Fox Creek Golf Club in Livonia finally got its 2026 Quad-Tour Challenge on Saturday, July 19th — and after two failed attempts, each by rainouts, the third time delivered something worth every minute of the wait. Chase Keilitz, the rookie who claimed third place at the Crazy Brit just the day before, walked off Fox Creek as the 2026 Quad-Tour Challenge champion in the most dominant fashion the tournament has seen in years. The Mulligan Tour’s rookie class of 2026 didn’t just arrive this weekend. It took over.
The Quad-Tour format combines each player’s net score at Fox Creek with the best scores of three professionals from the Open Championship — played that same week at Royal Birkdale with a par of 70 — creating a 72-hole combined total where the pros do some of the heavy lifting but the MT player still has to show up. Keilitz’s pros showed up in commanding fashion, arriving with a combined score that handed him a four-stroke cushion before he even teed it up. What happened next is the part that will be told at Fox Creek for years. Keilitz went out and posted a personal net -5 — four birdies, two eagles, and an albatross. A double eagle. At Fox Creek. In the Quad-Tour. The man didn’t just hold the lead the pros gave him; he buried the field under an avalanche of scoring that produced a combined eight-stroke victory, one of the largest margins in Quad-Tour history. Tom Moran, you can relax now — the trophy is in new hands.
Jeff Cubel, fresh off his stunning run to the Match Play final just the week prior, continued his late-season surge with a strong round at Fox Creek and finished in second place — earning $24 and further cementing his status as one of the hottest players on the tour heading into the season’s final stretch. He had no answer for Keilitz, but few would have. In the skins game, Eric Birkle, Mike Geisser, Jeff Cubel, and Jon Barnes each claimed skins money of $12.50 each. On the challenge holes, Jeff Cubel grabbed the $10 cash CTP on hole 8, and Chuck Withey claimed the $20 MT account credit on hole 14 — small consolations on a day that belonged entirely to one player.
The 2026 Quad-Tour Challenge joins a champion’s list that runs back to 1999 and includes some of the tour’s most decorated names — Jeff Klipa with three titles, Eric Birkle’s 2015 wire-to-wire, Chris Cooley’s emotional 2019 playoff win that now carries even more weight in memory. Chase Keilitz’s name sits alongside all of them now, earned by the kind of round that doesn’t come along often. An albatross is the rarest scoring achievement in golf. Doing it in the middle of a Quad-Tour title run, as a rookie, one day after podiuming at the Crazy Brit, is something else entirely. The rookie season of Chase Keilitz is officially one for the books. The rest of the 2026 field has been warned.