Golf is a scary game sometimes.
PublishedNovember 3, 2025 2:35 PM EST•UpdatedNovember 3, 2025 3:20 PM EST
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Michael Brennan made his first professional start on the PGA Tour in October at the Bank of Utah Championship. It was a memorable debut, seeing how he won the event by four shots after a ridiculously strong weekend with rounds of 64-66.
If you had asked the 23-year-old if he ever thought he’d be a PGA Tour winner, the specific timing of that question would be incredibly important, because it wasn’t too long ago that he thought he was going to be killed in the Rio de Janeiro favela.
Brennan went into detail about a terrifying travel experience he had while playing on the PGA Tour Americas earlier in his career. It’s fair to say that one particular Uber ride in Brazil will stick with him forever.
“I thought I was getting abducted in Rio,” Brennan explained during a recent appearance on ‘The Smylie Show.’
“I’m getting told as I’m getting into Rio, ‘if you go into the favelas, you’re dead.’ We’re driving kind of through one, and I’m freaking out…I’m sitting in the passenger seat so I can kind of see the driver, and he starts voice-to-texting (in Portuguese). Then he goes into the Uber app, I have a video on my phone, and starts screenshotting our route and final destination and sending it to someone on his phone.”
Brennan went on to explain that he started texting practically everyone in his phone and sharing his location with people, which is an understandable move given the circumstances he found himself in. Sitting next to him in the car is his caddie, Jeff Kirkpatrick, who couldn’t care less about the situation unfolding.
“It was a false alarm, but I thought we were dead,” Brennan said.
What a quote.
Brennan’s story – minus the whole fear of being abducted and murdered – is a solid representation of the professional grind. So many players looking for their breakthrough are forced to travel around the world, jump in random Ubers in random countries, play for a paycheck that may not even cover travel expenses, while essentially just competing for their name to be towards the top of a season-long points list.
