By Stan Olenik, The Golf Club Editor-Publisher

If you’ve ever watched a Formula One race, you’ve seen the winner spraying Cristal all over the road from the podium. Dom Pérignon tends to appear whenever tennis or basketball teams clinch championships.

From Moët to Brut to Maker’s Mark Champagne—specially commissioned by the Los Angeles Dodgers for their back-to-back World Series titles—champagne has long been part of how we know something important was won.

Adding champagne to the name of an event has also been around a long time. In the Upstate, however, there is only one golf tournament bold enough—and important enough—to put champagne right there in the title.

The Thornblade Club Annual Champagne Shoot-Out has become both the unofficial end of the Upstate golf year and, at the same time, the beginning of the next one.

The tournament began organically on a troublesome New Year’s Eve day, when a few friends decided to help club member Tommy Lever celebrate his birthday by playing a shoot-out and then retreating to the bar.

From that first gathering—an event with no real plan, no expectations, and certainly no thought it would turn into a tradition—the Champagne Shoot-Out slowly took shape. After a few twists, turns, and a healthy dose of “yadda yadda yadda,” it became one of the most anticipated days on Thornblade’s calendar and was played this year for the 32nd time.

Over the years, club members and their guests have teamed up with touring professionals who call Thornblade home. In different editions of the event, aspiring pros and accomplished veterans alike have braved whatever weather showed up that day, all competing for what may be one of the most unimpressive bottles of champagne ever uncorked.

Whatever it has been called over the years, it has always been played on New Year’s Eve. Rain, sleet, or snow—the same things the post office claims—haven’t stopped the Champagne Shoot-Out yet.

This year, the team captained by Monty Desai, and including Jody Redmon, Daniel Littell, and professional Sebastian Caplan, blitzed the field for the second straight year, posting an impressive 23-under-par winning total.

When you win an event this often, you earn the right to a little verbal victory dance.

“I put a good team together,”Desai said. “We’ve got a couple of guys who can kill it and hit it a long way, and inside 150 yards three of us can probably beat anybody at the club.”

Before captaining the last two winning teams, Desai had already been part of four other Champagne Shoot-Out victories. If there were a record book—and a cover photo—Desai, with six wins, would be on it.

This year’s champions finished ahead of a strong second-place team made up of the Reeves family. Brothers Crawford and Austin Reeves are both former college All-Americans—Crawford at Clemson and Austin at Furman. Austin’s résumé also includes a South Carolina Golf Association Amateur Championship.

Their father, Rob, is a solid player in his own right, the 2023 SCGA Father-and-Son champion with Austin, and the current president of the SCGA. Add in the steady play of their professional, Peyton Shore, and the group reached 20 under par—an excellent total, just not enough to catch the leaders.

Only a few of what could loosely be called the “founders” still play in the tournament. Lever remains happy to host friends each year for what he still considers his birthday party golf tournament, even though most of the field has no idea that’s how it all started.

History has a way of fading. One of the original birthday shoot-out players, Ron Johnson, won a closest-to-the-pin prize this year—some 30 plus years after taking part in what became the first tournament.

The champions’ champagne may not be Dom or Cristal, and it may never even be opened. But winning anything matters. And capturing a share of a sixth championship for Desai—and a second straight for his team—has once again allowed the term sandbagging to be tossed around freely by the losers, a charge the winners dismiss with a smile.

Whether the Champagne Shoot-Out marks the end of the 2025 golf season or the start of 2026, one thing is certain: what began as a small birthday shoot-out has grown into one of the most popular events on the club’s schedule. It’s a tournament golfers look forward to every year—questionable handicaps, unpredictable weather, and barely-champagne prizes included.

And maybe just as important, it gives us a golf story at a time of year when most of the world is thinking about football.