The tao of No Laying Up: How Soly, Tron, DJ Pie, Big Randy and Neil did their own thing

You’ve got to see this house. It sits a few blocks from the sands of Neptune Beach, Fla. A little corner lot. White. Small porch. People coming and going at all times, all varieties or shapes and sizes, and facial hair, often hauling audio and visual equipment. The neighbors surely think drugs are being sold. Or pornography is being filmed.

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We’re on the second floor. Outside, bikers and rollerbladers zip past. Foot traffic consists of tanned locals, beach towels draped over and around them, trekking past in the late-day sun. It’s a whole other world out there.

And in here, four grown men in flip-flops are sitting around a table, ready to go to work.

That’s when the piano hits.

Dung dung-dung … Dung dung-dung … 

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the ‘No Laying Up’ podcast. Soly here.”

That’s Chris Solomon. If there’s a ringleader, he’s it. He knows a lot about golf and is the closest thing this group has to a founder. Across from him is D.J. Piehowski, aptly known as DJ Pie. He’s likable enough to have successfully executed an extraordinary social experiment — infiltrating a group of longtime friends without being cast as an outsider. To Piehowski’s right is Todd Schuster, who you might know as Tron Carter, and who will be referred to here as Tron Schuster, for the sake of clarity and consolidation. He is, in a group with a lot of opinions, the loudest arbiter of Takes. Across from Tron Carter is Phil Landes. He’s known as Big Randy and, thankfully, the closest thing to pornography in this room is the abundance of thigh he’s displaying in those shorts. Landes is freakishly tall and funny as hell. The fifth member of the gang is Neil Schuster, Todd’s brother, who has “the day off” and is downstairs preparing for a bike ride. The younger Schuster is known as “the merch czar” because he’s apparently sold enough NLU-branded gear to be appointed an emperorship.

This is the Kill House, otherwise known as “No Laying Up” headquarters, otherwise known as a modest home near Jax Beach in the alternate universe known as northeast Florida. Neil is the only NLU member who actually lives here. The moniker is a nod to Tiger Woods’ foray into Navy SEAL training detailed in Wright Thompson’s 2016 profile of Woods. The Kill House was the SEAL’s training grounds where Woods, toting an M4 assault rifle, went through mock scenarios “clearing rooms and rescuing hostages.” It’s also where he tore an ACL, according to Hank Haney. The reference is impeccably NLU — relatively obscure, comically perpetual, perfectly sardonic.

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Down the road is Ponte Vedra Beach, home to PGA Tour headquarters. A four-lane thoroughfare of Jacksonville strip malls separate the two properties with eight miles of easy metaphors. On this Sunday afternoon, the tour is celebrating the end of its marquee event. Justin Thomas is winner of the 2021 Players Championship. The tour and its constituents are quite pleased with the whole situation — a return of fans to TPC Sawgrass, a good product for the TV broadcast, and the narrative of a redemptive winner. It’s all so neat and circumscribed, just like the PGA Tour.

That’s over there. Over here, on the second floor of the Kill House, a double-barrel of commentary and critiques is discharged. Opinions pour forth on the depiction of Thomas overcoming adversity, the imbalance of video review usage on tour, an incredible comparison of Paul Casey to longtime Iowa football coach Kirk Ferentz, and a pondering if Bryson DeChambeau might ever request to be paid tournament winnings in cryptocurrency. There’s a full-blown debate over the course setup and pin placements at TPC Sawgrass. There’s a conspiracy theory speculating if the tour, pumped full of FedEx money, has plotted against Lee Westwood and his UPS-emblazoned shirt.

It’s a podcast.

It’s opinion as entertainment.

It’s humor, but with an intelligent bend. It’s schtick, but still fresh. It’s unscripted and unadorned, but also sponsored by Callaway. It’s all of these things at once.

That is, until Solomon’s phone rings early in the show. He pauses the recording. On the line is Stephen Cox, a PGA Tour tournament official. He’s calling, unsolicited, to say how happy he is with how the course setup at TPC Sawgrass challenged the tour’s top stars. Tron Schuster counters with a series of questions. He says he has spoken to members of the agronomy staff at the course and been told greens were drenched with water to soften conditions. He says, in between swigs of Stella Artois, that he has spoken to a half-dozen players who complained about the variant conditions. Cox answers each question, explaining the whats and the whys. The four NLU hosts shrug, thank Cox for calling and return to the show.

