Pressure Putts And Quiet Hands

The quiet before a three-foot putt feels a lot like the hush before a quadruple jump—or the breath you take when a headline tries to hijack your day. We open on Jacob Bridgman’s breakthrough at Riviera and live inside that moment where hands go numb, galleries roar, and a life can tilt on a three-and-a-half-foot stroke. What does it take to close when the stakes stretch beyond money to legacy, invitations, and the long arc of a season? We unpack the mechanics of staying present in a sport that’s mostly waiting and only minutes of swinging, and why routines are the real armor against nerves.

From the fairway to the rink, the pressure script repeats. Figure skating’s leaps mirror Sunday golf: precision in a storm, the reset of what’s possible as athletes push from triples to quads and pull the rest of the field forward. Alysa Liu’s gold becomes a cultural pivot, proving that style, voice, and performance can fuse into something that expands what fans accept and celebrate. Then hockey dials up the drama—USA vs. Canada thrillers, sudden-death momentum shifts, and the elegant chaos of three-on-three overtime. Belief, preparation, and clean execution write the endings we remember.

We don’t stop at sports. A razor-edged satire takes aim at DHS, travel bottlenecks, and political own-goals to show how attention gets weaponized—and how quickly it backfires. And we close with UAPs, where testimony, technology, and slow-moving institutions collide in a cautious trickle of disclosure. Across every thread, the lesson holds: focus is not the silence of the world; it’s the skill of moving through noise with purpose. If you loved the ride, tap follow, share this episode with a friend who geeks out on clutch moments, and leave a review to help others find the show.

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Chapters

• 0:06 Host Intro And Tone
• 0:44 The Three-Foot Putt Panic
• 1:20 Bridgman’s Riviera Win Stakes
• 3:22 Golf’s Distractions And Focus
• 4:30 Closing It Out On 18
• 6:22 Media, Idols, And Young Winners
• 9:23 Olympic Highs And Streaming Boom
• 10:40 Skating Pressure And Big Jumps
• 13:28 Hockey Thrillers And Comebacks
• 16:46 Work Beats Talent Every Time
• 17:37 Satire: DHS, Travel Lines, Politics
• 21:00 Reversal And Epstein Questions
• 23:05 UAP Secrecy And Public Proof
• 26:00 Belief, Institutions, And Paradigms
• 28:54 Sign Off And Subscribe

