Lee Trevino’s Dairy Queen recommends and ‘caddy’ reading

Welcome! Where are you, he asks. I call this the 9th weekend. Think of it as a place to warm you up on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We will have thoughts. We will have some tips. We will have tweets. But only nine in all, though sometimes perhaps more and sometimes perhaps less. Who am I? The sections below tell some 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 beat 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’s now a college senior.

And we still have Bernhard Langer and his New York City businessman son, Jason, who are likely to win something. Again.

The point here?

This weekend’s PNC tournament is one of our best golf events, even Tiger Woods and son Charlie, who have played in the past five PNCs, are absent this year as Tiger recovers from surgery. But that shouldn’t be too important.

Because we still get openings. We get integrity.

Nature helps. A win is great for PNC, but so is a participation award. (On Friday, I was pleased to hear that Nelly Korda was looking forward to seeing her father, Petr, a former tennis player, “in shock.”) And we’re at the end of the year, both on the calendar and in the golf campaign. Things loosen up. Everyone is close to family, too. Things have slowed down.

And we get good things.

Like Trevor Immelman talking about his love of golf.

“You know, I started when I was 5 years old and I just fell in love with this game,” he said. “I’m just having a blast saying that. I immediately got angry. Growing up in a small town outside of Cape Town, I could watch major tournaments and PGA Tour events on TV late into the night because of the time change. We used to record them on VHS and just play them back and watch golf all the time, professional golf non-stop, and I’d try to do things that I’d do with the TV players one day I’d see them and hopefully I’d do them. on VHS. chance.

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

“So I was very focused when I was young and the love was strong and deep and the fire was burning so much, so I recovered quickly.

“You know, I had a little bit of strength, a little chip on my shoulder from the corner of Africa trying to go on the most competitive tour in the world, I got there.

“And as your life starts to change a little bit and you’re 10, 15 on Tour 10, and I started to struggle a little bit, it gets harder. It happens to everybody if you play this game long enough.

“But that’s where that love comes back to help you, because sometimes, especially for me, I was beaten badly after winning the Masters, getting injured, losing form and struggling.

“You have to have that love, otherwise you will just roll over and stop, but in the end I look at it differently because of the role I have now, everything I have, everything he does. [his son, Jacob] you have, everything our family has is because of golf, the PGA Tour, major tournaments, and frankly, the United States of America, being able to have the opportunity to compete against the best players here.

“So that love is intense and I hope that people who watch me on TV on weekends on CBS do not sleep and hear that love is coming on TV, because I am very grateful for everything that the game has given me.”

And here’s Immelman talking about nerves.

“I just found out over the years, I don’t think you can control emotions,” he said. “I think when you hear people say, oh, I’m trying to control my emotions, that’s a complete and utter lie. We’re all human, we all worry, we all get nervous, we’re all uncertain at times. Sometimes there’s no rhyme or reason to it. It could be a 3-foot putt or a tee shot on the 18th and it could happen at any time.

“I just learned that – I always found it interesting that there will be times when I feel very confident about a shot and I hit a bad one, and then there are times when I feel completely exposed and think there’s no way I’m going to hit a good shot and I do.

So I started asking myself: ‘How important is how you feel?’ Get on with it. Trust your training and trust what you have done. At the end of the day, if you shoot it really well, you’ll be able to put your head on the pillow at night.”

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

And below Fred Couples talks a little bit about everything.

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No, we don’t need Team Woods.

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

2. The video below was also great.

On Friday, Korda was once again asked to name his favorite moment with Lee Trevino. (Korda played in five PNC championships, while Trevino appeared in all of them.)

“His characters are only one-liners,” she said. “He’ll shoot or like how he engages with the crowd and shares a lot of his amazing stories. I mean, a lot of times I catch myself saying, ‘Holy guacamole,’ every month because he says it. I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s Lee Trevino right there.’

“It’s a clean event, because like I said, as someone of my generation where I can play with the greats – like I said, I saw Lee yesterday and he was like, ‘Yeah, that left knee is metal. I’m going into next year on this knee, too.’ And he’s still out here crushing drives and playing the game he loves and talking to all the fans and sharing his stories.

“I think that’s what makes this tournament so important, that everyone comes together from different generations and tells their stories and plays together.”

One takeaway from the previous week

3. If you should be interested in the PGA Tour’s Form 990 from 2024, ProPublica we just published it in its entirety, and you can find it here. (Hat tip Sports Business Journal Josh Carpenter for seeing it first.)

Another takeaway from the week is that

4. If you should be interested in the Nielsen viewership data, the post below from Carpenter was great.

One weekend takeaway

5. Will LIV Golf get the Official World Golf Ranking points before the start of its next season? In the stories written by The Associated Press’ Doug Ferguson and Bob Harig of Sports Illustrated, OWGR chairman Trevor Immelman said “there is an opportunity.”

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

“When you look at the OWGR and how it’s done with the proper tour around the world … it’s about respect,” Immelman said of Ferguson. “That’s one of the great things about our game when you go on tour, you fight to keep your job on that tour.

“And then it was along those lines of working with them in understanding their league from that point of view – respect, promotion and relegation and at the end of the day, the discretionary aspect of how their league is run.”

A tip for instructions for your weekend

6. I thought the thought below was great. Featuring Charles Howell III and shot by GOLF’s Johnny Wunder.

It’s a golf story that interests me

7. I thought the memory below was great. It features legendary coach Butch Harmon and was broadcast on SiriusXM Radio.

The hot dog at the turn was still good, too.

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