I love watching great golfers have an awful time

The U.S. Open was an ode to Golf Misery. Plus, updates from swimming, cricket, darts, and the UFL, as well as a solution to the tied NCAA Track championship.

I like the US Open, the golf major whose organizers are dedicated to creating a Golf Torture Chamber every year.

This year’s tournament was at Oakmont Country Club, one of the hardest courses in the world. No easy buckets at Oakmont. They’re sending in the fescue to commit six hard fouls every hole. The course was recently redesigned by famed golf course designer Gil Hanse, apparently with help from Jigsaw from the movie Saw. In 2007, Angel Cabrera won with a +5.

Every time they host, Oakmont produces a new logo of a happy squirrel absconding with a golf ball that one of the world’s best players lost in foot-high grass. That Callaway’s gonna feed our furry friend through the cold winter months.

Why does Golf Squirrel #2 look like he’s about to jab-step and splash a fadeaway jumper in my eye?

As an open tournament, the US Open allows non-tour players to earn their way into the field through open qualifying events. These golfers are the human equivalent of the STUNTS PERFORMED BY TRAINED PROFESSIONALS | DO NOT ATTEMPT AT HOME disclaimer at the start of Jackass. One of this year’s qualifiers was George Duangmanee, a UVA golf alum who finished 15th at the NCAA championships last year. After beating thousands of hopefuls to get a spot, Duangmanee shot +35 over 36 holes (six double bogeys, two triples, and zero birdies) before missing the cut. Thankfully, he seemed to have a pretty good time.

Sunday’s round was played in the middle of a consistent rain that soaked every blade of grass on the course. The 36- and 54-hole leader, Sam Burns, shot a +6 on the final eight holes. At one point, USGA officials told him the puddle where his ball was lying wasn’t puddle-y enough to require a redo. Tyrell Hatton made this face at least 40 times in the final half-hour.

This highlight package eliminates most of the gruesome stuff, but still includes Hatton hitting a shot from one side of a sand trap to the other side of the same sand trap, and several shots that disappear into foot-tall grass.

I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed watching a golf tournament more.

The lone survivor was J.J. Spaun, a Californian with Mexican and Filipino heritage. He started the day with five bogeys on six holes, but somehow avoided falling into a gigantic psychological sand trap and stopped the bleeding. I don’t know how he did it. Other golfers appeared to be on the verge of tears, but Spaun closed with back-to-back birdies, driving the green on the par-4 17th and hitting a storybook 64-yarder on 18.

Spaun, in only his second U.S. Open, was the only golfer to finish below par. All the sport’s brightest superstars and vaunted legends had been cracked by the course, finishing somewhere between Spaun and Duangmanee.

To the best of my understanding, golf is the sport people with good lives play when they need to have a very bad time. Nobody seems happy on the course, even when they’re in a beautiful place with their closest friends, perma-pissed about their 5-iron and their 3-putts. I appreciate when the top level of the sport respects that tradition. I don’t want to see the world’s best golfers thriving through world-class power and precision. I want to see multi-millionaires humbled by grass, sand, and a tiny white ball that won’t do what they want.

Now let’s talk about other sports:

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The Summer of Summer

18-year old Canadian Summer McIntosh set three world records in five days at the Canadian national championships. Here’s her third record of the week, in the 400 IM:

After winning three gold medals in Paris last year, McIntosh is on track to have an all-time great career. Allow me to prove that I’m not being hyperbolic:

• McIntosh is the first swimmer to break three World Records at one meet since Michael Phelps at the 2008 Olympics. And that was with Phelps wearing the technologically advanced famous Speedo that was banned months later.

• Phelps is actually a great comp for McIntosh. They’re both middle-distance butterfly swimmers who can win freestyle events and dominate the two medley races on the Olympic program.

• McIntosh won three golds in Paris last year at age 18: The 200m butterfly, 200m medley, and 400m medley, while taking silver in the 200m freestyle.

• Phelps won his first four Olympic golds at age 19: the 100m butterfly, the 200m butterfly, the 200m medley, and the 400m medley, with a bronze in the 200m freestyle.

• And after this year’s world championships, McIntosh is moving to Texas to train with Phelps’ former coach, Bob Bowman. However, Summer is going to need to find three other Canadians who can help her win relays if she wants to match Phelps’ all-time medal totals.

• McIntosh is the second Summer to excel at her specific events, as Summer Sanders also won gold in the 200m butterfly and 400m medley before becoming the host of Nickelodeon’s Figure It Out.

• Sorry, we’re gonna need to talk about Figure It Out for a second.

• One time there was a kid on there who had a huge jar filled with his own toe jam. I’ve spent 30-ish years haunted by the way he revealed his jar filled with toe jam.

• Back to swimming: I’m straight-up pumped to see the showdown between McIntosh and Katie Ledecky at the World Aquatics Championships. They’ll go head-to-head in the 400m freestyle, where McIntosh just broke a record once held by Ledecky, and the 800m freestyle, where Ledecky just broke her own world record.

• The 800m is gonna be a classic. Ledecky now holds 14 of the top 15 all-time swims… but #3 on that list is McIntosh, whose 8:05.07 at the Canadian championships was better than the 8:05.76 Ledecky posted at the US championships. I’m picking Katie, but it’s gonna be eight of the best sports minutes of the year.

