There's essentially nothing to blog so, shall we dive in?
I Didn't Get It Anything - In case you were scratching your chin over that sub-head, Geoff has fired up the Wayback Maching:
Ryder Cup weekend marked 95 years since Bobby Jones clinched the "Grand Slam" consisting of the U.S. Open, U.S. Amateur, The Open and The Amateur.
And he even works in a Denny's call-out:
As USA’s team fell seven points behind and Don Rea closed Saturday out by rap-karaokeing to poor souls who just wanted to watch college football in peace, an important anniversary was lost in the Ryder Cup hullabaloo.Saturday, September 27, 2025, marked 95 years since the day Bobby Jones sealed the “impregnable quadrilateral” after winning the U.S. Amateur.His fifth U.S. Amateur victory and second at Merion culminated the 1930 season, where Jones also captured The Amateur, The Open, and the United States Open. George Trevor, a New York Sun writer, invoked “quadrilateral “in describing the potential feat and again after Jones pulled off the impossible.“Atlanta’s first citizen, like Napoleon before him, has stormed the supposedly impregnable ‘quadrilateral.’”When Jones defeated Eugene Homans 8&7 at Merion’s 11th green, O.B. Keeler invoked a bridge term that gave the sports world a simpler label: “Grand Slam.” Tennis adopted the term around 1936. Baseball started using grand slam around 1940. And Denny’s began using grand slam in 1977 to describe a signature breakfast option.
Keeler also invoked Trevor’s creation to describe the feat: “This victory, the fourth major title in the same season and in the space of four months, had now and for all time entrenched Bobby Jones safely within the ‘Impregnable Quadrilateral of Golf,’ that granite fortress that he alone could take by escalade, and that others may attack in vain, forever.”
In one of Grantland Rice’s final pieces for Sports Illustrated, he used both phrases while writing about Jones’ final career highlights.
“Jones beat Espinosa in the play-off by more than 20 strokes. The next year he won the Grand Slam. In the wake of that putt he went on his way to one record that may never be equaled. For, as George Trevor put it, “he stormed the impregnable quadrilateral of golf.”
In honor of the impregnable quadrilateral’s birthday—and since we could also use a cleansing following this year’s Ryder Cup—I cracked open The Greatest of Them All (Davis, et. al), Bobby: The Life and Times of Bobby Jones (Matthew), and Golf is My Game (Jones), to soak up random anecdotes surrounding the greatest single year accomplishment in competitive golf history. Enjoy!
And those papers:
A diadem is a jeweled ornamental headband, or a small crown, worn as a symbol of royalty, power, and distinction. The word comes from the ancient Greek diadēma, which originally referred to a cloth band tied around the head to signify authority. It can also refer to the ornaments or jewels on a crown, or, figuratively, to empire and supreme power.
How do we think that guy would have reacted to the last few years in golf? I can't see him being on board with Signature Events and the like....
Ryder Cup Detritus, Cont'd. - I've been reliably informed that there's no such thing as bad PR. To which the PGA of America says, "Hold My Beer". First, Mike Bamberger, in his conscience of the game persona:
Which would be fine if they still had editors:
The best golf events linger in our minds for all the right reasons. Tom Watson at Turnberry in the hot summer of ’77, Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” on car radios all over the world. Big Jack,Augusta, ’86, as he turned back time. Faldo-Norman, a decade later, a study in sportsmanship. Tiger’s 15-shot win at the Open at St. Andrews, in 2000, a study in superiority. The Presidents Cup in South Africa in 2003, the one that ended in a tie at nightfall. Great Moments in Golf.And then there is this most recent Ryder Cup: Bethpage ’25, lingering for all the wrong reasons.Tom Watson, as a former American Ryder Cup player (four times) and captain (twice), feeling compelled to apologize to the Europeans, our guests, even though he had no direct connection to this year’s event. “I am ashamed of what happened,” Watson said.
Weird lede for sure. Faldo-Norman had to be one of the most surreal days in our little game's history, not one I'd put on Mt. Rushmore. More to the point, Tiger won by 15 at Pebble, not the Old Course, and that Prez Cup where they changed the rules at the last minute isn't exactly Nicklaus-Jacklin.
This is far from his best piece, but he touches on an aspect I only heard through our head professional:
The profane chants by American fans, on the first tee and through the course. A beer tossed (or knocked) in the direction of Rory McIlroy’s wife, Erica. The blanket of litter on this gorgeous public course, part of a vast state park, as litter bins were overloaded and then some. In that, the Ryder Cup brought to mind the New York City sanitation workers strike in 1968. I can recall the mountains of trash in front of my grandparents’ apartment building on the Upper West Side that winter.
