Three down to USC’s Brianna Navarrosa in the semifinals of NCAA match play, Zhang was in an unusual spot when she arrived at the 14th green. Her approach had settled 20 feet away from the hole. Navarrosa had her against the ropes. Zhang looked exhausted, and Stanford — the defending champions — was on the verge of giving up back-to-back points.

Not so fast. She buried the putt for a birdie, a sign of life Stanford desperately needed. A rare reaction followed. Zhang smiled as she walked over to scoop up her ball.

The college career of the greatest amateur in history still had a heartbeat.


As Zhang continued onto the closing stretch, USC would go up in two matches and needed one last point to advance to the NCAA final. The defending champs had only one point on the board, leaving Zhang as the anchor match. When she and Navarrosa tied No. 15, suddenly, No. 16 at Grayhawk Golf Club became do or die.

All day, Navarrosa’s steely determination and ball-striking had put Zhang on the ropes

 But on the Par 3 16th, Zhang channeled something magical, hitting a gorgeous tee shot that landed softly and settled to three feet.


Navarrosa’s sat 10 feet away. Zhang looked like she was once again on the verge of something spectacular, something only she could conjure up. She had done this countless times throughout her career. But on this day, no putt seemed too big for Navarrosa, who never trailed in the match. The USC junior drained it with ease, and wouldn’t let up on 17th. The 157th-best player in the world closed out the No. 1-amateur in the world, 2&1.


Tear-stricken and emotionally exasperated, Zhang explained where she went wrong. “Everything caught up to me, the fatigue…when I was dialing in my yardages, trying to figure out my swing, nothing was going well. Felt like everything was a little bit of blur.”

The match was over – and so was Rose Zhang’s amateur career.

Even before the result of the National Championship, I’d been dreading the day I had to write this story.


Not because I don’t want Rose Zhang to turn professional. I think it’s the natural next step. But because we’d have to speak about Rose Zhang’s amateur career in the past tense, and I know how lucky I’ve been to witness a GOAT in real-time.

When I found out Rose was turning professional, I wasn’t surprised. We were on a video shoot in Palo Alto, and she was talking about her plans. She wanted to relocate to Las Vegas and finish up her degree at Stanford. At 25, I envied this 19-year-old for myriad reasons, but mostly at how settled she was in these plans. There was zero fear of the future in the way she spoke. Instead, there was a deep sense of security in what she had, even if it wasn’t everything she wanted.

Her contentment would be tested a few months later when she almost unraveled in the final round of the Augusta National Women’s Amateur, a tournament she’d quietly coveted since its inception. But when she emerged victorious, it seemed like yet another obstacle overcome by the greatest amateur in history. Now, all that was left was to defend her NCAA title and try to lead an injury-riddled Stanford squad to a team championship.

First, she recaptured her own glory, becoming the only woman in NCAA history to do so. Then she ran out of gas, knocked off by the brilliant putting of Navarrosa, which felt like an abrupt end to the perfect story.

When she walked off the 17th green at Grayhawk Golf Club, still in a blur, she was met by Anne Walker, her coach and confidant for the last two years. The two shared a tearful embrace. A nearly 36-hole day after a week spent in desert golf will do that to a player. But so will a sudden end to a career that, in Zhang’s world, would have resulted in another team championship to the program that gave her so much.

“There’s somewhat of a soul-filtering process in the pool of people that qualify for Stanford athletics,” says Walker. “They already have some built-in soft skills. They’re hardwired to show up every day, be determined, be ambitious and give their all at whatever they’re doing.”

A 4.6 high school GPA and the No. 1-ranked amateur will make you a shoo-in at any golf program.  But there’s no guarantee that such a player will be successful. Unless you are Zhang and win immediately – and three in a row, at that. In two years, she won 12 times in 20 starts, eclipsing names like Tiger Woods, Maverick McNealy and Patrick Rodgers to become the winningest player in school history, and matching Lorena Ochoa’s feat. Out of all 20 events, a total of only 31 players would beat Zhang.

That would be an incredible career if it ended there. But the Rose Zhang experience did not exist in a collegiate vacuum. It started even before she even signed her letter of intent to Palo Alto when she downed defending U.S. Women’s Amateur champion Gabriela Ruffels with an injured left wrist. In the last year she was eligible, she won the U.S. Girls’ Junior in the summer preceding college – becoming the first person to win both in reverse order.


Then came the Tiger comparisons. The NIL deals. The media attention. A near-dizzying warp-speed ascent, she’d remain the de facto No. 1 for the rest of her college career. And on that trail she’d encounter multiple obstacles – burnout, injury (an unlucky weight landed on her left foot, leading to a wonky start to her freshman spring) and a long sought-out journey to independence.

“In college, you have to live on your own and make your own decisions,” she said weeks after winning her first NCAA individual title. “That was when I realized what was the most important thing for me, rather than having other people tell me what’s best for me.”

Much of Rose Zhang’s epic career has been illuminated by her time with the Cardinal, but as significant are the moments she has walked alone. Her renewed faith in Christianity led to her Baptism after her freshman year. The major starts, when she became that one amateur who hung around all week. Connecting deeper with her cultural background by taking Chinese classes. And in the final ride with the sisters she never had, she would hoist a championship trophy alone.


It’s deeply symbolic of Zhang’s transition into her new life. Had she decided to turn pro as the No. 1-ranked junior in her class, perhaps her trajectory would have looked much different. The trial run at “adulting,” if you will, was backed by two years full of fun, friends and hard lessons learned. It all feels so fast, but in the context of Zhang’s timeline, she took her sweet time dominating everything.

In what’s now the biggest decision of her entire life, Rose Zhang has some semblance of direction. She will make her first professional start at the Mizuho Americas Open, and spend her summer playing four majors and three professional events. By her side will be Jason Gilroyed, whose caddying resume spans Minjee Lee, Alison Lee and Cristie Kerr.

Where is the ceiling for the greatest amateur golfer of all time? That’s tough to say. But compared to the deep historical significance of Rose Zhang’s amateur career, this next chapter is equally as massive. And thanks to her, women’s golf and women’s amateur golf are in a better place than she found it.

