At times, professional golf can be a humorless enterprise, and the coverage of the sport usually follows suit. That’s where No Laying Up comes in.

A Twitter account started two years ago as well as a golf website that mainly began in 2014, No Laying Up has risen into the consciousness as a funny and witty alternative to a sometimes subdued golf media. You can find the hilarious stream of golf thoughts –especially during live tournament action — on its Twitter account @NoLayingUp.

The No Laying Up group, a team of a few golf fanatics, also prides itself on finding fresh angles on golf coverage in its website writing. The greatest example in that regard would be Tour Sauce. No Laying Up’s own invention, Tour Sauce refers to a list of actions on a golf course that only Tour pros can do without looking ridiculous. No Laying Up released Tour Sauce to the world in a magnificent four-part series (here’s Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV) and it has caught on as a Twitter phenomenon with #TourSauce. Additionally, No Laying Up coined the popular #PrayForTedScott on Twitter.

Chris Solomon, a No Laying Up co-founder and the man in charge of its Twitter account, stopped to chat with GolfWRX’s Kevin Casey about No Laying Up’s origins, its place in golf media, some #PrayForTedScott, and, of course, heaps and heaps of #TourSauce.

Kevin Casey: You guys are called No Laying Up and Zach Johnson is famous for doing the opposite, so you are pretty vocal against him on Twitter. How are you feeling after Johnson won The Open? 

No Laying Up: There’s categories of guys I don’t like. Bubba and Poulter are in a class of their own. Those are really guys I just can’t stand. I wouldn’t say my dislike for Zach Johnson is nearly as justified as it is for those two. It’s really not personal with Johnson at all, I just don’t like his style of golf. You can’t win the Masters laying-up on every par-5. We celebrate the guys who have bigger personalities and have more firepower to the game. So that’s why I wasn’t excited to see Johnson win the Open.

KC: No Laying Up is never shy to call out players, with Bubba and Poulter being the primary examples. But, as you said, it’s tougher to justify with Johnson. It seemed like there were some who attacked you on Twitter for your Zach comments. 

NLU:  I wouldn’t really say attacks, just some people were kind of surprised at how much I was hating on him Monday. But it can’t be that hard to understand, really. Plus, I have no idea what we did to get blocked by him on Twitter and that fueled it a lot more than our hate caused it. I’m not even sure what it was, but it must have been the thinnest-skinned thing in the world, because I don’t remember tweeting at him ever and then just finding out one day that he blocked us. It took Poulter an embarrassingly long time to block us. Ted Scott definitely blocked us. Steve Elkington, Brandel Chamblee and Tim Rosaforte have also blocked us. Bubba has not blocked us yet though! I commend him for it; I don’t know how he hasn’t at this point.

KC: You jokingly tweeted that you wear Johnson’s block as a “Badge of Honor.” Is there anyone who blocked you that you seriously feel that way about?

NLU: Yeah, Poulter. I was trying to earn that one. That one was completely justified. The rest of them are for thin-skinned stuff, but I worked on Poulter for a year-and-a-half and that’s one I’m pretty proud of.

KC: You’ve detailed it before, but can you go through the origins of No Laying Up?

NLU: Me and a couple of buddies, who go by the aliases Tron Carter and Big Randy, always had a group text message for many, many years talking sports, mostly golf. Some of the things my buddies came up with were just too funny to keep harnessed in our little group. The whole time with the stuff they were coming up with I was like, “We need to get this on a website, we need to do a blog.” Finally, I said enough of this and I just made the Twitter account one day. I didn’t even put any thought into the name. I just made the Twitter account, gave those two the password and I was like “Let’s try this.” We did it for a while, shared the account and just got bored with it after a year. And we were like, “We should really do something with this.” So last January we bought the domain and the four of us (including Neil at that point) started the website and decided to see if we could do some real analysis. It’s hard to get credibility on Twitter if you’re just tweeting dumb stuff all day. If you can back it up with a chance to show that you have some golf knowledge as well, it works better.

KC: So you wanted to start this to get that funny content out there, but golf coverage can be a little dry at times. Was the idea of getting this alternative out there also a factor? 

NLU: Definitely. We’re big fans of Spencer Hall and Ryan Nanni from Every Day Should Be Saturday, so that was our inspiration from the get go. Every time we write or do something on the website, our goal is for it to be something you can’t find anywhere else. Golf.com, Golf Digest and these websites will all have this same story, like some slideshow of Rickie Fowler’s girlfriend the day after he wins. We don’t want to be doing stuff that everybody else is doing. We’re not really inspired by traffic numbers; we don’t have advertisements. If 50 people read a piece and love it, we’d prefer that over 5,000 people reading it and being indifferent.