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Yes, to an outsider, this sure-as-hell felt like a preemptive strike to sway opinions. And yes, to an outsider, it is surreal that a group of podcasters operating out of a potential stash house/porn studio warrant such attention as to be called by a PGA Tour official.

This, though, is exactly where “No Laying Up” finds itself nowadays. Right in that sweet spot. Right where it could’ve never imagined being. This week — Masters week — golf fans will digest the CBS and ESPN broadcasts, see highlights on Golf Channel, and read columns and features from any number of “traditional” media outlets. For swaths of fans, though, the conversation surrounding the Masters will stem from the saturated marketplace of independent podcasts. In the car, in the bathroom, cooking dinner, golfers will consume everything from “The Shotgun Start” to Barstool’s “Fore Play” to “‎Get a Grip with Max Homa & Shane Bacon.” They are massively popular. They move the conversation. And right at the forefront, entirely self-made, is NLU. To understand where golf media is going, start here.

Let’s get the background out of the way. The whole thing — this utterly accidental golf media company — began as a group text message.

In the early 2010s, Solomon and Tron Schuster lived across the hall from each other at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Landes transferred in from Washington & Lee. They all hit it off, in part, because they were niche golf nerds. What began as a friendship evolved beyond graduation into a text chain including Neil Schuster, who played football at Columbia before moving to San Francisco to pursue a variety of tech jobs. In time, “No Laying Up” entered the world as a Twitter feed created by Solomon in 2013. It was essentially the group’s text messages in tweet forms. A following grew. Among them, Piehowski, who was working in social media at the PGA Tour and was, he estimates, “one of their first 10 fans.” Piehowski and Solomon met during the 2015 Open Championship at St. Andrews and Piehowski morphed into the fifth member of the group.

Over time, each quit a real-world job to go all-in on NLU.

Solomon was in line as a senior manager at KPMG and a few years away from partnership. He walked away in July 2017. He had to. Over the course of 2016, while finishing up a three-year stint living and working in Amsterdam, he saw NLU grow into “kind of a monster” with young tour stars like Thomas agreeing to lengthy, revealing interviews. There were signs he could no longer ignore. Prior to attending the ’16 Ryder Cup at Hazeltine, Solomon preached on the podcast and on Twitter that the U.S. team pair Dustin Johnson and Brooks Koepka together. When the Saturday afternoon fourball session rolled around, lo and behold, there was DJ and Koepka side-by-side. Solomon followed the group, watching them promptly get eviscerated by Rory McIlroy and Thomas Pieters. Through eight holes, the Euros were 4 up. McIlroy saw Solomon sitting on a bench behind a tee box. He walked over, sat next to him, gave a nudge, pointed to DJ and Koepka and said, “Hey, you got your wish.”

“I was trying to come to terms with all this and was just blown away,” Solomon says all this time later. “Like, ‘Wait, this guy actually listens?’ I did not really realize the depth of it until that point.”

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McIlroy was soon a guest on the podcast. An hour, uninterrupted. Few fans had ever heard anything like this. It was as if McIlroy was elbowed-up at the bar. The general golf-content-consuming public began to take notice.

In a separate NLU interview, McIlroy said the game needed more outside voices. He said the media landscape needed a change. He offered NLU an endorsement that most media companies would pay tens of thousands of dollars for. Then McIlroy tweeted out the interview to his 3 million followers.

“I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that, as he was saying this, I pretty much had an epiphany like, ‘I think this is my job now,’” Solomon says. “There was no turning back.”

In the summer of 2017, Tron Schuster quit his job with Marriott and moved from Atlanta to Jacksonville. He was a natural on the podcast, having been a very good junior golfer and still a natural shit-stirrer. That’s where his comfort level ended, though. Tron battled a stutter as a child. “Projecting my voice in a microphone is something I’ve had to learn,” he says.

Piehowski, who successfully dodged the mistaken pursuit of sportswriting as an undergrad at Bradley University, followed next. He left the PGA Tour in 2017 and joined the group, bringing new ideas for video content. It was like Ronnie Wood joining the Rolling Stones — he looked, talked, and acted the part; as if he belonged there forever.

“It was so clear that we all spoke an identical language,” Piehowski says.

