Rory’s emotional message to his daughter, and a thank you | Best of Weekend 9

Welcome! Where are you, you ask. I’m calling this the Weekend 9. Think of it as a spot to warm you up for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We’ll have thoughts. We’ll have tips. We’ll have tweets. But just nine in all, though sometimes maybe more and sometimes maybe less. As for who I am? The paragraphs below tell some of the story. I can be reached at nick.piastowski@golf.com.

Thank you, Weekend 9 reader. 

Thank you for letting me opine about golf in this space. And write about Bob Uecker. And even make a bracket. 

Thank you for letting me find stories that interested me. And videos that interested me. Thank you for letting me find instruction tips that may help you. And stories that may make you smile. 

Thank you for emailing me. I read every message. I published a few, too. 

So on weekend No. 1 of 2026, I’m offering you a gift. Below is the Best of the Weekend 9. There are 27 items in all, and each was published at some point last year. Why 27? Simple. No, the reason isn’t golf related, though 27-hole days are always welcome. 

Twenty-seven is simply long. And hopefully this will help get you through Monday No. 1 of the new year. 

Let’s start. 

Stories that interested me 

1. Here, from January, the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay took his turn in reviewing TGL. This was gold: 

“Golf reimagined. That’s what TGL pledges, which should necessitate an adage: Any time you see ‘__________ reimagined,’ investment firms have entered the chat.”

This was also great:

“The night kicked off with the zenith expression of sports enthusiasm: the dramatic walk-out. Low-key men accustomed to quietly stepping from tournament courtesy cars marched into the rowdy ‘SoFi Center’ like gladiators wearing pressed pants. Woods, naturally, got Tuesday’s biggest ovation, walking out last to the rumble of Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger,’ a song old enough to qualify for a discount at most South Florida restaurants.” 

2. Forget TGL. Oswego, Illinois, may be getting nine holes under a roof, and the concept’s got a sweet name — the Megalodome. In February, Sam Woodworth of WSPYnews.com wrote here that progress is being made. 

3. After Billy Horschel hit a left-handed shot at the Valspar Championship, an interesting back and forth started after popular Golf Twitter user @Top100Rick shared video of the play and wrote: “If you are a 25 year old scratch player and I gave you unlimited time, the best teachers, the best equipment, best fitness coaches…The  odds of you getting a tour card are ZERO.”

The post has 6 million views. Folks have weighed in. 

Including Horschel. He wrote this:

“Umm sorry to be the bearer of bad news but Rick is probably right. Percentages are less than 1%. It’s one thing to get the technical part but then you need the mental which is probably the hardest and don’t forget course management and vital tournament experience….. which guys similar in age would have roughly a decade of experience playing highly competitive tournament level golf.”

4. Here, Viktor Hovland joined … the UAP Files Podcast. What’s a UAP? It’s short for unidentified anomalous phenomena, a term for what have long been called UFOs, short for unidentified flying objects. Hovland has talked about the subject on occasion, and on the podcast, he spent a good portion of his time questioning the host. 

The golf talk was brief, though this was interesting:

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“Just to relate this to golf,” Hovland said, “the past couple years have been a little bit challenging for me on the golf course and it’s made me have to question a lot of the things that I’ve done. Because when you make an instinctual move that I’ve done for, I’d say, maybe the past 10 years of my life and the ball is going one direction, it’s going pretty straight, it’s going where I want it to go and then suddenly it’s not doing that, you have to really question everything and look at all the things that you’re doing to re-engineer the golf swing that you had before. 

“And when you do that, it’s quite addicting, really. It might give you some short-term discomfort because you look at things that you regard as facts and then maybe they weren’t as true as you thought they were. And that original discomfort goes away quickly when you realize that on the other side, there’s lessons to be learned and you can actually improve because of that. 

“And then when you extrapolate that to other things in society or how you live your life in general, it’s quite freeing and it almost becomes a little addicting — you just want to question everything, although within reason; you still need to put on your shoes and put on clothes and go out there and work and get better at the things you want to get better at. But yeah, it’s just fascinating so that’s kind of what led me to this topic.”

5. In March, former NFL star JJ Watt said he’d been invited to play Augusta National the day after the Masters, but he was concerned: While he shoots in the 95-to-105 range, he hadn’t played in a year. It made for an interesting scenario.

