Easy Game Radio - February 16th, 2025

[00:00:05] Welcome to a very fresh episode of your Easy Game Update. I'll be covering some of the details from the Genesis Invitational that just wrapped up out in San Diego. Quick notes about the Live Tour, as well as its merger with the PGA that's starting to look good. And as well as some TGL changes that are going to change the rule on the hammer, so this should be pretty interesting.

[00:00:29] A really exciting weekend of golf, had a star-studded field. Saw the likes of Scotty Scheffler, Louis Oberg, Roy McIlroy, and just a fantastic name in Maverick McNeely up there chasing the top spot and leaderboard.

[00:00:44] But Ludwig Oberg won his first event of the 2025 season, his second PGA Championship of his career, finishing with a 12-under for the weekend, edging out Maverick McNeely, which is just a fantastic name by one stroke. Ludwig Oberg had an absolute clutch putt on 18th at Torrey Pines, making his birdie and preventing what would have been a really epic playoff round as well.

[00:01:11] But the tournament overall was really, really exciting. If you recall, Ludwig fired off opening 63 back in the Farmers Insurance last month, which was at Torrey Pines. More on that in a second. Although he ended up finishing 42nd back in January. So this win this afternoon puts him in the driver's seat of the FedEx Cup standings, albeit early in the season.

[00:01:34] But Ludwig is going lights out really early this year. His form looks awesome. He's really exciting to watch. This weekend had the first full field of the season. We saw Scotty and Rory paired up on Sunday playing together, and Chef was just doing Chef things. If you watched earlier in the tournament on Friday, he only hit 5 out of 14 fairways. It was just smashing that ball all over the place.

[00:02:01] But then we watched him have just an amazing holdout on number 15 on Sunday, making birdie from a greenside bunker and setting himself up for what would have been at the time a share of the lead as he had an eagle attempt on 18. Of course, Ludwig made birdie on that to finish 12 under and would have still beat Scotty by one stroke. But that extra pressure if Scotty had made that eagle putt would have been fun to watch how Louis responded to that.

[00:02:28] But the tournament wasn't without some excitement off the course as well. Historically, the Genesis is held at Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles, but the decision was made back in January to move the event from L.A. to San Diego due to the wildfires that had just ravaged Los Angeles.

[00:02:49] While Riviera Country Club wasn't harmed by the fires, it didn't seem right for event organizers to continue the tournament in Los Angeles, especially trying to bring that mass influx of people into an area that needed to focus on its recovery from those wildfires. So the event decided to pack up back in January. January 16th, they made the decision to move it to San Diego. And I'm just thinking about the logistics that went into moving an entire golf tournament.

[00:03:18] I'm sure that they were able to leverage some of the existing infrastructure. You know, you think about these grandstands and the TV crew access, having your fans have, you know, all the different food vendors and just everything that goes into making these tournaments successful. Having to make that decision to move to San Diego had to be a tough one. And the careers that made this event happen just did an outstanding job.

[00:03:43] And also, unfortunately, in some news off the course earlier this month, we heard about the passing of Tiger Woods' mother, Kultita, who was just an absolute incredible influence on Tiger and his growth as a golfer, especially as a young boy. And then becoming the professional that we've all known and enjoyed for decades.

[00:04:03] In fact, his iconic Sunday red is actually attributed directly to his mother because she believed that that was his power color and told him to play as much golf as possible while wearing the color red. Hence why we see Sunday red. Tiger was originally expected to play in this year's tournament and completely understandable. He made the decision to withdraw so that he could focus on, you know, his grief. But the tournament did pay honor to his mother.

[00:04:29] However, they placed a white flag on the 7th green at Torrey Pines, which is significant to the Woods family Buddhist culture. White serves as a color of mourning, especially for women in Buddhist culture. It also signifies respect and reverence for the deceased. Sending the connection even further, hole number 7 at Torrey Pines was the site back in 2008 at the U.S. Open when Rocco and Tiger battled it out for 91 holes,

[00:04:57] with Tiger going on to defeat him in that extremely long playoff. That was the year that Tiger was playing through significant pain. He had the torn ACL. He had stress fractures in his leg that year. And so I'm sure that was extremely special to Tiger and his family as they were able to mourn and remember his mother passing away. The tour now moves down to Mexico for the 2025 Mexico Open.

[00:05:25] And it's going to have a little less star-studded feel as there are actually no top 25 golfers from the overall world golf rankings playing down in Mexico. But the tour now moves into its Florida swing at the end of February. And they will get ready to play at the Arnold Palmer coming up in the next few weeks in March. The live tour had its second event of their season down under in Adelaide, Australia,

[00:05:51] as Joaquin Neiman took home the individual championship and the Fireballs GC, which is captained by Sergio Garcia, won the team championship. Live and PGA made some headlines this week as the PGA Commissioner Jay Monahan and Player Director Adam Scott met with President Trump at the White House for conversations on how to speed up the unification agreement between the twoers. These conversations originally began in June of 2023 but have been delayed lately.

[00:06:21] President Trump's involvement is seen as pivotal due to his connections with not only the golf industry but as well as key figures in the Saudi Arabian government. Going into this weekend's Genesis Invitational, Rory McIlroy made some comments that allude to a unified future for the two tours. He seems to be a little bit more keen to the players coming back together and being better for the game of golf,

[00:06:43] which marks a pretty severe about face from Rory, especially as back in the day when the live tour split away from the PGA. He was one of the guys that was saying that players that move on to the live should never be allowed back into the PGA. So pretty substantial 180 from Rory about that, but it looks like progress is going to be made on getting the two tours unified again.

[00:07:12] Hopefully providing some entertainment to the parts of the United States that are not able to enjoy their presence a weekend due to the weather. The TGL has a triple header tomorrow on Monday. It's going to have three matches across Monday afternoon and then another one actually on Tuesday. So we've got four TGL matches this week. On Monday, we will see Atlanta against Los Angeles and then follow up against the Bay. And then the Bay will take on Boston Common to wrap up Monday afternoon and Monday evening's events.

[00:07:42] And then on Tuesday, Tiger is going to be back in Jupiter as the Lynx play against Boston Commons. TGL also announced new rules for the hammer. Teams are now going to start with three hammers each rather than the one that has just passed between the two teams, as we've seen for the last couple of weeks of TGL. These hammers can be thrown at any point during the match, and if one is thrown before the hole starts, the opposing team must accept the hammer.

[00:08:09] This hammer rule change is an effort to give trailing teams a chance to get back into the match before it gets out of control, which we have seen plenty of in the events that TGL has held in its inaugural season. TGL has also announced favorable ratings news, according to Yahoo Sports, with three of the previous five matches reaching a peak of 1.1 million viewers.

[00:08:30] TGL reports that 42% of its audience is in the coveted 18 to 40-year-old demographic and is trailing only the NBA in median viewer age. To come up with what that means, that if TGL is trying to reach out and gain a large viewership among its younger demographics, and especially against the ones that traditional golf reaches, TGL is succeeding. I hope that this is a good indicator of things to come, as well as with the hammer rule changes.

[00:08:58] We'll see a lot more excitement come out of these TGL events. Just want to say thanks to everyone that has followed the channel so far. Make sure to check out the second episode of our full-length podcast. It's on Spotify, Apple Music, as well as YouTube. We're getting ready for our first golf trip of the year. We share some details about the location of where we'll be headed to in March. It's one of my favorite golf destinations and trying to protect the identity.

[00:09:25] So if you're going to want to know where we're headed to in March, you're going to have to listen to that full-length episode. Thanks for listening. Remember to visit us at easygameradio.com. Follow us on Instagram at Easy Game Radio. And subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts.