Tales from the first tee

Ryder Cup, Food Noise, and a Dollar Match

• Rich Easton • Episode 137

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Pressure doesn’t need a trophy to feel real. We start with Bethpage Black and the Ryder Cup’s unique voltage—captains orchestrating pairings, European chemistry in foursomes and four-ball, and a home crowd that couldn’t keep the line between passion and taunting. Golf asks for silence; fandom doesn’t always listen. You’ll hear how that tension plays out in shot routines, heart rates, and the razor-thin edge between competitive fire and corrosive noise.

From there, we head to a quiet nine that wasn’t. A new playing partner turns the round into a biography reading, carts stack up behind us, and timing collides with etiquette. That chaos opens a bigger idea: noise doesn’t just come from bleachers or laughter in your backswing—it lives in your head as “food noise.” We unpack the pull toward snacks at 8:01 a.m., planning travel around food courts, and the ritual joy of sandwiches at the turn. GLP-1s, paleo, prepped meals, and Nutrisystem all make cameo appearances as tools that can turn down the volume, but we make the case for a lasting mix of moderation, movement, and cooking with purpose.

The heartbeat of the story lands on the back nine with Valdemar. One dollar and a flag-on-flag challenge transform casual swings into committed shots. Concessions disappear. We play it down and putt everything out. Short putts grow sharp edges; focus finds a home. That single dollar ends up framed because it represents the simplest truth in sport and life: stakes create meaning, meaning creates pressure, and pressure—handled well—creates presence. If you’ve ever felt your hands shake over a must-make putt or your thoughts drift to dinner mid-round, this one’s for you.

If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a golf friend who loves a good sweat on a three-footer, and leave a quick review with your best tip for handling noise—on the course or in the kitchen.

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SPEAKER_00:

You're tuned in to another episode of Tales from the First Day. I'm Rich Easton telling tales from beautiful Charleston, South Carolina. The Ryder Cup. If you watch the 2025 Ryder Cup at the Beth Page Black Course in Long Island, New York, in its entirety, or a session or two, or just Sunday singles, you witnessed a golf event far different from the PGA tour or any other golf event for that matter. The difference was so dramatically apparent that if you were not a weekend golf fan and were just channel surfing and landed on the Ryder Cup, you might think, why is everybody on edge and so hyped up? The difference between the Ryder Cup and, let's say, any of the four majors, the highest pressure golf tournaments, where the winner changes their life from that point on, is that the Ryder Cup is a team battle of the United States versus Europe. It's an event where Donald J. Trump takes time away from the pressure-packed, laborious role as Commander-in-Chief of the United States of America and tweeter-in-chief of Truth Social to make an appearance to motivate the American team and intimidate the European team. It's an event where the team captains of Keegan Bradley, Luke Donald, and their vice co-captains spend months of planning off the course and countless hours during the three-day event of keeping their fingers on the pulse of everything that's transpiring and influencing the best outcome for their respective teams. It's an event where team building with players and coaches, with their life partners, develop an unbreakable bond to lift the spirit of their respective teams to accomplish golf greatness. It's an event where fans line up at the gates the night before or sometime after midnight just to get a running head start to get to critical viewpoints on the golf course before the players even arrive at the course. It's an event where the same fans that rush the gates try to affect the outcome of the matches. Yeah, we're not talking mashed potatoes or baba buoy after players hit their drive. We're talking fuck you, Rory, or fuck you to whoever the European player is while they're in their pre-shot setup. We're talking slurs and drinks thrown at players' wives. We're talking the epitome of the ugly human, commonly called the ugly American, whose first amendment rights are stretched to the edge with very little consequences until the police are brought in to kick them out. Most professional athletes, particularly in sports that pay as much as golf, as football, as baseball, earn more income than 99% of the fans that attend their events. They experience opposing fan hatred, unhappy wagerers, and the ugly underbelly of society that encourage each other to get inside the heads of opposing players. One of the roles of the captains and vice captains is to prepare their players for the worst. But that being said, no situation under a non-pressure environment can prepare you for the mean-spirited jeers, particularly when your match makes a difference in the outcome of the rivalry. And at the Ryder Cup, every shot in every match makes a difference. You know, some could argue that fan belligerence in all professional sports and sports where it's country against country are prevalent. And it's not just the Ryder Cup. World Cup football brings out the utmost patriotism which guides fans' emotional outcries. Golf is played in the sanctity of quiet, at least from the moment the golfer starts his or her pre-shot routine all the way up to the swing itself. Look, it could be between 30 seconds of a minute in that preparation. Well, if it's Patrick Cantley, probably longer. That's when it's customary to just shut the fuck up and let the golfer concentrate. Any sudden sound or movement by a fan or opposing player will have a negative effect on the swing and ball flight. And for some reason, the crowds at Beth Page Black felt that getting inside Rory McElroy's head was the best way to guarantee a US win or is just a fun thing to do. Rory is the heart and soul of the European team. And because ticket prices are so outrageously high, maybe it gives certain people a license to do whatever they need to do to try and affect the outcome. If you watch the Masters, you'll keenly notice that none of that is tolerated. So I think at the Ryder Cup, there were individuals that stood in front of the crowds before the players got out there to stoke the Americans, to stoke the Europeans. And I think that's okay. You want to get camaraderie, you want to get chanting, you want to make it loud for the home team. That intimidates the visitors. But some people just don't know where the boundaries are and they just don't know when to stop. Anyway, enough about the ugly fans. Because I'm sure in Europe similar things happen, just different words are spoken at different times. This year's event brought out the best in the four team events for the Europeans. They hit more greens in regulation and made more birdie putts during the four team sessions on Friday and Saturday. Why are Europeans historically better at two-man team sessions than the Americans? Is it the captains or is it the culture? You know, I think it's both. It's a combination of chemistry, strategy, and selfless play adopted by the Europeans that help them get off the schneid quicker and lead in the first four sessions. It's like the Europeans are entering a fist fight and know that their partners have their back. They always know that the other guy is gonna back them up if anything goes wrong. And things go wrong. So they think if they build a strong lead by Saturday night after the first four sessions, they have a better chance of staving off the run by the Americans on Sunday where the Americans and the Europeans are all by themselves competing one-on-one. They don't have their buddy to come in and back them up. All I can say to end this is that I sat at the end of my seat on Sunday from noon until 5 15 when Shane Lowry made a