Welcome to the sixth installment of GHIN & Tonic. Our hope is that this space serves as a callback to the spirit of the original writing that appeared on No Laying Up dot com: unvarnished, wide-ranging, and somewhat random, but with golf as the loose thread. Some will be more golf-heavy, some golf-light - think TrapDraw Podcast plus some golf sprinkled in. We’ll pass the ball around on these on a weekly basis and all will be personal in nature.
GHIN
FIRST NINE
We’ve been talking a lot for the last two years about how lucrative the rewards of professional golf should be, and whether disruption has been good for the PGA Tour. This week marks one year since the framework agreement between the PGA Tour and the PIF was announced on CNBC, and I’m not sure we’re any closer to an actual deal than we were a year ago.
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It’s been an exhausting but necessary debate, even though I doubt too many minds have been changed. We still don’t know how it’s going to play out, two years in, so we’re going to keep talking about it and arguing about it.
I hope we find some time, in the midst of all that, to talk about the loneliness creep that’s happening amongst professional golfers.
Despite all the glamour and the money the game dangles in front of its players, a number of them have been opening up in recent years, describing how isolating the game can be. Scotland’s Robert (Bob) MacIntyre brought it up recently at the PGA Championship, revealing that while moving to Orlando had been necessary professionally, it had not done wonders for his mental health.
“It's just a different environment on the PGA Tour. It's very much business,” MacIntyre said. “There's not as much chatting that goes on. In Europe, we travel the world. You know what I mean, we go to Asia, the Middle East. We go all over the place. When you're in these countries and you don't speak the local language, you kind of have to stick together. There's just a group of guys that I kind of hang about with in Europe that make life on the road a lot easier. Out here, it's me and my girlfriend.”
MacIntyre was so miserable during one stretch earlier this season, he decided to take a break and go back to Oban, his hometown, where he barely touched his clubs for three weeks. It was like recharging his body and his mind. When he returned to the United States, he played his best golf of the year at Valhalla, finishing T-8, his best showing at a major in three years. It made him question whether the excellent practice facilities at Isleworth in Orlando, and the proximity to PGA Tour events, was worth the trade-off.
“Look, when I can be around friends, family, people closest to me, people that actually care about me, they speak to me as Bob the human rather than Bob the golfer,” MacIntyre said. “I think that's when I'm at my happiest, when I'm not talking about golf, golf, golf. Life is actually more important than what I'm doing out here.”
You probably know what happened next. MacIntyre decided he’d try to bring a piece of Oban with him on Tour, if only for a week. So he called up his dad and asked if he’d caddie for him in the Canadian Open. MacIntyre won for the first time on the PGA Tour, and when he and his father cried during their post-round interview with CBS’ Amanda Balionis, it gave us one of the best moments in golf this year.
“If in doubt, phone dad,” MacIntyre said.
MacIntyre’s words echoed something Lexi Thompson said in her retirement speech at the U.S. Women’s Open.
“Being out here can be lonely,” Thompson said, before getting choked up. “I think, especially with what’s happened recently in golf, people don’t realize a lot of what we got through as a professional athlete. We’re not perfect. We’re humans.”
It also reminded me of something Kiradech Aphibarnrat said 18 months ago, when he was trying to get back onto the PGA Tour after losing status. He said he didn’t realize how lonely he would feel playing professional golf in America when he became the first player from Thailand to earn his PGA Tour card in 2018-19.
“I think the tough and difficult thing for me is to be only one single Thai player on the PGA Tour,” Aphibarnrat said. “I don’t have any friends. I mean, Thai friends. So we keep speaking English. Not in my language. To be honest, I feel a little bit lonely and homesick sometimes. My family is not here. … When you’re playing good, you’re not celebrating with anyone. When you’re playing bad, you’re staying with yourself again. You just can’t explain anything to anyone.”
It also made me think about Grayson Murray, and how he understood feeling isolated better than just about anyone. It’s one of the reasons he reached out to other professional golfers if he heard they were struggling with depression, addiction and anxiety. He would send them messages of encouragement, even if he’d never met them, just to share that he knew what it was like to feel alone.
I don’t have any profound wisdom to offer here, or any solutions. I think mental health is essential to talk about, but it’s also complicated. Is homesickness the same as loneliness? How much can depression be attributed to environment and circumstance versus a chemical imbalance in the brain? I’m sure there are some valid opinions in both camps, but in my experience, people who think there are easy solutions to complex problems are usually selling something.
One of the tragedies of Murray’s death is that he did have people who loved him, and he was brave enough to keep asking for help, even when he felt like the PGA Tour was letting him down. There are a lot of valid criticisms of Jay Monahan and the job he’s done as PGA Tour commissioner, but I do think he deserves credit for trying to help Murray. In 2021, Murray wrote a series of tweets expressing his frustrations with the Tour, saying no one had ever responded when he asked for help dealing with addiction and anxiety.
“When Grayson said that, I called him right away,” Monahan said. “Over the last several years, I spent a lot of time with him. I wanted to understand what we could do, in his estimation and his opinion, to help everybody else out here. We’ve made a real point of focus and emphasis. We’re proud of the programs we have in place to support our players. I’m devastated by Grayson’s loss. The conversations I had with him over the last year, I learned an awful lot from him. He was very open and transparent with me. I found inspiration in that.”
This shit is hard, and no two people’s situations are the same. But it’s important to keep talking about all of it, because at least that makes us feel like we’re not alone in our struggles.
SECOND NINE
My colleague Tron Carter wanted me — in this space — to talk about what my five favorite golf courses are in the world.
After thinking about it for a few days, I feel like the kid who goes off to college and is afraid to name his five favorite bands during a late night dorm conversation because he knows everyone else in the room is way cooler than he is. They’ve been passing around sophisticated playlists or attending concerts for years, and I’m just trying to build a record collection. When your friends have played Pine Valley, Royal Melbourne, The Old Course, Augusta National, Cypress Point, Tara Iti, Sand Hills, Royal County Down, Muirfield, Merion, Pebble Beach, LACC, Kingston Heath, Riviera and you’ve played zero of them, you can’t help but feel like a poser trying to put your own list together.
That said, I suspect my experiences are more in line with the majority of our audience. One of the reasons Tourist Sauce is NLU’s most enduring franchise is it gives viewers a window into places they might not have access to, either because of financial limitations or a lack of personal connections.
Favorite, of course, can mean different things. There is something a lot more personal about calling a course a “favorite” as opposed to trying to list the “best” courses you’ve ever played, which is why I think the music analogy still works. “Into The Mystic” by Van Morrison is probably my favorite song ever recorded, but saying it is one of the best songs ever written is a subjective take, one that can’t be proven right or wrong, just shared.
So with that in mind, here are my five “
Source: https://nolayingup.com/blog/ghin-and-tonic-vol-6-kvv
