Golfpocalypse
An annual 'Friends Ryder Cup' trip is the greatest thing in golf
Richard Heathcote
Golfpocalypse is a weekly collection of words about (mostly) professional golf with very little in the way of a point, and the Surgeon General says it will make you a worse person. Reach out to The Golfpocalypse with your questions or comments on absolutely anything at shane.spr8@gmail.com.
I can't wait for Friday morning. More specifically, I can't wait for the feeling of Friday morning. I know I'm going to be tired. The nerves won't let me sleep, or at least not well. On Thursday night, I'll try to limit myself to one beer with my friends, but the social energy will get the best of me and I'll have two or three. On any other morning, I would wake up with a groggy 10% hangover. But on Friday morning, the adrenaline will erase it all. I will become a wide-eyed Billy Horschel, mainlining the energy of the universe, unstoppable.
Friday morning is the start of the Channels Cup. You almost definitely don't know what the Channels Cup is, but you've heard of something like the Channels Cup, and maybe you have a Channels Cup of your own. It's a Ryder Cup-style tournament, held once per year, featuring me and about 20 of my friends. "Channels" refers to the channels of our Slack group, the digital social club where we hang out when we're not together in person. It's a mix of friends I knew from real life, others I met over time through various online sports things, their friends, a few randos who fit the vibe and some WAGs who were lured in reluctantly but now bring their own energy.
It's a beautiful system, because if you can hang on Slack, you can hang in real life. What started out as a place to chat about whatever game you were watching on TV got a massive pandemic boost, and once our social dynamo Joanna organized the first Zoom hang, and it wasn't massively awkward—it was actually fun—it opened the door to actual in-the-flesh hangs. Now we have 100 people in the Slack, and channels for everything from sports to cooking to TV to home improvement to mental health.
And golf.
Actually, that's not true ... we have five channels for golf. We love golf. Four years ago, we organized the first Channels Cup in Durham, NC. It featured teams of eight (Team Carolinas vs. Team world), four rounds over two days (fourball, alt shot, scramble, singles), 20 points total. Everything went right. About 20 dudes fought it out over two days with exactly the right amount of competitiveness, which I define as "everyone really wants to win, things get chippy and borderline hostile exactly once, and the losing team is genuinely bummed but everyone stays friendly in the end." The women in our group have not yet played in a Channels Cup, which I'm sure will change over the years, but their presence adds a ton to the social element—Joanna does actual on-course interviews—and the evening hangs went perfectly too.
Now we're in our fourth year, we're playing in Denver, we have a trophy, we have interviews, we have an official media channel that does literally dozens of preview videos, we have a guy that compiles oral histories after the fact that range up to 20,000 words (no, this is not a joke) and every year we add new people.
As far as the competition itself, I care more about those two days than I do about many things in life that are arguably more important, such as family, work and health. (I'm joking ... kind of.) I love the lowkey buzz of the Thursday practice round, when every single shot has the weight of premonition for what's coming on Friday and Saturday. I love the bubbling tension of the Thursday night group dinner. I love cheering on my teammates, I love hearing them cheer me on, I love the tactical reassessments on Friday night, I love the wild momentum swings of the Saturday afternoon singles sessions and I love the ridiculous Saturday nights, when in the space between the nerves of competition and the fatigue of the next week, everything gives way to total unprintable mayhem. But most of all I love the first tee Friday morning, with its nervous anticipation, both teams in their colors, and a collective sense of a great battle unfolding. In that moment, I'm corny enough that I can almost hear the bagpipes in my head.
I grew up playing sports, and I have tried to maintain some level of competitive juice into adulthood, because it's sad when that feeling goes away. I played USTA tennis for a long time, but then I tore my ACL. I care too much about my six-year-old daughter's soccer games. I clearly have a deep need for competition, golf is my outlet, and Channels Cup is my highlight because nothing beats the energy of being on an actual team. I play more golf in August than I do any other time of the year, because I want to peak in early September. I know my lifetime record (8-3-1). I know I've never lost a singles match, though that's bound to change. I know I suck on Saturday mornings for some reason. I know which players are best together, which pairings are trouble, and how our various personality quirks (mine included) will manifest under pressure. The great part is, everyone involved matches my energy—I may be a lunatic, but there are 15 lunatics right there with me, doing the same lunatic sh*t, feeling the exact same lunatic feelings.
We've been friends for five years now. In that time, we've been through struggles and changes. We've seen our first Slack couple. We've seen our friends go through divorce. We've been fired, and hired, we've been overjoyed and stressed and triumphant and depressed. Our friend Daniel, one of the best of us, passed away last fall. A friend group based on a website like Slack is a modern idea, but the things we've lived through are very old. And through these relationships, our shared highs and lows, we've created this special tournament, which I hope endures for decades; I want to be playing 40 years from now, when ideally I'll be one of those grumpy old men who hits it 120 yards at a time but still manages to break 80. Even then, for two days, I will hate Team World with every fiber of my being.
We need a better name for these things than a "friends' Ryder Cup trip," because that's bulky and doesn't capture the essence. It's about friendship and competition and all that, but like any great event, you can't quite describe what it means just by listing its component parts. All I can say is that I feel lucky that it exists, many of you know exactly what I'm talking about, and for those who are thinking of taking the vulnerable leap to try to start one of your own, I can tell you that with the right group of people, it pays off in ways you can't imagine. And there's another neat benefit, too; we've had to endure so much bullshit and so many letdowns watching the professional game for the past few years, but the Channels Cup serves as a terrific reminder: The sport of golf does, in fact, belong to us.