I understand that there was garbage everywhere, making Farmingdale look like a third-world country. Remember our discussion of Occam's Razor? never assign to malice what can more readily be explained by incompetence. The PGA of America and the State Park Authority were all over all day beer sales, they just seem to not have made it to the sanitation portion of their To-Do list.
“As a native New Yorker, I feel like I should apologize for what you endured,” I told Rory McIlroy Sunday night. I was actually relieved the Europeans won. The stunning American reversal in Sunday’s singles turned what could have been a European blowout win to a bugs-on-your-skin nailbiter and a 15-13 final tally. The right team won. An American victory would have been a reward for boorish American behavior. It would have encouraged more of the same.“That’s OK — it’s all good,” McIlroy said. His white team shirt was soaked with sprayed Champagne. I first met McIlroy when he was 19. You’re tempted to say you knew then that he was destined for this big life but a career in golf guarantees nothing. “Anyway,” McIlroy said, “you live in Philadelphia now.”Because, you know, nothing like this could ever happen in Philadelphia.The PGA of America is coming to Philadelphia in nine months for its next international golf event, the 2026 PGA Championship at Aronimink, a stately club on Philadelphia’s Main Line (and 10 miles from a new Tiger Woods learning center at Cobbs Creek, a public course in the city limits). This here-before-you-know-it PGA Championship will provide the PGA of America with a chance to trot out all manner of new-and-improved.
A very different event with a very different vibe or, perhaps more accurately, no vibe whatsoever. There will be no issues in a stroke play event, so I really don't know what he's nattering on about here.
Mike throws out some nuggets of interest, but seems not to appreciate the totality:
Ryder Cups are always intense, in their build-up, in their play, in their aftermaths. In a pre-event press conference, Collin Morikawa, a mild-mannered Californian, said this: “I’ll be honest, I think it’s kind of tame so far. I hope Friday is just absolute chaos. I’m all for it. I think it feeds into who we are, as American players and the American team. We want it. We want to use that to our advantage.”No. No, no, no, no, no.Morikawa is a bright young man who knows that words matter. You could say that golf does chaos well, inside the ropes on Sunday afternoons when leaderboards are tight and mistakes kill. Most players are freaking. The greatness of Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods was how still and focused they became when things were going haywire for the other guys. Heightened fan interest stems from this tingly intensity, this particular inside-the-ropes chaos.
Does Collin know that words matter? Fair play, so when he tells us that he owes us nothing, we should take him at his word?
At Bethpage, all 12 American players and their caddies, the captain and his five assistants, plus other team personnel in uniform, could have done way more to silence the hooligans. You raise your arms. You point to the troublemakers. You have a policy by which they are thrown out after their first offense, not just escorted elsewhere. The PGA of America could have had many more crowd-control officers among the fans. It could offer some kind of pep talk on the way in, Austin Powers reciting “Oh, be-have” on an endless reel, something like that.
The PGA of America and the American team got exactly what they wanted. They just didn't want us to understand that this is what they wanted....
They tell us it's the greatest event in golf, but can't be bothered with any proactive crowd control or even having the garbage properly carted away. I'm sorry, why would we expect them to be better at putting together foursomes pairings or even the golf thing.
Good news, kids, we have Eamon Lynch on the case as well:
Lynch: The Ryder Cup needs a new vision in the U.S., and new owners
I expect there to be an impressive body count.
There are two places in golf where confidence often outpaces competence. One is the U.S. Ryder Cup team room, where the gospel of American exceptionalism is preached until the very last moment before it is drowned out by the chants of European fans hailing another victory. The other is the headquarters of the PGA of America, long a wellspring of self-assured guff by a preening officer class, and which was so rudely exposed by the antics of the imbecilic slapnuts at Bethpage Black.Postmortems on the 45th Ryder Cup will focus on the cadaver of Keegan Bradley’s squad. There’ll be revisionist criticism of his appointment as captain, second-guessing of his decisions in the field, head-shaking about the performance of his top players, belly-aching about the "envelope rule" that has been part of the captain’s contract since the ‘70s (now apparently an inappropriate gentlemen’s agreement in an era when gentlemen no longer agree).
