WM Phoenix Open

TPC Scottsdale (Stadium Course)



    Golfpocalypse

    I was the world's most annoying teenage golf course maintenance employee

    January 30, 2025
    1241329397

    Boston Globe

    As far as summer jobs go for a middle class kid in upstate New York, working the maintenance crew at a private golf course had to be the absolute worst decision I could have made. I was the youngest person on a crew of lifers, I wasn't licensed (or frankly, trusted) to drive any of the machine mowers or even the bunker raker, which left only the grunt work—my job was to use a push mower or weed whacker to trim all the areas the mowers couldn't get. And which areas were those? Tee embankments and other steep hills. So for eight miserable hours on hot summer days, I would walk sideways on hills trying to control an absurdly heavy push mower while dodging golfers who would yell at me if I delayed them by a millisecond. (Yes, I hated them.) Was the mower at least self-propelled, you ask? Ha, ****ing ha. We did have one of those, but the other grunt on staff was older so he got dibs. I got the clunker.

    This went on for two years, and in the third summer, we had a drought, which meant that for eight hours I stood with a garden house watering greens all day (the sprinklers, you see, could not be turned off and on between golfers). By the end of every shift, my hand ached from squeezing the nozzle, I was somehow both soaking wet and extremely hot because I had to wear a rain coat, and at lunch I ate alone on a Workman while everyone ignored me. (On my first day, the boss had for some ungodly reason told the other workers that I was one of the best students in my class, which could not have been more perfectly calculated to isolate me, forever, from everyone there.) The best moments of my day were when I could drive to an isolated patch of woods for a few minutes and stare at the trees. I begged for August and the purportedly "hard" two-a-day football practices that would finally free me from this hell.

    Now, what do you do for fun when you hate your job, your co-workers, and, at least temporarily, life? Well, in my case, I found my release valve the second summer at the club. On the back nine, there's a dogleg left par-5 that goes downhill from the tee, but then steeply uphill on the approach. The landing area is invisible from below, and the cart path takes you into the woods on the right before you emerge at the green. For long moments, the green is totally hidden from view ... and you might see where this is going.

    In the afternoons, when I had a free moment, I would park the Workman on the street, walk through the woods, and wait for a group to hit their approaches. Then, unseen from below, I'd walk to the green, pick up one ball, and place it in the hole. Then I'd walk back to the woods, watch the reaction from a safe distance, and try not to die laughing. I didn't do it often—I was smart enough to know better—but it was the occasional little thrill I needed to survive the worst days.

    Let's pause for a moment. I didn't play golf at the time. I play a lot of golf now. What was hilarious to me then as a punk teen would be infuriating to me now from the other side. If I were chasing a good score and someone pulled that, I'd probably spend the rest of my life tracking down and finally killing them. It is simply unconscionable. But at the time, for an overheated miserable high school student praying for the mercy of the school year? Up against the theoretical upper crust enemy who would gripe at me if I forgot to turn the mower off the instant they reached the tee box? This was the height of comedy.

    The funny thing is, I have these really vivid memories of moving the ball, but very few memories of the players' reactions. As best I can recall, most of them actually knew it was BS and they hadn't made an eagle/albatross, and were just pissed off. The only reaction I really remember came when a player got so mad he went and complained to the club, it got back to maintenance, and though I steadfastly denied any knowledge, it was clear that my pranking days were over. The last year I worked there, they hired a kid younger than me to join the crew and paid him more. I quit on the spot, drove to the beach for a week of vacation, then got a job working as a prep cook at a popular restaurant with a tyrant owner and a motley crew of drug addicts. It was a million times better.

    FIVE TOUR THOUGHTS, JANUARY EDITION

    2195371674

    Jennifer Perez

    1. There's one word for the January slate on Tour, and it's exactly 14 letters:

    Ooooooooooooof.

    Just, oof. Joel Beall said many of the things I would want to say about the slow play conundrum here, and the experience of watching these events has been an absolute slog. When even your loyal foot soldiers on the broadcast are calling you out, you have a massive problem. It was kind of fun watching Hideki Matsuyama set a scoring record at the Sentry, but since then it has dragged to an insane degree. And here's the thing—putting slow play aside for a moment, you absolutely need better players in these events. Granted, we all got unlucky with Scottie's injury, but where's Rory? Where's Xander? You're already depleted in the superstar arena thanks to LIV, and while I understand that the best players can't play every single week, you've got to try to get them out there on a rotating basis even in the down months.