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:06

Thanks for finding our podcast. I'm your host, Tellin Tales, expanding on the truth, questioning just about everything, and lacing in my take on golf, golfers, and anything else that catches my eye. And if you agree with my take on life, that's great. And if you don't, that's good. Just not great. Holy crap, I am freaking out. Have you ever had that three-foot putt to win some cash? Most seniors I play with wager moderates amount of cash. Some of the pre-seniors maybe put a little bit more on the line, and the 30 to 40-year-olds sometimes get crazy stupid and wager more than their significant others will ever know about, unless they win big. Which usually ends with a spousal brag session and maybe a dinner out with hopes that their luck hasn't ended yet. Whatever the bet is for us non-pros, it's nothing like what Jacob Bridgman faced on Sunday at the Genesis Open at Riviera Country Club to win his first PGA tour event. Which, by the way, comes with this cool ass trophy, an invite to play in the Masters, and a$4 million purse for first place. When Jacob was interviewed by Amanda Baleonis after winning the event, he said he couldn't feel his hands while putting for the last three holes. I mean, he basically just took his putter back with his shoulders and his arms and stroked the putts, hoping that his body knew what to do. Because at that time his brain couldn't have a reasonable discussion with his hands. They just wouldn't or couldn't listen with the sounds of the gallery in the background and the devil and angel sitting on opposite shoulders whispering positive manifestations and self-doubt into each ear. I mean, can you remember the time you missed a short putt to lose the holer match, or the last time you lost the match for you and your partner and had to apologize for the umpteenth time, including the missed putt on 18, when you're convinced you heard your partner moan or curse under his breath, and then say, No, it's okay. We all do that once in a while. It's okay when they're looking at you and they're just gritting their teeth. And hopefully it's a feeling that a few beers at the 19th hole can muffle, but it still has a sting to it. Anyone who's ever competed in golf knows that feeling. No one, I mean no one is immune from losing concentration in a round of golf. During the three and a half to five and a half hours that you compete, you only spend upwards of 30 minutes executing your shot, leaving three to five hours of distractions, talking, looking for lost balls, and walking or riding between shots. Most of your time is consumed with distractions. Now, if you're playing with your good buddies and enjoy their company, it's a worthwhile distraction. Or if you play a great tract or panoramic view, or both, the vistas and the course design are worth paying the green fees for, for epic distractions. And those distractions from the game might not improve your score, but they feed your soul, so it might be worth it despite your underwhelming play. Now, that being said, staying focused during a round of golf is hard. Which makes you feel that much better when you could keep your shit together for 18 holes. Now, Jacob Bridgman did that for his four-day 72-hole tournament, and despite some season vets going low enough to get within one stroke of his score coming in 18, he hit a great drive, a well-placed approach shot, and two putted to change his life. Now, if he missed his second putt, three and a half foot putt on 18 on Sunday, and then lost in a playoff, instead of earning four million and an invitation to the Masters, he would have earned 2.2 million, no invite to the Masters, and would have earned 300 less FedEx points on his journey to the tour championship at the end of the season. And some of you would say, Oh, he would only make 2.2 million instead of 4 million. And while that might be true, winning a tournament, getting an invite to the Masters, gaining 700 FedEx points and holding the trophy where you competed with 71 other great golfers makes a huge difference in his life. And do you think he was thinking any of that when he stepped up to make that three and a half foot par putt to win Tigers event? Who knows? We'll never know what he was thinking, despite all of his post-round interviews. No professional golfer will ever reveal negative swing thoughts in public. It just gives the non-well wishers ammunition to make their life miserable. That would be like President Trump giving his adversaries and media countless embarrassing sound bites. Hmm. Jacob just said he couldn't feel his hands because of the realization that his moment of glory was just a short walk and a couple of swings away to victory. Now he didn't say all those words, but I think that's what he meant. Anyway, he executed well enough to win and snatched victory away from Rory, who had just caught up one shot behind, who probably was his childhood idol. And Rory was asked about, hey, did it really matter that you made that long putt, even though you didn't win? And I think Rory said something about, well, making it was the difference of around four to five hundred thousand dollars. So yeah, I'm happy about that. Hey, what does a 26-year-old from Inman, South Carolina, know about overcoming distractions that most golfers struggle with? I don't know the answer to that. What I do know that his future is going to be filled with even more distractions on the course and certainly off the course, now that he's a young tour winner. And usually what comes with that is a lot of microphones in his face, cameras surrounding him, and a media that's looking to increase their circulation, whether the story is good or bad. Look, he's now in the tour winner circle with other newcomers like Chris Godderup, Nick Dumlap, and teen idol Blaze Brown, who's not a winner yet, but he's going to be one to watch. It's fun to watch the new blood come in to the tour and compete against some of their idols. The game, when you get to the PGA tour, is entirely different than any other league that you've played in. The fans are different, the venues are different, and the distractions on and off the course are different. Just the number of camera people that are following players on the tour, particularly when they're in the last groups, is so much