I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball in a fried.
Egg Friday egg, the dreaded Frida egg Friday Frida Egg Egg, Frida egg bride egg.
Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the course. Welcome back to the Friday E Golf Podcast. I am your host, Andy Johnson. I'm really excited. This week we are joined by Stuart Sinc. This has been years in the making. I don't really know why I delayed so
long on having stew on. We've been talking about him coming on since the Open at the Old Course a couple of years ago, a topic we we get into a little bit on this podcast, but it was really great chatting with someone who has played golf at a extraordinarily high level for a very very long time.
So we get into all.
Sorts of topics about his career and golf as a whole, and super fun. Big thanks to ste for giving us so much time. And before we get to Stuart, let's talk about a new sponsor, Cobalt Rangefinders. Ironically, we talked about rangefinders in this episode. I just got my new Cobalt. It is awesome.
I used it.
I went out and played to use it before we had to start using the doing these reads using this Cobalt, I was amazed at some of the features that they've added on. In particular, they have an optical zoom which you can get up to twelve x. This is a particular pain point if you hit a tree behind a hole, okay,
like a flag. This is can like ruin your round if you're especially if you're playing for something and it's happened to me before and you mail it over the green, You're like, what the hell happened?
The zoom is such.
A game changer for the rangefinder, so they go from six x to twelve x zoom, which allows you to be really precise with what you're hitting, whether it's bunker, edge or whatever it is. It's designed to build for golfers who prioritize precision, consistency, and performance, and the QZ six delivers enhance visual clarity and confident distance measurements shot after shot. If you're interested in learning more about Cobalt rangefinders,
go to Cobalt dashgolf dot com. That's Cobalt dashgolf dot com and use the promo code fried egg Pod fifteen all one word fried Egg Pod fifteen four fifteen percent off your order. Let's get to Stewart Sync. Now, all right, Stuart, this has been years in the making. Glad to have you on. I got to ask as I was kind of just scrolling through and thinking about your career. I think one of your great accomplishments that is maybe goes under the radar. You were the first pro golfer on Twitter.
You were the og. Well was it like, how did you become the early adopter back in I think it was maybe like nine.
Oh wait, yeah, I don't know if I was the first one to get on there, but I was the first one to really gain a lot of followers and create these connections, like a one on one connection with each follower. That's the way I did it back then, and it was a new thing and the way it got started. My kids were I have to do some math. My kids were like in their early teenage years and
they played ice hockey. And so remember the show PTI, Right, So I was watching PTI and they were talking about an NBA player who was asking for a trade, but he didn't use the traditional route, like he didn't go to the front office and sort of like submit it in writing and all that. He went on social media and said I want out. I don't remember the player. And so the conversation between Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser was
not about the player in the NBA. It quickly shifted over to like, is this going to be like a new way for athletes to talk to their front offices and to their fans and like this social media thing,
Like what is it? What's going on? And so it got me thinking, like, as a golfer, I it's hard to get your personality across through the television lens and through the into the living room of the fans if you're not Tiger Woods or somebody that has like this unique sort of look or you know, a trade like Camilla was that at the time was like the guy who's just you know, a great looking dude, And come on, I mean, how's a guy like me competing against that.
I mean, I can hit my eight iron, you know, pretty accurately, and I can shoot decent scores, But come on, Millo, I mean, it's not giving anybody a chance. So I thought well, maybe, like it's hard for me to do that, so maybe this is a way for me to sort of like interact with some fans and get a few fans or find out that there's some out there. And I asked my son, Connor, who was, like, I said, about thirteen or fourteen. I said, what is this? What is Twitter? What is this? And he said, it's kind
of like a bare bones Facebook. And the way it works is you like put a statement out there and then people like either like it or they don't like it, and they might follow you and become like your friend or fan. And I understood a little bit about Facebook
because it was already existing. Twitter was just getting on the scene and and so I said, I don't see why I wouldn't try this, and he said, yeah, what'll probably happen is you'll probably find out like that you have like two or three hundred people out there that like want to know what you're talking about. I'm like two or three hundred. That sounds incredible, Like that's awesome. So I tweeted one day, I just opened up a Twitter account and I tweeted taking my son to hockey practice. Period.
You know, it's like, okay, it's not I demand a trade, but it's like something about me in my life. And so as I found out there were people out there that were kind of just waiting for you know, sports figures or whatever to start putting messages on Twitter. And I got several hundred responses to just that one message, and every one of them followed me. And I wasn't ever a big follower back. That's probably there was quite a huge ambalance in that.
And that's part of Twitter is cultivating your feet. You know, you got to you gotta be spartan with with uh you know who gets into that feed?
Yeah. So, and I used it like a one on one connection with every like I would answer their questions and talk to them about their day and tell them about my day. I would tell everybody at once, but I would interact with them one on one, and it was time consuming a little bit, And of course as it grew, as the followership grew, I learned a little bit about what they wanted to hear and about what I had fun talking about. Not that much golf, by the way, and the one on one thing just started
to lessen just by the sheer number of people. But it grew and grew, and I had a lot of fun doing it, and it lasted until probably it lasts about eight years where they continued to grow and that culture, you know that the culture out there kind of changed to a little bit.
And then, oh yeah, I miss what you're describing the idea of tweeting I'm taking my kid to hockey practice.
I missed that Twitter.
I missed the version of like, you know what, I liked the world whereas like I'm eating a croissant, you know, that's.
My exactly a simple world. And then nowadays I feel like if you, if you whatever they call it anymore. I mean, I know it's called X, but it's still called tweeting. If you post on X now I'm taking my hit kid to hockey practice, There'll be fifty people in my inbox that say, like, why don't you go f yourself?
Yeah, yeah, there's a different energy out there.
Yeah, there is a world and it's energy on Twitter. Now. X is what kind of drove me to sort of be like, all right, I think I'm going to join the ranks and first use it as a megaphone, which I didn't really want to do at first, and then eventually just kind of just got out of it, and I'm still on there. I don't really do much posting that much, really, but anyway, that's sort of the backstory.
You hit on something.
The difficulty as a pro caall for to get your personality across. You hit shots, you're inside the ropes, you're far away. You know, the only times you get interviewed are if you're near the lead, which you know there's one hundred and forty people trying to be near the lead. In your opinion, what are some ways And this is obviously, you know, a prescient topic and golf, that golf can do a better job of highlighting personalities and about and stories about players.
