It's no secret that the FGR has stumbled into a bit of a rough stretch having not made a worthwhile pick since Ben An finished runner-up in Hawaii like two years ago (or so it seems). To make matters worse, my real live golf game has taken a high arching swan dive into a dumpster fire over the past couple weeks after a very promising March when those shots I hit while playing by myself felt as easy as other people's Sunday mornings.  Everything may have converged on rock bottom last weekend with the woefully mediocre pick of Christian Bezuidenhout along with my two thoroughly uninspiring ..read more

I was going to share some heartfelt thoughts on Season 2, Episode 3 of Full Swing which looks at the mental side of the game through two golfers approaching it differently - Wyndham Clark who accepted that he needed help and now works with a sports psychologist and Joel Dahmen who figured he just had to grind his way out of the struggles with the help of some gin. I'll let you guess who I empathized with more but I will say it made me like Clark just a little more even if the starting point for that was previously zero.  Unfortunately, I switched away from the show to watch the thrilling ..read more

I'm going to avoid comparing my current three week run of failure to recent local events but damn if it isn't just sitting there for the taking. I mean Sam Burns missing the cut at the Valspar Championship would be like Edwin Moses tripping over every hurdle during his Olympic prime or Coldplay producing a listenable song. The odds are astronomical and yet it happened with Burns so maybe there's still hope for Coldplay.  The fact is that the real season doesn't start until The Masters so I've still got two more weeks of grace before it's time to panic. At least that's what I'm telli ..read more

We don't keep statistics around here for our own mental self-preservation but if we did, I'm pretty sure the last two weeks would go down as the worst stretch in FGR history. To somehow talk myself out of picking Scottie Scheffler not once, but twice in a row on courses where he was the prohibitive favorite was a level of incompetence not yet previously achieved on this website. And that's saying something.  I went to play nine holes at 3:30 p.m. on Sunday and, when I walked into the pro shop, I saw that Scottie was one shot off the lead so I asked the young assistant pro "he's going to ..read more

I had the opportunity to go see Nate Bargatze last week and, as you would expect, I have thoughts. As a preliminary matter, I will say that there are few things more cathartic than being in a room full of people who are laughing. If you've never been to your local comedy club, do yourself a favor and go, even if it has a ridiculous off-putting name like Magooby's Joke House. And please don't forget to tip your waitresses and try the veal. Thanks I'll be here all week. Back to the show: Nate performed at Capital One Arena which was built to host NBA games, monster truck rallies and Disney on ..read more

I just had a typically awesome experience at CVS that would probably only rate about a 3 out of 10 on their shitty service scale with a "1" being you actually get your prescription after a short wait but it's delivered to you by a pharmacist who appears to have eaten a bad taco for lunch. A "10" is it's Friday at 5:30 p.m., your kid is sick, the line is an hour long and, when you finally get to the counter, the pharmacist who is now more miserable than the guy working "Lost and Found" at LaGuardia Airport tells you that your insurance that worked yesterday doesn't work today and, once you work ..read more

Let's go ahead and get this out of the way. I want Travis Kelce to catch four touchdown passes including the game winner in overtime as Jim Nantz exclaims "LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!!!" Then I hope he proposes to Taylor Swift after the game in the middle of the field by offering her a ring with one hand and the MVP trophy with the other because "I couldn't have done this without you . . . it's a love story, baby . . . just say 'yes.'"  I'm firmly in the Charles Barkley camp on this one and I'm actually grateful that the haters have given me a reason to care even one iota about w ..read more

The Sunday washout at Pebble Beach provided myself and other golf fans the "opportunity" to catch-up on what LIVGolf has been doing to make their product more appealing and by "more appealing," I mean remotely watchable. When I tuned-in on whatever hole they were playing, the leaderboard featured Jon Rahm, Dustin Johnson, Sergio Garcia and Joaquin Niemann so that's three green jackets to go along with one of the best young players in the game. I committed to giving it as much of an unbiased look as I could muster. Here's how that went: The first cringe came (as it always does) at the sound o ..read more

Before we get to the golf, please allow me a few comments on the Ravens and, more particularly, many of my fellow fans who have been inclined to blame the loss on everything from the officiating to Travis Kelce being a big meany to Justin Tucker before the game. My polite request to them would be to please shut the fuck up.  The Ravens got their asses kicked across the board and it started days before kickoff with whatever absurd offensive game plan called for them to hand the ball to their running backs six times. SIX FUCKING TIMES!!! They led the damn league in rushing yards (again) an ..read more

I have intentionally held-off on posting these picks as a public service following last week's complete debacle that yielded an 0-4 record. To paraphrase one of the great monologue's in film history, "Mr. Elliott, what you just wrote is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever read. At no point in your rambling, incoherent analysis were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone is now poorer for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul." The issue appears to have been that I thought the 49ers were who the Raven ..read more