birdie putt on the 18th green and did his unbridled horse riding river dance once he knew he retained the cup for the Europeans. The previous hour before that, we watched three Americans win a point and dechambeau tie a point on the 18th hole, which gave us hope. You know, it's funny, they put a heart monitor on Justin Thomas just to see what his heartbeat was like, particularly on the first shot, and I think it was like 135, 130. His resting heartbeat is like 40. And so it just shows the pressure these guys are under. I think if I had a heart rate monitor watching on Sunday between 4 and 515, it would have registered well over 140. Anyway, Europeans did a great job. They deserved it. For those of you that know me, I often head over to the golf course in the late afternoon to play a quiet solo nine holes. It feeds my soul, and there are no consequences for a miss hit. If I hit it in the drink or deep in the forest, I throw down another ball and try to correct my errant swing. Sometimes I attach my Bluetooth speaker and groove to whatever playlist helps me maintain that good golf vibe. The other day I attempted to go it alone, but because of the late afternoon surge of golfers these days, I got paired up with a Gen Xer. I figure late forties, maybe fifty-ish. Let's call him Marty B. Usually when I meet somebody at the first T, you exchange names, which you forget, by the way. By the time you get to the first screen, hope you've forgotten his name. Try not to, try and write it down, but it happens. Basically, you meet them, you shake hands, no life stories, no one minute elevator speech about their life, nothing more than a possible handshake and a name. So I introduce myself to this golfer that I'm paired up with, and I'm thinking, great, I get to meet and play with another golfer. Maybe we have similar games or other things in common. And those things in common I'll probably learn over the next two hours. Or maybe I won't, because we're just focused on golf. Marty B wanted to tell me everything about himself before we teed off on the first tea box. Now imagine this. You get to the first tea box and there's Marty B. Hey, how you doing? I'm Marty B. I'm from Bayside, New York. Been down here for six months after retiring from the force, worked there for over 25 years, almost got killed five or six times. But anyway, my wife thought it was a good idea I'd take up a hobby. So I choose golf. I'm probably gonna stink it up today, but you know what they say? The worst day on the golf course is better than the best day at work. Now I had to interject out of fear of losing our tea time and out of fear that Marty B was gonna continue to share his life story before we even teed off. So I say, hey, nobody cares how well or poorly we play except yourself. Let's have fun. He hits a respectable drive, and I quickly tee it up to avoid hearing his autobiography this early in the round. So he goes on to tell me that this drive was his best drive on this hole ever, and he might have just shot in his load. Not a picture I ever want in my head, particularly before the first tee shot. By this time, two golf courts carrying the next foursome screech up to the tea box behind me at right before I'm about to hit, and I'm thinking, great, I'm playing golf with an overshare, and I've got the encroachers playing right behind us. I suggest to Marty B that we need to get out in front of these guys. So I step up to hit my shot, and Marty B is chatting it up with the foursome behind us. He might have overheard their prominent northeast accents just like his and whining a f wanting to find out where they were from. And I thought to myself, ah, this is gonna be another test from God. So I engaged the mechanism, focused on the tree line behind the green, 350 yards out. Not like I'm gonna hit it 350 yards, but it's always good to have a sight line, a tree line above whatever your target is. So anyway, I engage the mechanism. I'm balanced. I've got the swing thought that I that worked the other day. It has to do with the shoulder turn. And in mid-swing, Marty B and the Northeasterners laugh at something that one of them had said, and I caught the ball somewhere on the club head face, not the middle, but somewhere, enough to fly it down the fairway without embarrassment. But I heard them in my backswing. Marty B would go on to converse for the next two hours on every T-Box, every fairway, and every green. Have you ever gone to the movies and sat through some of the previews that are so long that when you're done with the preview, you turn to your friend or your spouse and say, I don't think we need to see the movie. I think the previews told us everything we need to know about that movie. That's what it was like playing for two hours with Marty B. When I shook hands with him at the end of the Nine Holes, I knew where he grew up. His three wives, his five kids. One was a big shot on Wall Street, one was an artist in Soho. His two girls were housewives with three kids each, and he had one kid that he said was a disappointment. Now, could you imagine a stranger confessing his thoughts about all his kids, but that one was a disappointment. I don't recall Marty ever asking me anything about my life, but that's a blessing because there was no more time to speak. He sucked all the air out of the golf course. We parted ways after the ninth grain, and I decided to play a few more holes in the quiet sanctity of the sounds of wildlife and the wind. I ended up shooting two over par on the back when I discovered I was gripping the club more in my palm than in my fingertips. And I discovered that because Marty B had shared one of the correctional golf videos that he had been watching all week before he played. So by the time I get out on the back, I could actually practice that thing. So, in summary, the overshare, after two hours of non-stop chatter, finally bestowed upon me some words of wisdom.

