Rich is Determined to NOT Finish DFL in This Year's Tahoe ACC Celebrity Golf Tournament!

Rich has a goal for this year's American Century Championship in Tahoe, and it's a modest one: do not finish dead last.

To that end, he revealed that Performance Golf reached out to get him ready, and after a recent show he met up with coach JT Thomas, a four-time Golf Digest best young teacher whose YouTube streams Rich plugged. The mission was to find Rich's "root flaw," the single problem that, when fixed, can solve five or six other things in a swing. Rich joked that he has root flaws, plural, but the appeal was clear: instead of juggling a dozen swing thoughts, he'd carry just one.

The show rolled the video of the lesson, in which Thomas used a swing-scan app and zeroed in on getting Rich's shoulder more down so he's already set up to move the club right at the ball, rather than rerouting to find it. The results, at least on tape, were promising, with Thomas praising the compression and the sound off the club face, which Rich noted is what he's always good for, good audio.

The best part was the simulation. Rich had Thomas introduce him as if on the first tee at the American Century Championship, complete with imagined applause and the very real memory of topping his opening shot last year. The single swing thought, point the shoulder down, became his mantra. Rich still has to actually go hit a bucket and take another lesson before it's go time, and the pairings aren't out yet, but he's determined that this is the year he avoids the bottom of the leaderboard.