In the first episode of our new Golf Digest podcast, 50 Things That Changed Golf, Shane Ryan and Jamie Kennedy travel back 30 years to the 1996 Masters.

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In the early 1980s, there came a point where the Ryder Cup governing bodies had seemingly tried everything, but nothing worked. The matches weren't competitive, the U.S. players were losing interest, and the chief sponsor of the European team dropped out, leaving them with no money to continue. This, even more than the pause for the Second World War, saw the Ryder Cup on the thinnest possible ice, seemingly fated to die a sad death. This week on Local Knowledge, we're telling the story of the unlikely resurrection—how a collection of players, captains, and executives managed to keep it alive against the odds.

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Buried in Ryder Cup history, in the middle of the last century, are some enormous personalities, and today we're looking at three of them who rise to the level of "maniac"—which we mean as a compliment. These three stories encompass incredible human resilience in the face of tragedy, outrageous, event-changing competitive drive, and an unlikely savior of the Ryder Cup when it was just about dead.

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