Carolina Outer Banks golf, discover Tahoe-Reno, Mickelson's U.S. Open driver woes and Geoff Shackelford on his latest book, "Lines of Charm"

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Podcast host Dave Berner brings the show on the road, to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Berner finds a sandbar off the mainland with “perfect conditions for links style golf.” The courses are not long (the longest comes in under 6,300 yards), but the slope ratings are high.

Sea Scape Golf Links Head Professional Kevin O’Bey comes on with Berner and gives an insider’s perspective on the area’s golf.

“It’s fun,” O’Bey says of Outer Banks golf. “If you can ever catch a day with no wind, you better take advantage of it. Because 25 days out of the month the wind’s going to blow … Yardage means nothing.”

West Coast Bureau Chief Chris Baldwin returns from a trip to the Lake Tahoe-Reno High Sierra area with tales of good golf (cheaper than Las Vegas) and perfectly crazy towns.

“There’s a neat town called Graeagle that has one traffic light and six golf courses,” Baldwin says. “Which sort of shows you where their priorities are.”

Noted golf author and course architecture guru Geoff Shackelford discusses his book “Lines of Charm: Brilliant And Irreverent Quotes, Notes, And Anecdotes from Golf’s Golden Age Architects” and those zany old course architects. No, really.

“They were wonderful writers,” Shackelford says of the trailblazing designers. “More importantly, they were funny. They were very funny guys. I think a lot of people think the master architects are very serious and take themselves a little too seriously, and they just weren’t that way at all.”

Equipment expert Kiel Christianson argues that Phil Mickelson’s use of a fade-biased driver sealed his collapse in the U.S. Open.

“You just wonder if trying to hit a baby slice with a fade-biased driver, he just overcooked it and ended up bouncing it off the hospitality tent,” Christianson explains.