different than most of these players are used to. But these young kids are all growing up with ice in their veins. I mean, the good ones are walking down the fairways with their childhood idols like Rory McElroy and Scotty Scheffler while keeping their shit together on the course and not being too starstruck to compete and having to deal with all of the fans that are favoring the players they're playing with. That's pretty awesome. Just a last follow-up comment about the Olympics. Man, I heard that for two straight weeks in at the State of the Union address. The Winter Olympics in Milano, Cortina were good to Team USA. 12 gold, 12 silver, 9 bronze, 33 total medals, a record number of gold, and a record overall number outside the Americas. I wanted to view as much of the Olympics as possible, so like so many others, I subscribed to Peacock, who, by the way, experienced record-breaking streaming minutes for the Winter Olympics, upwards of 17 billion streaming minutes. That was big for them. As the second week of the Olympics was coming to a close, we found ourselves watching the ice skating, and I couldn't get enough ice hockey. I usually don't watch hockey during the wintertime until they get to the Stanley Cup playoffs, and even then, I probably miss a few games. It was fun watching ice hockey, both men and women. To me, the pressure of figure skating for a medal resembled golf, having to stay focused on the back nine on a Sunday to win an event. There were so many falls, slips, and unachieved triple jumps when the pressure got elevated. Now, this might be a little bit of shodden fried, but I found myself expecting mistakes during planned jumps. Every time a skater was skating backwards, or the announcers were telling us this is where they do their whatever the jump was, triple Luts, Axle, whatever it was. And so you're watching and you could see them kind of bend down, and as they're leaping in the air, you're thinking to yourself, Oh, this is gonna be horrible. But then I'm pleasantly surprised when they land the jumps and that back leg kicks out and they just glide on the ice. I'm like, fuck, that was good. And don't you find it astonishing that years ago elevating jumps from doubles to triples was breaking new heights, and now quadruple Lutzes introduced in competition by Ilia Malinan is like now everybody else is watching it. It's like breaking the five-minute mile. I expect in the next Winter Olympics, quadruple, whatever it is, axles, letzes, it's gonna be a thing because once people see you can do it, they then practice and practice so that they can do it. And they figure out what kind of exercise routine, what kind of coaches they need, and do they have the wherewithal to be able to make that jump? You know, I also find it entertaining and informative when somebody who looks a little bit different and breaks out of the mold, wins gold, and captures the world's curiosity. This year it was Alyssa Loo. I first watched her, and it was her gold performance. So she skates out onto the ring. Now, at that point, I hadn't seen her halo hair, probably because she had it up either to convey a style or keep it out of her face when she spun, or both. And I hadn't seen her mouth piercing yet, and didn't see it until after she executed this flawless skate, goes back over, I think says something like, Fuck yeah, and it was bleep, but I'm like, hey, who is this kid? Great skater, she's got attitude, and then I see her later on, she's got this halo hair, she's smiles, and she has this piercing above her, you know, the her upper teeth, and I'm like, you know what? I am definitely an old guy to even be thinking that why is this person different than anybody I knew who was skating? I mean, I'm such a curmudgeon. But anyway, the fact that she skated for a gold and she looked that way, I'm like, I think it takes somebody who looks different, sounds different, acts different to do something exceptional for us to accept, hey, you go ahead and look that way, but boy, are you a great whatever it is, in this case it was skater. Yeah, Rich. What an epiphany. The oldest proverb in the books. A kid looks different, they accomplish something noteworthy. The tribe accepts them despite their differences, and maybe even look up to them and start to accept others just like them. So Alyssa Liu did that. She's an artist on skates, and now she has a gold medal to allow her to elevate her voice if she wants. The ice skating was entertaining, but the women's and men's hockey kept me on the edge of my seat and was probably to me the most exciting event of the Olympics. What are the odds that both gold medal finalists would have featured the US and Canada ending in a tie in regulation three periods and an overtime sudden death? A goal is scored by the Americans to win both goals. What are the odds? Well, according to Vegas, both American teams were favored, so the odds were probably greater than you'd think. Yeah, so both American teams played up to the odds. The women's comeback with 124 seconds on the clock in the third period was as exciting as I thought you can get. Victory from the jaws of defeat. They changed the momentum of the game, which carried over into overtime. I mean, how could it get any better than that? Well, according to our commander in chief, it did get better when the men won in the same fashion. The American men hadn't won gold since 1980, 46 years ago. Two sets of brothers, the Kachuks and the Hughes brothers, are playing together. And a tribute, a heartbreaking tribute to a fallen player whose spirit drove the team to win the gold. And I particularly liked in overtime the three on three format. It just opens up the rank, it makes it much faster, and the opportunity to score is far greater than the old four-on-four, which, if it ended in a tie, they'd have to go to a shootout. The Olympics left me with a good feeling about what we're able to do if we put in the work. Now, certainly it's great to have the genes from past Olympians, but still not everybody had that advantage, but they all had one thing in common hard work. Yeah, so if you want to get good at something, you gotta put in the effort. The greatest talents without dedication, focus, and commitment get passed up over time by the hard workers. It always happens. And that's the bromide of the week.