KC: When you guys first started the website, did you have any structure planned out?

NLU: We had a basic structure of we wanted to do a preview and a recap for every week. We’ve kind of axed the recap because it’s a lot harder to do a recap and not generalize everything. The previews are a lot harder to do than they look because it’s difficult to find fresh new nuggets about something like the Wells Fargo Championship. So we did have that structure in place and trying to do features once a week. But with full-time jobs on top of this, it’s hard to sit down at night and pound something out when we’ve got other stuff going on and me living on the other side of the globe in Amsterdam. That was the structure, but we also threw a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what stuck. It’s always about finding a fresh angle and it’s hard to think creatively like that full time.

KC: You guys are kind of a counterculture outlet for golf. How much do you think there is a market for that audience-wise?

NLU: It’s pretty obvious that there is a space for this. Just to see how much this counterculture has grown in this last 1.5 to 2 years is great. I think a lot of us counterculture people are based on Twitter, while a lot of golf media types are website-based. They use Twitter to interface, but their job is to write. For us it’s more about having fun on Twitter and finding like-minded people to talk golf with. That’s where I spend most of my time and people on Twitter want more to be entertained than to talk serious golf all of the time. I love going on Twitter to see people’s reactions to shots in the moment. So there’s a space for this, but I mean it’s not paying the bills. I don’t have an interest in becoming a full-time golf writer and following the Tour week-to-week and pounding out deadlines. The reason golf writers have to produce all of this Tiger and click bait stuff is because that’s what pays the bills. They’re being judged by how many people go to the website and they’re balancing the line between journalism and trying to get clicks and that’s why we’re able to operate in the function we do. If we were revenue-based, we would be doing the same thing.

KC: So we need to talk about #TourSauce. Can you briefly describe how you guys came up with this concept?

NLU: It was something that my buddies and I would do on the golf course. We knew each other and our games really well and had really great matches, improved a lot over the years. We just started thinking we were better than we were. It was to the point that we were rooting for a 65 degree day when we could justify wearing pants, which is an example of Tour Sauce. It snowballed into you hit a good shot and your buddy says nice shot and instead of saying thank you, you give a tip of the hat. And we kept one-upping each other and it would turn into this hilarious side game of who could pull it off the best. It kept going and going until finally we were like, “We have to get this on paper.”

KC: You guys have done a lot of these Tour Sauce moves yourself, but some are really crazy. Like have you ever actually acted out “The Apology?”

NLU: I’ve never seen that one done. But we did have someone tweet us a picture once of hitting a ball into someone’s yard and they signed their glove and left it on their fencepost. Also, one of my friends won the member-guest at his club and after he sank the winning putt on the 18th green, his two little kids ran out onto the green and greeted him, and his wife came out and kissed him. And to top it off, he took out the flag and took it home with him. It’s funny because my mom’s totally in on it now. My dad was playing in the same member-guest this past week, and he was in second place going into the last day and she was like, “I’ve got my high-heeled boots on and I’m ready to run onto the green if he wins.”

KC: You and Kyle Porter did a Tour Sauce Power Rankings. What pros do you think have the most underrated Tour Sauce games?

NLU: [Justin] Rose was the first guy who came up there. Patrick Reed isn’t an underrated Tour Sauce guy; he’s one of the sauciest guys out there. Sergio can be really saucy, too. He’s never happy with a shot; he’s always leaning and can be pouty. Keegan Bradley can be very saucy — when he misses a putt it looks like he just found out his dog died. He’s basically got his own Tour Sauce category too with his pre-shot routine. Phil can get really saucy with how analytical he gets on a lot of his shots. Everyone has their own flavor of Tour Sauce.

KC: So #PrayForTedScott. We know its origins, but you actually first used the hashtag during last year’s Open Championship. Did you in any way expect the avalanche that followed after you first used the hashtag?

NLU: I remember some catastrophic event had happened somewhat recently and I had remembered seeing “Pray For.” But it was far enough away from that event that I felt OK making the hashtag. It was meant to be a joke about Ted being in danger because of the way Bubba treated him. I just did it and it took on a life of its own. It’s so ridiculous in a way because it all stems from that one Travelers incident. Bubba doesn’t really yell at his caddy and he’s not really hard on him, but it will always be funny to me to keep that line of jokes going forever. At the same time, I’ve never seen a player do that to a caddy, at least on camera.

KC: Did you get any DMs about #PrayForTedScott?

NLU: I’ve gotten a few messages like, “You’re doing God’s work right now.” A few of them are from players. The funniest to me is which players will favorite an anti-Bubba tweet, which is public for people to see. And you can tell right there, OK, that guy doesn’t like Bubba.