Godspeed, Rose Zhang

ROCHESTER — Viktor Hovland was wiggling his feet in the sand. He was trying to stay poised, to stay in the moment, but the task in front of him was enormous. He was standing in a fairway bunker on the right side of the 16th hole at Oak Hill, trailing Brooks Koepka by a shot. All day, Hovland had hung so tough. He’d refused to flinch, even when Koepka briefly stretched his lead to four. But now he had to hit the shot of his 25-year-old life, a 9-iron with the ball below his feet. He needed to stay level, maintain his spine angle, but also get the ball up quickly, over a mound that was roughly the size of a small whale.

He took a deep breath, gripped then re-gripped his club, and swung.


The PGA Championship essentially hung in the balance.


The ball never got six inches off the ground.

Hovland blasted it directly into the face of the mound, and you could hear, in succession, a muffled thump as it disappeared into the grass and dirt, then a groan from the gallery. Hovland said nothing, but looked toward the sky in agony, then put his gloved left fist to his mouth and lightly bit down on his knuckles.


Five minutes later — after Hovland’s lengthy discussion with a rules official, a drop for an embedded ball and a despondent chip out — Koepka addressed his ball up ahead in the rough. It took him roughly 10 seconds to pull the club back. But when he did, he delivered one of the most ruthless shots I’ve seen on a golf course. His wedge slashed through the thick rough like he was using a filet knife. The ball climbed into the blue-gray sky, but only a little. It seemed to float under the wind, and for a few seconds, everything was deathly quiet. It landed on the front of the green, skidded a bit and released. It came to rest four feet from the hole.

Hovland, marching morosely toward his ball, also knew.

Everyone watching, in fact, knew. The tournament was essentially over.

That is what I’ll remember most about the return of Brooks Koepka, and the day he became just the 20th man in history to win a fifth major – that he saw a moment of weakness in his closest pursuer and he pounced. He snatched the soul right out of Hovland’s body. He hit 67 shots Sunday on his way to a 2-stroke victory over Hovland and Scottie Scheffler. But that one hovers above all of them.

“Brooks is a player that, when he gets in contention, he’s like a shark in the water,” said Masters winner Jon Rahm.

There have been plenty of times, in recent years, when Koepka had a chance to deliver a dagger on a Sunday at a major. Plenty of times, he let those moments slip away. He even referred to them, early in the week of the PGA Championship, as choking. (His words.) It seemed partly done in jest, to get the phrase out there before anyone else could bring it up. But it was also a reflection of his own high standards. Winning majors is hard, and plenty of golfers let opportunities slip away. Koepka once prided himself on not being one of them, and he hated that injuries and mental mistakes eroded that aura of invincibility. But he learned from those miserable moments, and perhaps Hovland will too, one day.

“I've always learned more from the four times I finished second than, I guess, the five times I've won now,” Koepka said, standing next to the Wanamaker Trophy for the third time. “I think failure is how you learn. You get better from it. You realize what mistakes you've made. Each time I've kind of made an adjustment. It's more mentality than it is anything. It's not really golf swing or anything like that. I think the big key is just being open and honest with yourself, and if you can do that, you'll be miles ahead of everybody else.”

Losing to Rahm at the Masters in April, as devastating as it was, taught him something about himself. He won’t say what it was, only that he plans to draw on it frequently from now on.

“I learned from it,” Koepka said. “I'm very pleased with what I took from it, and I'm pleased with the honesty I was able to dive into. My best friend, actually, my brother's caddie, my best friend, I think we stayed up probably most of the night just chatting about it, and he kind of ripped into me pretty good about it. He was texting me all last night about it and making sure that I wouldn't fall into the same trap.”

No matter how you feel about LIV Golf and the PGA Tour and the ongoing battle between the two leagues, Koepka’s reemergence is worth celebrating. He is now, unquestionably, the most successful golfer in major championships who is younger than Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. You can view this win as a boon to LIV, as a symbolic middle finger to everyone who said LIV golfers were washed and couldn’t compete against the best in the game. You can also view it as something bigger than golf’s civil war, as a reminder that the game was more interesting when Koepka was healthy and hoovering up major championships at an alarming rate. Koepka was happy to plant a foot in each camp on Sunday.

“I definitely think it helps LIV, but I'm more interested in my own self right now, to be honest with you,” Koepka said. “Yeah, it's a huge thing for LIV, but at the same time I'm out here competing as an individual at the PGA Championship.”


The fairest assessment would probably be to say that LIV Golf and Koepka have been mutually beneficial to each other. Guaranteed money and fewer tournaments — that also featured fewer rounds — certainly helped Koepka focus on getting healthy again. And now between Koepka and Cam Smith, LIV Golfers have won two of the last three major championships held.

“It just validates everything we’ve said from the beginning,” said Bryson DeChambeau. “The truth always comes out eventually.”


It’s also fair to say that the emergence of LIV Golf has only heightened the importance of the majors, because it is now the only time when all the best players in the world are facing each other. Regardless of what happens with the Official World Golf Rankings discussion, whether LIV ever gets ranking points for its tournaments, Koepka just earned exemptions into all the majors for the next five years.

“The problem with LIV is it’s not a competitive tour, it’s another tour,” said Pete Cowen, one of Koepka’s swing coaches. “But it’s been good for him because at the time we thought his injuries were not going to be corrected. So 14 tournaments a year plus four majors would be fine. And now he’s got another five years of exemptions.”

Koepka has been a little coy over the extent of his injuries, but he’s also made a conscious effort to be more open and more human over the last year, and that includes participating in the first season of Netflix’s “Full Swing” where he expressed doubt that he’d ever play great golf again.

“It was a lot worse than I let on to you guys,” Koepka said. “It's been a long road. But look, that's who I am. I'm open and honest. I know I seem like this big, bad, tough guy on the golf course that doesn't smile, doesn't do anything, but if you catch me off the golf course, I'll let you know what's going on. Like, I'm happy they got that side; right? That's truly me, and some people might hate it, some people might dog it, but at the end of the day, it's just me.”

