At The Turn - Golf Podcast · Joe Simons & Nick Heidelberger

2025 U.S. Open Preview (and 2025 Corner Club Open Preview)

·1 hr·3 clips

Romy calls the USGA exceptional score reduction the best thing the USGA has done.

Nick Heidelberger and Joe Simons welcome Brian Romy back for a double preview of the U.S. Open and the Corner Club Open. The show opens with the easy back-and-forth the three already have. Romy is brought in as the returning champion in the Corner Club Open gold flight. The early stretch is mostly about the upcoming gathering. Nick walks through the welcoming barbecue and asks Romy what makes the menu work. They joke about trying to match the poke from a couple years ago. That food talk sits right alongside the golf talk, which feels very on brand for this show. The hosts keep needling each other about whether everyone will eat well or end up sick before Saturday morning. Drinking comes up too, but in the usual half-serious way friends talk before a golf weekend. Then the U.S. Open debate settles on one question: which course feels the most like the championship. Pinehurst comes up fast. Payne Stewart beating Phil Mickelson there is treated like the cleanest answer, and that memory sits at the center of the argument. The episode leans into the idea that Pinehurst now feels like the modern home of American golf. The USGA connection only reinforces that feeling. Pebble Beach enters the conversation next and makes a similar case from another angle. It is public. Anybody can play it, at least if they are willing to pay. The joke about spouses and expensive tee times gives the discussion its usual dry edge. Pebble also gets credit for already carrying the right kind of U.S. Open energy. The hosts treat it like a course that naturally belongs in the championship rotation. Oakmont is the other big name in the mix. It stands out for different reasons, mostly the history it carries and how often it has hosted. The three venues are compared less like data points and more like memories. That is the whole point. The conversation keeps circling back to the public-course idea. If the U.S. Open is supposed to suggest that anybody could, in theory, do this, then the venue should feel accessible too. The episode also slips into the smaller golf details that make the show feel local. Lessons, alignment tune-ups, and score posting all show up as part of the same ongoing argument about what golfers actually do with their time. Those bits are not filler here. They are the texture. The hosts let the talk wander without losing the subject. That is what makes the episode easy to listen to. By the end, the preview has turned into something broader than a preview. It is a golf hangout with a major championship threaded through it. The final effect is part tournament chat, part clubhouse joke, part shared memory. It treats both events with the same kind of affection. The strongest moments come from the way the group keeps folding serious golf history into ordinary weekend logistics. That balance gives the episode its shape. The result is loose, specific, and very much in the show's lane. It sounds like golfers talking the way golfers actually talk.

As heard by us

A loose, golf-literate preview that turns U.S. Open history into clubhouse talk.

At The Turn turns a U.S. Open preview into clubhouse-style golf talk, with Nick Heidelberger and Joe Simons bringing Brian Romy back for the Corner Club Open and the championship discussion.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a U.S. Open preview with barbecue on the side.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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