Lee Trevino’s Dairy Queen compliment and ‘caddie’ lessons | Weekend 9

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

We don’t need Team Woods.

Because we still have Annika Sorenstam and son Will, who leaked this week that he recently defeated his mother, a hall of famer.

And we still have John Daly and son John Daly II, whom the elder Daly still affectionately calls “Lil John,” even though he is now a high school senior.

And we still have Bernhard Langer and his New York City businessman son, Jason, probably going to win the thing. Again.

The point here?

This weekend’s PNC Championship is one of our great golf events, even without the participation of Tiger Woods and son Charlie, who had played in the past five PNCs but are absent this year as Tiger recovers from surgery. But that shouldn’t matter much.

Because we still get the openness. We understand the sincerity.

The environment helps. Winning is fun at the PNC, but so is the participation medal. (On Friday I was pleased to hear that Nelly Korda was looking forward to seeing her father, Petr, a former professional tennis player, “nervous.”) We are also at the end of the year, both in the calendar and in the golf campaign. Things are looser. Everyone is also close to family. Things are less stuffy.

And we get the good stuff.

Like Trevor Immelman talking about his love for golf.

“You know, I started when I was five and I was immediately obsessed with the sport,” he said. “It gives me goosebumps to say that. I was immediately obsessed. Growing up in a small suburb outside Cape Town and being able to watch major championships and PGA Tour events on TV late into the night because of the time change. We would record them on VHS and just play them and watch non-stop golf, non-stop professional golf, and try to emulate these players and do the things I saw them do on TV, hoping that one day I would get the opportunity.

“The first major I ever saw on TV was the ’86 Masters, one of the most famous, and from that moment on I thought to myself, OK, everything I do from now on, the decision and the answer to the decision has to be: Is this going to help me get to the Masters one day?

“And so as a young person, I was hyper-focused and the love was intense and deep and the fire was burning very bright, and so I got good pretty quickly. I practiced a lot. My parents gave me every opportunity they could to give me a chance.

“You know, I had a little bit of toughness, a little chip on my shoulder coming from the corner of Africa trying to make my way onto the most competitive tour in the world, and I got there.

“And when your life starts to change a little bit and you’ve been on Tour for 10, 15 years and I started to struggle a little bit, it becomes a bit of a grind. It happens to everyone if you play the sport long enough.”

“But that’s where that love really comes back to help you because sometimes, especially in my case, I was pretty beat up after winning the Masters, injuries, loss of form and struggling.

“You have to have that love, otherwise you’re just going to roll over and quit. But at the end of the day, if you look at it from a little bit of a different perspective because of the role that I have now, everything I have, everything he has [his son, Jacob] everything that our entire family has is thanks to golf, the PGA Tour, major championships and honestly the United States of America because here we get the opportunity to compete against the best players.

“So that love is pretty intense and I hope that people who see me on CBS on TV on the weekends don’t fall asleep and hear that passion coming through the TV because I really appreciate everything the game has given me.”

And here Immelman is talking about nerves.

“I’ve discovered over the years that I don’t think you can control the nerves,” he said. “I think when you hear people say, oh, I’m just trying to keep my nerves in check, that’s a complete lie. We’re all human, we all get anxious, we all get nervous, we all get insecure sometimes. Sometimes there’s no rhyme or reason to it. It can happen on a 3-foot putt or on a tee shot on the 18th hole. It can happen at any time, and you just have to deal with it.”

“I just learned that – I always found it interesting that there were times when I felt super confident about a shot and hit a bad shot, and there were times when I felt absolutely exposed and thought there was no way I could hit a good shot, and then I did.

“So I started wondering, ‘Well, how much does it matter how much you feel?’ Just keep going. Trust your training and trust what you have practiced. In the end, if you do your best, you can put your head on the pillow at night.”

And below is Padraig Harrington talking about scoring and hitting good golf shots.

And below is Fred Couples talking a little bit of everything.

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No, we don’t need Team Woods.

Let’s see if we can find eight more items for weekend 9.

2. The video below was good too.

On Friday, Korda was also asked to name her favorite moment with Lee Trevino. (Korda has played in five PNC Championships, and Trevino’s was in every one.)

“Just his one-liners,” she said. “He’ll hit a bull’s eye or appreciate the way he interacts with the audience and shares so many of his amazing stories. I mean, the amount of times I catch myself saying ‘Holy guacamole’ every month because he says so. I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s Lee Trevino right there.’

“It’s such a fun event because like I said, as someone from my generation where I get to play with the greats – like I mean, I saw Lee yesterday and he said, ‘Yeah, the left knee is all steel. I’m going for this knee next year too.’ And he’s still out here crushing drives and playing the game he loves, engaging with all the fans and sharing his stories.

“I think that’s what makes this tournament so special: everyone from all different generations coming together, sharing their stories and playing alongside each other.”

One takeaway from the week that was

3. If you are interested in the PGA Tour’s 2024 Form 990, ProPublica recently published it in its entirety, and you can find it here. (A hat tip to Sports business magazine Josh Timmerman for spot it first.)

Another takeaway from the week that was

4. If you are interested in Nielsen’s ratings, you can check out the post below by Carpenter was good.

One takeaway for the weekend

5. Will LIV Golf receive official World Golf Ranking points before the start of the next season? In stories written by the Associated Press’ Doug Ferguson And Bob Harig of Sports IllustratedOWGR President Trevor Immelman said, “There is an opportunity.”

LIV events have not received OWGR points since their inception in 2022.

“If you look at the OWGR and how it is made up of eligible tours around the world… it’s about meritocracy,” Immelman said in Ferguson’s story. “One of the great things about our sport is that you earn your way onto a tour and fight to keep your job on that tour.

“And so it’s really been in that sense of working with them to understand their league from that point of view – meritocracy, promotion and relegation and ultimately the self-selection aspect of how their league is constructed.”

An instructional tip for your weekend

6. I thought the thought below was good. It features Charles Howell III and was shot by GOLF’s Johnny Wunder.

A golf story that interests me

7. I thought the memory below was good. It features legendary instructor Butch Harmon and was narrated on SiriusXM Radio.

The hot dog at the bend was still good too.

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