Well, I think it's a two way thing. First of all, I think golf, especially the golf media, can do a little bit better job. It's perfect timing. Right now, we got the Olympics going, and I've always thought that well, and think in my lifetime, NBC has been the majority. You know, they're the carrier for the Olympics, and they do a good job packaging those little little, uh like three or four minute promos for a sport and an athlete that you would probably never watch other than Olympics.
You know, some obscure athlete from another country and telling the backstory and when that sport comes on, now you're like, that is my athlete. I want that guy or that gal to win, and you know a little bit about him. They create a connection, and I think we could do
a little bit better job of that in golf. Let's have some of these little I don't know what you call you guys probably know, but a little two or three minutes, just a little segment about a player in the cain waiting for that player to be in contention for the weekend, and let's run that, you know, let's let's get that player out there. And that's one thing I think, But the other thing is the player. I mean, we also we can benefit by just showing a little
bit more emotion. The problem with that is that, you know, Tiger, there's a select few people that thrive on it, but most of us have figured out that we play better golf and we're more consistent when we kind of keep the heart rate down and try to like suppress the adrenaline a little bit. And that comes off as being boring and robotic and emotionless and unengageable. That's that's a problem.
It's a conflict. So personally, I like to try to just smile and remember like my gratitude for me being grateful out there is a great way for the personality just to come oozing out. And it doesn't mean I fist plump, It doesn't mean I'm like you know, jumping up and down and like getting excited. But it makes you knowable when you smile and when you look excited and happy about something, and when you look upset and disappointed about something, people can see it on your face.
It matters. And and so I think that's one thing that we all need to do too, just to let that let the personality come through a little bit and maybe some creative ways. And our partners out there in the media I think could do a little bit better job promoting us too.
I think, yeah, it's definitely a two way street.
Something like it's really clear, you know, especially in the I would say the last twenty five thirty years, like the sports psychology, it's like stay in the present, you know, keep your keep your emotions at a certain level that like that equal where you.
Were most common table and you.
See outside of like team competitions. I think you don't see those huge reactions very often. And I think like it's just kind of like the push and pull of how the sport plays out. It's not like a massive adrenaline sport like basketball or you know any any real you know, football, where you know, you make a play, you've got this time to you know, you're operating on adrenaline and these other sports, and in golf it's like it's kind of like adrenaline could be a bad thing.
You know, it can lead to you not hanging your numbers and all these things. I completely agree with the vignette thing. I think like as a whole golf and this is like totally you know, it kind of ties back to what we were talking about earlier with Twitter, Like you know, there's this you know, rash of people that show more shots, show more shots, show more shots, and that's all the networks here now show more shots
and what's gotten cut at the expense. So that is any sort of storytelling where you know, they feel they're like afraid to take the camera off you know, the players and the shots and show these vignettes. But I think they're missing the point, Like you know, I was on Golf Week yesterday and they aggregate stories from all over the country, you know, on their website with their I think it's like the USA Today or whatever network
of newspapers. And there was an article written by the Patosky like the Patoski Free Press or whatever it's called, and it was about Joey Garber.
And I didn't realize Joey Garber grew.
Up in Pataski, Michigan, which is like way at the very top of Michigan.
And I found that fascinating.
It's like, okay, like this is not a place that pro golfers typically come from, like you know, it's covered in snow six months of the year, Like how did this happen? And I was enthralled reading the story about you know, Joey Garber and how he moved to Florida
and he came back. That could be a great little short video in like you said, if Joey Garber ever got in the mix, it's like here, here's that you know, and pardon me wonders if like that's partly on the tour, Like how can the tour create these assets that that then can be used when players get in the hunt but you know, it is hard. Golf is a I think that's like the tricky thing with golf as you talk about the next you know, twenty years, is like, you know, how do you how do you get people
to care about number seventy in the world. And these are extraordinarily high achievers and but like outside of you know, these mega moments where Joel Damon takes a shirt off, it doesn't it seems very hard for players of that ilk to break through.
That's true. And I like to compare this to like a team in the NBA, where teams are generally categorized either in win now or rebuilding for the future, right unless I feel like the PGA Tour exceptables, yeah, bull.
Team.
Same with the Hawks. It seems like it's Hawks bulled every year and we're but we're it feels like the PGA Tour. We're always in a win now mode. We were writing our superstars and we're asking a lot of them. That's you know, it's part of the nature of our business. But it's also not really that fair. But the greatest example is when Tiger went down for his massive uh disappearance, you know, back in two thousand and nine and all of a sudden, we're all like, what are we gonna do?
There's a void. Tiger is like the greatest athlete on the planet right now, and all of a sudden he's not here. Well, golf does a great job of backfilling it's stars. Jordan Speech comes on board, Justin Thomas, Ricky Fowler. Guys like that are really popular, and they still are. I'm not saying anybody will ever fill the Tiger void,
because Tiger's his own thing. But the thing is, it takes time for that backfield to happen, and if we're writing the superstars, we're never gonna have any immediate backfill. With guys like the Joey Garber story, that's a great example. These vignettes I think can educate the fans, and I'm not really sure that the I know the focus groups, I'll say, show more shots, show more shots. But all my friends that I talked to that watch golf say I don't know who anybody is, And my response is always,
I don't care if you know who they are. Their shots are amazing, and if you want to watch shots, you want to watch amazing shots. It does shouldn't matter who hit the shot. But the people that watch golf will tell you that I don't know who the names are, and if there's big names on the leaderboard, they'll watch. If there's not, they probably won't watch. And the march madness proves it out too. Everybody wants the underdogs to win.
It's great, you know the five beats that are five losers to the twelve and everybody's brackets get torn up. Well at the final four when you have a bunch of middle seed teams, the ratings are in the toilet because no one was to watch.
Everybody wants the underdog story until the final four.
Exactly. Yeah, that's right, it's.
I yeah, I think that's a good I think the thing that maybe golf needs to do is like where the telecast needs to be shook up is on Thursday, Friday, Saturday. That's the moments in time for the storytelling and then it's you know, the last two hours of the telecast sits lock in and watch what happens in the tournament.
It's a I I you know, the storytelling aspect is the thing I think that's missed by the show more shots, show more shots, and I think there is like we people get obsessed with like, you know, what are what are the fans saying?
You know?
And I agree that the fans are a big constituent that you want to listen to. You don't want to not listen to them. But there is like a certain degree of like the experts in there rita are the media executives that should be determining some of the things, Like some people don't know what they want until they see it or experience it. And I think that's like another aspect of this that gets, you know, kind of changed.
I think you're a unique you know, when you talk about.
Golf and and people becoming fans of people, you are kind of like a person that I point to you like you a lot of your peers Jim Furick, Steve Stricker. One of the aspects of golf that is super important that I wonder about over the next twenty years is you know, your your era of players. There were a lot of twenty thirty year careers, you know, twenty your your career spanned. You know, you won basically in three decades,
which is insane. But in that time, you think about like how golf fans get to know you over the years, and you go from in the early two thousands being a young player to then, you know, in the mid two thousand, in the mid two thousands, you're this established top ten player in the world, and then your tail of your career continues into the twenty twenties where you're a household name. And that's kind of I think, like
I always think about like how golf really works. Well, it's like when you have this crew of household names, do you think part of this, like building fandom is more important because do you see the world of golf changing in terms of like your types of careers are maybe less likely in the future.
I do think it's less like in the future because as it sounds like the tour shrinking, that's just gonna be less players starting. We've already seen this, and with less players starting, there's just there's the door. It just we reach capacity quicker and so there's gonna be more people leaving. So just a math doesn't work for longer
careers anymore. And when you add the typical golfer, you know, client around like early forties, you can play a long time and still be very effective, but it's not really the distance anymore. It's not the you know, the physical tools anymore. It's more like the physiology and the chemicals the brain produces when you're fifty as opposed to when
you're twenty five. It just doesn't let me that well, your brain shifts from a sort of like I just want to like bust through every wall and get everything I can get when you're in their twenties to when you're in the fifties. It's kind of like, let's just gather these acorns and put them in the little basket
and we'll just walk away quietly and conserve. That's the way that human beings' brains develop, and that fifty year old conservative mentality, and I'm not talking politically conservative, I mean conservational. That doesn't equate to like rip your heart out, go for broke golf, and when you're playing against guys that have that kind of chemical physiology, well, that's the reason that we decline. It's not because we can't hit
it far. Most of the guys that are turning fifty now hit it just as far as they did when they were, you know, thirty six. So technology and what we know about biomechanics and all that has made that possible. But you can't turn off that chemical falset in your brain. It just it changes because that's the way the human
beings were created. And that's that's a fact. So long answer anyway, Yes, I do feel like because of that natural decline in the forties that more players are going to leave earlier than they have over the course of history because the pool is just smaller. There's not as much room in there.
That mental shift.
I you know, I there's a great Padrick Harrington quote from a couple of years ago at the Open. It was, like, I think it was along the lines of like experiences is all it's cracked up to be. With experience, you lose innocence, and that seems to be what you're kind of hitting on. Is like almost like that night naive mindset where you rip through and you're thinking of anything versus you get older, you start to think about more
stuff do you have? Do you think that kind of struggle with your brain manifests itself in particular areas of the game more than others.
Probably in you know, you you look at the artist book, you plan your shot, you know, when we're all like into the data stuff, so you kind of know it's not that hard to figure out what the best play is. But somewhere in the downswing is where I think that switch happens, where you decide like I don't really want to be right on this whole, and that's when you bail left. And that's I think where it affects you is that when the rubber meets the road, that's that's
what you know. That's what happens. You bail on a shot where you back in your twenties, you'd be going for everything and like there are no consequences. And now over time Padrick is right. We experience teaches us the consequences just like it teaches just the successes, and you hang on to both. In fact, the brain hangs on to them more the negative stuff than it does the positive stuff, because it doesn't see the positive stuff as
a threat. It's the subconscious busy picking up threats and when it has when it sees something in its environment that matches, like a threat, like a three putt on a hole that really mattered, like the seventy second hold of a tournament, and it sees that possibility, it's like threat, we got like a red alert here. But it doesn't see like holding the trophy as a threat, so it just discards that memory. I'm sure it's a memory, but
it's not like a physiological response type of memory. That's why I think Pasrik was telling you and or telling that when he meant That's what he meant when he used that quote about the innocence is that you're battle scars. It's just another way to describe it. And yeah, you flinch at the bottom of that swing to avoid trouble, when when you're twenty five you just there are There is no trouble. You just take dead aid.
You're just about thirty years from your first PGA tour one. I guess you're thirty years from your first Nike tour wins. Now, what would you if you could go back to your younger self, what would what would be the piece of advice you would tell, you know, twenty three year old Stuart sink At, you know, what would you tell them about golf for life?
Now? Well, two things. First. The biggest thing I would say is get to work on making sure this doesn't become your identity right now, because I started doing that about ten years later, and that ten years I feel like got wasted a little bit and the reason is because I just and this is number two thing I
would say is that don't sweat. Don't sweat it. Just let's I spend a lot of time I feel like looking back on, especially my first ten years on the PGA Tour, really sweating it and living and dying by the results of every day and every shot, and I probably cost myself years of my life. It just was not a good way to live. You know, there's only so much you can control in golf, and where that golf ball goes and where it lands, and what that score says on your card, those things are not in
the pile of stuff you can control. Ben It's really hard to detach yourself from that. But those are the things I would tell myself as a twenty three year old. What you called it thirty years ago, is to not sweat it and unweave your identity from what that scorecard and what that money list and all those victories and all that stuff. Unweave it from who you are.
Yeah, it's a fascinating part of golf.
I kicked around the idea of trying to play in my early twenties, and I went down to Florida and I worked, but I would play tournaments as an amateur, and what I found during that period of time was that golf got way harder for me, like way harder. And the second I, you know, I decided this wasn't for me. I'm not cut out for this. I don't think I'm a good enough but be like, I don't know if I want to do this for ten years
to like have a maybe a shot. And I went back home and I feel like when I started to work then like weekend golf, I started shooting like really great scores again, and it was like, oh, like this is because it's such a smaller part of my life where I'm not I'm not wrapped up in like, oh, I hooked one on the range today and I'm worried about like is this going to happen?
Like it's so hard.
I can't imagine trying like trying to compartmentalize golf when you're on the road by yourself in a hotel and this is what you're doing.
Yeah, I know, And it's almost unfair to try to put golf in that kind of a little corner in your life because you know, the fact is it matters to somebody who's had a long career playing and it does matter, but in a performance kind of sense, you know you're better off the less it matters. And your example is perfect because as soon as it didn't matter to you as much anymore, you became a lot better
at golf. And the stories I hear from players who are now former players who go to work and get their eminer status back and they kill it out there in the stadium. Most of them don't even play because it's not fair. It's the same exact thing. You know, I've never played better golf. I've never played better. And it's true. They don't play. They'll practice, they play every two weeks and they average about sixty seven. And they
never did that when they played in the pros. Now, of course, the golf course is a little bit different and the setups, you know, a little kinder, but still you have to hit the shots, and it's just a it's a level of you know, you got a ratchet down the importance of the results in your life and the way it affects who you are and the way it affects the rest of your life. And that's really tricky thing to do when all you want on that eight footer is to make that put All you want
is to make it. It's the most important thing in the world at that moment, and you have to dial it back and say, you know what, I'm going to put ten thousand of these. My goal is to make one percent more than I should not make this very one What.
