Touring pros made the 20-hour trip to the 3M Open after a flight was canceled
Wesley Bryan (left) and Sam Stevens (right) had a rough trip to this week’s 3M Open.
Tim Heitman/Getty Images
The entire world experienced technical problems last weekend due to the global outage caused by CrowdStrike, with thousands of flights canceled or delayed as technical systems went down. PGA Tour pros were not spared. Just ask Wesley Bryan and Sam Stevens.
The two champions did not qualify for last week’s Open Championship, so they squared off against the Barracuda Championship in Tahoe. They lived together in Tahoe, and even though Bryan missed the cut, he decided to stay the weekend and stay with Stevens rather than change his flight. With both players fighting to make the FedEx Cup Playoffs, their next stop was the 3M Open in the state section of Minnesota.
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When the competition was done on Sunday, they started their journey by plane. But when they arrive in Salt Lake City, a global outage makes its presence known. Just before they boarded their flight, the flight was cancelled.
That’s when Bryan came up with a radical idea: Why not rent a car and drive to TPC Twin Cities, which, as Bryan told Golf Channel, is an 18-and-a-half-hour drive?
Stevens was game.
While it’s easy to think that a long road trip quickly turns into a nightmare, it’s quite the opposite. In fact, Bryan said the two artists “had a blast.”
“I’ll be honest, we had a great time. That would be as fun as I could imagine,” Bryan told the Golf Channel during practice at the 3M Open. “It helped not having a wife and children and trying to find a way to work together. So two grown men in a car for 20 hours, we had a lot of noise.”
So how did our featured golfers pass the time in the car, which ended up being a solid 20 hours? Bryan detailed their activities, including listening to some podcasts and stopping at fast food restaurants and tourist attractions along the way.
“There were a lot of phone calls, we listened to a lot of shows, we stopped at a few important places like the Mitchell Corn Palace and Wall Drug in South Dakota. Those were good. He spent a lot of time in Wyoming. I don’t even think we stopped, but maybe for gas sometime in Wyoming. And we hit McDonald’s and Hardy’s, then we had so much fun we forgot to eat dinner. I got here around 1 am this morning and realized I was hungry. So I just went to sleep.”
Unbelievably, there is another joke in this story. When Bryan woke up after his long tour, he learned that his caddy’s wife had gone into labor three and a half weeks early, according to the Golf Channel, and he was forced to find a last-minute replacement.
But Bryan and Stevens weren’t the only Tour pros who ran into trouble making it to the 3M Open. A group of eight experts, Chan Kim among them, also had their flights cancelled. But instead of renting a car and driving to Minnesota, they bundled together a private jet chartered from 3M, as Brently Romaine of the Golf Channel reported on X.
With everyone finally at TPC Twin Cities, the 3M Open is slated to begin Thursday morning, July 25.
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