Some weeks in golf hand you everything you need in a single Sunday afternoon. This was one of them. Across three different tours, the game produced a 72nd-hole collapse that will be replayed for years, a veteran proving that experience can still cut through the noise, and a 39-year-old rookie reminding everyone that some stories simply refuse to follow the expected timeline. There was joy and heartbreak in roughly equal measure — which is to say, it was a perfectly normal week of golf.
PGA Tour: John Deere Classic
There’s a particular cruelty to losing a golf tournament you already had. Ben Kohles knows that now in a way he probably never wanted to. Standing on the 72nd hole of the John Deere Classic with the title within reach, Kohles found a way to give it back — a 72nd-hole disaster that changed everything in about thirty seconds. The collapse handed Chris Gotterup the trophy, and while no one wants to win quite like that, a win is a win.
Gotterup played well enough all week to deserve what came to him. This is his fifth PGA Tour title, and there’s a quiet steadiness to the way he competes — he doesn’t impose himself on a tournament so much as outlast it. When the door opened at TPC Deere Run, he walked through it without flinching. That’s not nothing. That’s actually quite a lot.
The equipment world has already taken notice. A full breakdown of Gotterup’s winning bag is making the rounds this week — the kind of detail golf fans consume with the same appetite they bring to the leaderboard. For those who believe the clubs matter as much as the swing, there’s plenty to dig into.
As for Kohles — there’s nothing to say that he doesn’t already know. The game asks hard questions sometimes, and the only honest answer is to come back and ask one of your own.
DP World Tour
If you need a reason to keep believing in the longer arc of things, look at what happened on the DP World Tour this week. Michael Hollick is 39 years old. He once walked away from professional golf entirely to coach. And on Sunday, he rolled in a 19-foot eagle putt to win his first DP World Tour title.
Let that sit for a moment.
Hollick’s story is the kind the game occasionally produces — not often enough, but when it does, you stop whatever you’re doing. He left the tour. He found meaning in teaching. And then something pulled him back, the way golf tends to with people who genuinely love it. A rookie at 39. A first professional win via one of the most dramatic putts of the season. No careful branding, no tidy arc engineered for social media. Just a man who kept at it until the game finally said yes.
That one’s going to stay with people.
PGA Tour Champions: U.S. Senior Open
Padraig Harrington has never been easy to categorize. He’s too analytical for the romantics, too heartfelt for the purely technical. He thinks about the game in layers, processes it out loud, teaches it with a generosity that feels almost at odds with the competitive engine running underneath. And now, after winning his third U.S. Senior Open, he’s become only the second player in history to do so.
The question being asked in golf circles this week is whether Harrington is the most under-appreciated player of his generation. It’s a fair question, and the honest answer is probably yes. Three major championships. A Ryder Cup captaincy. A post-competitive career that has somehow produced a record-tying win on the Champions Tour. He’s done more than almost anyone, and yet the conversation always seems to settle on others first.
His lesson from the week, characteristically Harrington, involves what he calls “a saturation point” — the idea that at some stage, more information stops helping and starts hindering. It’s the kind of insight that takes decades to earn and about thirty seconds to understand once you hear it. That’s Padraig: the clearest thinker in a sport that often mistakes complexity for depth.
Around the Game
Beyond the scoreboards, the week had a few threads worth following. Jordan Spieth’s return to Royal Birkdale is generating real anticipation — Birkdale, where he won the 2017 Open Championship in that electric, nerve-shredding way only Spieth seems capable of producing. The venue alone adds something the week wouldn’t otherwise have.
On the technology side, the game keeps moving. Players 1st has launched an AI assistant built on what it’s calling the world’s largest collection of golf intelligence — a tool aimed at giving club operators faster, smarter access to their own data. Separately, the NGCOA is hosting a webinar around AI-informed tee time strategy, a phrase that would have sounded like science fiction not long ago and now feels entirely routine. The industry is moving, whether the traditionalists are comfortable with it or not.
Nashville will host the inaugural World Series of Competitive Putting — more than $65,000 on the line and the first-ever world champion to be crowned. Putting has always been the part of the game that levels the playing field, the place where a weekend amateur can beat a tour player on any given green. An event built entirely around that skill makes sense.
And somewhere on the back nine of Payne’s Valley in Missouri, a golf cart went off a cliff at the 19th hole. No one appeared to be seriously hurt, but the video is circulating online with the kind of speed reserved for moments that are equal parts terrifying and unavoidably funny. Golf contains everything.
Looking Ahead
The Open Championship at Royal Birkdale is coming up fast, and most of the golf world’s attention is already drifting that way. Gotterup arrives with momentum from Sunday. Harrington arrives having just tied a record. And somewhere on a DP World Tour range, a 39-year-old first-time winner is figuring out what comes next — which, if the last few days are any indication, is probably something none of us would predict. For those keeping score on the 2026 major season so far, the game has already handed us more than its share of memorable finishes, and Birkdale has every reason to add to that list.
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