Exclusive Interview with Casey Bannon of Golfer's Journal
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00:00We are back in game live all access spending the better part of the next two hours chatting
00:09about the Open Championship at Royal Troon fired up to do that. I'm Charlie Hume. I'm
00:14a co-host of the smiley show with smiley Kaufman and my next guest is he is a golf guy for
00:19sure, but he's a good buddy Casey Bannon with the girl with the golfers journal. He's a
00:23brand manager there. He is the host of a podcast. It's really good stuff about the mind game
00:29the mental side of the game. So Casey Casey and I were I got a laugh in the break. We're
00:33just catching up to Casey's about 11 minutes for me right now. He is currently in Durham
00:37North Carolina was just here in the state of North Carolina playing Toth Hill Farm yesterday
00:42a really cool Michael Strand scores and we were just talking about, you know, guilty
00:45pleasure TV. Like that's what you do on an Open Championship Sunday. So, you know, look
00:50I'm a big owning Manhattan guy. You were a your real housewives guy. It sounds like.
00:55Yeah, well not by choice. I think I think it's let's start there. That's you know, I'm
00:59married now and I don't have control of the remote but real housewives. I'm getting into
01:04it and appreciating it for you know for its depth. But yeah, it's nice to be it's nice
01:09to finally come to Durham and get to talk to you from from a hotel down the street.
01:13That's how we like to do it, you know big commentary on the disconnected state of society
01:17which we can unpack at a later date on another in-game live all access. I'm sure so. Yeah
01:23the first the first place we got to start is like, I don't I can't I don't know how
01:27or why this this happened the way it did the last few days, but every guest I feel like
01:30I've had on the show is going to play somewhere. It's super cool right after the show or they
01:33just finished playing somewhere cool somewhere really cool. We had Jackson Van Paris going
01:37to play Roaring Gap Karl Paulson coming off Diamond Creek. I'm a big Mike Strance nerd.
01:42I want like the cliff notes version on Toth Hill Farm is someone who is I'm ashamed to
01:46say I've never gone and played there. Tell me a little bit about Toth Hill Farm. Yeah,
01:51it's the the work they've done. I actually played it in 2020 before they restored it
01:54and it was you know, overgrown and just really rough. They've put a lot of work into it
02:01and and put it back to its original sort of Mike Strance vision, but it's it's aggressive
02:09and intimidating visually as all my good Mike Strance courses are the best. I you know,
02:14Tom Doak and the confidential guide of golf some did some this up pretty great. It's it's
02:19Tobacco Road with a lot of rocks and that's what it is is there's huge stones and and
02:24granted that you can sort of get a good bounce or a bad bounce off of but it's just fun,
02:29you know, like we've talked about Mike Strance courses a lot. You just want a great match.
02:32Our match came down to 18. You just want to you know, make a couple birdies see a couple
02:37things you've never seen on a golf course and and have a really nice day. Go go try
02:41to find a Mike Strance course. I love that so much. I think Tobacco Road is it's just
02:46a little bit under an hour from my doorstep here. So I try to get down to Sanford and
02:49play it as often as I can. I'm not trying to equate the two here say that you know that
02:54his courses are equivalent to some of the courses on Scotland, but just having been
02:58there and playing press week some of that quirkiness, you know, it's clear that he took
03:02some pages out of that playbook and try to kind of make the land feel natural with roles
03:06and contours. And so it's fun watching this this week and this style golf and having been
03:10there and saying we have a little bit of that back at home and Mike's done a great job with
03:13a couple different courses here. So that's that is, you know, fun stuff. It is of course
03:18a major week and another place I want to go with you here is you had the good fortune
03:23of being selected for the Masters Media Lottery. We were talking about this. We were actually
03:29game planning this in the media building at Augusta National that week. So it Casey wrote
03:35a phenomenal piece about this on the golfer's journal. I believe actually this is outside
03:38the paywall. So if you want to go check that out now, it's a pin tweet for Casey and it's
03:42well worth the subscription of the golfer's journal fantastic publication. Just the publication
03:47itself is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful thing. So it's worth checking out there and
03:50also the writing is top tier, but Casey just give us a little bit of the feel of the nerves
03:56on that first heat Augusta National how that kind of went throughout the round. And then
04:00of course you all should go read that piece of case. He wrote about his experience at
04:03Augusta National. Yeah, you know, you know, there's like a the term walking on eggshells,
04:10you know, when you're that's sort of what actually playing golf feels like there, you
04:15know, it's one thing to walk around the property, but when you put spikes on and stand on the
04:19first tee box, I had this weird feeling of not wanting to damage any of the golf course
04:23throughout the day, you know, like just very light on your feet. The way they do the media
04:28lottery is just incredible and that they keep the Sunday pins out there. The the greens
04:33are rolling like any tournament day would so you really get to play your sort of dream
04:38round at Augusta National. So I mean, I can't you know, it went by way too fast. It was
04:45it was a blur. I was able to make some birdies. I made a I made a bomb on nine down the hill
04:50for birdie, which I did not have on my bingo card. When I started I made I made birdie
04:54from the trees on 13 and I made one on 17 as well. So I felt like that article was pretty
05:02self-indulgent, but I had to like list it out for myself. I just I was going to write
05:06down all the yardages and stuff, you know, clubs. I hit just for myself and my kids and
05:11my hopefully grandkids one day to tell them the one time I played but yeah, it was it
05:17was it was a very cool experience running to tell you out of breath in the in the media
05:21center that I won as I was scarfing down a moon pie daddily. No, I think you're allowed.
05:27I think you're allowed to be self-indulgent when you play Augusta National. That is the
05:30one place where you know, let's we want that. We're all here for that. So let's let's talk
05:35about now the open a little bit Casey because you know, the Gulf of Journal does such a
05:40good job of painting this game and these broad strokes and taking the sort of this 10,000
05:44foot view on what all this sort of means. And so just the romanticism of this major
05:50this week, you know, a lot's been said about, you know, good and bad about the unpredictability
05:55the weather the test, you know, whether T should be moved up, you know, whether it's
05:59it's too demanding of a test and your mind watching this week and just the open championship
06:05at large, you know, what sort of feelings or emotions does it evoke for you?
06:09Well, it's it's golf in its purest form, which was like a big sort of inspiration behind
06:15starting the Gulf of Journal in the first place. I actually just got my first my first
06:19taste of Lynx golf. I was I went to Ireland last month for eight days proper proper Lynx
06:25golf, you know, and one thing I learned there is that you know from the caddies and the
06:30and the locals and the people that work where the work there live there. They really don't
06:36care about whether you want the team moved up or not. They don't really care that it's
06:40blowing 40 into your face or across or down. They don't care that you know, your gloves
06:48are soaked through this is this is the game. This is how the game is played, you know,
06:52and so I think it's always a nice sort of, you know, shock to the system after watching,
06:59you know, the PGA Tour a lot of professional golf be played in the US sort of on redundant
07:04layout and and course styles and stuff every year you get we get to the open and we get
07:10to remind ourselves kind of what what golf should be, you know, and it's purest form.
07:16Absolutely Casey never enough time. We'll do the Real Housewives without owning Manhattan
07:20recap next time around. Thanks so much for making the time. I promise.
07:29Transcribed by https://otter.ai