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I live my life a quarter-inch at a time

Mondo Duplantis set the world pole-vaulting record again, bumping the record from 6.27 meters to 6.28 meters at a Diamond League meet in Stockholm.

• Mondo has now reset his outdoor record 12 times, by a centimeter every single time. That’s not including the indoor world record, which Mondo has set six times.

• This is Mondo’s first record on Swedish soil—he promised the home crowd he would try to break the record, leading to a packed house at the 1912 Olympic stadium. The man knows how to sell.

• As we’ve discussed about 11 times before: Mondo could jump higher, but he gets a minimum $50,000 bonus from the Diamond League every time he sets a new world record. So he’s gonna keep bumping up the bar .01 meters every time.

The women’s NCAA pole vaulting record also fell this weekend, also by one centimeter. After Washington’s Amanda Moll set the record in May with a 4.78… her twin sister, Hana Moll, won the NCAA championship with a 4.79.

• The Molls are trading championships with one another. Hana won last year’s indoor championship; Amanda set the NCAA indoor record this spring; Hana and Amanda tied for the NCAA indoor championship in March but Amanda won on countbacks.

• Amanda finished third in Eugene. Don’t worry, she’ll probably win next year with Hana coming in second.

• Because we’re dumb Americans, Washington’s official athletic website wrote that Hana jumped 15 feet, eight and 1/2 inches, breaking Amanda’s mark of 15 feet, eight and 1/4 inches. Mondo’s version sounds cleaner.

• Hana and Amanda insist they don’t see each other as competitors. “I think it’s important to separate ourselves and our performances and just acknowledge that we’re two different people,” Hana said in an interview; “We just know that we’re two different people with two different vaults and two different minds,” Amanda said seconds later. I’m unconvinced that they are two different people.

• Identical twins scare me. I am upset every time ESPN brings Marcus and Markieff Morris onto the same panel to talk about LeBron James while two completely different teams play in the NBA Finals. I’m sorry to any ITs out there, I’m sure you’re great people, but if we’re ever one-on-two in conversation I’m going to run away.

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Around the World

• South Africa won the Test World Championship in cricket, their first world championship in any of the sport’s three formats. Test cricket is the 5-day long version of cricket, and the championship takes about two years to play out. Basically, the way it works is, you keep batting until someone gets you out. With South Africa needing to chase down a huge run total on Days 3 and 4 to win, Aiden Markram stayed alive for six hours and 23 minutes, shifting the tide in the Proteas’ favor.

• Northern Ireland won the World Cup of Darts, a 2-vs.-2 competition between national duos. The pairing of Josh Rock and Daryl Gurney beat Wales in the 19th and final leg of the best-of-19 championship match, 10-9. You can watch the whole thing here:

• The second match of FIFA’s billion-dollar Club World Cup paired Bayern Munich, one of the best teams in the world, with Auckland City FC, an amateur team from New Zealand which qualified by winning the Oceania Champions League. Bayern won 10-0, calling into question the whole purpose of a billion-dollar event pitting the best teams in the world against amateur opponents from New Zealand.

• For more about the Club World Cup, I appeared on Ryan Nanni’s new podcast Phantom Island with Ryan Nanni to talk about it. We had a good time.

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College Credits

• USC and Texas A&M tied for the NCAA men’s track championship. After the final race, it took about two brutal minutes of calculations for everybody to realize the teams were tied in total points.

• Seriously, can’t we just have a head-to-head 100m between each team’s best sprinter to see who gets to be the champion? Maybe you could take the best result by each team in the 10 decathlon events and see who has the best overall score? Maybe do a countback system give the championship to the team which won the most events outright?

• The women’s competition did not have this problem, as Georgia won the school’s first title comfortably. They were led by Aaliyah Butler, who was part of the gold medal-winning 4x400 relay team in Paris last year—she won the individual 400m and helped Georgia win the 4x4 relay.

• My favorite individual championship of the tournament is probably Colorado State’s Mya Lesnar winning the shot put, simply because she looks SO MUCH like Brock.

• The Men’s College World Series is underway, and I’m rooting for the Murray State Racers, the Oregon State Beavers, the Coastal Carolina Chanticleers, and the LSU Tigers, in that order.

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Quick hits

• The DC Defenders won the UFL championship 58-34, the highest-scoring game in the short history of the league. Spring football legend Jordan Ta’amu threw for 390 yards and four touchdowns. More like the DC Offenders! Actually let me run that back.

• The Grand Slam of Track got a DNF for its first year, canceling its final meet of the season in LA. The people in charge insist there will be a second season… we’ll see.

• NASCAR held its first race outside of America since 1958, heading to a road course. The race was dominated by Shane van Gisbergen, the Kiwi driver who dominated the Australian Supercars series before realizing he could make more money kicking NASCAR drivers’ asses on the handful of road course races they do per year. SVG (which reads in my head as “Stan Van Gundy” or “Scott Van Gelt”) won by over 16 seconds, the largest NASCAR margin of victory since 2009.

Hope you’re enjoying the new format of the newsletter—you’re gonna be getting a little bit about every sport on earth for as long as I can type.