Oisín Keniry
Likelihood is, your summer season isn’t booked with international live performance dates or weeknights behind The Tonight Present desk. Finest to depart that stuff to superstars: Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon. However the one factor we can all do to channel our internal JT and Jimmy is to have extra enjoyable on the golf course.
Simpler mentioned than finished after you’ve bladed a wedge throughout a inexperienced. Nevertheless it’s their dedication to protecting every spherical enjoyable (it doesn’t matter what occurs), that makes the on-course vibe that Timberlake and Fallon share price aspiring to.
On the annual 8AM Invitational, held for the third consecutive 12 months on the Wynn Las Vegas, this tandem teamed as much as placed on a present rivaling something you’ll discover on the Strip.
Timberlake, a low-handicapper, takes his recreation and tournament-hosting gig severely; Fallon takes severely his job of protecting the environment phenomenally unfastened. On the flip facet, JT’s aggressive edge rubs off on Jimmy simply sufficient for the late-night king to put off the humorous to lean into clutch photographs.
Their camaraderie has helped make the 8AM Invitational the sport’s preeminent movie star workforce occasion.
The chummy, star-studded discipline at this 12 months’s bash featured a who’s who of sports activities heroes — Olympic legend Michael Phelps, six-time MLB All-Star CC Sabathia, Tremendous Bowl LVI champion Matthew Stafford, 2014 U.S. Girls’s Open winner Michelle Wie West — and a forged of Hollywood stars and comers that included sitcom bigs Brian Baumgartner (The Workplace) and Anthony Anderson (Black-ish), humorist and actor Andrew Santino (I’m Dying Up Right here) and movie and tv actress Kathryn Newton (Massive Little Lies).
The 2-day, 36-hole occasion has groups change groupings after every nine-hole loop. The concept is to spark recent chatter and new friendships, the sort epitomized by the decades-long Timberlake-Fallon bond.
However the palling round isn’t restricted to solely stroke play. On the finish of day one, the sphere gathers for the Worldwide Know-how Shootout, a closest-to-the-pin contest through which golfers and gallery huddle in a good horseshoe to cheer on the highs (and occasional lows) of a good chip shot over Lake Travis — named after, sure, Patrick Mahomes’ bestie, Kansas Metropolis Chiefs tight finish Travis Kelce.
Throughout event play, golfers detour off the seventeenth inexperienced and onto the “Cabot Courtroom,” the place they drop their golf equipment and decide up a basketball. One of many few issues able to coaxing these guys off the courtroom is the close by Dewar’s bar cart, one of many coolest within the recreation.
Lastly, if a participant’s spherical takes a flip for the more serious, they will get again on monitor with a multiscreen simulator that captures what it’s actually wish to push a McLaren to 200-plus miles per hour in an F1 race. This factor blows the doorways off of something you’d discover in a neighborhood arcade.
All of it wouldn’t be potential with out the second-to-none hospitality offered by the Wynn, and all of it brings you proper again to that phrase: enjoyable. Which, within the case of the 8AM Invitational, at all times contains camaraderie, charity — one in every of this 12 months’s beneficiaries was the American Pores and skin Affiliation — and all-in-the-name-of-a- good-time competitiveness.
Oh, yeah. The winners? On the Wynn in April, it was a duo of former NBA huge males, Chandler Parsons and Blake Griffin. In life, it’s all of us who get to have a blast taking part in a recreation we love.