Welcome back to the No Laying Up bi-weekly mailbag! In this space, we’ll address topics big and small, smart and dumb, irreverent and serious. You need to be a member of The Nest to submit a question to the mailbag, but the mailbag itself will be free to read (as long as you behave yourselves). Most of our questions are submitted via our message board, The Refuge, but if you’re not a message board person, please send me an email at kvv@nolayingup.com with your Nest handle and your question. As a bonus, if your question gets picked, we’ll send you a free NLU towel.
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ChasingScratch: Why all of a sudden are we hearing endless conversations about who is the #1 player in the game? From my perspective this is a pretty unimportant conversation on a week-to-week or month to month basis. Golf careers are measured in years/decades, not weeks/months. Why does anyone care who is #1 in the OWGR? Is this based on our society’s need to rank everything? It’s pretty clear to me that Rahm, Rory, and Scheffler are the consistently best players in the world over the last year. Ranking one over the other is pretty pointless. Anyone can see that Rahm is the hottest golfer on the planet right now. In two months it could look different.
This is something that’s been bugging me recently as well, Mr. Scratch. I understand why it appeals to people drawn to the idea that everything should be quantifiable, but few subjects interest me less than arguing over the fairness of a math equation in the context of sports. Andy Johnson of The Fried Egg and I have a long-running bit about the careers of Ernie Els and Phil Mickelson, with Andy contending that Phil’s inability to ever reach No. 1 in the world is the ace up his sleeve in the argument that Els had the better career. (I recently had to concede that if morality is our tiebreaker, the Big Easy gets the nod, but I’m not quite ready to give up on the statistical discussion.) Is consistency what you crave? Or an athlete’s peak?
The Midnight Troubadour
Tough and timeless, this polo is built for the long ride. Featuring a crisp, non-collapsing collar and a rugged, stretchy fabric, it's the perfect shirt for any cowboy's wardrobe.
I have always been drawn more to the romantic element of sports, not the analytics, although I’ve learned to see the value in Strokes Gained when assessing whether golfers are playing well. But in my mind, it’s always important to remember rankings are just a snapshot, or a moment in time. It's insane to me to think that when Mickelson was standing on the 18th tee at Winged Foot, two good swings away from winning his third straight major, that he wasn’t the best player in the world. It also doesn’t matter to me if he was or wasn’t. If the best players don’t make you feel something, who cares what the numbers say?
One of the smartest things I ever heard came from Mathew Slater, the Patriots special teams legend. I was interviewing him for a feature in ESPN, and asking who he thought were the best special teams players of all time. He said he didn’t want to categorize or compare them. “Comparison is the thief of joy,” he told me.
Maybe that’s a phrase that’s been monetized by Etsy embroidery entrepreneurs for a decade, but it resonates with me. I try to think about it in terms of movies, books and music. Why not golfers?
If Jon Rahm is the best player in the world — and I think recent results clearly back that up — does that diminish my enjoyment of watching Scottie or Rory? It shouldn’t. I guarantee the people at Riviera this week did not care that Tiger Woods is currently 985th in the world. I used to rank a lot of things in my life. I think I blame the book High Fidelity. Now I just try to enjoy all of it. Comparison is the thief of joy.
The new 13th
An aerial view of the lengthened 13th hole at Augusta National.
Eureka EarthMshriver3: Augusta National recently announced the long foreseen lengthening of the 13th hole from 510 to 545 yards. This comes after the recent lengthenings of the 5th, 11th, and 15th holes. Is Augusta National done lengthening the course?
I’ve been saying for a few years that I think if the USGA doesn’t do something to curtail distance, Augusta National will be tempted to come out with their own ball. They could hand two sleeves to every player on the first tee. One version that spins a lot and one that spins less. You can pick which you’d prefer to play, but neither ball will go 350 yards. If you don’t like it? You are welcome to skip the tournament. Augusta National is the only power broker in golf that could put its foot down and say “enough” without a lawsuit. It’s an invitational. What choice would players have?
There would be plenty of Twitter eggs eager to tell you the Masters had lost all credibility because it didn’t have the top players in the world, but I don’t know that the Masters would care. According to the Wall Street Journal, the club has spent around $200 million buying up houses and land around its property. Could they, in theory, buy even more land and keep pushing tees back? I suppose, but where would it ever end?
Texasgolfer: Less than two years ago, Phil Mickelson won his sixth major and was by most accounts pretty beloved by golf fans and golf twitter. Fast forward to 2023 and present day Phil has lost a lot of the goodwill he built up for about 30 years. Can you think of a bigger heel turn in professional sports history?
Lance Armstrong is the only athlete who I think comes close.
Do you remember that brief moment in our culture when millions of people were wearing yellow LiveStrong bands? The megalomania required by Amstrong to spread his story and turn himself into a messianic figure — knowing it was mostly a lie — is still unfathomable. I think people wanted to believe it because the lie was too big. Few thought Armstrong could be so brazen, although plenty of European journalists were thankfully skeptical.
Mickelson’s metamorphosis from hero to pariah is more complicated. He didn’t cheat or break laws the way Armstrong did. He didn’t try to destroy the careers of his critics, although I think he has purposefully tried to mislead people about his interview with Alan Shipnuck. But the one thing Mickelson and Armstrong do have in common is they got the public to fall in love with a version of themselves that now seems disingenuous. I defended Mickelson in my friend group for years. The 2004 Masters is one of my favorite sports memories. He was probably my favorite athlete. He came to Arnold Palmer’s memorial service when so many of his peers couldn’t be bothered. I looked forward to having him around in golf for decades to come. It would have been so fun to have him in the booth for the next 20 years, serving as our generation’s Johnny Miller. He would have been brilliant.
Instead he’s going to spend his final years as a competitive golfer flying around the world playing junk courses, sucking up to monsters for one last payday, getting high off the adulation of the worst kind of sycophants. He may never get to be a Ryder Cup captain. Once a delightful smart aleck, both on and off Twitter, he is now mostly an internet troll. His press conferences, once an artful dance between athlete and reporter, now feel like depositions. The whole thing makes me sad.
I feel like he deserves better than the zombie existence he’s living through at major championships, https://nolayingup.com/blog/kvv-mailbag-rankings-phil-mickelson