As he walked off the 18th green and toward the scoring tent, you could see the emotion washing over him. The stoicism he’d displayed all tournament was melting away.


What was going through his mind at that moment?

"Pardon my language but it was all the fucking shit I had to go through,” he said. “No one knows. No one knows, I think, all the pain. There were a lot of times when I couldn’t even bend my knee. So yeah, it felt good."

Koepka’s return to the summit of golf will be the biggest historical takeaway from the 105th PGA Championship, but it won’t be the only storyline that lives on. Michael Block, a teaching professional from California, finished tied for 15th in the tournament and was the belle of the ball for much of the week — high-fiving fans, getting choked up in interviews, bouncing back from shanks, throwing darts at pins. The story crested emotionally on Sunday when he made a hole-in-one on the 15th hole. The ensuing roar was as loud as anything you will ever hear on a golf course, and it earned him a hug from playing partner Rory McIlroy.


“He had to tell me five times that I made it,” Block said. “So it was a pretty cool experience to have Rory be telling me that I made a hole-in-one in front of God knows how many people that were supporting me.”

Block, who had been teetering on the edge of tears for much of the week, finally broke down after the round, the gravity of having lived out a dream finally getting to him.

“If it makes any sense, the one thing in the world that makes me cry is golf,” Block said. “If that puts into context as far as how much I love the game, you know now. It's everything to me.”


There was a time when it wasn’t everything to Koepka, when he seemed eager to downplay its importance in his life. He was an athlete, not a golfer, he was often quick to remind people. If he could go back and do it again, he might pick a different sport, one with different rules of decorum. He liked being booed, and he liked waging a psychological war against his opponents instead of the course. He was good at golf, but he didn’t want it to define him. There are still traces of that in his bloodstream. On Sunday, when a fan in the crowd begged for his ball to find the water off the 13th tee, his caddie Rickie Elliott gave the fan a 10-second death stare, but Koepka masochistically enjoyed it.

“I hear it all. I just don't care,” Koepka said. “I mean, that's sports, right. You've got to be mentally tough. I guess some lady was chanting some stuff and another guy was shouting out some stuff. But you've got to be mentally tough not to deal with it. It happens in every sport. I'm pretty sure when Tom Brady was playing the Jets or the Dolphins, he wasn't exactly cheered upon when he ran in the stadium.”

A part of Koepka, however, has warmed to the idea of letting golf define part of who he is. He wants to play in the Ryder Cup again. He wants to one day play golf with his soon-to-be-born son. (His wife, Jena, is due this summer.) And he knows, even if he never wins another tournament, he’ll go down in history as one of the greats. A man who once scoffed at questions about legacy is now imagining a day when he’ll embrace them.


“I do care about it,” he said. “It's just tough to really grasp the situation kind of while you're still in it, I think. Probably when I'm retired and I can look back with Jena and my son and kind of reflect on all that stuff, that will be truly special, but right now I'm trying to collect as many of these things as I can.”

When Koepka holed on out Sunday, a one-inch tap in for par on the 18th green, he pumped his fist and grinned, then embraced Elliott, his long-time caddie. He shook hands with Hovland, then realized he’d forgotten to pluck the ball out of the hole. He sauntered over, the crowd still drenching him with applause, and scooped up the ball and tossed it 10 rows deep into the stands. Most men would’ve pocketed the winning putt, but not Koepka.

No sense in getting nostalgic just yet. He plans on winning a lot more of these.

Kevin Van Valkenburg is the Editorial Director at No Laying Up.

Brooks Koepka: Resuming the Pursuit of History

ROCHESTER — The most important thing about playing in the rain, Thomas Pieters said, is that you have to keep reminding yourself of a mantra.

Your shirt is soaked, your grips are wet, you can feel water dripping down your back. The ball is going to find bunkers, mud, trees and misery, even if you make a good swing.

But in truth? It doesn’t always work. He still got angry.

“You have to laugh about it, because what can you do?” Pieters said Saturday after his third round 70 in the PGA Championship. “This is the steadiest rain I’ve played in, and you just get soaking wet.”

What do you do when Oak Hill turns into Soak Hill? There is no singular strategy that works for everyone, as evidenced by an assortment of approaches. Some players, like Phil Mickelson, donned full body rain gear and two rain gloves. Others, like Pieters, represented the opposite end of the spectrum. He didn’t even wear a rain jacket.

“I can’t swing with it. I would shoot 90 if I did wear one,” he said.

As a result, he looked a bit like a sad puppy who’d just waited on the front porch for four hours until someone let him inside.

“My feet are surprisingly dry,” Pieters said. “That’s about it.”

Pieters, like most players, tried to strategically use an umbrella. But his playing partner, Taylor Montgomery, went without one and embraced the soak.


“In my mind I was like ‘Dude, how do you keep 

No one seemed to have a superior strategy because, by all accounts, an effective one didn’t exist. The bottom of every player's bag (at least in the morning wave) was pooling with water. Caddies were going through dry towels like they were napkins in a pizza parlor. Perfectly struck balls would trampoline off the clubface as if they were possessed by demonic spirits.

“It’s a caddie’s nightmare, put it that way,” said Dean Burmester. “It’s brutal on them. They only have two hands and they’re trying to juggle four different things at one time.”

Alex Smalley’s agent actually talked to someone working in the PGA Merchandise tent early in the week about getting a rain jacket, but he only decided to hand it over to Smalley after he dumped a bottle of water on it first to see if it would actually repel water. (It did. For a while.)

“You have to go in knowing you’re going to be miserable,” Smalley said. “My caddie was nice enough to let me have the umbrella most of the day. There were a couple drives where I felt like there was water on the face of the driver. Whenever that happens, the ball tends to go right. That happened to me a couple times. It really started turning right. I think that’s the toughest thing.”

A lot of it comes down to your mental state, Jon Rahm said. Getting over the initial denial is important. Acceptance, taking almost a Buddhist approach, is essential.

