Watch out rickroll!

What was your response?

I of course told him to follow his heart.

You're a better man than I. I would have probably responded, "there are 7 billion people in the world, have you ever wondered why it's only thousands?" or something along those lines.

lol

I don't recall what I actually said. I was partially stupefied, but I probably told him that I wasn't sure he was ready to handle the greens at Augusta.

it's actually really interesting because this is very common and a major reason why so many golfers are from wealthy families is because for every tiger who just storms onto the pga tour directly out of college

take jim furyk - one of the best golfers of his generation

all american 2x in college

he went pro in 1992

his big break was in 1993 winning a lower tier tour which got him a pga card for 1994

in 1994 he was just good enough to hold onto his card, in 1995 he won his first event and by 1996 he was an established golfer who was invited to play in all the majors

he only has 17 tour wins, the largest margin he ever won was 3 strokes with the majority of his victories coming in single stroke margins or playoff victories


so it wasn't just show up and crush, even someone considered by many to be one of the best golfers of his generation, a guy who was once the #2 ranked golfer after tiger still had a lot of variance go his way in his career

and he got out of the lower level tours pretty quickly - many established pga tour pros spend years languishing in the lower level tours where they actually lose money because the cost of travel, healthcare, coaching, etc all comes out of their own pocket and their winnings are very low - many people on the lower level tours live out of rvs

when robert garrigus was first coming up and spending time in a platoon between the lower tours and the occasional pga play, he lived with multiple roomates who were strangers he found through linkedin in order to save on housing



right now it's easier than ever - with liv pulling about half of the top 100 golfers in the world out of the pga tour - that created a vacuum where a lot of lower tier guys were able to quickly jump up - many would have needed to wait a few years or probably never made it all

yet despite the massive talent dilution, there hasn't been a super noticeable difference in skill because the guys in the tour below were also quite good and about the same level or just a slight notch below that of their pga superiors



so for a lot of golfers it's not so much talent as "how badly do you want this and how long are you willing to lose money each year chasing that dream and hoping in 3-4 years you'll finally earn your PGA card"

i was friends with an irish guy who for 4 years went heavily into debt chasing his dream in the lower euro tier leagues, he was just a slight hitch away from being as good as the people above him that he continued the grind with the "what if i can improve by one more stroke" mentality and went deep into debt and he was finally forced out not because he had given up, but because he was no longer able to continue living off his credit cards

i met him because he pivoted to coaching and the place where the money for that was in china where he was coaching children of wealthy chinese

it definitely felt like a ponzi scheme because i'd see him at the bar and go talk to him and he'd tell me how he's flying to australia tomorrow to pay a guy 10k for putting lessions and i'm like "wtf why" and he'll be like "this guy coached tiger and now i can tell my clients i've been coached by the guy who coached tiger and if i learn even one thing from this guy that's worth way more than 10k to me"

rickroll,

The people you are describing were a billion times better golfers than my friend, even if they were still struggling to get their tour cards.

I'm still holding out for my dreams of being a pro pool player. They'll be mentioning my name in the same breath as Reyes, Sigel, Strickland, and Van Boening this time next year, watch this space.

oh yeah i totally get that

i just wanted to say that he probably saw some stuff about that struggle and relatively slow development for goflers and how if you look at top 10 rankings it's always guys deep into their 30s

and a lot of predatory places exploit that and sell the dream



so he could easily rationalize it was "i'm still x years from my peak so the sky is the limit and it doesn't matter that i didn't play in college"

Playbig has a a huge advantage over Deuces because he has relatives that are high ranking in the military that provide him inside information. Deuces only has that indecisive, lonely hamster running in the wheel.

I guess the thing with golf is it doesn't weed people out early the way other sports do. Like if you dream of playing in the NBA, 99% chance you know by the time you're done high school that you aren't making it. And if you're in that 1% that goes past high school, you pretty much know by age 22 or 23 that you either made it or you didn't. If you haven't made it by age 23, your chance is over, and you pretty much know it. Random 27 year old playing in the park or rec center never thinks he still has a chance.