Here’s how he did:   

6. This was great from longtime French pro Mike Lorenzo-Vera. Speaking on the Sliced Golf Podcast (which you can listen to in full here), Lorenzo-Vera said he had tried to recreate one of Tiger Woods’ more famous plays — his around-a-tree bunker shot at the 2019 WGC-Mexico Championship (which you can watch by clicking here).

Why do you want to write this story?

A great question. And one I usually have no trouble answering, as you go to places with at least some understanding of what’s about to unfold. For example, the Masters? Because it’s the Masters. Easy enough. Everyone gets that. But standing in front of a dozen inmates and a superintendent inside their prison, I paused this time. I had encouraged the question — I simply asked: What do you want to know about me? And the query in the paragraph above was the first one I got. 

To take a quick step back here, on GOLF.com, a story headlined “‘I never thought I’d be golfing, let alone in prison’: Here, golf offers a second chance” was published. In a sentence, the story is about how a prison in Washington state is using golf as a rehabilitation tool — but I’d need a few paragraphs to explain fully what that all entails. Maybe you’d wonder:

What does that look like?

How did it start?

Should inmates even be allowed to play golf in prison? Should they be rehabilitated? Or should they be punished?

And why is this being written?

That took a while to answer. I wanted to say the right words. This was my chance to connect, I thought. That I wasn’t there for the benefit of getting a story. That I was there to share it.

I remember saying this then: 

“Because you all are playing golf, too.”

And, over the course of a few days, they did, and GOLF.com videographer Darren Riehl and I were invited in. Cedar Creek Golf Club played on its home turf — an old softball diamond at Cedar Creek Corrections Center — where pitch shots were hit and some drives were deposited over a 15-foot fence rimmed with barbed wire. And CCGC also played their first-ever ‘real’ round, during a day outing to The Home Course in Washington. At times, they wanted to see us hit too, and we did — and we were trash-talked, and we trash-talked them. 

All of that’s golf, right?

And since it is, there’s a chance that some of the inmates will adopt a few of the principles of the game that the sport’s romantics believe in. Tim Thrasher, Cedar Creek’s superintendent, thought that when he started the program.  

All of which sounds like a story. Below, you can watch a video of our time at the prison. 

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Best instruction tips of the year 

15. This was good from Robert MacIntyre, when asked in June for one thing he likes about himself:

“Most of the time, I don’t give a … about what’s going on. I don’t really care about what — I really don’t care about other people’s opinions, to be honest with you. If you’re not part of my team, not part of the inner circle, your opinion really doesn’t matter to me.

“I think that’s a massive thing, especially in the sport we play. I think it helps with, when you’re trying to move forward, you’re trying to dissect every part of the game to try and get better. I think, if you take too many opinions in that really aren’t trying to help you, then, yeah, it doesn’t help at all.

“I think something I like is I don’t really care about what others think outside of my team and my friends or my family.”

16. The post below, from Dr. Peter Tiereny, was very interesting. 

Takeaways from the year 

17. In January on the PGA Tour, the talk was existential, interestingly so. On the heels of declining ratings and potentially interest, calls were made — and letters written — for players to be more ‘entertaining.’ But isn’t the product in and of itself ‘entertaining?’ And how exactly does a golfer become an entertainer?

How deep did things get? GOLF’s James Colgan asked one of my favorite questions of the week, to Wyndham Clark.

Is it hard to be actively thinking about being interesting while you’re competing?

Here’s his answer:

“OK, so for TGL, I think the fun thing for me is I treat it more of just when I’m at home playing with my buddies at Whisper Rock where I’m going to talk trash when there’s time to talk trash — I’m going to enjoy things. I might say something that I feel like I put my foot in my mouth, I might say something funny and enjoy, laugh and say man, that was really fun. When you come out here [on the PGA Tour], for me, that actually could be a good way for me to be out here as well. But really when we get inside the ropes on the PGA Tour, I’m really focused on just trying to shoot the lowest score as possible. Because they can’t hear us talk, you’re not as much trying to be entertaining in this way — you’re trying to be entertaining with your golf shots.”

Good points. You should be able to sell world-class golf. But I’ve also been thinking about another recent exchange, on GOLF’s “Subpar,” between host Colt Knost and longtime pro Rocco Mediate.

Said Knost: “You’re one of the best personalities the game of golf has ever seen. And in an age now where we are dying for some of these guys to have a personality, have you always been this way, like since you were a little kid? Like, I’ve known you since I came on Tour in 2007-’08. And you were always this way.”

