Lee Trevino’s Dairy Queen compliment and ‘caddie’ learnings | Weekend 9

Welcome! Where are you, you ask. I’m calling this the Weekend 9. Think of it as a spot to warm you up for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We’ll have thoughts. We’ll have tips. We’ll have tweets. But just nine in all, though sometimes maybe more and sometimes maybe less. As for who I am? The paragraphs below tell some of the story. I can be reached at nick.piastowski@golf.com.

We don’t need Team Woods. 

Because we still have Annika Sorenstam and son Will, who leaked this week that he recently beat his mom, a hall of famer. 

And we still have John Daly and son John Daly II, whom the elder Daly still lovingly calls “Lil John,” though he’s now a college senior.

And we still have Bernhard Langer and his New York City businessman son, Jason, who are probably going to win the thing. Again. 

The point here? 

This weekend’s PNC Championship is one of our great golfing events, even without the entry of Tiger Woods and son Charlie, who had played in the past five PNCs, but are absent this year as Tiger recovers from surgery. But that shouldn’t matter much. 

Because we still get the openness. We get the sincerity. 

The environment helps. Winning is nice at the PNC, but so is the participation medal. (On Friday, I enjoyed hearing that Nelly Korda was looking forward to seeing her dad, Petr, a former pro tennis player, being “nervous.”) We’re also at year’s end, both on the calendar and in the golf campaign. Things are looser. Everyone’s around family, too. Things are less stuffy.  

And we get the good stuff.  

Such as Trevor Immelman talking about his love of golf.

“You know, I started when I was 5 and I was immediately obsessed by the sport,” he said. “I’ve got goosebumps just saying that. Immediately obsessed. Growing up in a little suburb outside of Cape Town, being able to watch major championships and PGA Tour events on TV late into the night because of the time change. We used to record them on VHS and just used to play them back and watch golf nonstop, professional golf nonstop, and try and mimic these players and do the things that I saw them doing on TV, hoping that one day I would have the opportunity.

“First major I ever watched on TV was the ’86 Masters, which is one of the most famous, and from that moment on, I was thinking to myself, OK, everything I do from here on out, the decision and the answer to the decision needs to be: Is this going to help me get to the Masters one day?

“And so I was hyper focused as a youngster and the love was intense and deep and the fire was burning real bright, and so I got good quite quickly. I practiced a lot. My parents allowed me every opportunity that was possible to them to give me a shot at it.

“You know, I had a little toughness, a little chip on my shoulder coming from the corner of Africa trying to make my way to the most competitive tour on the planet, and got there.

“And then as your life starts to change a little bit and you’ve been on Tour 10, 15 years and I started struggling a little bit, it becomes a bit more of a grind. It happens to everybody if you play the sport long enough.

News

2025 PNC Championship: TV schedule, streaming info, how to watch, tee times

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“But that’s where that love really comes back to help you, because at times, particularly in my case, I was getting beat up quite badly after I won the Masters, injuries, losing form and struggling.

“You have to have that love otherwise you’re just going to roll over and quit. But at the end of the day, looking at it now from a slightly different perspective because of the role that I have now, everything I have, everything he [his son, Jacob] has, everything our whole family has is because of golf, the PGA Tour, major championships, and quite frankly, the United States of America, being able to have an opportunity to compete against the best players here.

“So that love is pretty intense and I hope that people who watch me on TV on the weekends on CBS don’t fall asleep and they hear that passion coming through the TV, because I really appreciate everything the game has given me.”

And here’s Immelman talking about nerves. 

“I just found over the years, I don’t think you can control nerves,” he said. “I think when you hear people say, oh, I’m just trying to control my nerves, that’s a complete and utter lie. We’re all human, we all get anxious, we all get nervous, we’re all unsure at times. Sometimes there is no rhyme or reason to it. Could happen on a 3-foot putt or a tee shot on the 18th hole. It could happen at any moment, and you’ve just got to roll with it.

“I just learnt that — I always found it interesting that there would be times I felt super confident over a shot and hit a bad one, and then there were times I felt absolutely exposed and thought there was no way I could hit a good shot and then I did.

“So I started to wonder to myself: ‘Well, how much does it really matter how much you feel?’ Just get on with it. Trust your training and trust what you’ve practiced. At the end of the day, if you give it your best shot, then you’re going to be able to put your head on the pillow at night.”

