When Nick Taylor was coming up the 14th hole, the “Rink Hole,” during the final round of the RBC Canadian Open in June, Colt Knost asked his producer something.
“Are we really going to make him do this?” Knost recalled on this week’s episode of GOLF’s Subpar with his co-host Drew Stoltz and Taylor.
Knost was referring to Taylor’s impending walk-and-talk with the CBS TV crew which was due to take place on the 15th hole, as Taylor pre-agreed to.
CBS broke new ground this year in golf TV production when they debuted walk-and-talk segments with players during tournament action. The first one was with Max Homa during the third round of the Farmers Insurance Open. Homa won the tournament the next day.
Most of the previous walk-and-talks had taken place during the third round of tournaments, and if they hadn’t, they were typically early in the final round.
But because of programming constraints, Saturday’s third-round broadcast of the Canadian Open was shorter than normal so producers decided to push the walk-and-talk to Sunday. Taylor, as one of the home countrymen, who contended earlier in the year in Phoneix, agreed to take part.
But there was a problem. Taylor was five under for the day and had surged into contention.
Would a walk-and-talk at this juncture be distracting?
However, Taylor didn’t even know he was leading.
“I knew that it was gonna be on 15 and you know where I was in the tournament, a lot could happen. It was very bunched,” Taylor told Knost and Stoltz on the podcast. “I didn’t look at the leaderboard all day until probably 17. But when I got when I got to the walk-and-talk, the guy came up, I thought it would have been more of a distraction if I just made a decision to not do it. But I already committed to do it.
“When I was talking to Jim [Nantz] and Trevor [Immelman] and near the end of it, Jim’s appreciative. He’s like, ‘Thank you so much for doing this. You know, we’ve never had somebody do on Sunday in contention, let alone leading the tournament.’
“I’m like, ‘Oh, guess I’m leading the tournament.'”
Taylor parred 15 but bogeyed 16. He got that shot back and then another by birding the final two holes to finish at 17 under to get into the playoff where he drained that massive eagle putt for his third career PGA Tour title.
But when he got asked if it was a distraction after the playoff, he didn’t even remember it.
“After the playoff, I forgot I did that and people started asking because there’s so much that went on the last couple of hours,” Taylor said.
For more from Taylor, check out the entire episode of GOLF’s Subpar below.