Said Mediate: “I was not. Well, I was very shy, got over that. I couldn’t look you in the eyes. Mr. [Arnold] Palmer taught me one thing. And I would sit in his office many zillion times. And he said, you look people in the eye. Here’s what he said: If they’re dumb enough to come out and watch you play golf, you better give them something for the money. That’s what he’d say, busting my ass. I’m like, really? He goes, yeah, look at them; say hello, what’s going on; talk to them. I don’t care where you are in the event — say hi. Just give them something. So I learned to do that.”

18. In February in the Weekend 9, I did a Q&A with longtime instructor and CBS analyst Mark Immelman, and below was one of the exchanges: 

The Masters winner is? 

“Rory McIlroy,” said Immelman, also the brother of Trevor Immelman, the 2008 Masters champion. “I’ve had him in my group, in contention, and I’ve watched him play the discipline game he’s preaching. And I talked to him about it and asked him about the fact that he’s not going full bore with the irons. He’s crafting shots. He’s flatting the ball a whole lot more. And he said to me, he goes, yes, it’s difficult, but I’m committing to it. And if he plays a more disciplined game, he knows with his length, he’s going to make at least three or four birdies a round. And if you avoid mistakes, that’s adding up to 16-under over four days. So I feel like he’s aware of where the shortcomings are, and he’s being disciplined enough to remain true to that and not sort of gravitating back to what he calls his natural impulse. 

19. In mid-June, I led the Weekend 9 with this:

Since the U.S. Open is great in part because it’s such a test, the man wondered:

Why not play it every week? 

Not at Oakmont, he said at a presentation I was at Thursday night. But he asked why couldn’t that week’s Travelers Championship, for example, have the Open’s knee-high rough and zero-inch-high greens, along with other score-busting defenses. The man also said he was mostly unfamiliar with the pro game, so he hoped for forgiveness if his question sounded funky — and those in the know, of course, can offer some answers, among them being that the U.S. Open, as a major, should be special, and you’d think the pros wouldn’t appreciate the weekly slaughter. But all of it did get me thinking, especially the week the Travelers was played, when there is such a contrast between the high-scoring Open and the typically low-scoring Travelers:

What do you, the golf fan, prefer more: pros looking like world-beaters, or pros being brought to their knees?

Of course, the answer can certainly be that you like a little of both, or that a low score sometimes doesn’t fully reflect a course’s difficulty, as the best in the world are the best in the world for a reason: They’re really freaking good, no matter the park. Earlier this week, Scheffler said as much, when asked if TPC River Highlands, the Travelers’ host, was too easy. His answer was somewhat lengthy. 

“Golf’s funny in that sense,” he said. “People, when they watch golf, it’s not like other sports where you want us to look like y’all when we play golf. It’s one of those funny things. You watch the NBA, and you’re like, I wish they couldn’t dunk, I wish they were scoring less, I wish their shooting percentage was lower on 3-pointers. If you watch tennis, you’re like, man, I wish the ball was going slower so they look like me out there playing tennis. It’s not like that.

“As much as some people want us to feel like them, professional golf is different than amateur golf. We get a lot of time to prepare to go out and play. The guys out here are really good at golf. If you stand here on the driving range and watch a range session, that ball doesn’t go offline very often.

“I think sometimes, especially in this day and age, people get way too caught up in the winning score being what is a proper test. I think a proper test is good shots being rewarded and bad shots being punished. I think this is one of the best golf courses for that.”

Scheffler then reviewed a few of Highlands’ holes. 

“There’s opportunity out there, and there’s also punishment,” he said. “You look at the closing stretch. Fifteen, if you hit a good shot, you’ve got a birdie opportunity; if you try to bail out right, you’re going to be in a bunker short right of the green and have a 40-yard bunker shot, a hard shot. Sixteen, if you hit a good shot, you’re going to have a good look at birdie; if you bail out and go long, it’s a tough chip down the hill. Seventeen, you hit the fairway, you have a chance to hit in there close to the pin; if you hit it in the left rough, you probably can’t get to the green. That’s what we look for in golf courses, in terms of you want good shots to be rewarded and bad shots to be punished. It’s as simple as that.