If there’s a spirit animal of the group, it’s Landes. After graduating from Miami, he went to work for Ernst & Young in Cincinnati. It was a learning experience, in that he learned he hated being an accountant. Nonetheless, he went for his MBA at Indiana, then landed a job in Chicago with an audit, tax and consulting firm. Landes lasted five months before having a panic attack one morning and asking himself, “What the hell am I doing?” So he quit, moved home and got into high school basketball coaching. (Big Randy is 6-foot-8 and played college hoops at Washington & Lee. His pictures from those days bear a slight resemblance to a young Kevin McHale.)

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Landes spent three years as a freshman basketball coach in Columbus, Ohio, where he also held a school district job as a teacher’s aide for developmentally challenged students. “No Laying Up” was his hobby. In April 2018, the moment arrived to decide if it would be more.

“It was kind of my time,” Landes says. “It was spring. I was at the end of the school year. I was single. I was making nothing. It just made sense. The only hesitation for me was that I wouldn’t be able to coach basketball.”

Neil Schuster penned the first post for NLU’s original website when it went live on Jan. 1, 2014, blogging about a murder suspect arrested while hitting balls in a simulator at a PGA Tour Superstore. Because he lived in San Francisco and worked in tech (even though he was in sales, not a coder), Neil was asked to get the site off the ground. He spent the next few years working a variety of gigs at a variety of startups before landing as an ad sales account manager at Google. It was a good job, except Neil might’ve been the only person there not trying to devour the competition to climb the ladder. He was too busy slinging merchandise and talking golf. NLU’s popularity was growing to a critical mass.

“It’s like the frog in the boiling water,” Schuster says. “You don’t know it’s happened until it’s too late.”

Neil left Google in February 2019, packing up for Jacksonville.

That, abbreviated as it may be, is how today’s version of “No Laying Up” came to be. What was a novelty is now a full-time operation. A podcast downloaded by hundreds of thousands of listeners. A main Twitter account with more than 260,000 followers. An Instagram account with 139,000 followers. Video productions. Two travel series. A fan base that amounts to its own subculture.

Pulling back the lens, this is about far more than an edgy podcast. Fans began by caring about what the NLU guys said about golf. Now they care about the NLU guys themselves. They are the content. They are the brand. Last October, their travel series, “Tourist Sauce,” visited Oregon. An 11-episode series tallied nearly 1.2 million views on YouTube. Most recently, a one-off episode of “Wild World of Golf” consisting solely of Solomon and Neil Schuster playing a match at a Jacksonville course is up to 64,000 views. It’s not as if these videos include famous players or celebrity guests. It’s just them — their personalities. People care to watch.

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“If they had set out to do any of this, of course it would’ve failed spectacularly,” Piehowski says. “It never would’ve worked. It would’ve been way too self-serious, and it would’ve just been a disaster. What’s fun about it is that there was no intention to build a media company or build some voice in the game.”

Piehowski pulls up his shoulders and gives a quizzical cock of the head. He doesn’t get it, either.

“It’s crazy,” he says, “but it’s happened very naturally.”

It’s well into the evening on a Friday in March, and here comes Harry Higgs. This outdoor restaurant courtyard is loud and bustling, but you can’t miss Higgs. The man is not only 6-foot-2 and 235 pounds, but he’s also still wearing his entire ensemble from the second round of the Players Championship. Full slacks. Untucked Greyson shirt. Essentially, a professional athlete, still in uniform, walking through a Mexican restaurant. Play had been suspended due to darkness at TPC Sawgrass, and Higgs, along with some guests, was racing out to eat before establishments closed.

Walking in, Higgs spots Piehowski and Tron Schuster. He pivots and comes their way. Fist bumps all around. Some laughs. Some gossip. Everyone is friends. This is normal.

It is, except it isn’t. The early roots of “No Laying Up” are as a sort of golf media saboteur, hurling Takes from outside the club. Its origins are sowed in mocking everyone and anyone, threading inside jokes through every bit, hammering on the absurdities of the golf establishment, satirizing the quirks and self-importance of many tour pros, and getting (proudly) blocked on Twitter back in the day by the likes of Ian Poulter, Zach Johnson, Steve Elkington, Brandel Chamblee and Tim Rosaforte. The first episode of the podcast, recorded in April 2014, is all gas, no chaser, complete with potato chips crunching in the background. It amounts to an absolute lampooning of Matt Kuchar. It was easy then because they didn’t know Kuchar, nor was there any chance they would ever know Kuchar. Unlike most other golf podcasts that have grown in popularity over the years, NLU had no media outlet mechanism to bring it to the mainstream, nor were any of the hosts a member of the media. They were just friends lobbing grenades and laughing like bastards.