“For me, the first hour and a half where you’re hoping it stops, that’s the most difficult,” Rahm said “Even though you know it might be 

 difficult after that, you can adjust. You know how the body is moving and how the golf ball is reacting.”

Rahm and Pieters seemed like two of the best players to talk to about handling the elements, considering they’ve both been known to simmer with rage, even on the sunniest of days. Rahm was calm by the time his round ended (three birdies in the last five holes helped) but it did not start that way. When he flubbed a chip on the 5th hole — the ball squirting well away from the hole out of thick, wet rough — he was not shy in expressing his displeasure. He waited until the ball came to rest, then hammered his wedge down on one of CBS’ greenside microphones. On the 6th hole, he smashed another mic after he yanked a drive left off the tee. He also barked at a cameraman who got too close to him at one point as he was assessing a shot that went over one fence but not a second fence that marked out of bounds.

“I waved [him off] because he got five feet from my face when my ball ricocheted off a tree and almost went out of bounds,” Rahm said. “It was more about giving me some space. I don’t even remember the microphone. They detach so it’s not that big of a deal.”

Rahm said it was pointless to try and play for strategic misses.

“There was a couple today that were dead center of the face and some went left and some went right,” Rahm said. “We played for water on No. 5 and ended up in a dead spot. It is what it is. It’s a bit of luck.”

But even the game’s most laconic players had their patience tested.

“Probably the most annoying thing is the rain dripping down off your cap when you’re putting,” said Cam Smith. “It was dripping all day today.”

“I try to tell myself it doesn’t matter if you have fun or not,” said Chris Kirk. “This is my job. Not every day has to be 75 and sunny. But there is also no place I’d rather be. If I had missed the cut by one instead of making it, I’d be hating it that I wasn’t out playing in the rain.”

Mickelson — who could be overheard telling someone in scoring how much he loved playing in rain like this — offered a nuanced take about the conditions.

“There were some things that were easier,” Mickelson said. “It was easier to putt, easier to chip, it was easier for greens to receive shots in. But it’s playing longer and the ball is kind of squirrely in the water. The rough is tougher. But it was very playable.”

Plenty of players — Justin Thomas, Rory McIlroy, Adam Scott — tried to solve that problem by flipping their hats around and wearing them backward. (Thoughts and prayers, if you will, for the Oak Hill members who may have seen this and seethed; such behavior is not allowed in the club’s bylaws.)  Lucas Herbert chose to ditch his hat entirely and just let his hair get soaked.


“I had a haircut this week so it’s not like I had a big shag getting in the way,” Herbert said. “I just kind of embraced being wet. I think it’s worse when you flip the hat around. Then the rain just runs down the back of your neck and inside your shirt.”

Herbert, who didn’t wear a rain jacket or rain gloves, also decided at one point to just let his caddie Nick Pugh have the umbrella. He wasn’t going to bother trying to duck under it, then pop back out every time he needed to hit a shot.

“You see a lot guys, their caddie will hold the umbrella for them until the last minute, and I think you almost end up being skittish of the rain,” Herbert said. “I told Nick ‘I just want to be in the rain so it doesn't feel at the last second like you’re bracing for the water. And just try and laugh as much as you can out there.”

In trying to embrace the comedy of the situation, Herbert couldn’t resist giving the middle finger at his ball after he lipped out a birdie putt on the 8th green. It made for a tremendous photo, a man soaked to the bone and fed up with both the elements and his golf.

“I actually hit it alright on the front nine and just made nothing,” Herbert said. “That was another lip out, the second 90-degree lip out in a row.

And I was finally just like ‘You know what? Fuck you!’”

More like Soak Hill! (Sorry)

ROCHESTER — At every major championship, it is possible to witness a golf shot that makes you feel something deep in your soul.

Maybe it’s a 2-iron stinger from Tiger Woods or a towering drive from Rory McIlroy. It could be a buttery flop shot from Phil Mickelson, or a nuked 4-iron from Brooks Koepka. Even a putt from Jordan Spieth — like the double breaker he made on the 16th hole at St. Andrews in 2015 — might qualify. There is something about a great golf shot that looks effortless and seems ethereal, the way the ball seems guided by sorcery as much as force.

However, I don’t want to talk about those kinds of shots right now.

I want to talk about the visceral spectacle of a violent hosel shank.


Michael Block hit one on Friday in the 2nd round of the PGA Championship, a shank so unsettling that I’ll likely still be thinking about it when I climb into bed tonight. (And perhaps tomorrow.) But I’m not interested in mocking Block, a club professional from Arroyo Trabuco Golf Club in Southern California. Instead, I come to praise him.

There is something endearing about seeing a shank hit by a man in the midst of one of the greatest rounds of his life. It’s a reminder that golf, even at the highest level, can feel like a tightrope walk on the edge of a cliff. (While juggling snakes.) Even the best players in the world flirt with an element of golfing death. It looms in the back of your mind like a kernel of despair, and it can never truly be killed. No one who has ever dared to swing a golf club — not Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Ben Hogan or Bobby Jones — can say a shank hasn’t bitten them at least once. It is the one experience in the game that is truly universal, the despair you feel in your stomach when you see the ball knifing sideways, headed expeditiously toward parts unknown.

Block is a 46-year-old teaching professional who has played his way into six major championships. He has won (according to Ryan French of Monday Q Info), a staggering 43 times in California PGA Sectional events. He is, by any reasonable measure, one of the best ball strikers in the world. There is a decent chance he could, if he’d chosen a different path in life, be playing on the Korn Ferry Tour or even the PGA Tour. He is friendly with Patrick Cantlay and Beau Hossler and, for the most part, plays them straight up when they play money games. Block is good enough, at minimum, to hover on the fringes of the professional game. And if he was doing what we normally expect out of club professionals at the PGA Championship — playing mostly a ceremonial role — we likely wouldn’t have seen any evidence of his vicious hosel rocket.


