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Issue No. 234 | July 22, 2025 | Read Online
I spent most of Sunday’s newsletter reflecting on a lot of non golf thoughts I had after the 153rd Open Championship, which is not really unusual for me but it does mean we have a lot of leftover Open stuff to get to below.
On Thursday, I’m headed for Colorado for a little mountain golf and some fly fishing with our kids. Books will be read (I’m particularly excited about this one). Mini golf will be played. Games will take place. Fights will break out.
All that to say we are planning on a Tuesday/Friday newsletter cadence this week as we clean up everything from Portrush, and then we will probably only publish one newsletter toward the end of next week before getting back in our regular rhythm as we march toward the Ryder Cup.
I told our team on Sunday evening that I can’t believe our first major season as a business is complete. It went so fast and was so much fun. I think it went fast because it was so much fun. Jason and I have more offseason plans than our typing fingers can probably handle, and we are even more excited (10x more excited!) about Normal Sport today than we were this time a year ago.
A podcast is inevitably happening. As inevitable as Jordan Spieth making the U.S. Ryder Cup squad, I might add 😄 . A couple of books are in the queue. We are trying to thoughtfully and methodically walk through where these three circles overlap because that’s a great place for us to live.
Thank you for joining us for this first year. We truly hope the joy we have in doing this comes through the screen (and headphones soon 👀 ) and that it makes your experience of following golf even more meaningful than it already is.
Today’s newsletter is presented by Meridian Putters.
My son and I went today to get a couple of clubs cut down for him for that aforementioned trip we’re talking this week. While we were waiting, we went over to the putting green and started rolling a few.
I picked up a putter — not a Meridian — hit a couple that felt good and then looked at the price tag. This was a used putter, by the way. A used putter. The tag said $579, and I just stared at it for a good 10 seconds like my brain had mixed up the numbers or something.
It reminded me of something Meridian founder Ryan Duffey said when I talked to him about his putter business.
One of the challenges I've had is communicating that this is a good putter. It's all being done in the United States, and it can be done in the United States. And you don't have to pay … it's still a challenge.
I look around and I go, “I don't get why it's so difficult to offer a reasonable price. We're just going to start at 250. We are small enough that we can do that. I can throw your initials on the putter for 30 bucks. We can make the putter your own for very reasonable prices.” That's just the way we operate.
Ryan Duffey
I loved that so much. I love the ethos of looking around and saying, Wait … we don’t have to do that. We don’t have to copy what everyone else is doing. We don’t have to charge the price of a laptop for our putter. We can be different. A lot of what Normal Sport is trying to get at, and I’m proud to partner with a putter company that feels the same.
Go check them out. Everything they make is awesome, but I’m particularly partial to the Key West (pictured below).
OK, now onto the news.
1. Fine, let’s get into it. People were Big Mad — like BIG MAD — that I compared Scottie’s 2022-2025 stretch to Tiger’s 2002-2005 stretch.
If I’m being honest, the reason I did it was because I thought the 20-year symmetry looked nice and it was the first four-year stretch I looked up after vaguely hearing Soly talk about the Scottie-post-2002-Tiger comps on the NLU pod.
When I saw that the numbers were almost identical, I went with it. Again, people were furious about this because it ignored Tiger’s 2000-2001 and 2006-2008 runs. Which is fair!
What’s interesting — and what I only realized later on — is that I was also comparing Scottie and Tiger’s age 26-29 seasons. Tiger at age 26-29 and Scottie at age 26-29. Here they are.
Scottie from 2022-2025 (age 26-29)
• 81 events
• 20 wins
• 4 majors
• 2 Players
• 2.8 SG/round
Tiger from 2002-2005 (age 26-29)
• 79 events
• 18 wins
• 4 majors
• 0 Players
• 2.8 SG/round*
*per Data Golf, which only includes 2004-2005.
2. I’m not really trying to compare Tiger and Scottie here. At least not yet. Tiger was a cultural icon. He shifted an entire sport, an entire sport’s economy. Nothing like it. Probably never will be again.