“The winning score, I think people get way too caught up in. I’m not saying necessarily that even-par is a bad winning score. Some weeks like the U.S. Open, you hit two great shots and you’re going to get rewarded with a par. That’s fine. That’s good, too.

“Across the board, the way we get tested in professional golf is very good. We play different types of golf courses, different types of grass, we play different types of winning scores. We just see different tests, and I think not one is better than the other.

“The most frustrating thing for me when I play a golf tournament is when you see good shots not getting rewarded and bad shots not being punished properly. That’s all we look for. Do we care that 22-under wins this week? No.

“I played good last year, and if they somehow change it to 12-under by making the pins in silly spots and doing things to trick up the golf course, what we want is a fair test. I think having birdies at the end sometimes is a pretty exciting finish. That’s really all there is to it.”

20. In August, I led the Weekend 9 with this:

I promise this won’t get preachy. Or syrupy. 

After all, this starts with a tee shot smacking a 50-foot tree about 100 yards out, then ricocheting off it at about a 4 o’clock angle, before finishing 10 feet below the hole we’d just finished, about 50 yards to our right. The only thing higher than the odds of that happening was the degree of absurdity. And Matt heard about it. It was his golf ball that he’d played more like a billiards ball.

Good stuff. And that’s what my annual golf trip is, which I went on last week. (Should you be interested, I’ve written about it here, here and here.) We go to Green Lake, Wis. (about 90 minutes north from where I grew up), we play the Lawsonia double, Mascoutin and Tuscumbia (which is right down the street from our Airbnb) and we eat, drink and watch old pro wrestling on YouTube (sometimes all at once). Going are Matt and Ethan; they’re college friends. And another Matt; he’s a high school friend. And Todd, whom I’ve known since grade school. You have this group. You have this trip. 

And isn’t that the “point”? 

Remember Scheffler existentially reflecting on that at the Open Championship? About a month after he wondered why he should try to win, and after he wondered why he should try to win when things such as family matter infinitely more, and after he wondered “what’s the point,” I’d still been thinking about it all, too.   

Then somewhere after a bogey and a beer, I was reminded of the answer. Sometimes it gets lost among the emails and meeting invites. But it’s why we respond to all of those messages. It’s why we hustle. It’s why we keep hustling. 

The answer is the thrill of the climb, whatever your climb may be. And the ability to celebrate that, in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways. 

Like with golf balls off trees. 

Feet-good moments of the year 

21. Below, from February, is a video of Dean Burmester at LIV Golf’s Adelaide event. The gesture may have been the kindest of the year. (To view the video, click the white arrow in the middle of the photo.)

22. The Instagram post below, shared in January from the Hero Desert Dubai Classic, made me smile. 

23. One of the touching moments from the Masters came when Rory McIlroy spoke to his daughter, Poppy, during the green jacket ceremony, saying: “The one thing I would say to my daughter, Poppy, over there, ‘Never give up on your dreams. Never, ever give up on your dreams. Keep coming back, keep working hard, and if you put your mind to it, you can do anything. Love you.’” On Sky Sports, McIlroy went further, though, after reporter Anna Jackson asked him: “If she ever turns around to you and says, ‘Daddy, why was it such a big deal when you won the Masters?’, what do you think you would say?”

In response, McIlroy said this:

“I think it’s a story of perseverance. And I think that’s what I would tell her, that there was a lot of years that I came here and I wasn’t able to achieve what I wanted to achieve but I never let that discourage me or get me down. I kept coming back and I kept giving it another go. So I think that’s the story that I would tell her and why it meant so much to so many people.

“But she did come back — they have the daycare here and she came back with a T-shirt on Friday and on the back of that T-shirt was all the past champions of the Masters tournament and she asked me, ‘Daddy, why is your name not on the back of this T-shirt?’ So I said to her after I played today, I said, ‘Poppy, next year my name’s going to be on the T-shirt.’”

24. This story here, written by Ben Gagnon of the County Press, is good. It tells how Eldrick Norris of Michigan and his dad recently won $225 for winning a tournament — and how the fourth-grader donated the money to his school. 

Said his principal, Jennifer Christian: “I didn’t know what to say. I asked him what he wanted and what we could do for him, and he said he wanted churros back on the lunch menu and some basketballs and footballs for recess. He’s just a great kid with a great family.”

