect player. He has the ideal player for live to sign. His best golfer, I feel like, is ahead of him or at least was ahead of him. We'll see how this affects him on that regard. He's extremely likable. He's, he's the reigning players champion like, he's fucking awkward. Is it going to be? If he wins this, oh my, if he wins the FedEx cup, holy shit, man, it's going to be so awkward. But just, you know, like, all right, cool. He's probably like, he's not going to be. I'm close a pro show, a different like of a monahen just smack the trophy off the table.

What? Huh? I think of the camp, the camp stuff. I don't know. It's tough. It's he's kind of on that top five players. Like I, I hoped wouldn't go list because I love watching them play. At the same time, he's now exempted into all the majors for the next, what, five years, the open, essentially, for life. He, you know, it kind of, I don't know what his like childhood loyalty to the PJ tour is, you know, I know obviously grew up watching

the majors. I don't know how closely grew up watching PJ tour golf. But on the flip side, I also, you know, and try and you're probably much closer to this than I am, but just reading between the lines on kind of what changed over the past couple of years, it kind of seems like it's just because he absolutely worked his ass off. And the PJ tour absolutely pushed him to do that. Right. And so I don't, I'm not rooting for this necessarily. I mean, but I could kind of see him being in that category of live guys. It's like, sweet man, yeah, I'm just going to fish a lot more. And like your performance is going to to fall off if that is the case. And he kind of seems like a prime example of somebody that's like, yeah, he is selling at the absolute highest. And I don't know, I mean, we say this about guys all the time. Like, oh, man, they've got another five years and other 10 years. They're just going to keep going, keep going, keep going. I honestly, I'm happy to look like an idiot down the road. Think that if he goes and does

this, like, his best golf is not ahead of him because his whole game is predicated upon working hard and like his, he's, it's all about his intangibles, not necessarily about this raw talent that he's trying to tap into. Who knows? That's what it seems like. I don't know. It kind of just sucks all the way around. I'm just curious to. Like, what, you know, he lives like a mile and a half from TPC Sockress. I mean, less than that. Like, he lives, he lives in mild on the road. He, he practices out there. He, like, he, he runs into everybody at the local coffee shop. I think he's gonna be looking for a public creek membership.

Yeah, well, he'll be able to pinch him in monohanner over there. They're probably not gonna let him in the air. I think he's probably gonna be like, well, shit, I gotta move to Jupiter and play out of metalist or whatever, right? But I think the other thing too is DJ, you brought it up. There's a certain sense and people should all over me when I bring this up, but I think it's a very real thing.

The Australian guys and the South African guys, you're totally right. They have a lot less loyalty to the PGA tour. The PGA tour is an American entity. To a certain extent to where I don't think the PGA tour, I think they've done some things that may have been malicious, but otherwise I don't think that PGA tour, I think they've done some things that may have been malicious, but otherwise, I don't think that there's been a whole lot of instances where they've helped out other tours, right?

Where I think the wrap around schedule thing really hurt the Australian guys. Yeah, those two countries you mentioned specifically have a disproportionately high number of professional, like world-class professional golfers in comparison to the amount of attention that the golf in those countries gets paid particularly that professional and they have their own tours like in those countries and those tours are predominantly played in you know in our winter when these when guys like

came and like i mean i've talked about it about a bunch where like if leash doesn't go and play the shrinners and the cj cup and thezo. Like he's he's rocking up at Sony, you know, 75th on the FedEx Cup list or 150th on the FedEx Cup list and like, feeling like he is up against it and it's not a good way to start the year. And I know that's like, whoa is me, you're making millions of dollars to play golf. But these guys also like, they've most of them have done a good job of going back to Australia in November, December, playing golf down there.

Like, I mean, Adam Scott used to do that every year. Like, he was sharp as fuck going into Capilua every year because he'd been playing, you know, he would play and then he would rest for a while and recharge down there and come back and tear it up on the West Coast swing. So I think there's definitely a certain level of like, you know, I think Cam could go,

like I wouldn't underestimate that like, the guy didn't get to go home for like two years due to COVID, right? Any where I, where I, I don't disagree. I think I, I don't excuse it though, is this is all gonna change. Like next year. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is a specific thing that is gonna go away. So it's not just not a val, maybe they are frustrated with how that's gone over past years, but that's not going to be the case going forward. Totally, totally a valid, you know, a valid thing. But I just think at some point, like the schedule feels more self-contained. Plus, I know that they've said, hey, we're going to have two more events. They're not going to be live tour events, but we're going to have two more events, you know, and so, hey, if Cam goes home, you know, twice a year now for an extended period of time for two or three

months, like that feels like a massive quality of life thing for him. I also think like this is probably going to devolve into not, I think I'm going to develop a certain level of hates too strong of a word, but just frustration and upsetiveness at the people that are going to fight the PGA tour on this. And the live players are going to fight the PGA tour and the live players are just going to go play the other tour. Right. And I think it's the assholes that are going to try to have it both ways and are going to make the shit just crawl through the courts and it be excruciating and trying to double dip is gonna put you in a totally different bracket than like a lot of the live guys that aren't a part of that suit and part of, you know, antitrust claims in the future

and all that, it's kind of like if you guys wanna go do that, go do it, but just, you can't try to tear down and break up the entire PGA tour competitive network along the way. Something this week like Bobo resigned so that, you know, it sounded like he had resigned prior. Yeah. But the fact that he resigned and then more guys got into the

more very final. Yeah, it didn't sound like it was, it was, you know, he did it because of that or whatever. But when you resign, question, like when you resign, do you give up any vested income or any? No. So you're- It's vested.

Yeah. And I believe it's, I don't, DJ, you may be able to speak He vested in come or any. No. So you're... You're vested. You're a bit anxious. I believe it's, I don't, DJ, you may be able to speak to this better, but I know Davis love mentioning because he... He's resigned from the table. Yeah. He didn't play 15 events and his retirement kicked in. So I don't know if their retirement kicks in as of a certain age, plus not playing 15

events or once you don't play 15 events, your retirement starts kicking and you start getting paid off that. But... All right. 15 events, your retirement starts kicking in, you start getting paid off that. But all right, we are, we have now turned this podcast into the two plus hour show, which is going to be tough to sustain going forward, if I may say. But as we, as we approach here at the end of the PGA tour season, it's a whole heck of a lot going on. So I got to say, thank you, Job, for all the work that went into preparing us for this.

Thank you guys. Educating us on everything. Going up legal hour. Going on in the world. Please let us know what your hourly rate is. It's going up after what I saw on the hearing last week. I'm Tuesday. Tell you I don't charge enough. So thank you everyone for tuning in.

We'll be back here at the same time next week. Cheers. Let's get it right club. Be the right club today. Yes. That is better than most. How about in? That is better than most. Better than most. I'm gonna go.

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I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go.

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