Clayton was born at 1:51 p.m. the new parents basked in the presence of their big boy — 10 pounds, 6 ounces! — and then mom drifted off to sleep. 

So Luiz held his newborn, and yes, he put the World Championships on his phone. The games had been canceled last year because of COVID-19, and Luiz was pumped to tune in while he passed the time with Clayton. 

“I really got into disc golf in the last year,” he told me Monday from McKinleyville, California, where he and Thurman live. “This is the first time I’ve been able to watch the championships live. I wasn’t planning on watching it, but the way things worked out, he was born at the perfect time and we were hanging out in the room when it happened.”

“It” is in italics for a reason. I do not follow disc golf closely, so I am partially relying on Luiz’s narration here, but I also watched the clip in question, and it is indeed one of the wildest sports scenes I’ve ever witnessed.

The world championships came down to two players: Paul McBeth, whom Luiz refers to as the Tom Brady of disc golf, and James Conrad, the underdog. On hole 18, Conrad basically had to nail a 247-foot birdie to stay alive. “It seemed like McBeth was walking away with it,” Luiz recalls. Conrad released his Hail Mary attempt. “It just floated,” Luiz says, “and the whole time it was in the air I was saying, ‘Oh no, no way!’ When it went in, I went, ‘Oh my God! Oh my God!’ I had my son in my hands and a couple of nurses came running in asking if everything was OK.”

Or, as he texted a friend: “It was insane bro. Best worlds ever… I screamed when it went in [and] all the nurses came in thinking something was wrong.”

Nothing was wrong. Most importantly, he did not wake up Clayton or mom Thurman, who does not remember any of this.

Conrad went on to win the title. The family is back home; Thurman is doing well, and so is Clayton. Luiz would love for Clayton to give disc golf a try someday — if he’s interested in it, anyway. And even if he isn’t, his dad’s disc golf freak-out will almost certainly be brought up for years to come.

Plus, Luiz can now make an unusual, difficult-to-disprove claim: He is the first person to ever alarm hospital workers because he was yelling about a disc golf shot. 

“I’m sure they didn’t quite understand the moment,” he says. “I’m just very glad I didn’t wake up mom, because she definitely would not have understood what was going on.”