Michael Block missed the Charles Schwab Cup Championship by six places. His closing 70 at the Simmons Bank Championship left him tied for 10th at 11 under and $51,060 richer, 42nd in the standings, with only the top 36 bound for Phoenix and his season finished. By Monday, that was no longer the most discussed thing about his week.
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Days earlier, asked by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette whether he had grasped how much money was available on PGA Tour Champions, Block had listed what the payday had not altered. “I still drive the same car, live in the same house, have the same wife, have the same kids, still work from my phone,” he said. “It is what it is, and it hasn’t changed me one iota.” On paper, the answer reads as a man keeping his head. Spoken aloud, it sounds like a man grading his own humility, with a wife filed alongside the fixtures he chose not to upgrade, and that is how it landed on Monday’s episode of The Shotgun Start, where Joseph LaMagna called it “ridiculous.”
Any backlash began on the podcast circuit, and its sharpest version came from LaMagna. He is a full-time Fried Egg Golf writer and analyst, the author of a weekly column built on data and opinion, and the founder of Optimal Approach Golf, a consultancy that advises tour professionals on strategy. He is also the show’s regular third chair alongside Brendan Porath and Andy Johnson, the voice normally applied to numbers rather than moral judgments, and he did not hedge here. LaMagna put the question to Porath before answering it himself, calling Block “a complete lunatic” and suggesting he deserved a medal for the achievement of remaining married now that he had made it on the senior circuit.
What bothered the pair was less the sentiment than the packaging. A wife listed between a car and a house implies the alternative was available, and LaMagna said so, calling it “a crazy thing to say about joining the Champions Tour.” Porath noted that Block had not exactly won a Grammy, which made the modesty a fairly easy flex. From there, the segment turned into an audit of the claim. Porath insisted there was no way the car was the same one, citing the throwback Block had bought with the proceeds of the famous 7 iron, and the two settled on the conclusion that he probably owned several by then.
The phrase “I still work from my phone” caused more difficulty than anything else, with Porath asking flatly what it was supposed to mean. The answer, once they worked it out, was that Block had kept his job as head professional at Arroyo Trabuco Golf Club in California and was running it remotely between tournaments, which is either admirable or absurd depending on how much time you have spent in a pro shop.
Inevitably, the conversation drifted. Jeff Bezos became the benchmark for a man who got rich and did change partners, and the two began sketching a fantasy in which some struggling player followed Steven Alker’s path from club pro to senior star and immediately started behaving badly, complete with blondes on each arm. Porath eventually called time on it, admitting they had gone “pretty far afield,” before restating Block’s quote in disbelief: he had kept his wife even after blowing up his car, his house, and his standing in the Schwab Cup.
Earlier in the same conversation, Block had described himself as a crowd player, someone who feeds on attention and admits it. “I guess I’m a pleaser is what I am,” he said, and nobody objected. That self-awareness played fine. It was the inventory of unchanged possessions, with the wife sitting in the middle of it, that read as tone-deaf.
The season-ending arithmetic made it worse. Block, a career club professional who turned sponsor invitations after his 2023 PGA Championship breakout into a rookie year on the senior tour, began Sunday tied for fifth and projected to finish 35th with one steady round in Phoenix. A 70 was not enough. Three players passed him into the top 36 while Darren Fichardt won with an eagle at the last, and Block was left outside the field for the finale and short of the exemptions that come with it.
Block meant that a modest payday had not made him a different man. LaMagna and Porath meant that he had found an unfortunate way to prove it, and that “ridiculous” was the gentlest word available.