Hey Everyone,

Did you see it this week?

The flicker of light at the end of the tunnel?

A touch of warmth and the sound of melting snow and ice gave me hope that we might be through the worst of the winter weather.

Could we get more snow? Sure, it’s February. But spring is close, and March is just around the corner.

Golf soon.

The Falmouth Planning Board met on Tuesday night, and the solar project was on the agenda. The conditions for the project were discussed for about 40 minutes. You can watch here if you’re a golf or local government sicko.

A few takeaways:

AT&T PEBBLE BEACH PRO-AM: Michael Thorbjornsen is T28 after an opening round 68 (-4) at Spyglass Hill. Keegan Bradley shot 63 at Spyglass and is T2.

In this week’s Small Bucket, I broke down some of the stats from the start of the season for Davis Chatfield and Thorbjornsen.

KORN FERRY TOUR: No event this week on the Korn Ferry Tour.

Last week, Former Yale football player and golfer James Nicholas won the Astara Golf Championship in Colombia. Robbie Oppenheim (N. Andover, Mass.) shot a second-round 76 and missed the cut. It’s been a tough start to the season for the veteran. He’s made one cut in four events and has earned $4,937.

MINOR LEAGUE GOLF TOUR: 2025 Mass Open winner Steven DiLisio (Swampscott, Mass.) teamed up with Evan Katz to win the 2026 Winter Team Championship. The format was a front-nine scramble, and the back was best ball. They shot 59, but so did Chris Francoeur (Amsbury, Mass) and Frank Gifford. DiLisio made eagle on the first playoff hole to take home the win. Here’s a video of the putt… and here are the results.

PALMAS DEL MAR COLLEGIATE: Down in Puerto Rico, the Rhode Island finished T6, and Boston College finished 10th in their spring opener. For the URI Rams, Aidan O’Donovan (Somerville, Mass.) finished T33 with rounds of 73-72-72, and Tyler Bruneau (Concord, Mass.) finished T40 after shooting 74-75-69. Results

LAKE JOVITA INVITATIONAL: UConn finished T3 down in Florida. Matthew Costello (Taunton, Mass.) shot 76- 75-74 and finished 71st. Connor Goode (Glastonbury, Conn) led the way for the Huskies with an impressive T3 finish. Results

BGSU WOMEN’S INTERCOLLEGIATE: The Providence Women finished in 15th place. Oliva Arone (West Newton, Mass.) finished 81st. Results

WHO IS TEEING IT UP NEXT WEEK?

I have compiled schedules and results for every New England Division 1 team and Massachusetts-based D1 players. You can find it here.

GASPARILLA INVITATIONAL (2/19-2/21): This Mid-Amateur tournament is one of the most popular events of the year. Herbie Aikens, Nick Maccario, Matt Parziale, Ricky Stimets, and Matt Parziale are all in the field.

I am creeping towards 3k subscribers on YouTube and would love it if you clicked on the video below to help me reach that benchmark. The channel has grown 3x in the last year.

Some weeks, I sit down to write the newsletter, and the blank page is tough to fill. This week, I’m leaving some items on the cutting room floor that should still be timely next week.

So here are three (timely) things I’ve been thinking about this week.

There’s been a lot of discussion in the last week about The Players Championship becoming a major.

What dredged up this old debate?

A new Players Championship promo ended with “March will be Major” splashed on the screen.

A statement, to be sure.

It was then given a rocket booster when Brandel Chamblee said the following:

Brandel’s take is nonsense; let’s put it in the middle of the table and make sure we all understand it.

Was it clever marketing by the PGA Tour to hijack the golf discourse for more than a week with their advertisement?

Sure.

What it made me ask is: Why are the majors The Majors?

Who waved a magic wand to make the decree that The Masters, U.S. Open, Open Championship, and PGA Championship constitute the Grand Slam?

Before The Masters came along in 1934, the Grand Slam was a different beast. It constituted the U.S. Open, U.S. Amateur, Open Championship, and Amateur Championship.

Bobby Jones famously won all four in 1930, an incredible feat considering he had to cross the Atlantic by boat to compete in the United Kingdom.

But that iteration of The Quadrilateral fizzled with the slow and steady growth of professional golf. The divide between the professional and amateur worlds grew, and at some point, the Grand Slam shifted.

What replaced it, for quite a while, were three events: The Masters, U.S. Open, and Open Championship.

The fourth spot was available. There were some big professional events, like the Western Open and PGA Championship, but nothing broke through until 1960.

That’s when Arnold Palmer decided, along with sports writer Bob Drum, that maybe the PGA Championship should be the fourth major.

From Wikipedia:

If you’d like more info on how the four majors came to be, Shane Ryan did a superb deep dive on his podcast “Local Knowledge” last March.

There was a time when the PGA Championship and Open Championship were so close on the calendar that it was nearly impossible to compete in both. The PGA Championship was a match-play event (now that would be major…), and some players who lost early in that event could scurry across the Atlantic for a shot at the Claret Jug.

A player like Ben Hogan played in one Open Championship. He won it, helping him secure the career grand slam. But a look at his career shows all of these gaps in what he did and didn’t compete in. He played in ten PGA Championships and one Open Championship during his 33-year career.

