‘We had a blast’: Tour pros make 20-hour road trip to 3M Open after flight cancelled

The whole world suffered technological issues last weekend due to a global outage caused by CrowdStrike, with thousands of flights being cancelled or delayed as tech systems went down. PGA Tour pros were not spared. Just ask Wesley Bryan and Sam Stevens.

The two pros didn’t qualify for last week’s Open Championship, so instead they played the opposite-field Barracuda Championship in Tahoe. They roomed together in Tahoe, and even though Bryan missed the cut, he decided to stay the weekend and hang with Stevens rather than change his flight. With both players battling to make the FedEx Cup Playoffs, their next destination was the 3M Open halfway across the country in Minnesota.

Lifestyle

Once the tournament was done Sunday, they began their journey by plane. But when they made it to Salt Lake City, the global outage made its presence known. Right before they boarded their connecting flight, the flight was cancelled.

That’s when Bryan came up with a bold idea: Why not rent a car and drive to TPC Twin Cities, which, as Bryan told Golf Channel, is an 18-and-a-half hour drive?

Stevens was game.

While it’s easy to imagine that long of a road trip quickly becoming a monotonous nightmare, it turned out very differently. In fact, Bryan said the two pros had “a blast.”

“I’ll be honest, we had a great time. That was about as much fun as I could have ever imagined,” Bryan told Golf Channel during practice at the 3M Open. “It helped not having wife and kids and trying to figure out how to coordinate. So two grown men in a car for 20 hours, we had a blast.”

So how exactly did our featured golfers pass the time in the car, which ended up being a solid 20 hours? Bryan detailed their activities, too, including listening to some podcasts and stopping at fast food restaurants and tourist attractions along the way.

“There was a lot of phone calls, we listened to a lot of shows, we stopped at a couple major landmarks like the Mitchell Corn Palace and Wall Drug in South Dakota. Those were good ones. Spent a lot of time in Wyoming. I don’t even think we stopped, but maybe for gas one time in Wyoming. And hit a McDonald’s and a Hardy’s, and then had so much fun we forgot to eat dinner. So got here around 1 a.m. this morning and realized I was starved. So I just went to sleep instead.”

Incredibly, there’s another twist in this story. When Bryan woke up after his long road trip, he learned that his caddie’s wife had gone into labor three-and-a-half weeks early, according to Golf Channel, and he was forced to find a last-minute replacement.

But Bryan and Stevens weren’t the only Tour pros who ran into issues getting to the 3M Open. A group of eight pros, Chan Kim among them, also had their flights cancelled. But instead of renting a car and driving to Minnesota, they grouped together a chartered a private jet to the 3M, as Golf Channel’s Brently Romaine reported on X.

With everyone finally at TPC Twin Cities, the 3M Open is set to get underway Thursday morning, July 25.

Kevin Cunningham

Golf.com Editor

As managing producer for GOLF.com, Cunningham edits, writes and publishes stories on GOLF.com, and manages the brand’s e-newsletters, which reach more than 1.4 million subscribers each month. A former two-time intern, he also helps keep GOLF.com humming outside the news-breaking stories and service content provided by our reporters and writers, and works with the tech team in the development of new products and innovative ways to deliver an engaging site to our audience.