50 Things That Changed Golf

If you wanted a worse title pun than last week, in the words of Memphis Music Hall of Famer Roy Orbison, "baby, you got it." The PGA Tour playoffs are officially underway, and Digest's three foremost Ryder Cup obsessives are back to talk about what went down in Bluff City. Is Lucas Glover bludgeoning his way onto the team one win at a time? Has JT's stock gone down as he watches from the sidelines? Did the Euros have as bad a week as it looked from the outside, and is there any clarity on the bubble for either team? We're dishing out the barbecue-grade takes today as the Cup train rolls on.

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We're on the verge of the playoffs, but even with the DP World Tour in a two-week break, we had some red-hot action at the Wyndham, where the Tour regular-season finale saw at least seven hopefuls from both teams teeing it up. We're here to talk JT's surge, Bryson's 58, and where they (and everyone else) sit as the bubble watch heats up. Plus, let's gild the lily: Each of the lads chimes in on what they'd change about the Ryder Cup if they had absolute power. (And they should!)

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On paper, it might look like nothing special—another European win on home soil in the Ryder Cup. But drill down, and you'll see something revelatory in Gleneagles. This was the Ryder Cup that took decades of American strategic weakness and decades of European guile and blew them out to epic proportions. It's no coincidence that the end of this Ryder Cup saw Phil Mickelson publicly challenge Tom Watson; this was the week that forced the U.S. to face all its own shortcomings, and that process wasn't pretty. Dive deep with us in this examination of everything Paul McGinley did right, and how the web he wove ensnared the Americans ... but perhaps woke them up, too.

Thanks to Ivan Ross for producing the introduction.

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The Sambuca Boys are back after conducting some on-site field reporting at Royal Liverpool. Harman's in, the Euros are rising (Shane's risk of becoming Luke-Pilled is currently "very serious"), and we're here to see where each team stands after the last major of the year. As July changes to August, Ryder Cup momentum becomes real, and the lads are here to guide you through the start of the endgame.

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Less than a year after the death of his best friend Young Tom Morris, Davie Strath came to St Andrews hoping to win his first-ever Open Championship. He'd come close before, but while Strath was considered one of the three best golfers of his generation, and had been a sort of pioneer in giving up everything for a career in the very new field of professional golf, there was also something dogging his reputation: A tendency to choke in the big moment. That tendency would rise again, but that's far from the only thing marking the 1876 Open as the single strangest major championship ever contended. Played over one day in late September, it's a forgotten oddity in the tournament's storied history, and remains as vibrantly bizarre today as it must have seemed to those who watched it play out almost 150 years ago. In this week's Local Knowledge, we examine the singular career of Strath, the tragedy of his life's end, and that wild day when he had his best, and last, chance to etch his name in the history books.

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The fate that has befallen Young Tom Morris, the greatest golfing talent of the 20th century, is to be known, but only in outline. His singular talent is measured today by lines on a Wikipedia entry, or the ancient scrawling of a name on the claret jug, and if anything, his star has dimmed with the passing years. But when he died on Christmas Day in 1875, just 24 years old, he left the world of golf utterly transformed by a career that ranks with the most spectacular of all time. Young Tom Morris didn't just win with absurd regularity; he transformed his sport, ushering in the era of the celebrated professional, and paved the way for the economic structure of the modern game. To study him in-depth, 150 years later, is to bring color to the massive talent and heartbreaking end of the sport's first superstar.

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On the first-ever Ryder Cup Radicals, Shane, Joel, and Luke jump into the deep end with a discussion of the LIV Golf imbalance—the US can have LIVers in the Ryder Cup, Europe cannot—and whether Zach Johnson has an obligation to level the playing field by leaving them out. Then it's on to discussions of the new closed circuit US Captaincy Conglomerate, LLC, Europe's key revival of the Hero Cup, and important Italian-centric concepts like Sambuca, Burratta, and the beauty of the word "Madon!" Brief attempts are also made to solve the mystery of the identity of Yannik Paul; no conclusions are drawn.

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The concepts of honor and integrity in golf are inseparable from the inevitability of cheating. The former are prominent because the latter is so easy—when self-policing is the best hope for fair play, you better have a code of honor to work as a secondary enforcement. In 1955, at Deepdale Country Club on Long Island, that code seemed to fail when two unknown sandbaggers won a tournament and took home thousands of dollars thanks to an associated Calcutta auction. In fact, the code had not failed: A crisis of conscience led to a confession, the scandal became national news, and the USGA took action. For the two men at the heart of it, the fallout was swift and severe, and lasted a lifetime. On this episode, we look at golf's most notorious amateur scandal and the aftershocks that transformed the amateur game.
 

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When Johnny Miller shot his famous 63 in the final round at Oakmont in 1973, it instantly became one of the most staggering achievements in the history of major championship golf. For the USGA, it was also something else: an insult. Oakmont was supposed to be one of the toughest courses in the world, and the U.S. Open was supposed to be the toughest test in professional golf. What Miller did undermined that identity, and when the Open came to Winged Foot one year later, the one certainty was that it wouldn't happen again. From the tournament committee to the club members, the mission was to return the U.S. Open to its place of prominence by all means necessary. The course the players encountered that summer was a monster, and they were its victims. What happened next can only be described as carnage; this week on Local Knowledge, we look at why it happened, and what it tells us about America's national open and the people who run it.

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This May marks the 20th anniversary of Annika Sorenstam playing the Bank of America Colonial at Colonial Country Club, where she became the first woman in more than 50 years to play with the men on the PGA Tour. That week was highly anticipated, stressful, and loaded with controversy as more than 300 reporters, hundreds of photographers, and thousands of fans flocked to Texas to see her play. The reactions to her inclusion ranged from supportive to hostile, and though she handled herself admirably both on and off the course, it's no surprise that she never did it again. In a way, Sorenstam was playing for the entire LPGA Tour and women's golf in general that week. She wasn't the first. Two women before her, and three after, also took their turn playing with the men, and the story of those women is one of courage, triumph, failure, and a no small amount of sexism. This is the story of the six women in history who teed it up with the men on the PGA Tour.

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