ONE TOUR THOUGHT, FALL PREVIEW EDITION
1. There was no tournament this past week, so I'm going to keep this basic, and we'll be back with our full five thoughts next time. But as we embark on the first "FedEx Fall" season, my main thought is that it could be ... kinda fun? If you haven't kept up with the breakneck speed with which the Tour format changes, the deal is that for the first time ever, any player ranked below no. 70 in the FedExCup standings now has to fight for his 2025 life in the fall season that begins this weekend at the Procore Championship and ends eight tournaments later at the RSM Classic in November. The top 125 still get their Tour cards, with conditional status for nos. 126-150 and a longshot prayer at Q School for anyone beyond (PS—the Local Knowledge podcast this week was all about Q School's history), but now instead of ending at the Wyndham Championship in August, it gives us something at least vaguely meaningful in the fall.
Look, I don't want to overrate fall golf here—it's still going up against mighty football, and even for the diehards it's still tough to get especially excited. And as a North Carolina homer, I'm still a little sad that the Wyndham isn't the true finale anymore. But it does add a little meaning to what was previously just full-on silly season golf, and though you still have to be a sicko to love it, I am a sicko, and I think it's going to be interesting to follow the race for the last spots. Plus, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Sea Island. It seems like a tournament and a venue and a town that should have more significance than it does, and I like that this gives them some built-in drama. So rest easy, PGA Tour, because Shane Ryan is very tentatively IN on the new fall golf format.
THE ABSOLUTE IRONCLAD LOCKS OF THE WEEK
The Golfpocalypse is not a gambling advice service, and you should never heed anything written here. Better picks are here.
Career Record: 2-25. @#%$QW#$978#$ I ALMOST PICKED MATT WALLACE FOR THE SECOND STRAIGHT WEEK AT THE OMEGA MASTERS! I EVEN WROTE IT DOWN! IT WAS ESSENTIALLY PICKED, AND THEN I CHANGED MY #$@%@#$% MIND! I SHOULD GET CREDIT FOR THIS!
On the PGA Tour, at the Procore Championship, I love Max Homa for the simple fact that everyone is talking shit about him and how he shouldn't have made the Presidents Cup team. His form is iffy, sure, but the guy is a team match play dynamo. What does this have to do with the Procore Championship? Very little, but I want to see the Homa Haters take their medicine.
At the Solheim Cup, you better believe I'm riding with Team USA. Have we proved in the last three Solheim Cups that we have a knack for losing to a European team despite superior talent? Oh yeah. Are many of our players fundamentally unlikable in comparison to the Euros? You know it. But did captain Stacy Lewis say she read my Ryder Cup book last year TWICE as part of her research? She did, so she has my undying loyalty. Plus, vanity aside, she was a solid captain last time who got wildly unlucky not to win on European soil, and I genuinely think at home the Americans will win in a semi-rout.
The Irish Open is at lovely Royal County Down this week, and while this may not seem related, a video of me (a bad golfer) being caddied by the great Paul Tesori came out this week, and I took a lot of guff in the comments for wearing two black rain gloves, even while putting. The kinder of those comments compared me to Aaron Rai, so you know what? I'm taking Aaron Rai, baby. It's a two-glove autumn in Ireland!
The old fellas are at the Sanford International in Minnesota, and I'm going to roll with Steve Stricker for the second straight week like I should have done with Wallace last time. Surely ole Strick can't lose for a second week in a row in the Midwest, right? It would ruin the dang potluck!
Finally, LIV Golf is in Chicago, and my understanding is that this is the individual championship that comes down to Rahm v. Niemann. I'm just going off vibes here, but even though Rahm has had a good season on LIV, the general trajectory outside of it has been rough, particularly at the Olympics, so I'm going with my gut and say that 2024 isn't going to end well for the man. Give me Joaco.
THE "DUMB TAKE I KIND OF BELIEVE"
You know how we're constantly talking about ending the Tour season with a match play championship? What about ending the fall series with one 18-hole Monday match between players no. 125 and 126 on the list, with only the winner getting full Tour status for the next year? Sure, it would be a wildly cruel exhibition with no apparent purpose other than milking drama out of two men fighting for their livelihood, like a 'Hunger Games' for golf, but imagine the entertainment! Someone might cry! We can call it the "Winter Death Match." Get Monahan on the phone ASAP.
THE READER STORY OF THE WEEK
Jim sends in this gem about his own friends Ryder Cup event, and an ill-fated trophy:
We’re now on year seven of our 12 v. 12, team match play, Ryder Cup-style event. We had a trophy made that functions as our Stanley Cup—the losing team pays for the winning team to drink red bull vodkas out of it all night immediately following the tournament; it gets brought around to different parties/events/rounds of golf throughout the next year, etc. etc. It has slept in a lot of questionable locations, been touched by a lot of questionable mouths, and has overall just seen a lot of action. After year one, the winning team successfully partied with it for a full year, and the trophy made it back intact for year two.
The other team won that year, and perhaps due to not being allowed to celebrate with it (or even touch it) the first year, they took it up several notches that evening. Short version of the story is that while the trophy was being carted around from bar to bar all night, there existed a sizable amount of the female population of Lawrence, KS that truly believed that these chucklehouses had won an actual PGA Tour event that day. Perhaps they weren't the most knowledgeable fans of golf, but we're not here today to cast aspersions.
The next day, while early morning tailgating for a Chiefs game after about three hours of sleep, part of the crew, unbeknownst to the rest, decided they were going to smuggle the trophy (which is not necessarily small) into Arrowhead for the game, to function both as a drink receptacle and as a conversation starter ‘for the babes.' An hour later, when the rest of the squad ambled up to the gates, they couldn’t help but notice this little chestnut sitting at security’s feet.
So Team One successfully managed the trophy for 365 days….Team Two held it for about 15 hours. Needless to say, we did not get the trophy back from security.
Previously on Golfpocalypse: