What a Jimmy Fallon/DJ Khaled golf match tells us about golf’s direction

The spiritual home of New York is not a church, a mosque, a synagogue or a temple. It is not a place of worship — at least not the Biblical kind.

It is a bar, cozy, loud, and outdated, with creaky wooden floorboards and scuffed pool tables. A hole in the side of 29th Street with friendly bartenders, well-worn wooden chairs, and old-fashioned, floor-to-shoulder urinals. A place where the music is usually a few decibels too loud, the bar tab is usually a few bucks too light, and the constant churn of the city melts into a dull hum. This is not any bar — it’s Paddy Reilly’s, where the music is live and the vibes are good and the Guinness is cold, seven nights a week.

Paddy Reilly’s is one of a dwindling number of Old New York establishments, which is perhaps how it became a regular hangout for much of the city’s celebrity class. Pop in Thursday evening and you might catch Hozier sneaking in a live set, the crowd of a few dozen quickly swelling to a hundred or more, a line forming down 2nd Avenue. Stop in on Tuesday afternoon and you might see Harry Kane, the British soccer star, flanked by teammates and a steady stream of pints. But if you get really lucky, you might find the celebrity visitors aren’t there alone. Rather, they’ve been joined by the don of New York celebrities, the very embodiment of Manhattan’s simultaneous enchantment with the past and obsession with the future: Jimmy Fallon.

Paddy Reilly’s is 10 miles as the crow flies from the nearest golf course (and more than an hour by car if the traffic is bad), and Fallon is admittedly a “consistently bad” golfer, so how’d these two characters wind up the subjects of a story on the pages of GOLF.com?

Well, because even if Paddy Reilly’s doesn’t know it yet, the bar is about to host a watch party.

On September 13, Fallon will join DJ Khaled for the latest celebrity golf TV excursion, the Cardigan Classic, a four-hole match that will air on NBC in the Tonight Show‘s usual slot.

“I think it’s opening golf up to a wider audience,” Fallon told GOLF.com on Thursday, hours before announcing the match to the world on the Tonight Show. “This is faster, it’s funnier. You know, it’s me. There’s just two people you wouldn’t really think to see playing each other.”

Fallon says the idea for the match came on a whim. He’d seen the success of TBS’s The Match series, and was one of many who witnessed Khaled’s meteoric (and much-publicized) golf obsession. Through his production company, he reached out Khaled to see if he might be interested in a smaller-stakes, entertainment-focused special. Khaled quickly agreed, and NBC agreed to lend its production teams on the condition that Fallon and Khaled play at the annual American Century Championship, where network crews were already stationed for the weekend.

By the time Fallon and Khaled made it out to the course on Sunday afternoon, 10,000 people were surrounding the 17th and 18th holes, which Fallon and Khaled would play twice as part of the arrangement with NBC.

“You feel that pressure that a pro golfer feels when they’re about to tee off,” Fallon said, gleefully recounting the abject terror of being a “double-bogey” golfer with a gallery. “Everyone gets quiet and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, what am I doing? I’m a comedian.‘”

In truth, the logic was sounder than it seemed. The explosion of golf during the pandemic years has led to a subsequent boom of the sport in popular culture, leading to the development of new television shows, a second Happy Gilmore movie, and the explosion of made-for-TV specials falling somewhere between golf as a competitive sport, and golf as a leisure sport.

The Cardigan Classic — named for the red cardigan given to the event’s winner “in lieu of a green jacket” — represents just the latest development to those ends, this one looking decidedly more entertainment than golf compared anything we’ve seen before it.

“Dude, this is old school. This is Wide World of Sports,” Fallon said. “It’s funny, it’s entertaining. It’s only four holes. It’s on late.”

In other words, it’s the sort of telecast that calls for a special viewing experience, and what better place to go than Fallon’s favorite watering hole?

“I mean, Friday night. If I had a sports bar — if I owned Paddy Reilly’s — this is what I would do,” Fallon says. “I would have a special Friday, September 13. If you wear a cardigan into the sports bar, you get a free shot or free beer or some drink special.”

Fallon laughs. Is that a suggestion, I wonder?

“Bring your buddies,” he says. “I think they’ll enjoy it.”