Were the best ways that you found to, you know, make your life more than just results oriented.
Oh my gosh, I probably should write this up down because I've forgotten most of it. Uh, the biggest thing for me, like in actual performing, like playing, it was just first of all, recognition and understanding, like let's look around,
like let's let's be grateful, and let's remember that. You know what my wife always says, She so on my nerves so bad that she says this, but she says, you know, you've already done probably as bad as you're ever gonna do in this game and most embarrassing in the most epic failure, and you're probably already done the best you're ever gonna do. So nothing you do from here on out is ever going to fall outside those boundaries.
And you've survived both, so why are you worried? And it's so true and it's actually just helps quite a bit, you know, to realize that, like, all right, yeah, I had a three shot lead three holes ago, and now I'm down by one because I just hit a couple of balls in the desert. You know, the heart rate's going. I feel like the biggest loser on the planet. Everybody's
gonna be asking me questions. And I remember what she said, You're probably never gonna do worse than you already did, and you're probably never gonna do better than you've already done. And so keeping that perspective is an important thing. So recognition, but then also like as an operational kind of thing, I just really try to just bury myself in the process. The most boring old adage that everybody says in every interview, in every sport, stick to the process. But it's so true.
Try to control the things you can control. I can control my preshot routine. And I hate the word routine. It's so not the right word for what it is. The operational process that happens before impact should not be called a routine because it is anything but routine. It is a constructed and executed.
You know.
It's like it's a real process. That I try to hit before impact and after impact. I'm like, oh, now I'm a spectator. So I hate the word routine. I've always hated that, but that's the way I use my routine is to keep me focused on something before the shot, so I don't have to be focused on where the ball is going to go and what that scorecard.
Is going to look like.
Yeah, you know that I'm forgetful. I lose range fighters a lot. It's just like a silly thing. But like I noticed, I play so much better when I go through the process of walking off yardages off of sprinkler heads and like with a pin sheet than I do with a rangefinder. And it's what you're saying. The process isn't just like your preshot routine. It's everything you do in how you interact. When you get up to the ball, like you're twenty yards away, you're thinking about the yardage.
That's all like the process, right, And I think what you're hitting on is if you're deep in the process, you actually have less time to have those intrusive or look ahead thoughts that come in and wreck golf, you know.
Yeah, And it's not just that you have less time, although that is important. And I would say that you using a yardist look in a pinsheet takes probably like eight or ten seconds longer, and that gives you time for your brain to sort of switch into that mode of being an athlete. Whereas if you're using a range finder like we all do, and heck we use among the PGA Tour champions, in turns a play. But how easy is it just to be talking and laughing and get your ball and go that and then that's a
seven iron to hit your shot. You don't even plan anything. No, it's not all that healthy. But no, I think it's the time that you spend doing the artist book and then the other thing you mentioned. It's not just the time where you don't have time to you know, for those thoughts to creep in, those negative thoughts. I think we also are Multitasking is not doesn't exist. We can't think about more than one thing at a time consciously.
So if you're going back to that process I was talking about, if I'm fully engaged with the process all the way until impact, my brain can't switch over and think about the result. It just can't. It doesn't have the ability to. So I'm locked in on something else in order to keep the mind occupied so that it can't wander to the current most important thing in my life, which is where that dagum golf ball goes.
Just while we're on the subject of your like long spanning career, what would you say in your time as a pro golfer has been the biggest change to the pro golf landscape.
There's just been so many big changes that are it's hard to say, but I'll just name a couple that I think are the largest ones. I don't think it's the driver. I think it's the ball that the distance is. I think it's a ball thing, not a driver thing. I mean, remember back in the you know, before two thousand, we all had a choice. We could use a pinnacle and hit it really far and have no control on the approach shots. Or we could use a blot of golf ball that was wound that didn't go as far.
We had tons of control. Pick your poison, right. Prov one comes out and I know the bridge Stone ball, and there's a few others at the same time, but really the program one was the one that just knocked over the industry. It comes out and now no one has to make a choice anymore. Now we have a pinnacle off the tee and a blot of ball everywhere else, except it's durable. So to me, the golf ball was
the biggest change in distance and the driver. Yeah, the driver's more forgiving, but we would hit the old drivers pretty far with this ball too, So the golf ball was probably the number one most consequential piece of equipment. And then after that, I'm going to have to say the track man, probably because the TrackMan has just taught us so much about how to optimize what's available with
the golf ball and the technology. You know, hitting up on it four or five degrees with your driver, launching it higher and faster with less spind just maximize as you're carry and back then before the launch monitors were existing, the way the only way you knew that is by hitting drivers side by side on a course and then driving or walking out to the landing area and looking at the balls, and you didn't really know which one, which one landed and hit a soft spot and stopped,
and which one landed way back there enrolled and you're like, oh, well, that driver number two is a a lot longer. Look that balls out there. But it might have carried fifteen yards shorter, but we did not. So the track man has given us like a real definitive picture of what's going on with the ball all the way down range, from impact to landing. And it's taught us a lot about what the wind does to the ball, what altitude does to the ball, what our club dynamics are doing.
It's just it's an enormous educational tool that I think has helped so much. And it's to me that's really what has you know, back in my earlier years, the PGA tour was really top heavy, and then as you got down towards the bottom of the field, the level of skill really trailed off. Nowadays the fields are top heavy and bottom heavy because there's so many players that are so close together that the players at the bottom
are capable of winning. And I think it's because of the track man and how everybody's just so optimized.
Yeah, the best way I've had it, I've heard it phrase that it said. Jeff Ogilvey told me. He said the tour before track man, you'd walk down the range and everybody would be like, I think I found it, and like that was the idea of like I think I got it, and then after track Man, everybody knew the answer and there was no Do you have any like funny stories or memories of like where you thought you had it and it just was gone, you know?