SPEAKER_01:

I said it before and I'll say it again. Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it.

SPEAKER_00:

It's when I'm sharing a meal and somebody is talking with an open mouth while they're chewing. It's it reminds me of the scene in Star Wars where Jabba the Hutt is eating a lizard-like creature while talking the same time. You ever notice the same brain that convinces you to hit a career shot over trouble to a well-protected green is also the one that steers your car across a six-lane highway, narrowly missing oncoming traffic because the line at In N Out Burger is no longer snaked around the building. Or the brain that convinces you to finish the three slices of pizza that you packed up three hours ago and now it's midnight, and it's like, you know what? It's in the fridge, gotta eat it. That, my friends, is food noise. It's the chatter in your brain that convinces you that your hunger is an emergency situation. Food noise is that earworm in your brain that keeps repeating like that popular song in whatever era you live through as a Ute. Food noise has a similar effect. If if you're food motivated, like each meal makes or breaks that part of the day. The food noise in your head is blistering. When I was ten, my dad would take my brother and myself fishing early Saturday mornings off the south shore of Long Island. I think it was called Captree Bay. My dad loved fishing even more than golf. In his later years, after a shitty round of golf, you could always find him casting his bait in Boca Siega Bay behind his condo, hoping to catch some snoot or red drum. Before we headed down to the docks on Long Island at Captree, we would stock up with Dagwood Bumstead like hoagies and pack them in a styrofoam cooler. It was a happy day in my life when technology and low-cost manufacturing introduced lightweight expandable coolers because those other styrofoam coolers would tend to break by the end of the day. So we'd get to the docks at 7-ish and the party boat would depart around 8 a.m. At 8 01, the food noise in my brain would remind me about the delicious sub just waiting for me to eat. By 8 20, I had devoured my sub and half of my brothers, which he would learn about sometime at around 11 or 11:30, and then he'd go apeshit on me. Whenever I make a long trip, like up to Harrisonburg, Virginia, or down to St. Pete Beach, typically eight-hour drives, I pack enough food in case the world ends as we know it, and I have to survive until the end. And this might sound crazy, but when I used to go on long work trips and there's a layover, and I had choices, I would always make sure that whatever airport I did a layover in had a good food court. That is food noise. Hey, look, not everybody I associate with has food noise the way I do. My son says he eats to live. I think that's more of a survivalist mentality since he's been in the music business struggling for 12 years. He's governed his food noise by adapting to a weekly budget that doesn't allow for cravings. That being said, I happen to play golf with this buddy that spent 20 years as an undercover narcotics agent. Let's call him Serpico. His radar for food noise trumps mine. As soon as we get to the first tee, we don't ask, hey, how's your game? We don't ask about our significant others. I mean that comes later. We don't chat about rumors. We save that for the bar. We ask, hey, what kind of sandwich did you make so we could eat it at the turn? Sirpico usually makes a turkey and mutz, he calls it mutz, it's mozzarella. Turkey and mutz with peppers. And when he says it, he says it with a smile, almost like he's been thinking about this for hours. It sounds like it's the best sandwich ever made. We tend to let our conversation veer towards new restaurants or revisited restaurants that we've been to in Charleston. Sirpico and his lovely wife, let's call her Mrs. Sirpico, have been out to dinner with us and they enjoy food the way we do. I'm not sure that the spouse's and girlfriends' noise level for food is the same as ours, but they seem to enjoy it as much as we do. Back to golf. Most of our conversation over the four-plus hour round revolves around food. I think we're both emotionally attached to the best that Charleston has to offer. It has become a food destination. So Sir Pico, his favorite is Hall's. And he goes there with his spouse, sometimes with his son, for special occasions. And when he talks about the experience, he starts from the beginning to the end. It kind of sounds like this. So we get to Hall's and there's Billy Hall greeting us at the door. They seat us and we sit down. I have this great martini. They make great martinis. Then we share a shrimp cocktail. Their shrimp cocktails are the best. They're gigantic shrimp. They're the best. Then I get the strip steak. Sometimes I get a ribeye. This time I got a strip steak. And you're not going to believe this. They know it's our anniversary. And what do they do? They come and bring us a free dessert. Man, those halls people, it's an incredible experience. And my son, my son eats like he's going to the gas chamber tomorrow. He basically gets everything on the menu. And why not? He's like an 18-year-old growing boy. And the wine, the wine was incredible. That's the kind of conversation we have between shots when we're waiting on the T box. Other people, they might be talking about