Patrick Cantlay doesn’t listen to music made after this year, throw TGL hammer when up

There’s a non-zero chance that Patrick Cantlay has read “Hammer of the Gods,” Stephen Davis’ 1985 unauthorized biography of Led Zeppelin that was written after two weeks following the rock band during their 1975 U.S. tour.

Cantlay has shared his affinity for Zeppelin before. He did an interview with Golf Channel in 2020 in front of a framed Zeppelin poster. That next year, his coach, Jamie Mulligan, said in a PGATour.com article that Cantlay “hasn’t probably ever listened to a full song that was written after 1979. He’s listening to Led Zeppelin, Jackson Browne, Cream.” A year after that, in Phoenix, Cantlay told Golfweek, “My musical taste is mainly summed up as like Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, with Zeppelin being my favorite.”

So unsurprisingly, during his TGL team Atlanta Drive’s debut on Tuesday night, Cantlay chose Zeppelin to blare throughout the SoFi Center while he hit shots.

Afterward he was asked again about his Zeppelin fandom, and he confirmed, “If it’s after 1980, I probably don’t listen to it.”

Cantlay apparently has another rule, too: He doesn’t throw the hammer when his team is leading.

“We just got up early and didn’t need to,” Cantlay explained after Atlanta’s 4-0 TGL victory over New York Golf Club. “It was that simple.”

Added Cantlay’s teammate Billy Horschel: “I think the hammer is a cool thing, and we’ve seen it the last couple weeks, but if you don’t use it wisely, it can backfire. … We’re all very much strategic and trying to understand, but Patrick takes it to another level, and he’s like, guys, we don’t use it in these certain ranges and everything, and we let him make the decision of when we needed to throw it, and once we got up early, he said, hey, guys, we’re going to hang on to this.”

For as unpopular as Davis’ biography was with Zeppelin, Cantlay’s hammer principle didn’t go over well with the New York players.

“Yeah, I thought that was the point of the hammer,” Matt Fitzpatrick said when asked if he’d hoped Atlanta would throw it. “Hey, just me.”