Oh my gosh. Well I remember hearing a funny antecdote about another player who this is really having for you to launch monitor. But it's a funny story anyway, so we'll tell it. And I don't think Gary Holberg would mind if he if I told you. But this got passed down to me, so there's a chance that it wasn't even Gary Halberg, but the person that told me
he said, this is what Gary Halberg did. So he's on the putting green before a tournament, I think it was Canadian Open, and on the practice screen with his caddy. He's just holding everything. I mean, he's like, look at this, look look at this little change I made, holding everything. And they get to the first green and he hits it in there about eight feet and calls his caddy over, and his caddie thinks are going to come over read the putt, and Gary Holberg says, hey, remember that I
was doing on the putting green. He goes, yes, sir, he goes, what was it? So that's like when you think you found it. I mean, how many times you've been on the range and you're like, you leave the range like you're the best golfer in the world, and the next day you're like, what was I doing? I can't remember, But yeah, I don't remember any specific stories
like that. I remember re launch monitor when the only thing you had going was your eyes, and you know, we on the PGA tour had reps out there that you know, were pretty good. They were excellent at like watching a driver and saying like not too much spin, not enough spin, and it was just an eyeball thing. But I certainly remember thinking I had it on the drive with the driver, especially on the range, and then going to the golf course and being like, isn't this
doesn't work? Is the work? I'm going back to the old original. So but yeah, that's that's a different story today.
Yeah, you just like think about like beyond just like your golf swing, the club, optimization of the track. Man, I'm curious when you when you describe pre pro v one interestingly, like you had this choice, you know, you could you know, you had the ballattas you had the tour professionals, you had the pinnacles if you wanted to go no spind How do you think that revealed itself
with like players? Was there more ability to play different ways because of the different you know, shortcomings of different balls and technology.
Probably so I would probably point to the the club side of the equipment more because it didn't have the forgiveness that we have now. So nowadays, I think a kid in college, if they're on a really tight hole and they need to hit the fairway, I think the go to clubs to drive them. And twenty five years ag that was too iron. You know, you're like, I'm just getting this in play now. The driver, I think is the club that most kids feel like they can
hit the straightest. That's really a different fundamental shift in golf.
But before I think, to get the most out of the ball that's spun a lot, and the club the driver that maybe even the irons that were just a little bit less on the technology, less on the forgiveness, you had to probably do something with the ball a little bit more like I'm gonna squeeze a cut or I'm gonna kind of hit down on this and and hit it low and it's gonna come out with more spin or there was just less uniformity to golf than
there is now. And the answer or the the goal in the game is still to shoot the lowest score and to beat all the other players, So it doesn't matter how you do it. But there's way less uniformity now than there used to be. I'm not saying that's really a bad thing. I don't think. I think it takes a lot of skill to be very uniform in golf, and that's one of the things I strive toward is to be very uniform. But I wouldn't have said that
in nineteen ninety five. I would have said, like, if I need to hit a fairway, I'm team this suckered down and I'm going to hit a low cut. It's probably gonna carry you two thirty five and if it rolls twenty five yards, that make me happy.
I want to talk a little bit about, uh, the nine Open obviously a huge moment in your career winning a major championship. Outside of like the obvious winning moment the putt on eighteen, are there is there a shot or an exchange or like an underlying like small moment that you find yourself replaying in your head all these years later.
The things I remember most, I mean, I obviously I can tell you like pretty much every moment for four straight days there. But the things I remember most about that week are that Tom Watson was involved and it kept me very distracted, which was a great thing. Kept me kind of not focused on my own stuff because
I get nervous. I'm a nervous player, and having Tom involved just kept me focused on like, wow, look, let's I was a sports fan too, so I would hit a shot and then look at the leaderboard and think like, gosh, Tom, look at this. It's amazing. Is such an inspiration. So that was a big deal for me. And around maybe twelve or thirteen on Sunday, I was I was in the hunt all week, but on twelve or thirteen Sunday I kind of switched out of that mode and got it.
I made about a twelve foot early in the back nine to kind of get either tied or right near maybe one back, and I got out of the Tom Watson mode and I got into like my own mode. And but I remember that distraction and that just like I just feel like it was a huge help for me to be like focused on something else besides what I'm going to do. And then the eighteenth hold, the
way it played out there. Frank Williams was my caddy, and we had just such a great game plan for that whole We were landing the ball because it was down wind and it was a brick out there. We were landing the ball in the gap. We said five to fifteen yard shore of the green was our landing spot. It was a nice flat area like so many Links courses have. And every day we just did the same thing, just flew it right in that little spot and just
like dropping a grenade and let's see what happens. Right, The ball always just kind of like trundled up onto the green and rolled somewhere near the middle of the green. I mean, it's just classic Links play. And on Sunday's round, the pen happened to be kind of close to where the ball kept trundling, and so I ended up making birdie there and then in the playoff did the same thing. But that was my game plan, and I just love I love that aspect of golf, like having the game plan,
executing it and having the game plan work out. It takes three things you know, to have a good shot, and links golf is one of the things I love most about it is it gives you that opportunity to game plan and you never really know how it's going to work out because there's so much vagary. But in that case, there the conditions set up pretty similar the last three days, like just the same direction to win and a similar amount of win a lot of it, and it enabled us to just have work that game
plan out every day exactly the same way. And it was really just a cool uh for somebody who loves links golf to see that play out into a major win was like something dreams are made of.
What is it about links golf that like lends itself more to game planning than normal tour golf.
Well, I think you a normal tour golf ball's not rolling as far, and we're really good at hitting it in the air the right distance, in the height and all that stuff. So your game planning is just a
little less complex. There's just a little less options because you kind of know, like, well, this hole is going to be a I want to hit it somewhere between two sixty and two ninety and then my second shots probably going to be, you know, somewhere between the seven iron and nine iron, and then the whole location is determined your strategy on the hole over there, the firmness of the ground and the wind dictate more than I think the whole locations do, and so you got to
look at a lot more area of where you might land the ball based on different kind of conditions. And that's why you look at a course map or you play a links course and you see bunkers just kind of all over the place in the most random areas, like why would that even be there? Of course, you know the old adage. You hear this the guy who says, like, why is that munker there? And the next day you couldn't even reach it because the wind direction and the
course changes so much every day. But you've got just a lot bigger, you know, area with which to play and you need to kind of be ready for it all. And there's a lot of game planning that just happens kind of on the fly over there too, because it's impossible to foresee every possible scenario. And I just think that that's why I like about it, because it's just so much more possibilities.