politics. They might be talking about local current events in Charleston. Might be talking about their family, but it's guys, so most likely talking about sports. You know, often I'll come back from a round after playing with Serpago. And if Susan's in town, she'll start asking questions about Serpago and his wife's uh lives. What's new with them? What's going on? And I'm like, I don't know. But I know this. He had a turkey and mutt sandwich today. They went to Hall's last week. We talk about the most mundane things on the golf course. Women playing golf, by the end of the round, they know everything about the other women they're playing with. What's happening with them? Their kids, their grandkids. What did they cook for the family last week? Who's in the hospital? Who's getting better? What's going on? Hey, did his did their brother-in-law ever get out of jail? Things like that. Not us. We're talking about all right, so turkey and mutts, what do you put on it? Do you put on mayonnaise? Do you put on mustard? Or do you go bareback? But you know, food noise doesn't always creep in when you're starving. You know, I think I'm becoming my dad when I talk about the next meal before the one I'm eating is even over. Like I'm sitting there, we're ordering dessert, and while we're waiting, I'm like, hey, what do you think about lunch tomorrow? And if I say that, Susan will look at me like, you gotta be kidding me. I can't help it. The noise is overbearing. And my brother has has decided that he wants to use GLP1s to help him with his lifestyle, cut back on his eating, and fix some other things. He says it has all of these ancillary benefits. And so he's been using it for six months, and certainly he's lost 30 pounds. But I just spent a week with him and he was in the kitchen more than I was. Granted, he's eating small bites of things. He's drinking a lot of coffee. So GLP1s might cut down the food noise, but they're not cutting down his frequency to the refrigerator. Look, golfers know noise in general. I've talked about it ad nauseum on previous episodes. The sound of Velcro, when a competitor removes their golf club while you or your partner are in the middle of a putt. The sound of the card girl pandering for do you want a double? Do you want a single? Do you want more beers? You know, you can get six for the price of five just when you're coming up to the T-Box to start hitting a shot. All these noises are external, like the ones I just talked about at the Ryder Cup. But food noise, it's in your head. There are two game changers that affect food noise. Like I said earlier, GLP ones are one of them, and then a moderation of how much and how often you eat. Some people have gone on to order pre-prepped meals. Some are vegetarians, paleo or vegan. I've done the paleo strategy for nine months in the past. The food noise diminished until I took a trip to New York City. When I'm there, I'm like, you know what? When in New York and I hadn't been there in a while. I think I'll have a New York bagel at Katz's Deli. It was incredible. And then in the afternoon or that evening, I had a slice of pizza at Lombardi's. And the next day, paleo was history, and food noise was louder than the Arrowhead Stadium at its peak. At a different time, through the encouragement of this ex-boss whose vision for his staff was fit for a fight, I tried NutraSystems for a year, the year that I lived in a hotel. It muffled the food noise, and I'm not certain that the boxed and canned foods were real food, but it certainly had an effect on my food hearing. But once I moved into a house from the hotel, 60 miles from the office, and had a commute both ways, I jettisoned the fake food and the foods food noise came back with a vengeance. All of these profit-generating, calorie-reducing, soul-crush were all temporary. The key thing for me is moderation because I enjoy liking food. I cook a lot. I spend a lot of time developing different types of recipes to make the best of whatever I'm making. Whether it's homemade pizza, whether it's pasta sauce, whether it's an incredible salad, doesn't matter. I spend the time looking up recipes, trying things, because I enjoy the process of cooking and I enjoy good food. So at the end of the day, if I like to go to the golf course and meet Serpico and talk about what sandwiches we brought, and if I like cooking pizza and I like cooking for friends when they come over, I just have to think in moderation and basically I have to do two things. Eat less and move more. But let the noise be what the noise is gonna be. This guy Valdemar or Val. I've had the pleasure of breaking bread with he, his lovely wife, and his kids at a traditional Swedish holiday event at Gunn's and Mrs. Gunn's house. They know how to throw it down. I learned that Val, an engineer by trade, ran the operations of a major car manufacturer here in Charleston. His company rotates him around the globe. I assume to groom him for a bigger job, not just because they just can't figure out what to do with them. So you know I'm curious, and I had to ask about the fate of U.S. auto workers in the United States. In Charleston, probably in South Carolina, there are no labor unions, so you would think the manufacturer had the upper hand. Nope. The workers apparently are just less motivated about optimizing productivity and income and more just about working