This story has been corrected. Caddie Lee Chaney made the road trip with Bryan.
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.
He didn’t qualify for last week’s Open Championship, so instead they played the opposite-field Barracuda Championship in Tahoe. He roomed with Sam Stevens in Tahoe, and even though Bryan missed the cut, he decided to stay the weekend and hang with Stevens rather than change his flight. His next stop was the 3M Open halfway across the country in Minnesota.
But when Bryan and Lee Chaney, who caddies for Ryan Brehm, arrived in Salt Lake City, the global outage made its presence known. Right before they boarded their connecting flight, the flight was canceled.
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?
Chaney 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 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 they 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 Hardee’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 Chaney weren’t the only ones who ran into issues getting to the 3M Open. A group of eight pros, Chan Kim among them, also had their flights canceled. 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 Brentley Romine reported on X.
Wesley Bryan isn't the only player who has had a travel nightmare this week.
Eight Tour players who had flights cancelled trying to get from Barracuda to 3M Open decided to split a private jet this afternoon. For at least one (Chan Kim), it was his first ever private flight. pic.twitter.com/vFc1jdjN8A
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