SPEAKER_01: 17:37

Hey, I have your son. Okay. And I want$2500.$2,500? What are you buying the Lakers? You have 30 minutes to hand deliver.

SPEAKER_00: 17:53

Let's make believe we're sitting in a conference room with the Department of Homeland Security in DC, and we're preparing for a meeting with the Secretary, Christine Gnome. We're her employees or her consultants. She asked us to prepare punitive actions if the Democrats continue to stall funding negotiations over DHS appropriations for continued growth on ICE operations and the continued beratement over the mishandling of the Epstein files. She wants to get back at them. And understand, here's my disclaimer. This is a fantasy sequence. Imagine she's already orchestrated high-level ousters, including key figures in ICE and border operations, to replace them with highly confrontational loyalists, which foster a culture of fear among all the employees. What a fun place to work. I imagine it was kind of like what Ellen de Generis was alleged to have done to all of her employees, unbeknownst to her faithful public. Okay, so imagine again, you're in the conference room spitballing ideas on how to inflict the most pain on the Dems until they acquiesce and let the administration send more masked ICE agents into heavily democratic run areas to cull the herd of the apparent unlawful aliens. So you're in the conference room, you're in fear of your job and can't fathom going to another job search to keep your screwed-up kid in college, your youngest in private school, and your wife's country club membership in good standing. So you and your team start coming up with ideas. Failure is not an option. So after ten ideas are shot down by the team, Christy walks into the conference room and demands a plan. The room gets quiet, and before you have a chance to tell her that none of your team's ideas hold water, one of your newer employees, let's call him Rambo Schitzkoff, handpicked by Christie, with covered up tattoos of SWAT stickers on his arm and a proud boy's logo lunchbox, stands up and announces. Well, the redacted Epstein file release. Well a nice distraction didn't hurt the Thames as we would have hoped. We can't close another bridge stifling urban centers. We've already tried that unsuccessfully, I might add. I think we need to impose drastic measures. Drastic. Well you know the spring break is coming up, which usually means longer lines at the airports. A survey launched just yesterday. We did the survey, tells us that most spring break travelers favor leftist policies. Commies, and are members of Global Entry and TSA PreCheck. Let's suspend those programs and make those liberals, LGBTQs and Obama lovers get back in line with the general public. That will absolutely frustr them, frustrate them to call and write their congressmen who will also be waiting in those airport lines and demand submission on the funding delays. That hurts my throat. So then Christy allegedly perks up and asks, how do we still sell it to the public to make it look like a fiscally smart idea? Now that question alone underscores the fact that this is a fantasy because she wouldn't ask any questions. Well the neo Nazi pauses, what if we say it's aimed to conserve resources, reallocate staff to core security functions for the general public. These TSA PreCheck and Global Entries are courtesy services amid staffing constraints from unpaid workers. Well what a great idea, she exclaimed. The Dems will be flooded with a request just to sign the appropriation. She says you deserve a promotion. Okay, first of all, I can't imagine any survey was ever fielded before they made that decision. And if it was, it was likely sent to the MAGA base, but likely it was never fielded. Second, how bad were the first ten ideas that the pre-check and global entry submission was brought into play in this scenario? And lastly, on Monday, February twenty-third, just a few days after their statement that they're shutting them down, the decision was reversed because industry and public backlash. You see, many of the travelers affected were business people, professionals, and constituents that used to favor the Republican Party. Whoops. So the decision to close pre-check and global entry didn't distract the public over the weekend from asking this question. If Donald Trump, who was buddy buddy with Epstein, traveled to his island and enjoyed some wink wink weekends with Jeffrey, why aren't we seeing any evidence of tomfoolery or at least evidence of he and the victims being in the same place at the same time? And of course we know why. Or at least we can guess. The glacial pace of UFO and UAP disclosures to the public is just another example of a slow boiling frog. My social media algorithm must reflect my interest in the ongoing discovery of UAPs, unidentified anomalous phenomenon. I mean, just talk about the PR challenge and changing the name from UFOs to UAPs. Changing the incredulous stories of UFO sightings and abductions by non-credible sources to now documented, firsthand experiences by respected professionals, military leaders, and scientists that swear to their experiences with alien crafts and intelligent beings not from this world or not from not certainly not human are true stories. The name of the phenomenon had to change because the experience suggested that more than just unknown flying objects are involved here. So the name had to cast a wider net and distance themselves from UFO hoaxes. After two congressional oversight committees that revealed alleged secret government funding, agencies that captured both craft and creatures. I mean, you just have to suspend your disbelief for a minute and ask, what do they know that I've been in the dark about? Basically, I'm open to the fact that we're just learning about the size of our universe and the infinite number of planets in the multitude of universes. If life can exist on other planets and on those planets, life began millions of years before ours on Earth, it's plausible that their technologies are far more advanced than ours, their ability to travel far quicker than ours, and the laws of gravity are mutable. It's possible we could have been visited over millions of years as we form life as we know it. The fact that we are now in the age of AI and have more abundant and universal discovery and communication, it makes sense now that the cat's starting to come out of the bag. Just too many sightings, too many experiences, and now documented. You know, all that being said, there's just still too much at stake for superpowers, religions, and economies to share what's known and what's on the horizon about life more intelligent than ours, with a different set of values and knowledge about things that we can't even conceive. So I think that's why there's such secrecy behind UAPs. But because now more people are talking to each other because they can connect with each other, you have to start letting a little bit out at a time. You know, to me it's like it's like the time we learned that Santa Claus wasn't real, the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy, it's when we started questioning some of the stories in religion. I think uh you know, it's certainly a way of coping and not necessarily the truth, but uh a way of allowing us to coexist with each other. So I think once we learn more about UAPs, we might come to the same conclusion that we came to when we learned that jolly old Nick wasn't real. And that is yeah, that kinda makes sense. And it might influence how much less tithing is gonna be given to certain organizations. But there'll always be that new progressive organization that casts a wider net than just Earth with a plausible story, just plausible enough for us to believe in and follow and tithe. You know, kind of like L. Ron Herbert. Thanks for staying to the end. If you want to hear more, subscribe to Tales from the Firsty on your preferred streaming service. There's always something to talk about in addition to my golf addiction. Talk to you soon.