But because Block had climbed into contention at a major by making four birdies on Friday, he was part of ESPN’s coverage window when he arrived at the 5th hole, a somewhat-benign Par 3 (by Oak Hill standards) that was playing around 165 yards. Up to that point, he had flushed nearly every shot he stood over. He discussed club selection with his caddie John Jackson, determined it necessitated an 8-iron, then stood over the ball feeling free and loose, without a single demon in his mind.

What happened next was, well … best to let him tell it.


“I love hitting baby draw with my 8-iron,” Block said. “I've done it well all week, and all of a sudden … we've all been there, done that. We look up, and I'm, like, ‘Oh, my goodness.’ The ball was just going off, somehow hit the tree, almost killed somebody, and then comes off and goes in the deep rough”


As someone who is, by any reasonable measure, NOT good at golf, I know what it’s like to hit that kind of shank. I have hit so many, in fact, I could not count them with an abacus. My main concern is the crippling fear that the next shot (and perhaps the one after it) will also be a shank, that I’ll never make solid contact with the clubface again. I have also never done it in front of thousands (perhaps millions) of people. I was fascinated by what was going through Block’s head as he trudged to his ball. Mostly, he said, it was shock. All his swings on the driving range (and in his round to that point) felt like he was an avatar in a video game.


“It came out of nowhere,” Block said. “I thought I hit it great, then I saw it going off a tree. I actually made a pretty good double from there, to be honest. I just played [the ball] off the toe the rest of the holes and hit some pretty good shots, so that helped me forget about it.”

It feels a little cruel to watch a club professional climb into contention at the PGA Championship — Block is tied for 10th at even par, the same score as Rory McIlroy — and only write about the worst shot of his round.  So I want to call your attention to the fact that he stuffed a wedge on No. 10, stuffed another on 12, hit a great pitch on 14 to set up another birdie, and made a stress-free par on No. 6 (right after his shank!), the toughest hole at Oak Hill in Round 2.

There is something unifying, however, about a great shank. It can serve as a round-wrecking lighting bolt thrown by the golfing gods as they try to humble even the best of us. And Block knows it better than most, having walked many students through the delicate swing surgery that’s necessary to suffocate them.

(The shank, by the way, can never truly be killed, only sent into hibernation for lengthy periods.)

I was curious, what advice did he give his clients when they felt paralyzed by the shanks? Normally this type of advice costs $125 an hour, but it seemed like Block was in a generous mood and selfishly I wanted to write it down for future reference.

“What I like to do is set up to the golf ball and swing and hit the ground on the inside of the golf ball,” Block said. “Like not even hit the ball on practice swings. Just take it, hit inside the golf ball a couple of times to feel that space and to get the hands in tight. If you watch a lot of the best players in the world, their hands are extremely close to their body at the moment of impact. A lot of the worst players in the world, their hands are far away from their body at the moment of impact. That's the difference.”

Informed that Dustin Johnson also hit a quasi-shank during his round, Block couldn’t resist a little chuckle.


“Well, that actually makes me feel better,” he said.

Despite the lengthy and insightful shank discussion, the highlight of Block breaking down his day didn’t come until a reporter pointed out that he was beating Jon Rahm, the No. 1 player in the world, by five shots. Block got choked up as he wrestled with how to answer.

“Pretty cool, to say the least,” Block said. He paused, weighing his words. His lower lip quivered.


“I wish you guys could come to my office and hang out with me and come teach with me on the back of the driving range with my students who are out there right now,” Block said. “I don't know why that makes me emotional, but it does. Sorry, Jon. I don't know who I beat, who I didn't beat. I'm going to go out there and do my best and put my head down and play as well as I can for the next two days.”


Then he headed off to grab lunch and an IPA.

“I guarantee you, within the next hour, I will have a beer in my hand,” he said.


Talor Gooch wasn’t interested in sticking around Oak Hill for very long after his second round ended. He jogged straight from scoring into the locker room, scooped up his stuff and then walked briskly to the parking lot. I managed to catch up with him on the walk, curious how he felt about likely missing the U.S. Open. Gooch could have secured a spot with a strong showing at the PGA Championship, bumping him inside the Top 60 in the Official World Golf Rankings, but he never felt like he had control of his golf ball and missed the cut after shooting 76-74.

“It always sucks when you don’t have your A game at a major championship,” Gooch said. “This was kind of the first week of the year where I just didn’t have the ball control. It’s not a good week to not know where the golf ball is going. I was just hitting it in the rough a lot and then I probably missed 8 or 10 putts this week inside of 8 feet this week. That’s just golf sometimes.”

I wondered how Gooch felt about missing out on the U.S. Open at Los Angeles Country Club, considering the fuss his LIV Golf teammate made last week over the USGA’s decision to tweak the language in its exemption category this year. Gooch originally believed he would be exempt into the U.S. Open based on having qualified for the PGA Tour Championship (the Top 30 in the FedExCup standings are given an exemption), but the U.S. Open changed its language to say only players who were “eligible” could qualify for the exemption. Gooch lost his eligibility when he signed with LIV Golf last summer. Mickelson called the change a “dick move” and a “direct attack on [Gooch] and his career.”

Gooch, a two-time winner on the LIV Tour this season, seemed fine with his fate.


“I knew with all the craziness in golf happening right now there might be stuff like this that would happen, so honestly it’s not surprising,” he said.

There was one last point I wanted to clarify: Why did Gooch, clearly one of the hottest players in golf prior to the PGA Championship, not enter sectional qualifying? It seemed likely he could snag a spot and perhaps contend. Was he trying to make a point with the USGA?


“A little bit of that,” he said. “But also our schedule is busy locked up right now. If I didn’t qualify via world ranking, I just felt like we have a lot of tournaments coming up. It’s time to focus on that.”

Rory McIlroy was happy to confess something late Friday after shooting a 69 to climb into a tie for 10th place.


Right now, he has no idea where the ball is going with a driver in his hands. The stats confirm it as well. He’s currently losing -.427 shots off the tee through two rounds, a number almost unheard of for him. All things considered, being even par and only five shots off the lead feels like a minor victory.