It is incredible to imagine Palmer and Drum sitting around, conjuring up this idea that served Palmer very well as he chased his own bit of history.

This would have been like Tiger Woods deciding in 2000, after securing the career grand slam, that The Players should be a major so he could add a notch in his belt that those who came before him could not.

Instead of someone like Palmer or Tiger pushing a narrative, a one-time PGA Tour winner and takesmith, Chamblee, decided to make unserious claims with the help of a promotional video.

Should the PGA Championship move back to August?

Of course, discussing the majors means the PGA Championship is going to get some stray bullets, as it has clearly become the fourth major in most (all?) people’s power rankings.

Justin Thomas might have it at the top of his power rankings….

In his press conference, Rory McIlroy said, “I would say it's (The Players) got more of an identity than the PGA Championship does at the minute. So like from an identity standpoint, I think THE PLAYERS has got it nailed.”

What would help the PGA Championship find an identity?

I’ll let Rory answer that…

The PGA Championship moved to May for two reasons.

First, they wanted to finish the season earlier and get out of the way of the NFL.

Second, the Olympics.

I think both reasons are flawed, and the move has significantly hurt the PGA Championship. It’s crammed into the schedule between The Masters and the U.S. Open. It’s as close to an afterthought as a major could get, and it’s made for a rushed major season when all four are played in the span of four months from April to July. The season falls flat once the Open Championship is done because the FedEx Cup, frankly, stinks.

The Ryder Cup has also been impacted by the PGA Tour’s reshuffling. The Americans have been totally unprepared to compete for the last two years. Their season ends weeks before the team event, whereas the Europeans play some DP World Tour events and look sharp when the Ryder Cup rolls around.

The Olympics conflict is an easy fix. Move the PGA Championship from August during Olympic years, other major sports have tweaked schedules for the sake of the games (or… make the Olympics an amateur-only event…).

Another half-baked (but fun!) idea is to move the PGA Championship back to August and, during Olympic years, pick a site near the Olympics. Of course, the logistics would be a nightmare for PGA professionals who qualify, and the PGA of America likely wouldn’t love a tournament in a foreign country.

But still… imagine a PGA Championship in Australia in 2032…

Is Ronaldo setting a precedent for Bryson DeChambeau?

This week, Cristiano Ronaldo sat out his third straight game for his Saudi club team - Al Nassr. In 2022, Ronaldo signed a contract to play in the Saudi League for $200 million a year. In 2025, he signed an extension that could pay him $700 over the next two years.

Sheesh.

This money is basically coming from the same coffer, the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), that’s paying the LIV golfers.

So why is he boycotting his squad?

He was unhappy that his team hadn’t spent enough money during the January transfer window. The 38-year old Karim Benzema, a former teammate of Ronaldo’s at Real Madrid, signed with another Saudi League team for $180 million a year.

But here’s the kicker.

In the Saudi League, the top four teams in the standings are all funded by the PIF. So Ronaldo was upset that his team wasn’t given the money to sign Benzema. The PIF used the money to put Benzema on another team.

All of this feels on the up-and-up, doesn’t it?

Ronaldo hasn’t won a trophy for Al Nassr yet, and Benzema might have put them over the top.

The conflict here is where the money is coming from.

This isn’t like the Dodgers stealing a player away from the Milwaukee Brewers.

The money is all coming from the same place.

So Ronaldo decided not to play three games.

Is that a surprise?

No. The 40-year-old superstar has a master’s in petulence.

But what if Bryson decided he might like to take a stand. After all, his contract runs out at the end of this season.

Ronaldo’s world fame dwarfs Bryson DeChambeau’s. Ronaldo has 671 million followers on Instagram. He reaches tens of millions with each post.

In 2020, he pushed aside a bottle of Coca-Cola on the dais before a press conference and then held up a bottle of water and said, “Agua.”

That 10-second episode caused Coca-Cola to lose $4 billion in market value (Note: Coca-Cola is doing fine and recovered the losses).

Bryson has 2.57 million subscribers on YouTube, and he’s not moving the needle on the stock market. I guess he could ask Phil Mickelson for some tips on that side of things… or maybe not…

But with the departure of Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed, Bryson is now the golden boy on LIV. He’s watching the league add young players while also employing washed-up players like Lee Westwood and Bubba Watson.

In the last couple of months, he has made comments about playing YouTube Golf full-time while chasing majors. He also complained about LIV changing to 72 holes.

“It’s definitely changed away from what we had initially been told it was going to be,” DeChambeau told Today’s Golfer. “So there is some movement that we’ve all been, I would say, interested in, and going, ‘Why that movement?’ Because we were told it was going to be this. So that’s definitely made us have some different thoughts about it.”

Ronaldo said he will return to the pitch this weekend, but it just makes me wonder if DeChambeau could openly boycott an event as a leverage play against LIV. He’s been non-committal about his return.

Bryson’s contract will be a big discussion in the next seven months, and he might be just crazy enough to sit out a LIV event if he’s unhappy or feels like the end of the road is near.

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