Can check: Southern Pecan brown ale (Lazy Magnolia Brewing Co.)
In-brain soundtrack: “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’” (Judas Priest)
Free legal advice: You cannot claim a chicken as a tax dependent
Golf hole living rent-free in my head: No. 1 at Pine Creek GC (Purvis, Miss.)
. . .
Mississippi has plenty to offer Tommy Fleetwood. UV rays, for one. A gettable PGA Tour win for another.
A week ago, Fleetwood — as of this writing, ranked sixth in the world — was firmly established as golf’s most snake-bit player. Fifteen years into his pro career, Fleetwood remained famously winless on the PGA Tour. It had become enough to make one rethink atheism.
Fleetwood kind of put an end to it all on Sunday with a three-shot win at the Tour Championship — in a 30-man field. The Tour Championship is technically a PGA Tour event. But if Baskin Robbins has more ice cream flavors than your golf tournament has golfers, then that’s a problem.
No one wants an asterisk hanging over Tommy Lad. He has shaggy hair, an unkempt beard, and a British accent, so he must be a nice guy. And it would be good to see something nice happen to a nice guy.
Enter my beloved Sanderson Farms Championship, the seventh major and jewel of the fall series.
Tommy Lad and the Sanderson need each other. For Fleetwood, there’s a lot to like about the Country Club of Jackson and the chance it would offer him for his first PGA Tour win against a full field. CCJ isn’t one of the Tour’s shortest courses, but at just under 7,500 yards (about 100 yards shorter than Augusta National), the course doesn’t box out a player with Fleetwood’s snack-size driving distance. (The 2023 winner, MacKenzie Hughes, currently ranks 101st in driving distance on the PGA TOUR in 2025.) The real key to success at CCJ is approach play: the greens (among the Tour’s best) have discernible sections that reward accurate iron shots. Fortuitously, Fleetwood is among the Tour’s 10 best in approach shots this year.
For the Sanderson, it goes without saying that landing a player of Fleetwood’s caliber would be a big deal. The tournament has spent the past couple of years in Title Sponsor Limbo, and a big-name winner couldn’t hurt its effort to find a long-term sugar daddy.
And if you’re Fleetwood, when the hell else are you ever going to see Mississippi, ever? You’re unlikely to ever build a two-week holiday around the Crystal Springs Tomato Festival. You’ll already be stateside for the preceding week’s Ryder Cup. Alabama has a home game three hours away, if you miss the cut. And on what other Tour stop are you gonna find fried catfish and cornbread at a gas station?
So pretty please, Tommy Lad. With sugar on top. And butter. And probably a scoop of ice cream on the side. Come play the Sanderson.
. . .
Golf is everywhere, as Jay Revell used to say. It’s even on Human Garage.
Human Garage is one of my favorite quack/pseudo-wellness accounts on Instagram. I’m talking about the Instagram accounts that advocate holding tuning forks against your pregnant belly, or massaging your liver to cure depression. In a nutshell, Human Garage claims that emotions and memories are stored in the body’s fascia (not in, say, the brain), and that the secret to processing repressed trauma is muscle stretches. Sunrise yoga meets Heaven’s Gate. That’s Human Garage.
And by the grace of the Content Gods, swing coach to the stars Chris Como has started popping up in some of Human Garage’s videos. He appeared alongside Human Garage maharishi Garry Lineham (a federal convict) in a recent clip, and in another one in June. Neither one is super-crazy, but if this leads to Bryson DeChambeau getting a butthole reset, then this whole apocalyptic year will have been worth it.
. . .
Final thoughts:
The Atlanta Braves are officially dead. Until last weekend, they’d won 10 of their past 12 games and set themselves up for a real (but slim) chance at a playoff berth, provided they could sweep the Mets this past weekend. They promptly lost two of three, and then lost again on Monday in Miami. The Athletic’s Dave O’Brien says that Atlanta can get back to the playoffs in 2026 if they stay healthy and play better. Bold analysis.
Musings on Brora Golf Club are coming soon to Lying Four. I started writing about Brora shortly after returning from my Highlands golf trip last October, but the writing quickly led to some pretty heavy topics, and it’s taken me a while to tie it all together. I’ll probably put it out on Substack in two parts, probably beginning next week. Stay tuned.
In addition to Human Garage, some of my favorite Instagram quack-wellness accounts are Certified Health Nut, Holistic University, and Spinal Energetics. Search out CHN’s videos about ayahuasca and butthole sunning. Thank me later.
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