Your Golf Tour MVP Votes – Pursell Farms

Note: This article contains spoilers, so if you haven’t found a spare 14 hours to watch the first tournament yet, consider coming back later!

The first tournament of Your Golf Tour is officially in the books, with Dalke leading his team to victory over Team Wes in the final round. And boy did it deliver. We had near course records, we had missed tap ins, we had Chance Taylor asking Sam Heung Min about Lynyrd Skynyrd – what more could you ask for?

While some of the boys didn’t have their best stuff under the bright lights of YGT, others excelled, and because we love positivity here at YT Golf Talk, we’re going to focus on the latter. The YGT MVP will work like this – each tournament, we’ll aggregate the scores of each player across the rounds that they played and post them on our Instagram and X/Twitter account (a couple of days after the release of the final video to avoid spoilers), and hand out votes in a 5-4-3-2-1 format. Those votes will be significantly impacted by each players’ cumulative score, but other intangibles will also come into play, like whether or not they shot 62 on the final day to win the event for their team.

Without further ado, let’s dive into the votes for the inaugural Your Golf Tour tournament.

5 Votes – Brad Dalke

A unanimous best afield among our voting panel of one, Dalke’s performance in Round 3 made this an easy choice. Captain of the aptly named Team Brad, he wasn’t at his scintillating best over the first two rounds, though he still managed to lead he and Garrett to -7 in the scramble before posting a slightly disappointing -1 in an alternate shot dream team with Sean Walsh.

Still, their team did just enough to qualify for the final round thanks largely to a final hole eagle by Peter Finch and wildcard Ben Hadden, and once there Dalke absolutely turned it on. The skipper was electric in the individual stroke play, making poor old Ryan Ruffels look second-rate despite carding a four-under 68. Irons and wedges were going to within ten feet at an alarming rate, and he capped it all off with a monster putt for birdie on 17 to take his score to -10. Dalke needed only a birdie on the reachable par-5 18th to tie the course record but unfortunately missed a fairly short putt to finish with par. Regardless, he was the best player by a country mile on the final day and captain of the winning team, and a no-brainer for the first 5 votes in YGT history.

4 Votes – Wesley Bryan

‘I’ll tap.’ The words that were always going to come back and bite Wes in the bum one day, and unfortunately, this was that day. The captain of the runners-up made a telling mistake on hole 17 in his final round, missing a 2-footer for par that would have maintained a one-shot lead over Sean Walsh. Had he held that lead for two more holes, the overall team vs team match would have been tied at 2 ½ a piece and a tiebreaker required. Alas, Wes tapped, Wes missed, and the rest is history.

In fairness, though he said those dreaded two words, Wesley didn’t rush the putt and in general, he is very solid when he does tap. And though it was quite literally a very costly miss for him and his team, Wesley led from the front throughout the tournament and was probably the best overall player from start to finish. He scrambled his way to -9 alongside the impressive Micah Morris in Round 1, alternated his way to -5 with Ruffels in Round 2, and was sitting at -5 with a birdie putt on 17 in the final round. Easy as it would be to dock him a couple of votes for that miss, he and Dalke were both at a cumulative total of -18 for the duration of the tournament, four shots clear of the next best player.

3 Votes – Sean Walsh

Sean Walsh didn’t have his best stuff at Pursell Farms, which is saying something. Granted he shot -7 alongside Finch in the scramble, but he wasn’t as flawless as usual in pairing with Brad for -1 in the alternate shot and on the front nine in the individual stroke play, he was clearly struggling with his swing. But cometh the moment, cometh the man, and while Sean Walsh might not be your stereotypical superhero, he certainly played like one with the $250k on the line.

The Good Good stalwart found himself at +1 and four shots in arrears of Wesley at the turn, only to shoot an incredible -6 on the back, tapping in for birdie on 18 to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Heading into the remaining tournaments he has plenty of room for improvement, which is concerning for the opposing teams, particularly considering his pairing with someone who just shot 62 in the final round.

2 Votes – Micah Morris

Micah freaking Morris, welcome to the big time. Can we call YGT the big time? Certainly the big time of YouTube Golf. Regardless, he has taken his game to a new level and at times looked like the best player out there at Pursell Farms. He started off hot with a -9 alongside Wes in the scramble, and though he didn’t set the world on fire with his +1 with wildcard John Peterson (did you hear he has his own garage repair business?), that wasn’t entirely his fault. The mental hurdles which Micah has openly had to overcome did rear their ugly heads at times during that round, most notably when he pumped a putt 15 feet past on the 6th, then missed the one-footer that JP left him with, but he came out absolutely firing in the individual stroke play against the man with whom it all began – his cousin Garrett Clark.

Micah’s scorecard read like an ornithophile’s dream in the early holes, with a pair of birdies and an eagle getting him to -4 through just 3 holes to lay down the gauntlet against his severely self-deprecating cousin. He ultimately got to -6 before dropping a couple of shots, but by that stage the fat lady had been singing for long enough to wear out her vocal cords. He ended the tournament with an overall score of -12, but his performance in Round 3 was as impressive as anyone not called Brad Dalke.

1 Vote – Ryan Ruffels

Ruffels is arguably unlucky to just pick up the one vote here. At -14, he had the third best cumulative total of the tournament, and that included a -5 in the scramble alongside Roger Steele who, bless him, wasn’t quite at his best at Pursell Farms (side note: anyone who watched the Internet Invitational last year knows that Rog has plenty more to give than he showed in these videos).

Unfortunately, Ruff was a victim of circumstance, being absolutely pumped by Dalke in the final round despite playing solid golf himself. He, Morris and Walsh all had similar cumulative scores, but with the latter two enjoying some huge moments and winning their stroke play matches, they slipped ahead of the Aussie in the votes. In that final round, Ruffels was a little more error-prone than usual, particularly with his typically trusty three-wood, but it shows how good he is that he still shot a 68. He was clearly one of the best players out there, and in a team alongside Wesley, with Micah having taken his game to a new level and Roger having plenty of room for improvement, they might be the quartet to beat moving forwards.

An honourable mention has to go to our favourite (self-proclaimed) redneck Chance Taylor, who, after being last picked on Draft Night, showed that he should potentially have been closer to the first round. He worked his way to -6 in a scramble with Sam, who didn’t have his best stuff, all but forcing Grant to bench the man he chose with pick 5 instead of the man he was left with at pick 12 for the second round. Chance continued on his merry way with a -3 in alternate shot with Michael Block, and had Team Grant qualified for the final round probably would have been in the votes. More importantly, he was also part of surely the best golf cart pairing of the event alongside Sam, an unlikely duo to put it mildly.

So there you have it – all the votes for Your Golf Tour Tournament #1. Did we get it right? Wrong? Don’t care? Check out each player’s overall score for the tournament below, and head to our social media pages to let us know any thoughts.

Cumulative Scores in YGT – Pursell Farms

Wesley Bryan: -18

Brad Dalke: -18

Ryan Ruffels: -14

Sean Walsh: -13

Micah Morris: -12

Chance Taylor: -9

Taco: -7

Tooms: -7

Grant Horvat: -6

Luke Kwon: -6

Sam Heung Min: -6

Josh Kelley: -5

Peter Finch: -5

George Bryan: -3

Garrett Clark: -1

Roger Steele: +4.