“I think with how terribly I've felt over the golf ball over the last two days, the fact that I'm only five back -- yeah, not saying it could be up there with one of my best performances, but when I holed that putt at the last, I looked at the board, and I thought, I can't believe I'm five back,” McIlroy said. “I guess that's a good thing because I know if I can get the ball in play off the tee, I'll have a shot.”

A reporter asked McIlroy if there was any safe shot in his arsenal he might be able to rely on over the weekend, something like the butter cut he’s used in the past where sacrifices distance for some control. He chuckled as he gave his answer.

“I tried to hit that little cut on 16 and almost hit it out of bounds,” he said.

It’s always hard to make definitive statements about McIlroy because there is so much volatility to his game, and he admittedly often lacks the patience to stick to a game plan when things go awry. But he has shown promising signs of patience at Oak Hill, something he tried to lean into prior to the tournament.

“I stayed really patient today,” he said. “I think my patience was rewarded with a couple of good breaks and a couple of birdies coming in.”

Will that hold up? It’s hard to say. He admitted he’s not likely to be patient off the tee over the weekend. It might be time to return to a strategy that benefited him when he was young and carefree and had little scar tissue from majors.

“I may just tee it high and bomb it everywhere,” McIlroy said.


And why not? Next year will mark a decade since he’s won a major. He’s tried a lot of strategies. Nothing has truly clicked.

What does he have to lose at this point but time?

2023 PGA Championship Notebook: Shanks and Scenes from Day 2

ROCHESTER — I have a confession I want to make from Day 1 of the PGA Championship.

If necessary, I will shout it from the blustery shores of Lake Ontario so that it can (in theory) travel beyond the American border.

I want this resurgence of Bryson DeChambeau to be real.

I want to see him chase majors again, not be mired in irrelevance. I want to listen to him explain his various eccentricities, even if those explanations sometimes don’t make sense. I want to witness him nuking drives that defy logic, then see him flash his dopey grin to the galleries, something he did frequently during his first round 66 at Oak Hill. I want him to go at the ball pain-free and take massive divots that fly through the air like someone has thrown a cheesesteak.

I don’t need him to return to the PGA Tour, because he seems happier with LIV Golf than he was on his former circuit — happier than he’s been in years. But I do want to see 

 kind of golf from him in majors once again. And I know I’m not alone.

Everything about the sport is more interesting when DeChambeau is relevant, whether we’re talking about his prodigious feats or his frequent faux pas. He still looms large, even though he is no longer quite as large, a topic he was happy to expound on after his round. DeChambeau says he’s lost about 30 pounds in recent months after some drastic changes to his diet. Gone are the days when he would drink eight protein shakes a day, overwhelming his body with calories, all in the name of speed training.

“I’m eating properly instead of eating stuff that inflames my body,” DeChambeau said. “I took a Zoomer peptide test, which essentially tells you what inflames your blood when you eat it. I was allergic to corn, wheat, gluten, dairy. Pretty much everything I liked, I couldn't eat. I took that out. Started taking it out in August and over the course of time I've lost all this inflammation, lost a lot of fat and slimmed down like crazy. I lost 18 pounds in 24 days. It was crazy. It wasn't fat. It was all water weight. You know how I looked before. I was not skinny.”

But it wasn’t just his stomach that was a mess. His wrist — and ultimately his psyche — needed healing too. DeChambeau withdrew from last year’s PGA Championship at Southern Hills, deciding to have surgery to fix a fractured hamate bone in his left wrist, and has struggled with his game and his confidence ever since. The player who dominated the 2020 U.S. Open at Winged Foot, winning by six strokes, looked like a shadow of his old self. At the LIV Invitational Tucson in March, DeChambeau finished 44th out of 48 players. Listening to him describe how he climbed out of that nadir, you couldn’t help but feel good for him.

“Each day, I had this glimmer of hope that I could get back to it,” DeChambeau said. “It was never like I've got nothing, I'm done. I could have easily been like, you know what, I had a great career, I'm good. But I didn't because I knew I had it in me to do it every single day, and I worked as hard as I could every single day. There were times I doubted myself, severe doubts, but never got to a point where I was done. Maybe for like a day I was done, I'm just going to take a day off, whatever, and the next day, I came back. All right, I think I got something.”

 building during his round on Thursday. DeChambeau’s bulk is gone, but the speed in his swing is still astonishing when he needs it to be. On 16, he pounded a drive 343 yards down the middle of the fairway, then nipped an elegant wedge that stopped 15 inches from the hole. It was a stark reminder of how easily he can dismantle a 466-yard hole when he’s healthy. Off the tee Thursday, he gained 2.77 strokes on the field – and while Adam Scott trails close behind (2.62), both players were more than half a stroke ahead of Billy Horschel and the rest of the field.

“How do I explain this easily?” DeChambeau said, holding out his left wrist for reporters after the round. “I’m just in a place where I’m more ulnar. I’m keeping the handle higher through impact, and that allows the clubface to stay more stable. I feel like I was pushing down to the left, and it was closing the face down really hard. And I had low left, high right (misses). So that's five years of trying to figure that out and not being able to, as well, like my wrist has not been able to do it.”

There was also a moment Thursday that reminded you that no DeChambeau round is ever dull, and sometimes for the strangest reasons. On 17, he lashed an approach out of the rough and watched it sail 30 yards right of its intended target. It came screaming down from the sky toward the 18th tee box and drilled Kenny Pigman — one of the PGA Professionals in the field — in the back, just below his right shoulder blade.

“He wasn’t aiming for me, but it stung pretty bad,” Pigman said, mostly chuckling over the incident.

Years ago, when DeChambeau was in a stretch of blasting the ball toward galleries with little regard for their safety, it might have sparked a controversy, the kind that frequently seems to follow DeChambeau around. But Pigman was quick to add that DeChambeau did holler out “FORE!” when the ball was in the air and he was effusive in apologizing when he arrived on the scene.

