50 Things That Changed Golf

The Sambuca Boys discuss the European Ryder Cup team’s six captain’s picks, highlighted by Ludvig Aberg and Nicolai Hojgaard. Shane Ryan issues a mea culpa on Aberg after the fledgling superstar (Aberg, not Ryan) wins the Omega European Masters to earn a spot on the European team. The boys talk about snubs, which pick could come back to haunt European captain Luke Donald, and how the team sizes up...

In a sea of speculation and analysis, we are pleased to report today that something actually happened: Zach Johnson made his captain's picks, and Team USA is now fully formed. Here at Radicals Headquarters, we are not necessarily surprised at the six picks who round out the squad, but we have some thoughts. Incendiary, revolutionary thoughts. Plus, Luke and Shane engage in partisan squabbles as we...

The Tour Championship is over, Zach Johnson makes his picks Tuesday, and Shane and Luke are on the scene to take their last crack at handicapping the U.S. team. Is it all coming down to Burns vs. Young? Did Keegan and Glover lose their mojo at the last moment? And what of JT? Plus, we Czech in on Europe, and a seemingly convoluted captain's pick situation that might have just become simpler than w...

The boys are back, and their important job of handicapping the Ryder Cup bubble is now more critical than ever as we approach D-Day. The U.S. automatic picks are set, but there’s so much drama in the race for captain’s picks that only the brightest minds can sort the data, and over in Europe, the situation is even more tenuous as the last four picks remain very much for grabs. On a good week for b...

The job facing Tony Jacklin, the unlikely captain who took the reins of the European team as Ryder Cup captain in 1983, was a massive one: He had to bring an end to decades of American dominance. The situation on the ground was dire, and to put it plainly, he was inheriting a mess. Since the Cup began in 1927, Americans had won 20 times, lost three, and tied once. Even the addition of Team Europe...

If you wanted a worse title pun than last week, in the words of Memphis Music Hall of Famer Roy Orbison, "baby, you got it." The PGA Tour playoffs are officially underway, and Digest's three foremost Ryder Cup obsessives are back to talk about what went down in Bluff City. Is Lucas Glover bludgeoning his way onto the team one win at a time? Has JT's stock gone down as he watches from the sidelines...

We're on the verge of the playoffs, but even with the DP World Tour in a two-week break, we had some red-hot action at the Wyndham, where the Tour regular-season finale saw at least seven hopefuls from both teams teeing it up. We're here to talk JT's surge, Bryson's 58, and where they (and everyone else) sit as the bubble watch heats up. Plus, let's gild the lily: Each of the lads chimes in on wha...

On paper, it might look like nothing special—another European win on home soil in the Ryder Cup. But drill down, and you'll see something revelatory in Gleneagles. This was the Ryder Cup that took decades of American strategic weakness and decades of European guile and blew them out to epic proportions. It's no coincidence that the end of this Ryder Cup saw Phil Mickelson publicly challenge Tom Wa...

The Sambuca Boys are back after conducting some on-site field reporting at Royal Liverpool. Harman's in, the Euros are rising (Shane's risk of becoming Luke-Pilled is currently "very serious"), and we're here to see where each team stands after the last major of the year. As July changes to August, Ryder Cup momentum becomes real, and the lads are here to guide you through the start of the endgame...

Less than a year after the death of his best friend Young Tom Morris, Davie Strath came to St Andrews hoping to win his first-ever Open Championship. He'd come close before, but while Strath was considered one of the three best golfers of his generation, and had been a sort of pioneer in giving up everything for a career in the very new field of professional golf, there was also something dogging...

The fate that has befallen Young Tom Morris, the greatest golfing talent of the 20th century, is to be known, but only in outline. His singular talent is measured today by lines on a Wikipedia entry, or the ancient scrawling of a name on the claret jug, and if anything, his star has dimmed with the passing years. But when he died on Christmas Day in 1875, just 24 years old, he left the world of go...

On the first-ever Ryder Cup Radicals, Shane, Joel, and Luke jump into the deep end with a discussion of the LIV Golf imbalance—the US can have LIVers in the Ryder Cup, Europe cannot—and whether Zach Johnson has an obligation to level the playing field by leaving them out. Then it's on to discussions of the new closed circuit US Captaincy Conglomerate, LLC, Europe's key revival of the Hero Cup, and...

