Like many kids my age, I grew up following sports. Some of us were blessed with cable or, by the end of the Nineties, satellite. My family wasn't one of them, as my dad believed in saving for long-term purposes, so we had to wait for the weekend to watch sports (except Monday Night Football or the occasional high school tournament fixture) or for the paper to drop in our driveway to find out what had gone down yesterday. I looked forward to calculating metrics based on the numbers printed in the Minneapolis Star Tribune every day when I got home from school. That we didn't have pay TV made me grateful for the sports we could see on television at home.
One of those was golf. Although I was definitely around when Tom Lehman became the first Umcee to win the Open Championship at Royal Lytham and St Anne's in 1996 (about seven and a half years of age), let alone for Tiger Woods' first pro wins in 1996-97, it wasn't until the 1997 Open that I got into golf. I was stunned when Justin Leonard (of all players!) won the event at Royal Troon and elated when his long putt won back the Ryder Cup over holders Europe at the Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1999. I was happy for Phil Mickelson when he finally won a major at the Masters in 2004 and devastated for him two years later when he threw away what proved his best hope for a career Grand Slam at the hands of Geoff Ogilvy of Australia in the U.S. Open at Winged Foot in Mamaroneck, New York. I eagerly followed the University of Minnesota golf programs as well. In 2002, the men's team brought home a tremendous NCAA Division I national title, and they would continue to have success over the next few years. I even played some recreational putt-putt with good regularity as a teen and then progressed to some form of full golf.
But as my interests evolved, my passion for golf dimmed. Whether because of my growing interest in football (both gridiron and association), time commitment or bigger problems to ponder, I didn't have the time or will to follow golf as much as I would have wanted to in retrospect. After I visited my expat uncle's place in Mexico in 2013, my interest in golf tanked, as I indulged almost all the soccer I wanted and became primarily concerned with that sport thereafter. (The FA Cup picks I post from time to time are a vestige of this interest.) It took a mild winter day in December 2017 to revive my passion for the royal and ancient game.
It was warm enough for me to hop on my bike and ride down to the local convenience store to pick up a copy of the Star Tribune. As I leafed through the pages of newsprint to the catacombs of the "Minnesota Scene" column at the back of the sports section, it caught my eye that a former University of Minnesota golfer had qualified for the 2018 Open! South African rising star Erik van Rooyen had finished jointly second only to Shubankhar Sharma of India at the Joburg Open on the then-European Tour (now the DP World Tour), doing well enough to get in via the Open Qualifying Series. Having graduated, it turned out, from the U the same year as van Rooyen, I felt a sense of alumni pride and resolved to get up early on Thursday through Sunday mornings to try to get a glimpse of him on TV from then on. That season, he would finish 38th on the Race to Dubai, which was more than good enough to keep his card; and he was named Challenge Tour (DPWT equivalent of the Korn Ferry Tour) Grad of the Year for his labours!
The next year, van Rooyen played every major but the Masters, finishing 8th at the PGA Championship at Bethpage Black on Long Island. I vowed to more intently track all the Umcees that I could as soon as van Rooyen broke through on the European Tour. This he did at the end of August, the same weekend as the PGA Tour Championship, by winning the last all-male Scandinavian Invitation over future U.S. Open champion Matt Fitzpatrick by one stroke. I followed through on my promise, tracking Umcees the world over and across various levels of tour golf with the dawn of the new decade--Troy Merritt, Tom Hoge, Zach Johnson...
And then came Covid. For three months, I struggled to cope with the sheer boredom stemming from a lack of sports. I understood why there was nothing going on, but I still chafed at the silence. At least I didn't have to worry about how my teams in team sports were faring, as there were no such sports to follow during the silence. One of the few interruptions was the NFL Draft, and the special live blog I have kept annually is the third sports component of this site.
Ever since 2010, I had been tracking Draft Day Party Hangover according to a method suggested by Phil Steele in his college football preview magazine. This was an offline experiment conducted for two years on one of my earlier computers. In 2012, I even started a live blog on my personal Facebook wall to be conducted every year; the account I had I have since deleted over concerns about negativity on the platform. In 2021, ahead of the tenth edition of the live blog, I moved it to Twitter (now X) because of privacy concerns on Facebook.
Meanwhile, as things returned to normal, other Umcees in golf elicited my attention. Justin Doeden got his breakthrough during the LocalIQ Series of 2020, set up to provide playing opportunities for golfers who couldn't travel to Canada due to Covid-era border restrictions, at the Classic at the Club at Weston Hills. (This was long before his fall from grace for the time being.) The next year, he made it to Korn Ferry Tour Q-School finals, finishing just outside the top 100. That same year, Angus Flanagan of the U of M made it back to NCAA regionals and finished 11th in the inaugural PGA Tour University rankings. The year after, Thomas Longbella, a year removed from the Gophers, tore up Sunshine Tour Q-School in South Africa and also passed his PGA Tour Canada Q-School test in a playoff. He went on to surpass Doeden, finishing 23rd to advance directly to Second Stage of Q-school, though further progress wasn't to be for now.
But the biggest Umcee golfing accomplishments in the years and months leading up to the Devilish Rake's launch were, of course, on the PGA Tour. With a fortnight left on his Tour card coming in, van Rooyen broke through at the opposite-field Barracuda Championship in 2021. He went on to surge into the Tour Championship, finishing 22nd even without the benefit of starting strokes. Not to be outdone, Tom Hoge of Fargo, North Dakota won the Pebble Beach Pro-Am the next February and made his first Masters, even making the cut there and at the PGA Championship. At the latter, he even did well enough to earn a free exemption to the 2023 edition! By the 2022 season's end, he too had made the Tour Championship, finishing 10th. During this time, I pursued real golf for the first time in nearly two decades, though I admit to having been extremely rusty.
In any case, by the twelfth edition of the Draft Day Party Hangover live blog (2023), a certain tycoon had bought Twitter and was remaking it in his own image. The final blow came two months afterward when Clay Travis of Outkick (the Coverage) started spewing political vitriol that I had not requested nor searched for on Twitter. While I dabble in politics, I try to keep them separate from my sportswriting. Can't say the same of Clay! It was the last straw with the platform, and I resolved to delete my account @Edwardthescop shortly thereafter.
Left without a platform, I solicited advice from a friend who suggested opening a blog. That's what I did, and with all the above history in mind, I opened the Devilish Rake on 3 July 2023. I kept the above Twitter feed open for a couple weeks to redirect my followers and readers to the present blog as a nightlight service of sorts and then deleted it on 20 July. I will say that if Elongated Muskrat loses the platform, I may return, but I'm not holding my breath.
Suggestions may be directed to my preferred email at edward.genereux@mnsu.edu. Hope you find a lot of good info here about Upper Midwest connections in the golf world, the FA Cup and the NFL Draft!
Yours,
Edward the Scop
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