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.
Thank you, Weekend 9 reader.
Thank you for letting me opine about golf in this space. And write about Bob Uecker. And even make a bracket.
Thank you for letting me find stories that interested me. And videos that interested me. Thank you for letting me find instruction tips that may help you. And stories that may make you smile.
Thank you for emailing me. I read every message. I published a few, too.
So on weekend No. 1 of 2026, I’m offering you a gift. Below is the Best of the Weekend 9. There are 27 items in all, and each was published at some point last year. Why 27? Simple. No, the reason isn’t golf related, though 27-hole days are always welcome.
Twenty-seven is simply long. And hopefully this will help get you through Monday No. 1 of the new year.
Let’s start.
1. Here, from January, the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay took his turn in reviewing TGL. This was gold:
“Golf reimagined. That’s what TGL pledges, which should necessitate an adage: Any time you see ‘__________ reimagined,’ investment firms have entered the chat.”
This was also great:
“The night kicked off with the zenith expression of sports enthusiasm: the dramatic walk-out. Low-key men accustomed to quietly stepping from tournament courtesy cars marched into the rowdy ‘SoFi Center’ like gladiators wearing pressed pants. Woods, naturally, got Tuesday’s biggest ovation, walking out last to the rumble of Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger,’ a song old enough to qualify for a discount at most South Florida restaurants.”
2. Forget TGL. Oswego, Illinois, may be getting nine holes under a roof, and the concept’s got a sweet name — the Megalodome. In February, Sam Woodworth of WSPYnews.com wrote here that progress is being made.
3. After Billy Horschel hit a left-handed shot at the Valspar Championship, an interesting back and forth started after popular Golf Twitter user @Top100Rick shared video of the play and wrote: “If you are a 25 year old scratch player and I gave you unlimited time, the best teachers, the best equipment, best fitness coaches…The odds of you getting a tour card are ZERO.”
The post has 6 million views. Folks have weighed in.
Including Horschel. He wrote this:
“Umm sorry to be the bearer of bad news but Rick is probably right. Percentages are less than 1%. It’s one thing to get the technical part but then you need the mental which is probably the hardest and don’t forget course management and vital tournament experience….. which guys similar in age would have roughly a decade of experience playing highly competitive tournament level golf.”
4. Here, Viktor Hovland joined … the UAP Files Podcast. What’s a UAP? It’s short for unidentified anomalous phenomena, a term for what have long been called UFOs, short for unidentified flying objects. Hovland has talked about the subject on occasion, and on the podcast, he spent a good portion of his time questioning the host.
The golf talk was brief, though this was interesting:
“Just to relate this to golf,” Hovland said, “the past couple years have been a little bit challenging for me on the golf course and it’s made me have to question a lot of the things that I’ve done. Because when you make an instinctual move that I’ve done for, I’d say, maybe the past 10 years of my life and the ball is going one direction, it’s going pretty straight, it’s going where I want it to go and then suddenly it’s not doing that, you have to really question everything and look at all the things that you’re doing to re-engineer the golf swing that you had before.
“And when you do that, it’s quite addicting, really. It might give you some short-term discomfort because you look at things that you regard as facts and then maybe they weren’t as true as you thought they were. And that original discomfort goes away quickly when you realize that on the other side, there’s lessons to be learned and you can actually improve because of that.
“And then when you extrapolate that to other things in society or how you live your life in general, it’s quite freeing and it almost becomes a little addicting — you just want to question everything, although within reason; you still need to put on your shoes and put on clothes and go out there and work and get better at the things you want to get better at. But yeah, it’s just fascinating so that’s kind of what led me to this topic.”
5. In March, former NFL star JJ Watt said he’d been invited to play Augusta National the day after the Masters, but he was concerned: While he shoots in the 95-to-105 range, he hadn’t played in a year. It made for an interesting scenario.
Here’s how he did:
6. This was great from longtime French pro Mike Lorenzo-Vera. Speaking on the Sliced Golf Podcast (which you can listen to in full here), Lorenzo-Vera said he had tried to recreate one of Tiger Woods’ more famous plays — his around-a-tree bunker shot at the 2019 WGC-Mexico Championship (which you can watch by clicking here).
Said Lorenzo-Vera: “Those guys can do things that even really good pros cannot do. I can give you one example. You know the shot in Mexico that Tiger hit around the tree from the trap? The year after, I went there and I threw six balls on the Tuesday. And I look at the shot, I couldn’t even get to like 40 meters of the green. The guy almost holed the shot with two clubs less, bending the ball more to the right. Altitude, temperature, it’s impossible to turn the ball, and the guy turns a 9-iron 140 meters 50 yards. And it’s pin-high.
“Oh, why we don’t have majors in France? Because nobody can do that.”
7. I also enjoyed enjoyed the thread below from the Golfers Journal (and the complete story can be found at the bottom of the tweets):
