Your vibes-only guide to the 10 best golf moments of 2025

While the rest of the world in 2025 was busy ranking players on data and skill and other unreliable metrics, the Vibes-Only Guide was honing in on the instinctive stuff that really mattered. The franchise began at the Masters, where I successfully picked the winner (Rory, ranked No. 41), continued at the PGA Championship when I boldly singled out the unheralded Scottie Scheffler as the most likely winner, got lost in the rough at Oakmont and the U.S. Open, then finished out the major season at the Open Championship as the only pundit in the world to pick out Scheffler a second time (this time in the No. 4 spot). For an encore, I had every player on the winning European Ryder Cup team represented in my list of the top 24 players at Bethpage.

It's been an unbelievably successful, dare-I-say masterful year, so it's no wonder I was asked by my editor to rank the year's best moments using the exact same system of vibes and intuition. Undoubtedly, this will be more accurate than any year-end list you see across golf media, including Golf Digest's own, which will have some overlap but probably lack the incisive emotional intelligence you can only find here at the Vibes Guide. With that said, here's the list: the 10 greatest vibes moments of 2025 in this, the vibe-iest sport of them all.

(Note: Contrary to the individual lists, where player vibes rule the day, here I'm mostly tapping events that stood out as memorable for reasons ranging from goofy to compelling, but that were unforgettable.)

Honorable Mention: Rory at Masters

Sure, fine. A good tournament. We all had some laughs.

10. Shane Lowry swears at—and I do mean AT—three different major courses

Here was Shane Lowry at Quail Hollow for the PGA. Here was Shane Lowry at Oakmont for the U.S. Open. Here was Shane Lowry at Portrush, where they literally painted a mural of him, for the Open. What's wild is that he used the same exact phrase each time: "F*** this place." It's easy to forget because of how his year ended with the winning putt at the Ryder Cup, but Lowry had a rough major year, with two missed cuts and two 40th-plus place finishes. But me? I can't forget, because I was at every one of these majors, and each time the news came through—"Shane Lowry just said 'f*** this place'"—I thought someone had just rediscovered an old clip. But nope, at every major course except Augusta National, he had the same exact three-word sentiment. It's a good thing he refrained at the Masters, because he might not have been alive to do it anywhere else.

9. The Brian Campbell OB-til-it-wasn't shot

OK, look, I won't pretend this was the most memorable thing of 2025, but Brian Campbell winning two events was pretty cool, considering how long he had played without winning. What I can't forget, though, is his first victory, at the Mexico Open, when it came down to him and Aldrich Potgieter in a playoff, and Campbell hit a tee shot that was flaring right and completely doomed … right up until he got a miracle deflection back into the fairway. The tree cover wasn't even that thick! He went on to win the hole and the tournament, and later toasted the tree. It's the luckiest break I can remember seeing in a career-defining moment.

8. Viktor Hovland's self-loathing after a win

I've never heard of a player winning a PGA Tour event and being so bereft of confidence as Hovland seemed to be after the Valspar. His game was in such a shaky state that he contemplated not even coming, and even after he won, he was saying things like this about his swing:

"It's still not great. I'm still hitting the same shots that I have been the whole year, really. But it's just I was able to time it extremely well this week. It felt like every single good shot that I hit I just saved it really well. Because the club is just not in a great place for me coming down. It's just not what it used to be. So I can't really rely on my old feels anymore because the club is in a different spot and I have to change my release pattern to make that work."

As for his chances at Augusta, which was only a couple weeks away at the time? "Some of the shots that I'm hitting, it's going to make it really difficult for me to be in contention at Augusta if I don't rectify that problem, if I don't see the improvements there," he said.

On one hand, it's absolutely wild to see someone so down on his game after literally WINNING an event on the hardest tour in the world, but on the other … he was at least sort of right. The rest of the year wasn't up to his usual standards, and while he got better over the course of it, it just shows how well these guys know their game.

7. Keegan Bradley runs out Harris England and Collin Morikawa for the first time at the Ryder Cup

There has been a moment early in the last few Ryder Cups when something happened that gave a pretty good indication of how things were about to go. At Bethpage, that moment came earlier than usual. If memory serves, No Laying Up was the first to recognize that the English-Morikawa foursomes pairing that Bradley put out in the Friday morning session was the least statistically potent combination possible, according to DataGolf rankings. And with 12 players, there were 132 possible combinations. To have somehow find the worst one was extremely funny, but also worrisome—didn't they have a stats team? How did nobody recognize this? As I wrote at the time, "it almost seemed like a joke." It wasn't, and it was even less of a joke when they were drawn against Tommy Fleetwood and Rory McIlroy. When they lost, 5 and 4, and the U.S. lost the first session 3-1, you could already tell the chances of disaster were high.

6. Ben Griffin's creatine weirdness

Any story that starts like this is one I'm never going to forget:

"Griffin revealed after his final round that he accidentally swallowed a large ‘rock’ of creatine just moments after teeing off, which caused him to become super shaky and led to his disastrous start to the final round. Griffin was six over once the effects began to wear off after three holes."

I'm still dumbfounded by this whole thing. How do you accidentally swallow a "large rock" of something? (Apparently, in his water bottle.) Is there anywhere online that says excess creatine can make you start shaking? Why didn't we question this more? As far as I can tell, Men's Health is the only one who somewhat called him out. Golf somehow manages to give us one or two of these really bizarre stories every year, but this might be the strangest yet.