Best of what you’re emailing me 

25. Here’s one email I received: 

A big part of the reason I’ve enjoyed being a golfer for 60 years is relaxation. I love being on a golf course, surrounded by beautiful, albeit sometimes man-made, views and being away from the cares of real life. The pendulum in the war on slow play has swung too far, in my view, where a round of golf has become a race to see who can finish the fastest. If I’m not holding anyone up, it makes me mad to have a marshal tell me to speed up and that doesn’t enhance anyone’s enjoyment of the round one bit. Sure, there’s a problem with slow play on the PGA Tour, but the bigger impact of the “speed it up” mentality is felt by recreational players who often just want to relax and get some relief from pressure and deadlines they deal with in the rest of their lives.

26. Here’s another email I received:

Max [Homa] is right. The anonymity of social media allows people to show the worst of themselves without consequences. Our society is generally rife with anger these days, and I attribute a lot of it to cable TV “news” shows that are more appropriately called “rage factories” because they build their viewership by enraging people. Viewers get addicted to their rage so they keep tuning in. I stopped watching cable TV news shows a couple of years ago and I’ve been much less angry ever since, which means I’m generally happier. As Max said, when anything important happens, you still find out about it, although perhaps not immediately. 

27. Here’s one more email I received:

It was exactly a year ago that I read your article [headlined] ‘Tom Kim and never-failing Tim Hortons: 50 Presidents Cup observations.’

Cards on the table, hailing from the other side of the pond meant I’d never heard of Tim Hortons. However, one line of your article stood out to me — and I made a point of screenshotting it and occasionally thinking about it during the 12 months leading up to the Ryder Cup:

“13. The Americans should be a lock at Bethpage. The atmosphere will be a carnival, and the home team rolls.”

Let’s start with what happened between the ropes.

I can only assume when you wrote this that you were giddy at the success of a routine Presidents Cup pummeling of the Internationals. Or maybe at Keegan Bradley proclaiming: “We are going to Bethpage to kick their f***ing ass.” Instead, the U.S. team was comprehensively dismantled in their own backyard for the first four sessions, although great credit to the U.S. for their Sunday fightback.

Each time the Ryder Cup rolls around, one thing never fails to surprise me. It’s the unerring confidence with which Americans predict a U.S. victory — or, in your case, overwhelming victory. This is despite the record now showing that Europe has triumphed in 11 of the past 15 editions — including five of the past 10 stateside.

I grant you that futurology can be tricky when it comes to predicting sports results — so let’s look at your prediction of the event’s vibe.

I wasn’t there and you were — but where do you even start with this horror show. Perhaps the emcee kicking off Saturday morning by encouraging 5,000 spectators (including children) to chant: “F** you, Rory”? Or what about other obscene remarks, often made mid-swing? Or what about a squadron of state troopers being called in to police the McIlroy-Lowry fourball match on Saturday? This was nothing less than a significant minority reveling in an unrelenting campaign of hatred and cruelty.  

And you foresaw … a carnival atmosphere? 

I mean, given the depravity of what transpired, that must be one of the most erroneous predictions in the history of golf.

Yet even here in the UK, people knew Bethpage was a car crash waiting to happen. Your ‘carnival atmosphere’ was presumably predicated on a U.S. landslide — but did you think that would make the crowd nicey-nicey to Europe? 

Now I don’t want to be holier than thou about this. I’m well aware European crowds aren’t perfect. There is a depressing trend over here over unpleasant comments being made toward players. But it barely registers compared to what went down at Bethpage. And even when it comes to the Ryder Cup, the European banter is at least born from creativity and humour, such as the “hats off to your bank account” chant at Patrick Cantlay in 2023.

Of course, Keegan Bradley desperately tried to invent some alternative facts about “violence” in Rome. The only violence I saw was Rory being restrained from Bones!

From a personal perspective, my lasting impression from Bethpage should have been celebration at a European triumph. But you know what? It wasn’t. As the TV director cut to the thousands of U.S. fans departing while matches were still out on the course, my thought wasn’t about the golf. It was about how a number of these fans had been happy to dish out non-stop filth to the European players and their wives — yet when faced with their own adversity (namely a European win), these ‘supporters’ showed their true colors by fleeing for the exits and scuttling back home at the earliest opportunity. They were the real losers – not Team USA.

And, ultimately, it felt like there was an even bigger loser — the spirit of golf. Knocked down and kicked into the gutter.

Some carnival.

Let’s hope for better things at Adare Manor in 2027!