The First Time I Met Sam Darnold

The first time I met Sam Darnold we played 36 holes together, on two different courses some 8,292 feet of elevation apart, and nearly fought a naked man—all within 24 hours. Allow me to explain.

It was June 2021, and we at The Golfer’s Journal had what felt like a perfectly reasonable idea at the time: What if we played the highest and lowest golf courses in California on the same day? So we booked tee times at Furnace Creek in Death Valley and Sierra Star in Mammoth Lakes, invited 30 friends, and called it The Rally.

Among those invites was Mr. Darnold—the Seattle Seahawks gunslinger who, later tonight, may become just the 35th starting quarterback to win a Super Bowl. He was born and raised about a mile from our headquarters in San Clemente and became a local legend under San Clemente High’s Friday night lights. He came home every offseason to train. We heard he also mixed in a ton of golf, so we extended the invite through mutual friends. To our surprise, he said yes.

So, what do you do the night before playing golf in the hottest place on Earth? You meet for drinks at The Last Kind Words Saloon.

The place is out of a bad movie: wood railings, tacky wallpaper, antlers everywhere, swinging doors that feel more performative than functional. There’s no chance he shows up, I thought. Then he walked in. And we got right to it over a couple Bud Lights. He told me how he regretted never playing San Clemente’s famous muni growing up—the beach always took priority. But now he was playing golf just about every day in the offseason. We touched briefly on his time at USC, what 24-year-olds do when they get paid, and how he’d always wanted a reason to visit Death Valley. But mostly, we talked about golf.

It was all going great. And then—BANG.

Through the saloon doors burst a fully nude man, running in circles and screaming at the top of his lungs: “The power of Christ compels you! The power of Christ compels you!” Two staff members lunged after him. He juked, spun, and gyrated, all the while still screaming. The room went dead silent. I froze.

Eventually, a staff member ankle-tackled him—great form—and dragged him back through the doors. His bare ass disappeared, his shrieks faded, and the silence hung for a beat too long.

Then someone broke it.

“I guess it’s clothing time.”

The room erupted. Darnold laughed, too—until we both looked down. I had a fistful of his shirt clenched so tightly my knuckles were white.

“I’m sorry, Sam Darnold,” I said, releasing a wrinkled wad of fabric. “If we had to fight, I liked your chances better.”

The next morning we teed off at Furnace Creek at 6 a.m. It was already 101 degrees. We raced around the course in three hours, piled into air-conditioned cars, and drove four hours and 8,000 feet straight up. By early afternoon, we were standing on the first tee at Sierra Star, trading desert heat for crisp, 60-degree mountain air. Five hours after starting at the bottom of California, we were on top.

That afternoon, tossing a football around the fairway, I confessed to Sam that I’m a diehard Patriots fan—which makes tonight’s Super Bowl a complicated emotional situation for me. I’ve had the fortune of playing several more times with him over the years, and in every other game I’m rooting for him (And yes, everytime we play together we laugh about the naked man in the Last Kind Words Saloon and his wrinkled shirt). I won’t be invited to his wedding or his funeral, but I’m confident in saying he’s even nicer, more genuine, and more down-to-earth than he appears on your screen. 

That summer was the low point of Sam’s career—he had just flamed out with the Jets, and would end up that fall buried on the Panthers depth chart. And yet, we wouldn’t have known it. He’s a golf junkie just like the rest of us; he loves it enough to join a bunch of strangers in the middle of the desert. It’s funny how we build people up to be larger than life, only to meet them and discover they might envy the guy who gets to tee it up on Sunday afternoons instead of working.