5. The Wyndham Clark Oakmont letter

One month after having to apologize for a dangerous club throw during the PGA Championship at Quail Hollow, Wyndham Clark reacted to his missed cut at the Oakmont U.S. Open by becoming violent with some clubhouse lockers. However, you'll notice the title of this item doesn't say "Wyndham Clark destroys lockers." It says "the Wyndham Clark Oakmont letter." That's because the best part of the whole story came a month later, when an internal club letter suspending Clark "leaked" to the public. I put "leaked" in quotes because this seems like the kind of thing where membership wanted absolutely everyone to know that they were literally suspending him from the grounds. The fact that he apologized apparently wasn't enough, and Clark was himself surprised that the punishment was made public. Here's what they wrote:

"Reinstatement would be contingent upon Mr. Clark fulfilling a number of specific conditions, including full repayment for damages, a meaningful contribution to a charity of the Board's choosing, and the successful completion of counseling and/or anger management sessions."

Some people will say "fair," but the demanding tone of the letter and the fact that it was communicated in a way designed to go public is pretty brutal. The lesson, I guess, is don't mess with Oakmont.

4. Tommy's overnight zero to hero act

I can remember a time when Tommy Fleetwood, far from being the colossus that we know him as today, was a shrinking violet and an object of pity. I can remember because it happened roughly three months ago. Remember when he three-putted and lost to Keegan Bradley at the Travelers? Remember when he faded in the face of Justin Rose in Memphis, and then had another fourth at the BMW a week later? In those melancholy days, he was the almost-man, doomed to play second fiddle for the rest of his career.

And then … he transformed like Gandalf into the uber version of himself. All it took was one win at the Tour Championship, and suddenly he was off, playing the Ryder Cup in beast-mode, winning in India and finishing top three in his final two events on the Race to Dubai. This man is totally transformed, in perception as much as anything else. He's winning a major in 2026, provided the man in the next item doesn't just take them all.

RELATED: Rory McIlroy's NSFW take on Tommy Fleetwood's finish to 2025

3. Scottie Scheffler goes existential at Portrush

There was always a sense with Scheffler that there was more depth to him than at first glance, but you had to look hard to find it, because he was pretty content to fly below the radar … at least as much as that's possible for the greatest player in the game since Tiger Woods. He always seemed smart, and he gave good answers, but you wouldn't catch him saying anything that really stopped the presses, and on the hot button issues like LIV, he took a back seat to more public figures like Rory.

That all exploded on the Tuesday before the Open began at Portrush, when out of nowhere he gave the most interesting presser of the year. There's far too much to cover in this short blurb, so I encourage you to read what I wrote at the time (it was one my favorite posts to write in 2025), but the basics are that he spoke openly on how the satisfaction of winning a tournament—even a major—wears off quickly, and leaves you feeling bewildered and unsatisfied. His ultimate point was that fulfillment has to come from elsewhere, but it's worth remembering how risky it is to say something like that as the world's No. 1 golfer, since it invites misinterpretations. "He's ungrateful!" "He's lost focus!" etc. etc. etc. Scheffler soldiered on through it all, won the Open, and stuck to his guns in the aftermath when it came up again. It was tremendous.

2. Rory gets nailed for DriverGate at Quail, while Scottie goes free

It seems like 15 years ago now, but coming off his Masters win, pretty much everyone (including me) thought Rory would smoke the field at Quail Hollow, arguably course that he’s most comfortable with in the universe. Instead, he seemed to be in a terrible mood all week after the tournament officials declared his driver non-conforming during a pre-championship test. It turned out this was a very normal process, but everybody involved went about it in the weirdest way possible. First, the policy of not commenting on those tests became fully absurd when the news leaked, and they still kept mum. That put the onus on Rory and his team to comment, which was unfair, but he made the mistake of skipping media on Thursday and Friday, which only made the story blow up more. People were asking questions like, "was his driver illegal at Augusta? Does it invalidate the Masters win?"

By the time everyone spoke and we figured out that this was normal and that 50 players had had their drivers tested, it had already ruined Rory's week. Incredibly, after Scheffler won the tournament, he acknowledged that he too had had his driver come up nonconforming that week, forcing a late switch. By then, though, everybody knew what it meant, and nobody seemed to care even a little. In other words, Rory took the full brunt, and Scottie skated. Though to be fair, if anyone deserved to catch a break on the legal side of things during a PGA Championship, it was Scheffler.

1. Keegan Bradley runs out Harris English and Collin Morikawa for the SECOND time at the Ryder Cup

If this looks familiar, it's because the No. 7 entry in this post was the first time Bradley put out his worst possible statistical pairing. He opened himself up for serious criticism—and took a lot of it—when the duo was dusted by Fleetwood and Morikawa. But if that felt like a mind-blowing self-own, nothing could compare to the reaction on Friday night, after the second session with the U.S. trailing by three points, when the Saturday mornings foursomes pairings were announced … and there they were again. In the media center at Bethpage, there was a moment of shocked silence, and then a truly cacophonous wall of sound. He had done it! He had done the unthinkable!

The funny thing about this is that it was a thoroughly modern spectacle. Twenty years ago, we might still have found this pairing weak, but only in the analytics era could we actually see just how bad it was. Bradley had no rationale for the press beyond "we're sticking to our plan," and adding an extra dose of humor was the fact that they had to play Tommy and Rory again … and of course they lost again. There were a lot of mistakes made on the American side that weekend, and we keep rehashing them up to the present, but none stand out quite like the sheer madness of making a bad analytics mistake, getting called out very publicly, and then somehow repeating it.