    2. Speaking of stars, there is always talk of trying to build future superstars, but it hit me recently that superstars in golf are created exactly one way, with very very few exceptions: By winning a major. Who's the last player you can think of that reached any level of stardom just by his Tour results? I think the answer is Rickie Fowler, and that took a wild confluence of personality and brilliant marketing. Tiger won almost immediately, but you could throw him in the bucket as someone whose fame was sky-high even before he captured the '97 Masters, and again, it was a really rare combination of personality, hype and advertising. Maybe Phil or Sergio sorta/kinda got there too before their first majors. Other than that, you have to look long and hard to find an example, and one does not exist in the modern game. Glance at the OWGR top ten, and the four players without a major are Ludvig Aberg, Tyrrell Hatton, Viktor Hovland, and Tommy Fleetwood. Granted, those are significant names in the golf world. But they're not transcendent; show their pictures to an average American sports fan who doesn't follow golf closely, and they couldn't put a name to a face. All which is my way of saying that the Tour is at the mercy of the majors when it comes to building stars, and they could really use one of these promising young guys to bag a big one soon.

    3. Going back to the pace of play issue, one thing Joel didn't hit on in his excellent piece is that staying the same exacerbates the problem. One rejoinder I hear often from Tour defenders is that the pace has not actually gotten worse with the years. That's fine, but you know what has gotten worse? Our attention spans. With 80 million other entertainment options, from YouTube golf to watching a guy make an obstacle course for squirrels in his backyard (it's good), a product that just hits its current stagnant metrics is going to regress. Running in place is going backward in 2025. Baseball got this—game length might have been getting longer, but only gradually so, but they knew that modern audiences demanded a drastic turn in the other direction. Hence, the pitch clock.

    4. Speaking of other options, the TGL this past week was good, and miles better than the first three. I want to write something more comprehensive soon, but my basic thought after the ups and downs of the first four weeks is that the whole thing works best when the surroundings are goofy, but the players take it very seriously. Having Keegan Bradley and Tom Kim dueling it out was so valuable on Monday night; you need guys who care and aren't afraid to spice it up. And yes, as many people prognosticated, a close match is way better. Any rules tweaks to keep it tight would probably be a good thing.

    5. One last question, though, on all this PGA Tour "sky is falling" rhetoric: Why do we care this much what happens in January? Why do we care if ratings are low in a niche sport during the height of football playoff season? Yes, slow play is a serious consideration, but a lot of this goes back to a thread I made a few weeks ago about everyone in pro golf losing total perspective on what this game actually is. The big money that has flooded the sport and the endless rhetoric about growth has fooled us into thinking that golf is bigger than it actually is—at least in theory, or in some perfect world where all leaders make the perfect choices. But folks, it ain't the NFL! It's not even the NHL! I want product improvements as much as the next guy, but what I want most of all is a tightening of the belt when it comes to what we actually expect.

    THE ABSOLUTE IRONCLAD LOCKS OF THE WEEK

    2195192098

    Cliff Hawkins/TGL

    Golfpocalypse is not a gambling advice service, and you should never heed anything written here. Better picks are here.

    Career Record: 7-50. I ended 2024 by picking Aaron Rai to win the Hero World Challenge, which is a pretty perfect summary of how things went. But my confidence remains inflated past any reason, which is why I expect to be perfect in the next year.

    At Pebble, I'm riding with Justin Thomas. It's a Ryder Cup year, and you know this man is going to mix it up, either by playing his way on the team or doing enough to spark some drama with Captain Keegan, who will have to decide between sweet, sweet revenge, or being the latest victim of the man's unyielding charisma. Ryder Cup captains simply cannot resist him! JT just took second at the American Express, and it's time for a breakthrough.

    At the LPGA Tournament of Champions, gimme Nelly Korda. She's the odds-on favorite, and I figure if she has a winter/spring like the one she had in 2024, I can make bank just picking her every week. Here at Golfpocalypse, there is no need for gambling integrity.

    At the Bahrain Championship on the DP World Tour, I just saw a tweet about Yannick Paul making an ace (I'm writing this on Wednesday morning), and cheating is encouraged with these picks, so, yes, Yannick Paul.

    Finally, at LIV Golf St. Vincent and the Grenadines, I'm going with Swedish sensation Klööp.

    THE "DUMB TAKE I KIND OF BELIEVE"

    There should be an app when you play recreationally with strangers, and on it you can indicate how much or how little you want to talk during the round, like on Uber where you can politely say "leave me alone" to the driver via phone. Hell, you could even sync up the people with similar preferences! I'm going to stop there because the more I type, the more I hate the entire concept. This is the quickest of my many self-disavowals.

    READER EMAIL OF THE WEEK

    The question was, what's the most annoying thing you do on the golf course, and with apologies to readership, our email this week is actually a Slack DM, and comes from Digest's resident Scottish golf sicko Jamie Kennedy. Take it away, Jamie:

    My family and friends mock me for never giving a straight answer to "What club you hitting?"They expect:

    • "7"
    • "Either a 5 or 6 iron"
    • "It's a perfect wedge"

    They get:

    • "Gonna try a sawed-off 6-iron that fades back into the wind"
    • "I'm thinking a wee Luke Donald 8-iron here, landing just past it"
    • "It's probably a 6-iron, but I'm feeling a 4-iron."
    • "I'm going to sling a wedge and try and get an extra 5 or 6 out of it

    I actually love this specificity, and while I don't know what a "Luke Donald 8-iron" means, I'm going to start saying it on the course all the time.