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Mosquito Free. Scoring Olympic Gold.

While it may not exactly be my story to share, I’m not sure anything better sums up my experience at Olympic golf than Justin Rose’s Facetime call to his kids right after he signed his scorecard.

In a very short call, his son compared the Gold Medal to a medal he’d recently won at a soccer tournament and closed the call by warning his father not to trip on the medals podium. It was one of many human moments that transcended the golf played on Gil Hanse’s unique and exciting design in Rio de Janeiro.

There were so many human moments during the week it’s hard to capture them all even now.

Backed up on the 12th tee on Friday, Bubba Watson was taking selfies with fans along the ropes and handing out golf balls and pins to kids throughout the week; Martin Kaymer’s caddie was razzing Danny Willett and calling for the crowd to clap and whoop it up for “OUR MASTER’S CHAMPION” while Willett looked like he was going to swallow his tongue. After the round when I asked Justin Rose to sign the Olympic score sheet, Henrik Stenson asked if I wanted his autograph too because he was the Silver Medalist (prior to this I’d never had the second place finisher do much more than leave the scoring trailer). And Bubba, Rickie Fowler and all three American women showed up to cheer on Matt Kuchar for finishing third – I mean, winning the Bronze.

This was a different week.

And a special one.

I had the opportunity to score some great rounds of golf, watch some of the best players of our time, and witness history being made. By the end of the first two days I’d scored the first Olympic hole-in-one thanks to Rose (who did it with a 7-iron from 187 yards on the 4th hole); walked 18 with Fowler now at the Walker Cup, the US Open and the Olympics; got to score Willett and Kuchar and collected signed golf balls as a thank you from them all; and befriended a retired Rio native serving along side me as a scorer who shared his life in stories over dinner at a fantastic Brazilian steakhouse.

That was even before the final round assignments came out and we learned I would be scoring my first ever last group in a Sunday final round: Justin Rose, Henrik Stenson and Marcus Fraser. As it turned out, the first Olympic gold medal match in 112 years.

There were 16 birdies on Sunday between them – including two on the opening hole and two on the closing hole (Rose birdied both en route to a 67) – and the weather was perfect. A slight breeze on the first tee picked up as we went along to make things more challenging on the backside, but the sun was out and they were playing before a sold-out gallery. By the time we made the turn, the 18th grandstand was already full and waiting for us. We saw a caiman on the 10th hole, a capybara wandering the fence on the back nine and a half dozen full-sized Union Jacks blowing in the wind on every hole.

Our funny joking around with Rose and his caddie on a practice round day earlier in the week that two of us were from Philadelphia and had both scored at Merion – the site of his U.S. Open victory – were something both he and his caddie would mention as we made our walk from the first tee, to the 18th green, to the medals podium that Sunday.

So even now, long after scoring that match (and all four rounds of the women’s golf tournament), the voice of Rose’s 7-year-old son through the phone remains indelible. There was joy and excitement that you’d expect, but something more… you could see it in the scoring trailer on Rose’s face (who I believe wiped tears from his eyes as he sat down to sign his card). You could see it as his wife and mother stood there beaming with pride and emotion… and how they got choked up even talking to each other. And you could certainly hear it in the voices of his children as he put Great Britain’s team tracksuit on over his golf shirt before going out to claim his medal.

Rose would later call it a magical week. What an honor it was to feel a bit of that magic in that moment.

At the time Rose was asking everyone he saw if Andy Murray had won Gold that afternoon… because of course he was part of a team that week, a team much bigger than Mark Steinberg his agent, Mark Fulcher his caddie and whatever else Team Rose looks like day in and day out. (Plus indeed, Great Britain had claimed the Country Club Golds that day after all.)

It seemed like of all of us, Rose had felt what the Olympics meant all along. And watching his face as they played “God Save the Queen,” you got a sense golf in the Olympics might be here to stay.

So while it could have been fun to score Rory McIlroy instead of the long hitting youngster Seamus Powers (who I scored with Nicolas Colsaerts and Emiliano Grillo – with massive crowds from Argentina following us all day), I’m not sure it would have changed the Rose-Stenson-Kuchar medal stand. And maybe scoring Jordan Spieth instead of Matt Kuchar on Friday (who I scored with Danny Willett and Haotong Li of China) would have been different; it couldn’t have been more special than it already was.

During the week I took in women’s basketball with a friend from New Jersey and a lovely woman and her mother we’d met from Paris, we spent a night watching rugby sevens with some rowdy Texans and new friends from Sao Paulo, we watched diving with a few college girls from Arizona, and spent a night watching Gold Medal round wrestling. Sometimes we watched the Olympians and sometimes we watched the fans… fans from Iran, Spain, Mexico, Great Britain, Cuba, the US and everywhere else are much more the same than they are different. They all somehow got to Rio, they brought their noisemakers and their whole hearts and they cheered and yelled and made every venue we got to vibrate with passion.

To say I owe a huge debt of gratitude to all the men and women who fought to get golf into the Olympics is an understatement. To think I got to play a little part in such a major thing; to think I might have missed the Olympics altogether without golf’s inclusion… But because these two weeks were as much about human moments as the sports themselves, I was lucky to have the opportunity to personally thank Peter Dawson, Gary Player, Ty Votaw, Ian Baker Finch, Paul McGinley, Gil Hanse and many others who walked the fairways with us every day.