the hours they need to to get the benefits. Overtime pay just doesn't motivate them to move smarter, harder, faster, or spend more time to beat inflation. I mean, all of the other places that Valdemar has worked, the worker seemed more motivated. As for bringing jobs back to America, workers want to have to work. So Val and I played this Saturday morning game, and we decided, hey, let's just go out and make it a friendly. So we go out and we start playing, and I think we're fairly evenly matched. We both decided not to play in the normal Saturday game where money's on the line and you're playing in team games because both of us were kind of struggling to recapture our game again. So we said, hey, let's just play a friendly. So we get out, start playing the first few holes, a little bit of struggle in the beginning, but Val starts to find this game. And hole by hole, each of us are starting to hit some pretty good shots. But I just find I need more motivation. So we get to the end of nine, we're driving over to the 10th T-Box, and I look at Val and I say, Hey, I think we need something to juice this up. Why don't we do this? Why don't we play a Ryder Cup match? Now understand, this is a few weeks before the Ryder Cup that just happened last weekend. So it's kind of foreshadowing, and obviously it did, and you'll hear that, the matches to be had. And so we decide let's play a Ryder Cup match straight up, no strokes. And each hole is worth one point. And obviously, if you get to the end, we half the whole thing. And I said, and to make it sweet, let's add a little moolah. And he looks at me like, what are we talking? I said, one US dollar. That's it. A buck. Let's play nine holes, represent our countries, and play for a buck. So we do it. He agrees, and we start USA versus the EU. USA, USA. Ole, ole, ole. None of that was on the course. That was in my head. So we're not talking life savings here. We're just talking country pride and a dollar to seal the deal. From the 10th T-box on through the back nine, the sense of urgency for each shot and each hole changed because it meant something. No putts were conceded unless you could kick the ball in the hole. We're talking a foot or so. Or putts were conceded if the other person had already won the hole. So we're playing this thing straight up, and all of a sudden, I felt my blood pumping. There was a little bit of pressure. A simple$1, and more importantly, country pride revved up the game. I felt the need to perform, the concern for effectiveness that I carried through corporate life. What seemed like a life ago, but it's still inside me. Did it improve my game? Nope. But it did make me feel something when I made a putt for par, or something worse when I missed one that should have been a gimme playing with uh SERPGO or any of my other buddies that say, that's good, pick it up. And let me tell you something. When you're given a lot of putts, it does not prepare you for when you need to make them. Just like when you're playing a game and you're rolling them in the fairway, my suggestion to everybody if you're going to play a real golf game and you're going to play a competition, when you're preparing for it, do not ever touch your ball until you're teeing it up or you're marking it on the green. Any other part of the course, you let it lay and you hit it. Because when you start moving your ball, particularly in the fairway, and then all of a sudden you can't move it, your mind takes over, and it's like that ball has cement under it because you didn't get to move it when you go up to hit it. You need to approach it like every shot is hitting the ball from where it lies. So our match goes all the way to the 18th green. Val was ahead one point. All I had to do on 18, a par three, only 120 yards away, 125 yards, was to get it on the green and make the birdie putt. And then we tie, we shake hands, and we walk away. Europeans and Americans tied. Makes the front page. But that didn't happen. We get to the green, we both make par, we take off our hats, we shake hands, and this was a precursor for what the Ryder Cup was going to be. At the end of the day, he's a friend of mine, and we both enjoyed it, but clearly we both kept reminding each other that all of a sudden now the pressure is on. We're both missing little putts. Puts that you could probably close your eyes and make, but all of a sudden, when you're playing for your country and that one dollar, it made a difference. We get to the end and Val would not accept the dollar, but I made him take it. And he said he was gonna have me sign it and he was probably gonna put it up on a wall somewhere. Anyway, I think it tells me something about myself. If I need to juice it up and start putting a little pressure on myself to feel what it feels like to compete, I have to do it more often. And if you're like me and putting anything on the line changes your whole perspective, revs you up, adds juice to it, then do more of it, get used to it, and use that energy as positive energy. Anyway, I think I'm talking to myself and I have to convince myself that. So anyway, if you see me out on the golf course, let's play for a dollar. Thanks for staying to the end. You've been listening to another episode of Tales from the First T. I'm your host, Rich Easton, telling tales from beautiful Charleston, South Carolina. Talk to you soon.