As Eamon notes, we can't judge whether the event was a success until we know their objectives:
But the finger-pointing at the U.S. team should wait. More urgent criticism should be squarelydirected at the PGA of America for its shoddy mishandling of the event.If the metric for a successful Ryder Cup is solely commercial, then Bethpage was cause for celebration at PGA headquarters since there were more sponsors than you’d see on a car doing laps at Talladega. Shy of selling access to premium portajohns, every dollar was expertly extracted from the week. If another standard of success is that it be a worthy shop window for the sport, or that competitors and spectators be safe and respected, then Bethpage was an ignominious embarrassment.Last week, the PGA of America finally reaped what it sowed over 12 years since announcing Bethpage as the venue. This Ryder Cup was continuously marketed as the biggest, loudest, rowdiest ever, always carefully couched in language about the "energy" of the New York crowd. The organizers knew exactly what Bethpage "energy" is, and how ugly it can get. They saw it at the 2019 PGA Championship, and at the ’02 and ’09 U.S. Opens (the latter was tamer only because heavy rain doused the douches). Yet the messaging tacitly encouraged boorishness, in effect green-lighting the debacle we saw unfold.
Dousing the douches? So good, although if e had read Mike's piece above, he might have gone with "Dousing the Dicks".
When fans predictably hurled invective (and beer) at players and their families, the PGA of America was slow to respond and impotent when they did. Security planning and enforcement were exposed as woefully inadequate. That put Europeans in the crosshairs and forced U.S. team members to police the gallery in a noble but futile effort to ensure fair play. By the time the first tee emcee was shown the door for leading a vulgar chant of “F—- you, Rory!”, it was painfully apparent that the Ryder Cup has far outgrown the PGA of America’s core competencies.
And what core competencies might those be? Though I disagree slightly, in that they got exactly what they wanted, so isn't that actually a demonstration of a certain kind of competency?
The organization is interested in the Ryder Cup’s revenues but not in its responsibilities. The task force formed after the rancorous U.S. loss in 2014 was all about deferring to the players any matters that could involve public blowback, like choosing skippers, making captain’s picks, and actually winning the Cup. The appointment of Bradley was a change in direction — the buddy system borne of the task force didn’t deliver — but it was a 360-degree change, and returned the team back from whence it began.The U.S. team still operates as it always has: prone to choosing "savior" captains who can rally the troops; reliant on performative theatrics, as though flag-waving and fist-pumping compensate for the absence of a battle plan; lacking the backroom support apparatus that has propelled Europe’s success for the past 30 years; and willfully negligent in applying learnings of what has and hasn’t worked into a proven playbook that’s portable from team to team.
Did someone mention a savior captain? But I completely agree with Eamon that this all the through-line from 2014:
Bethpage ’25 was a sharp reminder for the slow learners of Gleneagles ’14.
Even the liquored boors at Bethpage could write the script for what will now follow — calls for Tiger Woods to lead the team to Ireland in two years, because who has more stature to turn things around? But the U.S. has had plenty of accomplished captains who commanded respect. What it needs is one with a vision for success and the chops to insist it be properly resourced. It needs its Tony Jacklin. If Bradley had a vision, he hasn’t articulated it. More importantly, the PGA of America never asked for it. He was offered the job without a single conversation about how he would execute it.
You'll anticipate where he's headed from his, errrr, header:
Last week laid bare the institutional weaknesses in how the Ryder Cup is administered on this shore of the Atlantic. One of golf’s prime assets was devalued by a garish spectacle of drunken abuse, and more of the same awaits if the PGA Championship goes back to Bethpage in 2033 as scheduled. It’s time the PGA of America forged a revenue-sharing deal with a partner better equipped to realize the potential of its championships, and use the generational wealth from that to fund its core trade association mission of supporting members.Only two entities in golf have the cash reserves to make such an arrangement viable: the PGA Tour and LIV. Only one of them has a measure of organizational competence. The Tour’s new CEO, Brian Rolapp, is a deal maker and has billions of investment dollars to spend, but even he would struggle to dislodge the legions of snouts burrowed deep into the PGA of America’s trough. And such an acquisition would force an awkward reckoning for Rolapp on the Presidents Cup, the existence of which does nothing to aid the U.S. Ryder Cup effort, and could be credibly argued to undermine it.The Ryder Cup is a shop window for the sport, and this one left a lousy impression for prospective customers. The best thing for its long-term future is to hang a sign: “Under New Management.”
The PGA of America has members? Do they know?
Obviously the 1960's divorce that left the wrong PGA owning the professional events is hard to understand today. That said, given the PGA Tour's initiatives the last few years, do we think they'd run a better event?
As unrealistic as it is, I'm just going to enjoy the immense pleasure at the thought of Don Rea marketing the Ryder Cup and PGA Championship to the Saudis. Good times!
Did Someone Mention The Saudis? - I've had an unused Tour Confidential open for some three weeks now, and it'll work nicely with another Eamon Lynch piece. Shall we?