The concepts of honor and integrity in golf are inseparable from the inevitability of cheating. The former are prominent because the latter is so easy—when self-policing is the best hope for fair play, you better have a code of honor to work as a secondary enforcement. In 1955, at Deepdale Country Club on Long Island, that code seemed to fail when two unknown sandbaggers won a tournament and took...

When Johnny Miller shot his famous 63 in the final round at Oakmont in 1973, it instantly became one of the most staggering achievements in the history of major championship golf. For the USGA, it was also something else: an insult. Oakmont was supposed to be one of the toughest courses in the world, and the U.S. Open was supposed to be the toughest test in professional golf. What Miller did under...

This May marks the 20th anniversary of Annika Sorenstam playing the Bank of America Colonial at Colonial Country Club, where she became the first woman in more than 50 years to play with the men on the PGA Tour. That week was highly anticipated, stressful, and loaded with controversy as more than 300 reporters, hundreds of photographers, and thousands of fans flocked to Texas to see her play. The...

A key component of Jon Rahm's identity, and one that's not often discussed in English-speaking media, is his Basque heritage. The Basque people represent the oldest surviving ethnic group in all of Europe; they pre-date the Indo-Europeans who swept through the rest of the continent, and whose descendants live there today. Euskal Herria, the Basque homeland, is a region the size of New Hampshire in...

In 1990, the PGA Championship was set to be played at Shoal Creek Golf and Country Club near Birmingham, Alabama. The course had hosted the tournament six years earlier, but this time, thanks to an incendiary comment from the club's founder, the golf world couldn't ignore an inconvenient fact: Shoal Creek wouldn't admit any black members. Nor could the PGA paint it as an isolated problem, or even...

There was never a moment when Seve Ballesteros wasn't scrambling, when he wasn't recovering, when he wasn't looking for the outrageous miracle. That's how he lived, and that was always going to be how he played golf. We look at the mysteries of the Spanish golf legend, and his entire unbelievable story. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collect...

It's one of the most infamous moments in golf: Greg Norman taking a six-shot lead into the final round at Augusta National, only to live out every golfer's nightmare as he shot 78 and lost to Nick Faldo. Today, 27 years later, as Norman has emerged as the face of LIV Golf's threat to the game's world order, that memory feels as fresh as ever. On this episode of Local Knowledge, we dive deep to exp...

On an October day in 1983, Charlie Harris drove his blue Dodge pickup through gate three at Augusta National. His goal? To talk to Ronald Reagan, who at that moment was playing the 16th hole on his first-ever trip to the storied course. What happened over the next two hours is one of the strangest chapters in Augusta history ... and despite the high stakes, it disappeared almost immediately from t...

In 1983, under the leadership of Deane Beman, the PGA Tour faced the first great challenge to its existence. The leading players of the time, from Jack Nicklaus to Arnold Palmer to Tom Watson, weren't happy with the direction of the Tour, and felt that the new marketing arm was adding money to its own coffers while depleting theirs. Rebellion was in the air, and when they came after the man they c...

After recapping and analyzing every episode of the new Netflix golf series, Full Swing, it was time to bring our questions to the man who put it all together. In this bonus episode, Chad Mumm, the show’s executive producer, discusses who he envisioned as a target audience, how he locked in on different subjects, and why the show opted against a traditional chronological format. Mumm also reveals h...

The final episode of Netflix’s new golf series, Full Swing, and of our limited-run podcast recapping the show, is all about the star power of Rory McIlroy. As hosts Shane Ryan, Sam Weinman, and Alex Myers discuss, the producers were right to focus the entire last episode on the four-time major champion given the prominent role he played in golf in 2022, as well as his willingness to share parts of...

As the Netflix series on golf, Full Swing, approaches the end, our podcast recapping the show can’t help but judge the seventh episode through the prism of missed opportunities. Were rookies Sahith Theegala and Mito Pereira compelling enough to carry an entire show? Was either one of the biggest storylines of 2022? Although there were elements of the seventh episode—Theegala’s father being one, Pe...

After a triumphant run of episodes in the new Netflix golf series, Full Swing, our podcast recapping the show was more critical of a sixth installment focusing on Tony Finau and Collin Morikawa. As hosts Shane Ryan, Sam Weinman, and Alex Myers say, there is much to like about the Tony Finau portion, which captures Finau’s compelling and unique backstory, and provides new insight into the balance h...