But golf, you see some 40 year olds with dad bods making millions (I know some of them are great athletes, but guys like Phil Mickelson and many others just look like average guys) and you think, hey, maybe I could do that.

I wonder about this. Which do we believe is more likely:

[ ] Playbig has an acquaintance in the military who believes the same crazy **** he does.

[ ] Playbig doesn't talk about this stuff with anyone in the military and is just lying his face off.

I lean toward the latter, but it could be the former.

Yeah, but most of those guys were great golfers when they were young, even if they never looked like NFL WRs. Mickelson went to ASU on a golf scholarship and won the award for best collegiate player three consecutive years.

I don't think there is a single player on the pro tour right now who was a ten handicap in his early 20s.

for all we know his relative is bowser who claimed to be a green beret involved in psy-ops

Looks more like a shell than a beret to me.

What was Trump's actual involvement though? Did he authorize it? It looks like it was more of a scheme cooked up and attempted by some of his supporters, without direct involvement from Trump.

https://www.politifact.com/article/2...rump-electors/

That's not a valid analogy. I'm either far worse off than your "friend of a friend" in their Hoop Dreams saga or nothing like them at all. Your guy measures his playing abilities against NBA players and thinks, almost definitely erroneously, that they compare favorably. What I've done already puts me as a very talented prognosticator. So my delusion, if I'm delusional, is I think things happened which didn't happen. Like I didn't pick at 60% after the challenge was dropped, I didn't reason out the whole Trump Russia saga in one afternoon in 2015 and post it here, etc. So if I am delusional, the equivalent level of delusion would be like a guy who thinks he is or was in the NBA who never was. My confidence is based on results, not really estimations. If the results aren't real then I'm way worse off than like the older brother in Napoleon dynamite making VHS tapes of passes to no one I intend to send to the Denver Broncos.

btw it's incredibly hard to pick at a 60% clip. I don't think it's even possible now. I did this a long time ago and some dramatic rules changes instituted by the NFL basically made my models way less useful. And I probably got a little lucky too. It's entirely possible that the villain had the best of it.

That familiar situation of some sub mediocre backup being benched in favor of a player who gives a slightly less chance to win on a per game basis but who has the potential to develop into a franchise player does not best characterize this specific situation. This is slightly different type of familiar situation. You might have encountered this at your job. Someone goes out on a limb and spends a lot of capital on a guy. They aren't just going to let that guy fail because it reflects poorly on them and their decision making. That's one way you get super incompetent people inorganizations making a lot of money and they never get fired, because someone powerful can never admit they were wrong about the person.

The development of Young became a vanity maintenance project for the owner instead of a temporary sacrifice in a long term strategy for the team. It has been apparent for a long time that Young was not developing, as well as that other QBs made the team far more competitive. Andy Dalton lit up the field with this roster, and he's known as a journeyman backup. And why was the team held back in this way? Because the money makes the decisions, just like with our government. And you liberals are just like the coach, acting in your economic self interest within the confines of the power structure and never challenging it because you're afraid.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be afraid to challenge it, but let's be real about the situation. Let's not pretend Kamala Harris isn't supporting a genocide. Let's not pretend you liberals aren't putting your own self interest ahead of stopping that genocide. You think Kamala is the way you hold on to whatever you've got materially, not that she is actually motivated to do anything in consideration of humanitarian principles.

I never said it was an analogy. I just said it reminded me of this. That OP was legitimately concerned that this guy was wasting his life on basketball. I don't think you put much effort at all into the things you say here like Trump's arrest or the Ukraine invasion.

He has a bunch of friends in the military:

There is nothing suspicious about the fact that Playbig gets his breaking news from his inside guys in the military exactly a half hour after the same conspiracy theory is posted on the Internet by Q.

He's got that general who wrote a nice letter telling us Kamala was a Marxist. The man got a medal for guarding a warehouse full of rations in Iowa in the 90s or something, so we should probably listen to him.

Incidentally, does the Play Big 2000 toy set derive its name from allowing little kids to create a fantasy where they're grown adults doing important things? Amusing he chose that name as a a moniker.

all I can say is, Kamala is... MANUFACTURING CONSENT!