Yeah, I think what you hit on I think about like the most the shots that I take the most satisfaction on in golf are like when you hit you know, the chip that has like maybe a little check in trundles then over a ridge like and rolls out perfectly. Or the approach shot that you know you have to land five yards short of a green and it runs in. There's some satisfaction with golf when the ball hits the
ground and you judge that correctly. I think what you said, like, you know, hitting a golf ball in the air roughly the right yardage is like for a tour pro, especially like a pretty like it's just a skill. You have to have to have a moniker of success to get there. But then all the other things in the understanding of what the ball is going to do once it hits the ground.
That's like the PhD of golf.
With you getting to play now opens, I mean, it's got to be the most amazing thing. You get to go to Scotland for a couple of weeks every year, or or the you know, or Northern Ireland or you know, wherever the open is. You got to go for a couple of weeks for you know, foreseeable part of your life in terms of you played basically every single open venue that there is. If you were in charge of making the road, oh what what courses would be on it?
It would be Saint Andrew's. And that's all. I have this love affair with St Andrews. I just I love the Old Course so much. I just can't get enough Old Course, and I just think it's so much fun to play, and it's just like a it's a wonder being there and knowing how old it is, actually not knowing how old it is, and then the way the course can be set up for public play and for a major, and yeah, if the wind's not blowing that hard, the players tear it apart, of course, but I don't care.
The shots that you hit there and the way that course presents itself to you are just it's it's just remarkable how great it is and how cool some of those shots are. So I would just have a one course rotation there. It would be like the Players Championship of the Major RODA, just.
One, which is you're only one year away from the next and open at the Old Course.
That's true. That's true.
Do you have a particular favorite whole or feature of the old course that every time you see it you're just like wow.
I kind of like the huge mound in front of four.
That's one I always think of too.
It looks like a Hershey's kiss that someone put in like a growth ray or something, and it grew up about five hundred times, and it's just sitting there for no reason except to screw with your brain. That's exactly where you want to land the ball for almost every I mean, it's so obvious that a couple of dudes went out there with a shovel and just built it, and it's been there forever and no one says about it.
But it's exactly where you would have land your ball, and you got to put some kind of curve on it and land it right or left of that thing, and it's always in your mind, and it's right there in the front of the yards book. It's probably the first time anyone's ever singled that feature out as their most notable feature on the On the of.
Course, I think one of my favorite stories in recent years was was Reagan your son got got on the bag at the end of your PGA tour career and you you guys banged out a couple of wins, like kind of felt as as a close observer, felt kind of out of nowhere all of a sudden ste' sink is just you know, on a rampage.
And I'm just curious.
You've you've had, you know, professional caddies your whole life. And I think Reagan, you know, became a professional caddy in the year plus that he was on your bag, But what was the difference in having your kid caddy for you for a long time, and like the dynamic of how you did talk to each other and what he saw in your game versus a you know, a pro jock, like just you know, a caddy that's like a professional that might not have that tight, that close personal connection.
I think the one word that would sum most of it up would be conflict and in parentheses a lack thereof with Reagan, the any little conflict I had with caddies in the past, like uh, strategic plan or you know, how how close to aim towards a flag there's water, you know, stuff like that is the kind of decisions you have to be like comfortably at home with when you choose your strategy in pro golf. Those conflicts disappeared with Reagan because he had He's grown up playing golf
with me. We've played played a thousand rounds. Every time we played golf with each other, we caddy for each other basically, you know, we're like talking through every shot. And he's a big offer, so he understands golf. Like his golf iques off the charts high way higher than his zero handicap or whatever it is. So the conflict was just gone. I knew he believed in me. We had a really good system we were using to you know, to kind of determine like how much risk to take on.
It was very calculated and data driven. He believed in that. And I mean also the motivation, Like he wasn't motivated to pay his mortgage or anything like that. He just wanted to go out there and have fun. And he was. He had just accepted a job with Delta Airlines, but COVID apparently it was pretty big with the airlines big thing, so his job Starfly, his jobs starting date kept getting
pushed back, and he was at home. Yeah, I probably told you his story because you walked around with us at St. Andrews that one day.
Yeah, but he.
The first tournament back. I was coming back off an injury. I'd had a little time off. COVID gave me a little time off and we were about to go to NAPA and Napa is a pretty expensive place for the caddies, and my caddy was like, are you going to get in? Do you think I should make a flight? And I mean a lot of this is kind of non refundable, kind of like you know, commitment for the caddy. And Reagan could was overhearing some of the conversation. He's like, Hey,
I'm not doing anything right now. If it would help, I'll caddy. That's how it started, and we got there and win, And so it was supposed to be one week just to kind of give my caddy, Kip a kind of repriet from having to commit and maybe not even get in the field. But I got in and we won the tournament, and that's how it all started. So bad news for Kip, great news for the Sint household, and it turned into two years with just like it was the most special time in my career for sure.
Having him caddy was just so fun.
I can only imagine you know, I think it's something as you're as you you know, I'm in the stage of having a young kid and watching but like, you know, do you just think about like the precious amount of time you know, you see it kind of dwindling away.
Like I look at at like my kids.
She's almost six, and it's like, well, I you know, how many more years?
And like it had to feel like a bonus.
Yeah, And a lot of things had to come together for us. So we had our kids really young. So as a forty six year old, I had two children who were well into the age where they could caddy full time.
You know.
Reagan's a younger one. So we had our kids young, and then my career lasted a long time. So not many people span that time where they have kids old enough where they can still you know, caddy. I mean, there's there's plenty of guest appearances by teenagers out there that caddy for their dad a couple of tournaments. But and Reagan and Connor both did that too. But as far as is, why don't you come on and caddy for a little while, you know, and let that let's
see how it goes. And we went. We went first twelfth fourth in our first three tournaments, and it was kind of like, all right, this is gonna be something that lasts a little while.
I mean it goes.
It goes though to a lot of things you said about, like your career, like you're you're you're someone who gets nervous, right, Having someone or your son like has to take your mind away a little bit, Like you talked about the Tom Tom Watson distraction, Like having your kid, Like there's so much stuff to talk about, even if it's just your kid's life, Like just listening to him talk about what's going on in his life, it had to be amazing.
Changing gears here. You've played, you played in five Ryder Cups, nine total team competitions. You've been an assistant captain for both the President's Cup and the Ryder Cup.
In your career.
How would you say that the you know, the culture of the Ryder Cup has changed or evolved.