“He was going to sign a glove for me, then he realized I was a player,” Pigman said.

“We were like ‘How about flights somewhere? Or cash maybe?’ ” joked Pigman’s caddie Andrew Alderice. “We’ll take some tickets to the next LIV event.”

It turned out to be a minor blip on a day when DeChambeau was vibing, grinning at the gallery and soaking up some welcomed praise after good shots.

“The emotions have definitely fluctuated pretty high and pretty low, thinking I have something and it fails and going back and forth,” DeChambeau said. “It's humbling. Golf, and life, always has a good way of kicking you on your you-know-what when you are on your high horse. It’s nice to feel this today.”

If you listened closely, you could still hear a flicker of the kind of jokes that used to torment DeChambeau when he was in a more fragile, frustrated state. On the 11th hole, someone waited until he was walking up the fairway before belting out “Let’s go Brooksy!” a throwback to a time when the galleries tormented DeChambeau by calling him Brooks Koepka’s nickname. But it felt flat at Oak Hill, like listening to someone at a party repeat a joke that everyone has heard, and grown tired of, years ago.

“Bryson is lucky he didn’t hit it over here, I bet he’d have trouble with this rope,” I heard one man tell a friend, a reference to the time when DeChambeau accidentally clotheslined himself with a gallery rope at a LIV Golf event in Chicago.

His friend could only muster a courtesy laugh.

It was more fun to listen to kids in the crowd, to see them bobbing between adults, craning their necks to peek through the gaps near the rope line, yearning to get a better view of DeChambeau.

“I bet he annihilates this ball,” I heard one tweenage boy whisper to a friend as the three of us stood just behind the 1st tee, waiting for DeChambeau to hit.

“Oh my gosh,” his friend whispered back as we watched DeChambeau’s golf ball go piercing through the sky. “Wow.”

A Reminder of the Bryson Experience

Welcome back to the NLU Mailbag. In this space, we’ll address topics big and small, smart and dumb, irreverent and serious.

A quick reminder: You need to be a member of The Nest to submit a question to the mailbag, but the mailbag itself will be free to read (as long as you behave yourselves). Most of our questions are submitted via our message board, The Refuge, but if you’re not a message board person, please send me an email at kvv@nolayingup.com with your Nest handle and your question. If your question gets picked, we’ll send you a free NLU towel.

Dgolfman62281: Is Oak Hill CC the Torrey Pines of New York? I can’t even get one elevated pulse point for this course. I still have negative memories of the 95 Ryder Cup and I can’t remember a single thing about Jason Dufner’s win here. It’s a stinky bland generic east coast track and I might check in on the final 2 holes Sunday but that’s it.

Always love to begin a mailbag with a salty golf course review! I was probably in this camp before I did any research about Oak Hill, and then I watched 

this excellent video our friends at The Fried Egg produced

 about the Andrew Green redesign, and I totally flipped. I love interesting green complexes, and this course has them again. It’s almost unrecognizable from what it was before. When you see what Donald Ross greens used to look like, and what they became, it feels almost criminal they were allowed to become so bland and lacking in character. I think we’re in for a cool championship.

As for memories of Oak Hill, I have two from Dufner’s win. The first is, I’m not sure anyone 

has ever hit their irons better while putting worse than Dufner did that week

. It was surreal. He was hitting shots to kick-in distance, but even those putts didn’t feel like a sure thing. It was transcendent ball-striking and close-your-eyes-and-say-a-prayer putting. It was a tribute to Ben Hogan — whom Dufner modeled his swing after — in more ways than I think most people realized.

Hogan is widely regarded as the greatest iron player to ever live. His swing has been copied by generations of players. But Hogan grew to loathe putting so much late in his career, he actually suggested (perhaps in jest, perhaps not) it be eliminated from the sport. He grew anxious over the ball and was embarrassed to play in front of crowds.

"If I had my way, every golf green would be made into a huge funnel,” Hogan t

. “So that when you hit the funnel the ball would roll down a pipe into the hole. That way there would be no expensive upkeep of grass on the greens. And there would be much less misery among the golfers."

The second memory has to do with trees. Oak Hill was, at the time, nearly overwhelmed with trees. And from these trees, acorns were falling. Dufner’s wife, Amanda, one of the first social media stars connected to golf, picked up several of those acorns and 

declared she was going to plant them on the Dufners

’ land in Alabama. One day, from those Oak Hill acorns, majestic trees would grow. They would be strong and always serve as a reminder of that major championship. At the time, I thought: “That would make a beautiful lead to a story. I wish I was there to write it.”


That anecdote is an interesting window into how fragile some things can be, and how rare permanence is in golf and life. The Dufners are no longer married. Jason has gone from being the 6th-ranked player in the world to the 692nd-ranked player. Oak Hill has undergone a complete restoration. Many of those trees are gone.

It’s a sad story. But there is something moving about it too. You want to hold onto things but the world changes in ways you never expect. Someone could win the PGA Championship next week, and a decade later, they might feel lost with a putter in their hands. Sometimes heartbreak can lead to a better future. That’s one of the reasons why it’s a compelling sport to watch. You might be watching something beautiful unfold, but also quite fragile.

Wiganerlyon: Why does the run-up to the PGA feel less juicy from a grand slam perspective for Jordan Spieth than pre-Masters feels for Rory McIlroy? Both are very popular players in the game. Is it just the narrative with Rory and the amount of scar tissue now accrued at a single course?

I think needing just the Masters to complete the career Grand Slam is the biggest blessing/curse in professional golf. Jon Rahm will never have to answer questions for an entire offseason the way Rory has for 12 years about whether this might be his year. It’s always the first major, so the build-up feels enormous. It also feels like the more you want it, the more you hope it will fulfill something in you, and the more the tournament seems to delight in rejecting you. The fact that Rory came so close at such a young age, only to fail in such a spectacular and memorable way, plays into that narrative. Everyone has been saying for years that the Masters sets up so well for Rory, that he could win three or four of them, but that’s not how sports work. It’s possible his best chance was when he was 21.

