For Amanda Balionis, life on the PGA Tour looks like a hectic, long, relentless commute. The CBS reporter has been covering some of the biggest moments in golf this season, from the 2026 PGA Championship at Aronimink to the CJ Cup Byron Nelson at TPC Craig Ranch this week. And between the tournaments, she was in a rental car, driving herself from one stop to the next. But on one of those late-night drives home, she encountered an uncomfortable situation that left her stunned.
“Okay, so I was driving home today. This is a new one. In my rental car, I kept smelling something that smelled like a sweaty man. And I’m like, is it me? I’m checking. It’s not me. And then I realised it was my seatbelt. How sweaty must a person be to saturate a seatbelt? And like, are you not wearing a shirt? Are you just bare-chested in a rental car and sweating responsibly with your seatbelt on? It’s on me right now. Has anyone ever experienced this in a rental car—a sweaty seatbelt? It’s getting more disgusting the more I think about it,” Balionis wrote on Instagram, calling it “new travel horror unlocked.”
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Rental car seatbelts are among the most consistently overlooked surfaces in standard cleaning procedures. After cars are returned, most companies do a basic cleaning that covers vacuuming interiors, disinfecting high-touch areas, cleaning the windows, and removing any trash. But seatbelts rarely make that list.
Balionis covers roughly 22 to 23 events on the PGA Tour, including the Masters, the PGA Championship, the Genesis Invitational, the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, the RBC Heritage, and the TOUR Championship. She is on the road a lot, so we are sure she has plenty of other stories like this to share, but that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. For women, navigating professional or any travel comes with facing unexpected discomfort, and the golf world is also not untouched by these.
For instance, at the 2023 LPGA Tournament of Champions at Lake Nona, players arrived to find that no private locker room was available. Ironically, the area was shared with VIP sponsors and tournament staff. Yet there was neither storage nor privacy for 29 professionals competing that week. In fact, four-time LPGA winner Ryan O’Toole said at that time:
“I’m not mad at the club, I’m not mad at the sponsor, I’m annoyed at the LPGA for just being an overlooked factor.”
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After the issue was highlighted, the LPGA responded by ordering 36 temporary lockers to the venue, which arrived the same afternoon, hours before the first round. Instances like these serve as reminders of how easily basic needs for women in sports can be overlooked, and it often goes beyond hygiene.
As for Balionis, she is no stranger to travel. During the 2025 NFL season, she had opened up about battling a pinched nerve in her C4-C5 vertebrae that was sending shooting pain down into her shoulder blade. Yet she did her best to recover before a grueling stretch of weeks on the ground as the reporter. Similarly, Balionis has been the center of some of the most compelling storylines of the 2026 season.
Still on the course, Amanda Balionis keeps the conversation going at TPC Craig Ranch
Balionis is currently on the ground in Texas as part of the full CBS Sports on-air crew for the 2026 CJ Cup Byron Nelson, alongside Jim Nantz, Trevor Immelman, and Frank Nobilo. It has been a long stretch of events for her after she just covered the PGA Championship at Aronimink.
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On the field, Balionis has been in the middle of the conversation of the week’s most notable names. After Wyndham Clark carded 66 on Saturday to move into contention, she came to him with a very specific question. She pointed out that he was ranked 132nd on the PGA Tour in strokes gained putting, coming into the tournament, and it is a sharp contrast to how he had been playing greens all week.
Clark’s response was witty, as he said, “Jeez, I don’t think I’ve ever been that bad at putting stats, so thanks for letting me know. I’ve been hitting good shots. I played good at Augusta. I played good in Hilton Head. I’ve had some nice goals. I just didn’t make putts. So now, to make putts, it really does free it up.”
Heading into the final rounds, two shot off the lead, Clark looks like a player who may have found his timing right at the moment. And as for Balionis, she’s recovering from the horror story as she gets ready to be back on the course.
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