Barstool's Caleb Pressley: Beginner to Pro?

[JetFan1983]

I've been enjoying Barstool's golf content over the past year or so, whether it's the Foreplay Scramble guys or Dave Portnoy himself attempting to break par at a US Open setup with twelve mulligans per hole. Now another one of their personalities is embarking on a Dan Plan 2.0 of sorts as he attempts to become a professional golfer having only recently picked up the game during the pandemic. That personality is Caleb Pressley, one of the funnier people they have over there at Barstool IMO.

Apparently he's serious though. He hired Chris Como and has already moved to Jupiter, Florida (though I know Como lives in Texas). His best score so far I believe is like 120+ lol, so he's uh got a bit of a ways to go here.

Here's some basic info on the project that I've learned from listening to a few of his recent podcasts:

1) He says he's gonna quit if he's not scratch within two years. Reasonable decision there. 

2) He recently contacted and interviewed the Dan Plan himself (Dan McLaughlin), who IMO gave him some really useful advice for how to pick this silly game up as an adult. Sure, he said some dumb things too like this whole thing was "possible," but other than that, it's a good sign Caleb even figured out who Dan was and hit him up for advice. Here's a link to the podcast. Caleb says he's going to talk to Dan every now and then too to get advice.

Dan McLaughlin from 51 Strokes | Podcast Episode on Podbay

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Listen to Dan McLaughlin, an episode of 51 Strokes, easily on Podbay - the best podcast player on the web.

Here's a Youtube clip from the hour-long interview if you don't want to listen to the whole thing:

3) Caleb is a better athlete than Dan. He played backup QB at UNC.

4) Barstool is essentially sponsoring the whole thing. Caleb has said his content now will be centered around documenting this journey. Here's a video he did on his Youtube channel 51 Strokes working with Chris Como:

 

As far as the end game goes, Caleb seems to share similar delusions of grandeur as Dan did: he wants to be able to make money playing golf for a living, on some professional tour, somewhere in the world. Dan wanted to make a PGA Tour cut (which is also insane).

I know a lot of you guys are probably over this kind of thing by now, but I still find someone dropping their entire life to try to become amazing at golf, especially as a beginner adult, to be fun and entertaining.

Edited April 7, 2021 by JetFan1983

[mchepp]

I of course met Dan and interviewed him for the site and even wrote a postmortem. I took an interest because he was playing my club when he got started.

I think the delusional aspect of Dan's approach cannot be overlooked. Even in the interview, which had to be only a few months before he quit he was still talking about the PGA Tour. It was clear he was never going to make it. His swing speed was hovering around a hundred (which is 10+mph from where it needed to be), and he had a short game pretty similar to mine. He was basically a decent 6 handicap and was flattening out. He was doomed.

Dan started with a pro that gave him horrible advice, it tainted the water, he really never recovered. Going to Chris Como is a big improvement, but he is going to have to block out all the other information out there. That will be his challenge. My advice to Dan when we met was to talk with @iacas and only listen to him. That if he listened to smart people and only those smart people he would have his best chance. Instagram, Twitter, YouTube are all filled with noise, finding signal takes work.

I will be following. Mostly because it is interesting science. Especially if he does it properly.

[JetFan1983]

5 hours ago, mchepp said:

I will be following. Mostly because it is interesting science. Especially if he does it properly.

This thing seems to be a lot better funded and organized than the Dan Plan. The guy still has basically no chance obviously, but it's still fun that he's starting like this:

Edit: This is from October 2020 before Caleb decided to move to Jupiter, Florida.

Edited April 8, 2021 by JetFan1983