By Todd Dobson · Summer Grind · Final Round
Somewhere in the middle of Sunday’s back nine, I turned to Ned Michaels and said something I hadn’t planned to say on air. I told him it felt like the league was maturing. He nodded, we went back to the golf, and I’ve been chewing on that sentence ever since.
Here’s what I meant.
In 2024, the Grass League was an idea. An ambitious one. A professional league built on par 3 golf and two person scrambles, played by ex tour pros, caddies, reinstated amateurs, and guys with day jobs. Nobody knew if it would hold. Ideas like that usually don’t.
We’re in year three now, and we’ve played a lot of tournaments. And when you play a lot of tournaments, something starts to happen that you can’t manufacture, can’t market, and can’t rush. The same names start showing up at the top of the leaderboard. Not winning every time. Ebbing and flowing, contending, coming down the stretch with a chance. That’s what a real league looks like. That’s the maturation process, and Sunday at Goat Hill was the clearest picture of it we’ve ever had.
Think about who was there at the end. Parker Reddig and David Bradshaw posted 20 under and sat in the clubhouse as the leaders. Mason Glinski and Dylan Vanderveer held the lead for a long stretch, and Vanderveer birdied 15, 16 and 17 to take it outright before Reddig and Bradshaw’s number held up by one. And chasing them home you had Kevin Lucas and Matt Ryan, Torey Edwards and Stephen Hale. Guys who have been in this league essentially from day one.
That’s not an accident. That’s buy in.
Because here’s the thing about the Grass League that took me a while to fully appreciate. A resume doesn’t win here. Someone can show up with credentials that read like a Hall of Fame ballot, and it doesn’t particularly matter, for two reasons. One, this is its own sport. Eighteen par 3s and a two person scramble reward a different kind of golf than a Thursday at a tour stop. And two, winning here has to mean something to you. Some guys haven’t gotten there yet, and that’s fine. But the players who have poured themselves into this thing from the beginning, who have given the league their weekends and their belief, those are the guys showing up on Sunday afternoons. The league is starting to pay them back.
Which is why I keep thinking about the ones who haven’t broken through yet. Lucas and Ryan finished fourth. Edwards and Hale led this tournament into Sunday and lost by one. Vanderveer had never cashed a check in two years of playing nearly every event, closed with a 42, and lost by one. When those names finally win, and they will, it’s going to be emotional. It’s going to feel like it felt watching Bradshaw and Reddig on Sunday, a 43 year old journeyman and a 27 year old who once quit the game entirely, closing with four straight birdies and not making a single bogey all week. That’s what sports leagues are built on. Not highlights. History. Guys you’ve watched come close, finally getting there.
And I can’t ignore the backdrop. Golf at the highest level is in a strange, unsettled place right now. Money everywhere, certainty nowhere, and a lot of fans left asking what exactly they’re supposed to care about. I’m not here to litigate any of that. But I’ll tell you what I watched this weekend at a little par 3 course in Oceanside. I watched the slow little engine that could, the thing that was just an idea two years ago, become something different. Something with stakes. Something with rivalries and near misses and a champion who earned every bit of it.
The Grass League gives golfers something the modern game has been quietly taking away. A chance to not just dream, but to believe. Bradshaw spent twenty years grinding on the edges of professional golf. Sunday, he won on national television without making a bogey. Somewhere out there, a guy with a day job and a good short game watched that and thought, that could be me.
That’s a league growing up. And the season isn’t close to over.
The Match Play Series semifinals are next, with the GL Championship in Tempe December 4 and 5.