And below is Padraig Harrington talking about scoring and hitting good golf shots. 

And below is Fred Couples talking a little of everything. 

No, we don’t need Team Woods. 

Let’s see if we can find eight more items for the Weekend 9. 

2. The video below was also good. 

On Friday, Korda was also asked to name her favorite moment with Lee Trevino. (Korda has played in five PNC Championships, and Trevino’s appeared at every one.)

“Just his one-liners,” she said. “He’ll hit a shot or like the way he engages with the crowd and shares so many of his amazing stories. I mean, the amount of times I’ve caught myself saying, ‘Holy guacamole,’ monthly because he says it. I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s Lee Trevino right there.’

“It’s such a neat event, because as I said, like someone from my generation where I can play with the greats — like I mean, I saw Lee yesterday and he was like, ‘Yeah, the left knee is all steel. I’m going in next year for this knee, too.’ And he’s still out here crushing drives and playing the game that he loves and engaging with all the fans and sharing his stories.

“I think that’s what makes this tournament so special, is everyone coming together from all different generations and sharing their stories and playing alongside each other.”

One takeaway from the week that was 

3. Should you be interested in the PGA Tour’s Form 990 from 2024, ProPublica recently published it in its entirety, and you can find it here. (A hat tip to Sports Business Journal’s Josh Carpenter for first spotting it.)

Another takeaway from the week that was  

4. Should you be interested in Nielsen viewership data, the post below from Carpenter was good.

One takeaway for the weekend 

5. Will LIV Golf receive Official World Golf Ranking points before the start of its next season? In stories written by the Associated Press’ Doug Ferguson and Sports Illustrated’s Bob Harig, OWGR chairman Trevor Immelman said “there’s a chance.”

LIV events have not received OWGR points since its start, in 2022. 

“When you look at the OWGR and how it’s made up of eligible tours around the world … it’s about meritocracy,” Immelman said in Ferguson’s story. “That’s one of the beauties of our sport is earning your way onto a tour, fighting to keep your job on that tour.

“And so it’s really been along those lines of working with them on understanding their league from that standpoint — meritocracy, promotion and relegation and just really at the end of the day, the self-selection aspect of how their league is made up.”

An instruction tip for your weekend 

6. I thought the thought below was good. It features Charles Howell III and was shot by GOLF’s Johnny Wunder. 

A golf story that interests me 

7. I thought the memory below was good. It features legendary instructor Butch Harmon and was told on SiriusXM Radio. 

Another golf story that interests me 

8. I thought the quote below was good. (And LeBron, if you’re reading this and need more YouTube Golf videos to watch, here’s a good link.) 

One more golf story that interests me 

9. I thought that a story written by Tom Wroblewski of silive.com was good. It notes how golf balls have been found at the Silver Lake Park reservoir on Staten Island in New York. 

But Wroblewski’s story also points out this:

The Silver Lake Golf Course is across Silver Lake Park Road from the area.

That means that some golfers in years’ past have taken some pretty mighty swings, launching errant golf balls that traveled over the golf course fence, across the park roadway, over the fence surrounding the park and into the drink.

You can read the story here. 

A golf picture that interests me

10. Let’s do 10 items! I thought the picture below was good. 

What golf is on TV this weekend?

11. Let’s do 11 items! Here’s a rundown of golf on TV this weekend:

– Sunday 

1 a.m.-6 a.m. ET: AfrAsia Bank Mauritius Open final round, Golf Channel 

11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. ET: PNC Championship final day, Golf Channel 

1:30 p.m.-4:30 p.m. ET: PNC Championship final day, NBC 

Another instruction tip for your weekend 

12. I still couldn’t play golf — but maybe I could ‘caddie.’ 

That was my thought last week when I went to Las Vegas with some friends for a long weekend, which was four weeks since I had broken a rib in a car accident. I was good enough to do ‘Vegas things,’ but golf was out of the question. 

But then the temperature hit 75. 

And a friend was going to play. 

And the beer cart was in service. 

I went. I’d help read putts. I’d help pick clubs. I’d help select targets. I’d cheer. Why not?

All of it was interestingly entertaining. Standing behind the ball instead of over it, you see things differently. Things also move more slowly. You have to think only, not think and react. The biggest takeaway was that I’d been playing aggressively — but caddying conservatively. With a little extra time, the safe plays were easier to spot. 

The hot dog at the turn was still good, too.