Greg Norman officially announced his departure from LIV Golf, bringing an end to a four-year relationship (three as CEO) in which Norman helped the breakaway league come to life. What will Norman’s LIV legacy be?Melton: He’ll be known for his steadfast commitment to getting the league off the ground. Was he the best CEO? Probably not. But he did an admirable job shepherding the league through its infancy, which counts for something.Bastable: LIV didn’t only need billions of dollars to get off the ground — it also needed a brand-name pitchman to bring credibility to the league and sell the vision. When Jack and Tiger passed, Norman answered the bell. He never felt like a long-term solution for commish or CEO, but he deserves much credit for helping bring across the finish line many of LIV’s first wave of signees.Dethier: I know he’s been in the background for a while now but I still can’t quite wrap my brain around the idea that Norman and LIV are just — done. In my mind LIV is Greg Norman. The league took on his personality; its players took the chip from his shoulder and put it on theirs. Again, I know this has been in the works for a very long time, but the idea of a Norman-less LIV is very, very strange. The league’s legacy will double as his. It’s not clear when that’ll be cemented.
Trying to get my arms around Dylan Dethier's answer, which couldn't be more at odds with my own perceptions. To me Norman was never more than a lightning rod, never a factor on his own. he did what his Saudi masters instructed, and he was a bit of a clown every time he opened his mouth.
As for his assurance that the LIVsters would get World Ranking points? I'm still laughing over the concept of anyone believing the man. Where have they been the last twenty-five years?
But such a subject demands the skillset of Eamon Lynch:
Lynch: Bless his heart! Greg Norman demands thanks for $5 billion bonfire of his vanity
Only $5 billion? Those are rookie numbers....
A man with a messiah complex will always hoist himself upon the cross when faced with abject failure, so there are no surprises in published excerpts of Greg Norman’s non mea culpa interviewwith Australian Golf Digest, which showcased his familiar brand of self-serving drivel that could have been scripted in advance by any toddler with ChatGPT access.“It was hard. It was very draining on me. I was working 100-hour weeks,” he moaned about his tenure as CEO of LIV Golf, just in case anyone assumed torching billions of dollars is a part-time job.The interview shows Norman warming to his favorite topic – himself, and wrongs perpetrated against him: “What hurt me the most was the lack of understanding of why people would judge me and give the abuse they did. That was the thing that bothered me the most, because I’m the type of guy who will happily sit down and talk about things. And if I’m wrong, I’ll admit I’m wrong. But don’t judge me. Don’t judge what LIV was truly all about.”
OK, Greggie, I'll bite, what was it all about? seems it was about $5 billion large, though that's a moving target.
If you're wondering about that five bil:
LIV’s financials have again been laid bare in a report that detailed filings by the U.K.-based LIV Golf, Ltd, which runs the league’s activities outside the U.S. In 2024, it lost $590 million, bringing total losses for the entity to $1.4 billion in three years. That figure does not include losses incurred by LIV’s operations in the U.S. – home to half of its events and most of its high-cost hangers-on – or money set alight in 2025. Conservative estimates suggest the league has burned through well over $5 billion since 2022, and still shows no meaningful revenue or audience traction.
But Norman's self absorption is legendary:
“Mission accomplished,” Norman declared to his interviewer.It’s like watching the embers of the Hindenburg tumble to earth while its designer loudly demands praise for having gotten it airborne and striking a match.With a fourth, fruitless season behind it, LIV Golf is doing what it does this time every year: figuring out what players can be signed from the ranks of little-known rookies or the chronically injured; foraging for stops on its ’26 schedule, which often means poaching venues from the DP World Tour in an effort to bully that circuit into a partnership; fanning rumors about imminent announcements that either never materialize or don’t have any positive impact on its business; and negotiating with soon-to-expire talent it needs to keep on board to maintain the illusion of doubling down when it is merely buying time. All against a backdrop of staggering losses that are only accelerating.
Couldn't happen to a nice bunch of fellows, no?
I'll finish with this:
The sole face-saving hope that exists for LIV is a deal with the PGA Tour, which appears unlikely, or flipping the European circuit out of its strategic alliance with Ponte Vedra. The pressure must be mounting on LIV’s only benefactor, Yasir Al-Rumayyan. Even he must answer for expenditures that increasingly appear like lunacy. But in the fevered world of (past and present) LIV executives and their sycophantic scroungers, believing is seeing. Reality is what one wishes it to be.
But it's the Saudis that have reportedly walked away from the face-saving exit strategy, so what does Yasir do with this pig? But, unlike Eamon, I don't blame his Great White Pilot Fish for the mess, because I never even considered that he mattered.
That'll be it for today and the week. Have a great weekend as Fall finally arrives.
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