Now, though, the boys of “No Laying Up” are, in fact, not boys, and they’re no longer on the outside. They’re old guys — all in their 30s — and they’re plugged into every level of the game, from players to broadcast partners to the PGA Tour itself. The show, their style, it’s not for everyone. Some fans might not like it. Many players certainly don’t. Those who control the game’s levers have their own critiques. NLU’s influence and sway, though, can’t be denied. The group opines on everything from broadcast decisions to commercial time to course layouts. Their voices reach those they intend to reach.

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“Our whole thing is that we’re not a part of (the PGA Tour’s) circle, and if this requires us being a part of that, we’re going to stay on the outside throwing rocks at it,” Solomon says. “At some point you’ll have to come outside the building and address what we’re saying.”

In the past, the show sometimes felt like a flamethrower. For better or worse.

“I’m definitely guilty of that,” Tron Schuster says, “and that’s something I’ve had to check myself on. You never want to be negative just to be negative.”

“I’m much more conscious of not making anything overly malicious or personal or mean-spirited,” Landes says. “It’s just, hey, I’m gonna tell you my opinion and you can take it for what it’s worth. If the PGA Tour wants to listen and say, hey, Randy sucks and he doesn’t know anything about golf. You know what? They’re kinda right. And I’m not gonna be mad about it.”

Recent years have brought certain realizations. Whether accidental or not, NLU carries serious weight in this space. It creates a particular apostasy among its fan base. Podcast listeners watch broadcasts through the pod’s lens. They talk about what the pod talks about.

Both the reach and the popularity have created a sort of odd middle ground. NLU wants to remain untethered to convention, but its collective voice is heard at the highest levels of the game. This isn’t some outcast outfit that’s ignored. Quite the opposite. PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan once invited Solomon to join his group in a charity pro-am. Solomon agreed and spent much of the time explaining his stance on the glut of commercials featured during tournament broadcasts. CBS executives have convened meetings with the NLU crew, asking why they take exceptions with aspects of the broadcast. Important voices from the tour regularly call to make counterpoints or offer explanations.

“Our goal is for the fan to have a voice in that room,” Solomon says. “Sponsors can be happy, TV can be happy, players can be happy, and everybody gets paid, and the whole thing keeps going round and round and round. We’re on the outside of that. We don’t want to sit and watch this stuff if we don’t feel like we have a voice in the room. There are things that need to be called into question.”

Back in the day, the PGA Tour saw NLU as a hip in-road to a younger audience. After being lambasted on the pod over the years on all varieties of topics, though, that relationship is, as Tron Schuster describes, “so frosty.” The same goes for the tour’s broadcast partners.

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At the same time, the likes of Jim Nantz and plenty others have been on the podcast as guests.

“If we thought it was falling on deaf ears, we probably wouldn’t keep bringing a lot of this stuff up over and over, but we know it’s not,” Solomon adds. “These people have reached out. It’s been very validating. People have to take it seriously at this point.”

“No Laying Up” isn’t for everyone. It’s certainly not for traditionalists. It’s a media company, but it’s not a media outlet. It occasionally breaks news, but it doesn’t claim to aspire to any notion of journalism. Mainstream media, though, has had to react to NLU’s “coverage” at times. Most notably, in February 2017, when McIlroy played golf with then recently elected President Donald Trump, Solomon got a direct message on Twitter with exact details of the round. Solomon sent McIlroy a text message to confirm it. McIlroy responded by doing so and adding a couple of details.

Solomon then sent out a tweet from the NLU account, reporting on the McIlroy-Trump round. A minor uproar broke out because the White House had previously said Trump only played a few holes with McIlroy. The press corps was caught entirely off guard. That night, CNN’s Anderson Cooper squared his shoulders and said with a straight face, “The golf blog, ‘No Laying It Up’ posted this picture of McIlroy with the president …”

The White House was forced to clarify, issuing a statement that Trump had intended to play a few holes but decided to play longer.

At a conventional media outlet, the entire Trump-McIlroy episode would’ve played out within confined strategies. At “No Laying Up?” Solomon fact-checked the scoop and ran it by the rest of the group. Do we run this? Sure! Then his thumbs fired it into the Twittersphere. Checks and balances? The check is the required agreement of five very different but like-minded individuals, and the balance is however the audience reacts.