The culture of the Ryder Cup. I think the players just have a lot more power than they used to have. It's a lot bigger business out there playing golf as a professional on the PGA Tour than it used to be. So it's you know, recovery well, we know more about all this stuff. It takes more time. I'm not trying to say anything bad about the players, because I do all this stuff too, but there's just way less hang,
way more businesslike approach. You know, there's pre and post round physio stuff, and the days just take a lot longer than they used to. That's just the way it is on the PGA tour, and so it makes the team aspect. It lessens the team aspect, especially with regard to like the wives and this significant others and caddies. It used to be all one big team affair and
now it's a lot more like individual things. And I'm not saying that's some reason that the US team has not been succeeding, because the European team does the same stuff. You know, they That's just the way it is. But that's the like, the personality of the team room is way different than it used to be. The players control a lot more. There's a lot more power that has shifted from the captain and the PG of America to
the players. And that's what it seems like to me, after being an assistant for one of each team the last couple of years, that the players are just way more in power.
Yeah, it's tricky, right, you like want it to be, you know, like the old adage of like treat it like any other week, Right, But then you have the other thing, like the other elephant in the room is like, what's Europe doing that the US isn't doing like? Or is it just they're playing better? Like in your estimation intimately evolve? What what would you say to the frustrated US Ryder Cup fan.
Well, one thing I haven't ever been is intimately involved with the European team, So I can't say what it is they're doing. I mean, we have kind of an idea of what they do, but they, I believe, have a very deep, long standing plan that's been in place for a long time, and they don't waver from their plan. It doesn't always lead to winning, but I think their players are groomed from an early age to be Ryder cuppers, and they have past captains and players and future captains
that are their assistants. They aren't they're they're not very they don't waver on their system, their plan, and you can kind of see from the outside their pairings too, you know who they put together now they have in a way a little bit of a benefit when you have like let's say two Scandinava players who can play together, and you have two Spanish players who can play together. Well, we have like two guys from California and two guys from you know, New York. Well, that's not really quite
the same like nationality. You know, we don't see people, you know, waving the California flag out there, you know, but we do see Spanish and Swedish and English flags. So they have a little bit of an edge I think in that national sort of like bond with within countries that they can just make some natural pairings with I don't think that explains anything on the overall record, but that's part of their system, I believe. And we
don't really have necessarily that. We have more like social uh you know, sidelos where players sort of reside, they have their dinners, they stay together. But the European team def you can see in their choices of their captains and assistance that they have like a strong plan. They have leadership that's not captains. They have a good leadership that's sort of overseeing the whole thing, and you know, it's leading to a good bit of success and the players buy into it.
If you were, if you were to be a captain, how would you approach maybe in your own unique way, What would be a unique thing that you would bring to the table.
Oh?
Man, if we're first of all, I think if we're playing overseas, I think we got to go over earlier. We got to get there. We can't just show up on Monday and expect to be ready to go by the time the opening ceremonies are over. It's just the body doesn't work like that, not when things are this close together. You know, you got the top well it's not fair to say the top twenty four players in the world, but you know what I mean.
Yeah, it's like basically like twenty four of the top thirty five players.
Yeah, that's about right. So you got players that are this good and this close together going at it in a team. You gotta just like the margins have to be one. We have to win the margins and we can't let jet lag be part of it. And I think that that's happening when we go over there. Would definitely want my players to be here a lot earlier and probably not making the families happy, but It's just part of the deal. If you want to compete and win at be at your best.
Well, Manner is a beautiful hotel, so.
Deri Maner is beautiful. I'm sure it is, and Ireland's lovely. So like the European guys came over this year early and just played a lot of golf in Long Island, you know, I mean that was fun and I'm sure they probably had the conversation with their wives that were kind of like, yeah, yeah, Luke. Once it's come over quite a bit earlier this year. It probably didn't go well, but as far as I know, I think they all did it, the ones that were able to. I think
Seth had some issues at home. He might not have been able to do it, but you know, the we just have to be ready to play. And uh I was part of that team in Italy as an assistant for Zach, and Zach did a great job, and I Zach's one of my best friends. I hate the fact that he's getting so much negativity about the Ryder Cup. I mean he did he did the best job he
could have done. I mean you could go back and say, yeah, in hindsight, you probably would have changed some things, but we didn't have the benefit of hindsight at the time, and we thought we were doing everything as well as we could.
And the thing with captain, see is if you win, you're this hero like that, don't I've never heard of a losing Ryder Cup captain getting a good like like being like, you know what, they did a great job, even if they lost by half a point.
Yeah, it's because they all do a great job. They all. I mean, I had the wholar opposites of the spectrum for personalities with my Ryder Cup captains. I had Singer, I had Corey, I had hal I had Curtis and Tom Layman. And those guys are all like basically peppered across the spectrum and guess what, they all did fabulous, all of them. We only won one time, and I don't know that it's because of the way that Zinger captains. The other guys did great. It was up to us to win or lose.
We didn't.
We didn't. We didn't win except for once, and so yeah, I've always thought that the captain gets way too much credit for winning, a way too much crap for losing. It's just a it's a Willi's in the Joe's it's.
You know, they're just jogging.
Who's a player from your era, like at any point of your career that you feel like didn't get the respect of, like how good they were? Like you watch them, it was like, God, this guy is good. But like no national pub on how good he was.
David Thoms, he'd be the one. He won to like I don't even know how many tournaments, fourteen and the PGA, it was like consistently up there. He was good in every fast of the game. He was a nice dude. He's really popular. He won the PGA championship and never even been considered for an assistant position or a right captain c never had his name mentioned one time?
Isn't he coaching too in Louisiana? Doesn't he have like a like he's got an academy.
I don't think he does any coaching, but he's got an academy. He's got coaches there. Yeah, he's good for the game. Well, I shouldn't say. I believe Sam Burns might have come out of his academy Barbary.
Barbary and Burns, I feel like we're both both came out of there. It was a story at like either a USAM or something years ago. Yeah.
So, and he's one of my great friends too, So I know a lot about his academy down there, and and he would never say it. He would never be the one to say, like, you know, my name never came up, But he's the one I would pick, and and just a great guy, and he played so good for a long time. And he's also my partner for the American Family and the team event we have out on the Champions Tour. So I got to raw raw him up and get him some confidence.
Up in Wisconsin and you know, the the great northern Midwest. What are your you know, as someone who's who's been involved with the tour for so many years, what do you think about the direction of the tour and the idea I think like a popular thought is scarcity would be.
Good for the PGA Tour.
What are your kind of thoughts about that potential direction change?