The narrative for Spieth is different. For starters, the PGA doesn’t return to the same place every year so there isn’t the same psychological baggage surrounding the event. Will the baggage grow if he never wins a PGA? If he has a heartbreaking near-miss the way Tom Watson did in 1978, it’s possible. But at this point, it feels like a Spieth victory that completed the Grand Slam would almost come as a surprise. No one knows, at this point, if he can hold a Sunday lead in a major. His own scars are thick in that department, so I think he’d have to come from well off the lead (the way he’s almost done a couple times at the Masters) to make it a reality. He wouldn’t have to mull the gravity when his head hit the pillow or even talk about it. He’d just have to play a great round at the right time when no one expected it. With his recent wrist injury, I’d say the expectations for him will be fairly low, assuming he plays at all.

Even if Rory entered the final round of the Masters in 8th place, all eyes would be on him. For whatever reason, the way we view them is just going to be different. In 2015, it looked like they were poised to be rivals for a decade, the best players of the post-Tiger generation. Now it’s fair to wonder if either of them will end up completing the Grand Slam. As absurd as it sounds, Phil Mickelson winning the U.S. Open at LACC or Jon Rahm winning the PGA and the Open Championship might be our best chance at a Grand Slam.

Wnf08a: Who has a better week at the PGA — Rickie Fowler or Jason Day?

Regular listeners to the pod know that I’ve been predicting Jason Day will win this year (something he hasn’t done since 2018), all season. But his recent allergy issues — which seem to be contributing to the return of his vertigo — are a genuine cause for concern. As my colleague Chris Solomon recently pointed out to the world, Rickie Fowler has been so solid in 2023 (Data Golf has him as the 18th-ranked player in the world), he is a genuine candidate for one of the last two spots on the U.S. Ryder Cup team, something I definitely didn’t see coming a year ago. Oak Hill is definitely a course where I could see Fowler sneaking into contention.

Even if you agree with my colleague Big Randy and feel like Fowler's fame within the sport represents late-stage capitalism, you have to admire how he’s rebuilt his swing and salvaged his career. I’m sure it must have been tempting to join LIV when he was deep in the wilderness, but without a path into major championships, Fowler would have been trapped in a lucrative but substance-free existence, the exact space his critics accused him of occupying for years. It would be pretty rewarding if a major were the payoff for all that work.

Gottliebk12: What is your ideal food and drink option at the turn?

I think this depends on the season. In the summer, nothing beats a bratwurst with mustard and a cold beer, particularly a gose or a sour. That might seem blasphemous to those who feel passionate about the simplicity of Miller Lite, Coors, or Bud, but when you play most of your golf in the sweltering humidity of Maryland, it’s basically like living in the Devil’s armpit. There is something delightful about a crisp sour or gose with a hint of salt that makes the perfect golf course beer. I think a Transfusion runs a close second, but it needs to be a good one. If the grape juice is too strong, I’m dumping it out after a few zips. (They make an incredible Transfusion at the course I just joined.)

In the fall, I mostly just opt for beef jerky. It’s simple, it’s not messy, you don’t have to think too much about it. But a good Bloody Mary is undefeated on the golf course.

ThatDuffGuyPat: What’s something, other than golf, that you have struggled with to get to the point you’re at but still enjoy through the frustrations or difficulties?

My genuine answer would be writing. It’s such a subjective thing to believe you are good at writing. The standard you’re trying to reach exists mostly in your own head. It requires both hubris and vulnerability. One smart person can look at the words on the page and see brilliance and another smart person can look at the same words and dismiss them as pedestrian. There are days when many writers (myself occasionally among them) stare at the screen and feel miserable, like we’re trapped in a decades-long fraud of pretending we’re good at this stuff. Any day now, we fear, someone is going to tap us on the shoulder and say “You realize you’re no good at this, right?” And at the same time, we can look at writers who are commercially or critically successful and think “How can anyone think 

In golf, there is a score. We can measure each other and compete against each other and reach a conclusion about ability based on facts. We often joke about the Eye Test at NLU, but for the most part, we know the difference between someone who is great and someone who is fine. Every result is compounding evidence.

Writing — beyond objective standards for punctuation and grammar — has more to do with whether or not it speaks to the reader’s soul.

Few things in life are more satisfying to me than writing paragraphs that make a reader feel something, whether that is humor or anger or joy. And yet, sometimes the road to those sentences can be torture. Most writers, even the great ones, are chasing a standard they’ll probably never reach. But the striving becomes addictive. When you write a good sentence or a great scene in a story, it’s like a perfectly-struck long iron. All you want to do is chase that feeling, even if you know, deep down, how difficult it will be to repeat.

To borrow a lyric from the subject of our next question: It gets easier but it never gets easy.

Mathew823: Do you have any thoughts on the Jason Isbell “Running With Our Eyes Closed” documentary? I was, as ever, struck by his directness. There are plenty of musicians who can open a vein in their music but won’t talk much about it outside of that. Isbell has no pretense about that at all.

Regular readers of this mailbag know that I am something of an Isbell devotee — 

so much so that I was interviewed by The Ringer

Articles

Godspeed, Rose Zhang

Brooks Koepka: Resuming the Pursuit of History

More like Soak Hill! (Sorry)

2023 PGA Championship Notebook: Shanks and Scenes from Day 2

A Reminder of the Bryson Experience

KVV Mailbag: Early PGA Championship Talk, Parenting and Jason Isbell

Rachel Heck is still here, even if she's missing a piece of her

Nest Exclusive: Jerry Springer Was Here to Listen

Randy: A golden day for Nelly's second major

KVV Mailbag: LIV and the majors, all-timers and sandwiches

KVV: What do we do about slow play?

Jon Rahm's Inevitability

Simply Sam Bennett

Brooks Koepka (tries to) smash windows, smashes expectations

The Things People Say About Phil Mickelson

KVV Mailbag: Masters Part Two

A Newly Nostalgic Tiger Woods Remembers His Epic Chip on No. 16

KVV Mailbag: Masters Part One