This was a different golf trip.

And a special one.

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Maybe DJ Doesn’t Shoot 68. But He Wins.

In retrospect, maybe the most interesting part is that we didn’t really know the firestorm that was brewing after our group left the 12th tee. We were just walking along watching and scoring some incredible golf. A couple of reporters were on their phones following Twitter and other social media so we had some notion, but not nearly the full picture of how the rest of the golf world was exploding.

Of course we now know the drama at Oakmont started on the par four 5th hole. The standard bearer and the “scoring supervisor” stayed up on the 6th tee rather than walk down to that hole. But Lee Westwood hit his approach shot short of the green and I couldn’t quite tell where it was, so I walked up with the three rules guys and stood with them on one of the mounds just left of the green. That turned out to be a fortunate thing. Mark Newell was the senior rules guy (and USGA Executive Committee member) who went out to the green to confer with DJ and Westwood.  When he walked back to us, I confirmed there was no penalty and even confirmed the stroke DJ was about to hit.

When we got to the 12th hole, USGA officials held all the media back near the edge of the 11th green when we walked up… I didn’t think much of that since it’s a pretty tight space anyway. The standard bearer and I walked up to the tee and overheard most of the conversation. I wasn’t paying that much attention at the beginning so I missed any reference to WHAT they were talking about. When I heard them say “we’ll have you review the video after the round before you sign your card” I started listening a lot more closely. We assumed it was about the 5th hole, but it wasn’t totally clear in the moment since I didn’t start eavesdropping in earnest until halfway through their chat.

Again I asked Mark Newell after the talk, is there anything I need to know for scoring purposes? He said “no.”

As the players and caddies walked off the 12th tee I fell in line behind the rules team… and Westwood dropped back to us. He was angry. He said something very much like this: “If you’re wondering who made the ball move on the green I’d vote it was the USGA. You have greens running at 16 on the stimpmeter and you put the holes on these little nobs and bumps, so if you’re looking for what made the ball move I’d look less at Dustin and more at yourselves.” Not those exact words, but very, very close to that. And he wasn’t quiet about it.

After that we got to see some fantastic golf from DJ and besides the regular madness of scoring a guy late on Sunday in contention – more reporters and media inside the ropes, etc. – it wasn’t that different except for people in the grandstands yelling “Come on let ’em play, ref” and somewhat hilarious stuff like that.

A TV guy’s radio went on and off – always one of my fears because of that ridiculous noise it makes going back on – just as DJ was about to hit his approach on 18. Dustin backed off, stared at the TV crew in the middle of the fairway and barked: “Really bro? Really?” Then he turned and proceeded to stuff the ball right behind the pin. That was pretty much the moment I felt that no matter what the penalty was – a stroke? two strokes? none? – Dustin Johnson had probably just won the U.S. Open.

The standard bearer and I were at the foot of the steps behind 18 as Westwood walked off… DJ took a good bit longer. We realized we were standing next to Bubba Watson holding his son and then I noticed Jack Nicklaus was standing on the other side of him. (I didn’t realize until later that the USGA was naming the gold medal for the champion after him, so it was both cool and shocking to see him there.) Again, bonus material for me because we clearly overheard Nicklaus – while embracing DJ – say how proud of him he was “especially with all the crap the USGA threw at you.” Never thought I’d hear “crap” and “USGA” in that voice in the same sentence. Haha.

We followed DJ up over the bridge and into the SWAT room in the Oakmont clubhouse. After Mike Davis and the USGA rules team guided him into a private room I stood and waited. Westwood was sitting at the scoring table and looked up at me and asked if I’d walked in with Dustin. I said “yes.” He asked me where he was now. I said he was in the room behind the closed door and pointed. He leaped out of his seat and, no joke, said, “Oh that’s bullshit I’m his official marker, I should be in that room too” and knocked on the door and disappeared.

You really do have to respect Lee Westwood… for that, and for a bunch of smaller reasons that unfolded over the round and especially the back nine. It was fairly obvious early on that he was no longer in contention to win after a rough start, but he played quickly and stayed out of Dustin’s way because it was clear that Dustin was right in the thick of things.

After they came back and reviewed and signed the official score cards I had DJ sign the paper copy of the score sheet we keep. He was extremely nice to everyone. It very much seemed to me that Westwood was a lot more upset than Dustin ever was about everything – at least expressively. Austin Johnson asked what I was going to do with the signed sheets and I told him eventually I’d probably frame them and hang them in my office. He asked if I was going to change the score before framing it. My response: “Lee Westwood and I both have him shooting a 68, that may have changed after the fact but that’s the score I kept and the one I’ll frame.”

“Yes, bro. Just yes. I’m going to tell him that hangs in your office one day as a 68. Yes,” was the response I got.

It was pretty amazing being on the green for the presentation ceremony too. We met Paulina, Jack Nicklaus, and got photos with Dustin… but that’s not really the golf story out of all this.

This was a special experience on a golf course I’ve played and marveled at before… and a day where the game truly loved me back a bit.