“We all trust each other implicitly to say what we truly believe,” Tron Schuster says.

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Sometimes things turn political, or at least veer in that direction. When the 2022 PGA Championship was stripped from Trump Bedminster in January, the ensuing podcast episode cut in a direction that might, let’s say, strongly piss off a portion of the audience — a portion that very traditionally exists in the golfing world.

Intentional or not, it was measured risk.

“We’re conscious that people don’t want to be preached to,” Landes says, “but we’re also going to say what we feel.”

This is what happens when a hobby becomes a job.

That’s when real life intersects. Suddenly things get a little serious. Of late, the five have had to take a long look at their own coverage of the sport. It has skewed heavily toward the men’s game. They’ve long said they want the game to look different. But what were they doing about it?

A long look in the mirror. Some more realizations. More and more, NLU is covering the women’s game, sponsoring up-and-coming women’s players and focusing on minority initiatives.

“I think we’ve been pretty clear that we’re not cool with the status quo of golf,” Tron Schuster says. “It can’t just look like the five of us. We are conscientious that we’re five middle-aged white guys who grew up in affluent suburbs and grew up playing golf and have had great opportunities. We’re thankful for that, but also really cognizant that’s not everybody’s reality. So, hey, how do we expose people to golf that don’t naturally get exposed to this game?”

They’ve come to realize there’s more to do than talk about it.

To this day, for many of those who have to react to what NLU does and says, there exists this misguided notion of youth. That these are just some young dudes playing a part. That their audience skews young. That this is some amateur operation.

In truth, Soly is 34 and recently married, Tron is a 35-year-old father of two, DJ Pie is 33, Big Randy is 36 and recently moved to Denver in search of better living conditions (i.e., not Florida) and “Young Neil” is 31.

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These are guys thinking about long-term financial investments and navigating their 40s.

They’re not popping up on TikTok.

“It’s not that we’re young,” Piehowski says. “It’s that we’ve tried new things and it got us here.”

But now they need to grow old together. And that’s complicated. The ingredients of “No Laying Up’s” organic rise can’t be frozen. Individual lives will change. Maybe some priorities too. As Piehowski says, “It’s much more of a band than media company.”

In recent years, focus has shifted, turning NLU into something real, something tangible. Neil Schuster, with lingering memories of that job at Google, has built structured schedules and meeting times. Those gatherings are spent discussing everything from approaching sponsors to merchandise sales to the editorial direction of the podcast to the airing of grievances.

“A work in progress,” Neil says.

There might not be a human resource department, but this ain’t exactly a treehouse anymore.

“If we’re going to survive for a long period of time, we need to have processes in place, and we have to have schedules, and stick to them, and have meetings, and have uncomfortable conversations,” Solomon says. “We have to be able to say, ‘Hey, you’re lacking here.’ ‘Hey, this is bothering me.’ If you let that stuff fester for a period of time, it might blow up in our face. We have what so many people want. And the last thing any of us want is to screw this up in some way.”

That idea — what happens if the band ever breaks up? — is impossible to ignore.

Speaking by phone while driving through the Great West, setting off on his own after three years in Jacksonville, Landes thinks about all this and processes it. From two time zones away, he’ll still be a regular on the podcast and handle NLU’s checkbook, invoices and bills. (Turns out that MBA came in handy.) Nothing is going to change, he says. It’s going to be the same, but different. And different is a good thing.

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“At the end of the day, this is about five friends — that’s the basis for all this,” he says. “Our biggest fear, or biggest threat, is that we grow to hate each other and have to walk away. So we focus on that. We work on that. We’re honest with each other. We’re a little disciplined and mature about it.”

Sure sounds adult. Sure sounds thoughtful, practical. Maybe even business-like.

Then Big Randy adds: “But I’ll tell you this, the day we start taking ourselves seriously will be the day I voluntarily run away from it all.”

Which brings us to the end. As in, where does “No Laying Up” go from here?

On this, Landes takes a long pause. He considers the possibilities, then realizes … how can one know where he’s going when he’s not sure how he got here in the first place?

“I don’t know, man,” Big Randy says, before pausing again.

“Like, it’s ridiculous that any of this happened. This has to have all been one big joke, right?”

(Photos courtesy of No Laying Up staff)

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