Chances are, your summer isn’t booked with global concert dates or weeknights behind The Tonight Show desk. Best to leave that stuff to superstars: Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon. But the one thing we can all do to channel our inner JT and Jimmy is to have more fun on the golf course.
Easier said than done after you’ve bladed a wedge across a green. But it’s their commitment to keeping each round fun (no matter what happens), that makes the on-course vibe that Timberlake and Fallon share worth aspiring to.
At the annual 8AM Invitational, held for the third consecutive year at the Wynn Las Vegas, this tandem teamed up to put on a show rivaling anything you’ll find on the Strip.
Timberlake, a low-handicapper, takes his game and tournament-hosting gig seriously; Fallon takes seriously his job of keeping the atmosphere phenomenally loose. On the flip side, JT’s competitive edge rubs off on Jimmy just enough for the late-night king to lay off the funny to lean into clutch shots.
Their camaraderie has helped make the 8AM Invitational the game’s preeminent celebrity team event.
The chummy, star-studded field at this year’s bash featured a who’s who of sports heroes — Olympic legend Michael Phelps, six-time MLB All-Star CC Sabathia, Super Bowl LVI champion Matthew Stafford, 2014 U.S. Women’s Open winner Michelle Wie West — and a cast of Hollywood stars and comers that included sitcom bigs Brian Baumgartner (The Office) and Anthony Anderson (Black-ish), stand-up comedian and actor Andrew Santino (I’m Dying Up Here) and film and television actress Kathryn Newton (Big Little Lies).
The two-day, 36-hole event has teams change groupings after each nine-hole loop. The idea is to spark fresh chatter and new friendships, the kind epitomized by the decades-long Timberlake-Fallon bond.
But the palling around isn’t limited to only stroke play. At the end of day one, the field gathers for the Worldwide Technology Shootout, a closest-to-the-pin contest in which golfers and gallery huddle in a tight horseshoe to cheer on the highs (and occasional lows) of a tight chip shot over Lake Travis — named after, yes, Patrick Mahomes’ bestie, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.
During tournament play, golfers detour off the 17th green and onto the “Cabot Court,” where they drop their clubs and pick up a basketball. One of the few things capable of coaxing these guys off the court is the nearby Dewar’s bar cart, one of the coolest in the game.
Finally, if a player’s round takes a turn for the worse, they can get back on track with a multiscreen simulator that captures what it’s really like to push a McLaren to 200-plus miles per hour in an F1 race. This thing blows the doors off of anything you’d find in a local arcade.
All of it wouldn’t be possible without the second-to-none hospitality provided by the Wynn, and all of it brings you right back to that word: fun. Which, in the case of the 8AM Invitational, always includes camaraderie, charity — one of this year’s beneficiaries was the American Skin Association — and all-in-the-name-of-a- good-time competitiveness.
Oh, yeah. The winners? At the Wynn in April, it was a duo of former NBA big men, Chandler Parsons and Blake Griffin. In life, it’s all of us who get to have a blast playing a game we love.