KC: No Laying Up had an excellent podcast a couple of months ago with Justin Thomas as a guest. I’m curious how did that come about? 

NLU: He started following us back in January or February and he would favorite a tweet and message us here or there. I just shot him a DM and asked him if he was interested in doing a podcast and he was down to do it. I think he appreciates the golf counterculture. He knew I wasn’t going to ask him about Spieth and run through the same narratives and everything.

KC: It seems like you’ve kept in contact with Thomas, too, as well as other Tour Sauce fans Billy Horschel and Scott Langley.

NLU: We’ll exchange messages from time to time. It’s funny, some players will DM me random things that they can’t say in public. I have some screenshots I would never take or send that would be very interesting on Twitter. It’s cool that Twitter gives you the opportunity to develop relationships with these guys. They can appreciate somebody who tells it like it is. But at the same time, Horschel is friends with Poulter, so he probably hates my Poulter stuff. I protect the guys we’re friends with. I don’t call out Thomas or Horschel on Twitter. I can definitely be criticized for being hypocritical when it comes to the guys I like. I’m very soft on them on Twitter.

KC: Are there any guys who lay up too much who aren’t really contending at the moment that you dislike?

NLU: There are certain things about guys where I’m like I’m out on you. Like, Will Wilcox, you can’t play with a yellow ball, get that off my screen. For Johnson and some of those short-hitters, the whole mindset of No Laying Up is not that you’re not allowed to lay up. When Sergio laid up on 17 at the BMW last year from like 223 yards, he can get on from anywhere he wants to, but he played with fear and laid up. That’s the kind of thing I’m most against. I’m not advising golfers to play outside their ability. It’s just that I love the guys who will go for it and be aggressive.

KC: What are your favorite Tour Sauce moments of 2015 thus far?

NLU: Probably the entire montage of Spieth yelling at his ball at the Masters. Kevin Na comes to mind on No. 17 at Sawgrass when he did the club throw and he hit it to 5 feet. Spieth also did that at Colonial when he hit it to 15 feet on the 72nd hole. Living in Amsterdam it’s tough to watch a lot of golf, so I’ve been relying on people to report Tour Sauce to me.

KC: Are there any new Tour Sauce moves you’ve noticed since writing that series?

NLU: Some will pop up. A caddy will stand over a putt with the pin behind his back, as if he’s going to putt it. If you’re my partner and you’re lining up a putt from behind the hole, I go stand over your putt as if I’m the caddy and I’m going to putt it. Another one is when you hit a shot into a blind green and you think it’s really good but there’s no applause from up around the green, you can act confused as to why there wasn’t an ovation.

KC: You’ve said that Tiger kind of invented Tour Sauce, but have you ever looked at players from previous generations in regards to purveyors of Tour Sauce?

NLU: It’s funny to go back and look at and see the old highlights from the 70s and you see guys doing the spike mark blame. Nicklaus in ’86 when he missed the putt on No. 12, he tapped down a spike mark immediately. So people always get that to me. Jack had some premature tee grab sauce for sure and he was also the purveyor of the hike-up-the-pant-leg-before-getting-the-ball-out-of-the-hole. I think he basically invented that. Palmer had all of the leaning going on and the follow through finishes and what not. Tour Sauce is not new, it’s always been there.

KC: No Laying Up is a big fan of a lot of these younger guns. I know this is a long-term projection, but how many majors do you think Rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth each end up with?

NLU: This was a question I floated to Shane Bacon a while ago: Between Rory and Spieth, do they beat Nicklaus’ 18 majors? I’m confident they’ll beat Tiger’s, but I’m less sure on Nicklaus. I’ll say they each win six more majors; Rory wins 10 and Spieth wins 8. No one will ever remember to look back at that prediction, so it’s the safest one you can make. But overall, I think this will be an unbelievable rivalry for the next 10 years. It’s impossible to put into words how amazing the state of the game is.

KC: What is the future of No Laying Up?

NLU: We would love to redesign the site; we just haven’t gotten the time to actually sit down and do it. We had one design and redesigned it to what it currently is like a month later and we haven’t touched it since. I would love for the site to look a little cleaner, a little better. We have some new merchandise coming out; we’re trying to perfect the shipping and all of that process. We would love to have some towels and pullovers in the pro shop. I come up with ideas all of the time, and then I sit down to write and hate what I write. I have an arsenal of unpublished drafts. I’d like to pick the podcast game back up, but we’ll just keep doing what we’re doing.

I wish my other friends with No Laying Up just had more free time because when they write, it’s some funny and really good stuff. If they had the time to dedicate to it, the website would really be something.