Tony Romo's Golf Scorecard Got Him Disqualified

Three rounds in Oklahoma, and the thing that ended Tony Romo’s week wasn’t a swing. It was a pen.

Meanwhile, Michael Brennan is 24, has played 33 events on the PGA Tour, and has won three of them. One of those two guys is having a better October than the other.

Also in here: three chipping mistakes worth fixing, a set of Steph Curry irons with a five-grand price tag, and a Michigan course that might have you planning next year’s trip before you’ve finished looking at the pictures.

Plus a man, a water hazard, and a decision he’ll be thinking about for a while.

I’ve been on the road a lot this fall, which means my short game has gone completely untended. So I did what any reasonable person would do and built a putting game instead of practicing.

It’s called The Gimme — nine of the best holes in the world, par 18. I shot 22. Go beat it and tell me what you think.

Let’s tee off.

Birdies: Where the Pros Play 🏆

Tony Romo's Pro Golf Dream Ends With Two Letters: DQ

Romo shot 76 and 75 in his first two rounds at a Korn Ferry Q-School pre-qualifier in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Then he signed for a 74.

He’d actually shot 76. He put a 4 on 16 and a 4 on 17, and he’d made 5 on both.

A South Central PGA pro who’d been following the group pulled up the hole-by-hole scores online that night, remembered two 5s, and started making calls. By the time a rules official reached Romo, the window to correct the card had closed. Signing for a lower score than you made is an automatic DQ. Romo took responsibility for it.

The part that stings is that none of it mattered. He was 13 off the lead, he needed a top 37, and he’d have missed by three with the card he signed.

He was never going to advance. Now he isn’t even in the results.

👉 Read more here.

Michael Brennan Wins Again, and He's Only Played 33 Tour Events

Brennan started Sunday tied for the lead in Yokohama, and he had company all afternoon.

Keith Mitchell made a charge. Jacob Bridgeman missed the birdie putt he needed. Xander Schauffele stood on the 18th tee one shot back, drove it into the trees, and made double.

Brennan’s answer was six straight pars to finish. That sounds dull until you get to the par-3 16th, where he got up and down from a greenside bunker to a foot with the tournament still live.

He shot 68, finished at 16-under, and collected $1.44 million out of an $8 million purse. Second win of the season.

Three victories in 33 starts at 24 years old. At some point we stop calling it a breakout.

👉 Read more here.

Bogeys: For Us Weekend Golfers 🏌️‍♂️

Three Chipping Mistakes That Are Costing You Strokes

A beautiful approach shot, five yards off the green, and three more to finish the hole. We’ve all written that number down and pretended it didn’t happen.

Ged Walters is a Golf Monthly Top 50 Coach and a PGA pro at True Fit Golf Centre in Warrington. He says weekend golfers keep making the same three mistakes around the green:

• Treating a chip like a full swing. Standing too far from the ball and rotating too much can lead to chunks and thin shots.

• Using the same technique in thick rough. A slightly steeper takeaway helps the club cut through the grass.

• Leaning away from the ball on uphill lies. Lean into the slope for better contact.

All three are setup changes. None of them need a swing coach, a winter, or a new wedge — just a bucket of balls and a Wednesday.

I’d trade 20 yards off the tee to stop embarrassing myself from ten feet off the green. It isn’t close.

👉 Read more here.

His Irons Were Too Heavy. One Change Fixed the Problem.

Joe Ferguson is a PGA professional, the former head pro at Celtic Manor, and he used to run the national fitting centers for both Titleist and TaylorMade. He’s fitted thousands of golfers.

He says at least 70% of them were playing shafts far too heavy for them.

Seventy percent.

One of those golfers was his Golf Monthly colleague Dan Parker, an 8-handicap who couldn’t find the middle of the face with a long iron. Ferguson pulled the 120-gram steel out of Dan’s Ping i230s and rebuilt them with 95-gram Fujikura Axiom graphite.

“Mercifully, the improvement was instantaneous,” Dan wrote. Centered contact became the default. His 5-iron went from a club he dreaded to one he’s nearly holed out with twice.

Fair warning: that’s Dan’s account, not a launch monitor printout. Ferguson says he has the data. Golf Monthly didn’t publish it.

Still. I’ve spent years assuming my long irons are a me problem. It never once occurred to me they might be a spec problem, and that’s worth an hour to find out.

👉 Read more here.

This week’s Weekend Card has three goals for Saturday. Open it here →

Bourbon: Life on the 19th Hole 🥃

This Week’s Pour

Blanton’s Original Single Barrel

I spent this past weekend in Jupiter, Florida with my college buddy Hayden and his family. If you’ve never been, Jupiter has a reasonable claim to being the golf capital of the world. It seems like every Tour player has a house down there.

We couldn’t get out for 18. So we settled for Phigolf in the living room once Hayden got the kids down.

Parlays running on the TV behind us. Some of them hit. Most of them did not.

What didn’t miss was the Blanton’s.

Here’s my issue with how Blanton’s gets talked about. It’s become a trophy bottle — the one people put on a shelf, photograph, and save for something. That does it a real disservice, because it’s one of the most drinkable bourbons being made. I’m not going to pretend I ran a formal tasting at eleven at night, but what I can tell you is that it’s sweet up front without being syrupy. There’s vanilla and something like butterscotch, and the spice arrives late and settles in. At 93 proof, it’s warm without being work.

What you do have to watch is how fast it goes. Two fingers become four. That’s when another parlay gets placed.

Every bottle is a single barrel, and they write the details on it by hand. Ours was dumped on September 10 from Barrel No. 497, Warehouse H, Rick No. 111. Nobody else on earth has that bottle. That’s the whole point.

The stopper is worth knowing about too. Every Blanton’s is topped with a horse and jockey, and there are eight different ones. Each carries a letter, and together they spell B-L-A-N-T-O-N-S. The poses track a race — trot, canter, gallop — and the final S is the jockey with his fist up crossing the line. People collect all eight. I have one and a long way to go.

Verdict: Buy it and open it. Don’t save it. This is not a bottle that improves while it sits on a shelf waiting for an occasion grand enough to deserve it — and if you’re waiting for that occasion, you’re going to be waiting a while. A Saturday night with an old friend, kids asleep upstairs, and a parlay dying slowly on the TV is the occasion. That’s exactly what it’s for.

MSRP is around $85. I paid double because the night called for it and I had no time to waste. Under $100 is findable if you plan better than I did.

BUY A BOTTLE →

One Last Thing

Saturday night I was swinging a club in a living room in Florida. Playing a simulator, drinking bourbon, swinging lefty for no good reason, watching our parlays die on a second TV, and laughing like I was 19 again.

My buddy and I have known each other for almost twenty years. His kids were asleep upstairs. It was some of the most fun I’ve had with a golf club all year, and there wasn’t a course involved.

Birdies are great. A good par feels like something. A bogey can make you question everything.

I can’t tell you what I shot the last ten times out. But I can tell you who I was with every single time.

So this weekend I’m going to pay attention to whoever’s standing on the tee with me.

That’s the part that stays. The scorecard doesn’t.

See you next week,

Adam

Adam Rosen
Editor-in-Chief, Birdies, Bogeys & Bourbon

P.S. Answer: A. 1991 at Kiawah Island. The Americans won 14½–13½ after Bernhard Langer missed a six-foot putt on the final hole.

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