Well, I mentioned this before, how the bottom of the field is way more capable than they used to be and there's not that big a spread from top to bottom anymore, and so the parodying off is increasing and the skill level overall has just like vastly increased, but yet we're talking about shrinking the tour. To me, those things are at odds with each other, and I hate that. I hate that. I wish we could be opening up
the game to more players. I think it would be good for us, but business wise, I understand that it doesn't. There's just only so much room and then eventually more players in the field become more of a cost than they do a benefit. And it's it's a sad thing, but it's kind of true in the nature of the sport. So the fact that we have this new company called PGA Tour Enterprises that is a for profit and we have a heavy investor, you know, that's invested a lot
of money in the PGA Tour expecting the return. It's not just a sponsorship now. This is a new kind of a relationship we have that is expecting return, and so we have a responsibility of that. And I'm not a business expert, but I trust our leaders, and I believe that Brian, our new CEO, probably he probably has it right that in order for us to make a profit we probably or increase our profits, we need to
probably go that direction. And he's got a lot of experience in the world of sports and dealing with media and TV especially, so I hate to say it, but I think he's probably right. I wish it was not that way, though, because I just believe that there's more players than ever before that deserve a shot.
I've been thinking about it a lot, and I think if you got to a state of like true true relegation, where like, hey, if Jordan Spieth finishes seventy two, he's he's off.
He's off, like or whatever the number is.
It's a hundred, maybe it's one hundred and one hundred and ten, it's you know, if if they're.
Out of that, they're out.
But then if that bottom group is like three hundred players and there's true relegation and promotion, I think you might get into a spot. And I you know, you don't know how this would play out until it plays out in practice, like you can put this on board, but like to me, like it's it's fascinating, Like what's going on with Patrick Reed right now in Europe is crazy, you know, but there are a lot of capable players
in Europe. There's so much talent on the corn Ferry Tour, there's so much talent in the bottom part of the PGA Tour, and you think about, like, being a rookie on tour is really hard these days because it's like, hey, you got like ten tournaments, the first ten tournaments that you can play to start the year. If you don't play well, like you might want to just start playing the corn Fairy Tour again. You know, it is It
is a such a difficult you know thought. But like I think about like the juice of a event that's basically the bottom half of the tour, top half of corn Fairy and some European tour players, the juice of that event if one of the big names falls out for a year, would be huge. And then it also adds like a whole story and redemption arc to that player's career where it's almost like their second you know they're coming, they're coming back, and it like makes them
more marketable. I think there is like a world where in practice it works out really well, where it's like, you know, you have these like really rich stories that come from up coming up you know, I don't know, though, you know, it could go the other way.
Just to be Devil's advocate. If you have a full relegation set up, you just risk losing some of your top names. And Jordan SPE's a great example. You risk losing that and that's something that our sponsors say, hey, on, we want to have the top name. So there's this tug of war between name recognition and absolute quality of
play and skill. Right. We face the same thing on the PGA Tour champions The sponsors in the tournament offices want the Hall of Fame guys, and so do we don't get me wrong, but there's a pretty strong core of us. They're like, we want this to be the best players over fifty in the world every week that's possible,
the best players, and the model doesn't work. So if you use that example as a way to apply to the PGA Tour going forward and you have like a full relegation, we only want the best players every week, then you're gonna end up with a lot of players going back and playing in the next tour. We probably
need a third tier, is what we need. We probably need these whatever they're going to be called in the future, these top fifty signature event no cut type things, and then we need the rest of the PGA Tour and maybe some new tournaments, and then we need the corn Ferry Tour maybe a few less and have this tier of up and down and all that stuff like you were talking about. I love the idea. I'm just not sure that our sponsors would stand for it.
Speaking of the Champions Tour, you know, I expected that you were going to go up there and just you know, with the Lake career on the PGA Tour wins is the Champions Tour harder than the normal golf fan things like to win on the Champions Tour?
Oh?
Yeah, it's harder to win because the players that are playing out there, they may have lost some of their absolute skill like distance, and they haven't forgotten how to win tournaments and how to hang in there and grind it out. And it's harder than people think to win. And I learned that myself. I thought I was gonna waltz out there and knock them dead, and it took me. Let's see, it took me a year and a half before I got a first win. So and I lost
some tournaments in dramatic fashion along the way too. So there's a comfort level of moving to a new chapter and seeing new courses and you know they're new old faces, new faces that I've known for years that I haven't played against in a long time. And so the level play out there is really good. It's really good, and it's hard to win. You got to play really good
golf to win. I have won in different fashions, and I've been really proud of every single one the way I've done it, because they've all been different.
Went up there, obviously, like anyway, the Fellas Golf, it was like Steu six going up there, He's going to clean up. Was there a guy that you played with it, You're like, whoa, I was unfamiliar with this, with what I'm seeing here, But this guy's really good.
I mean no, because I've seen these guys for years and I know what they can do, and nothing surprises me out there. I knew going into it that it was going to be like a dog fight, but I just thought that my dog was going to fight a little bit better. And I played pretty well. I finished high a lot, but I didn't get the job done at the end. You know, I let a few leads go. I hit the ball and some you know, I made some doubles and triples here and there, and just kind
of threw away some tournaments. I got a little sloppy, but I think that that was mostly happening when I was still trying. I had one foot on the PGA Tour and one foot on PGA Tour Champions, and I was going back and forth, and I was really doing kind of a crappy job on both. And so when I committed to play the PG two Champions and I realized I had this window of you know, you can really reap some pretty good rewards out there in this
certain window if you keep yourself in decent shape. And I was lett this window slide by, and I started feeling like, you know, I kind of wish I was playing Champions Tour because it's really fun getting a contention,
and I'm in contention a lot. So when I committed to just play out there full time and leave the PGA Tour behind, I won the first one, and I think that change in mindset was like huge for me because it was like, this is my tour now, and I got to win that first week, and it's been pretty consistent since then.
Yeah, you just had your fifth one oh season opener. You can't win them all unless you win the first.
One, right, that's right.
Sure, Well, I have to have you back on This was so fun. I got through like a tenth of the things I wanted to get through.
But anytime, I love talking to you guys.
This was awesome. Thanks so much, and we'll talk to you soon.
Okay, sounds good.
Again.
Big thanks to Stuart for the time. I really enjoyed that chat. A lot of fun topics there. We will be back next week. Big thanks to PJ Clark for editing and producing this podcast. I will be I'm on vacation this week, but I will be back next week. We'll probably do some sort of catch up on the last two weeks of pro golf. But thanks so much and we'll talk to you soon.