What I’m trying to do is set up the truth that Scottie is living at (and exceeding) where Tiger was living at the same age. Scottie obviously didn’t have Tiger’s age 21-25 run (or anything close to it), but he has a real opportunity to far surpass what Tiger did from age 30-40.
I could look at this Data Golf graph all day.
Scottie’s age 27 season got close to Tiger, then his age 28 season was better in terms of SG and age 29 has been as well. He’ll have to take it up a level to get to where Tiger was at age 30-31, but then it gets bumpy for the Cat.
Scottie has a real chance to have a better age 30-40 run if he can just somehow stay at this plateau (or near it) for the next 10 years. Very easy and simple, I know.
3. One of the things that stood out most to me on Sunday was what Spieth said about Scottie. You can watch it starting right here, but the money quote for me was as follows.
I think more so maybe it's less the golf swing and maybe more of his personality. He doesn't care to be a superstar. He's not transcending the game like Tiger did. He's not bringing it to a non-golf audience necessarily.
He doesn't want to go do the stuff that a lot of us go do, corporately, anything like that.
He just wants to get away from the game and separate the two because I know that at one time, he felt it was too much, that he was taking it with him. Whenever he made that switch, I don't know what it was, but he has hobbies. He's always with his family. They're always doing stuff.
Jordan Spieth
This is …
1. One of the more unusual quotes I’ve ever heard about a superstar and …
2. Absolutely terrifying for every other golfer in the world and …
3. Insane and kind of sad that hobbies are such an oddity in pro golf. [Jason’s point]
I think anyone who has experienced success at any level in the workplace knows and understands how difficult it is not to get swept up in that, to be consumed by it, to take it with us everywhere. To capitalize on it with a bigger salary and fancier title.
Now imagine if you were the best golfer on earth and people were soberly comparing you to Tiger Woods.
How do you just leave that at the office?!
I am personally always thinking about this newsletter, what I can write to get more readers, how I can delight the ones I have. I am consumed with self more often than I would like to admit, and I’ve experienced about 1/1,000,000 the success Scheffler has.
4. Scottie’s disposition is not normal. Not even close. And it makes me think it’s just kind of hardwired into him. Like, this is just who he is. Yes, it takes some discipline to not give yourself over to the corporate overlords or the magazine photo shoots or Lexus commercials, but there also seems to be an internal scale on which he measures the cost and the benefit, and that scale is not the same one everyone else has.
Here’s my guy Paolo Uggetti on Scottie’s dad from the weekend.
Scott chatted up the marshals nearby, sharing childhood stories of Scottie, raving about how he bounced back from the double bogey on No. 8, acknowledging the company his son now keeps in golf history while preaching the same kind of message his son has espoused at every turn.
"He doesn't ever think about that, he never has. He's just like, 'At the moment, I'm good at what I do,'" Scott said. "I always told him the joy was in the journey. You never know what you'll find along the way."
ESPN
I believe this is called — as KVV wonderfully described here — contentment.
But even as someone who would say that I find myself to be rather content, I think the way Scottie goes about things so unique and almost confounding. Even as someone who would say that I think I’m fairly grounded, I so often get swept up in my own minuscule headlines. Reading my own press. Always struggling to fight the thought that I need another $10,000 or need to accomplish something else.
We probably all do it. How could you not? But Scottie apparently either doesn’t do it or is far less enamored of both his own headlines and his own wealth than anyone else.
Shane said it well here.
It is almost impossible to believe that someone this good, this famous, living under this microscope, could possibly be this grounded.
Shane Ryan
I agree with Spieth: “I don't think anybody is like him.”
This post will continue below for Normal Club members and includes …
The Porter family major draft results.
A wild Scottie-Rory comp.
An admission that I … like Bryson?
If you aren’t yet a Normal Club member, you can sign up right here.
If you are, keep reading!
Normal Sport is supported by exactly 963 crazed individuals. By becoming a member, you will receive the following …
• Our very best stuff during majors (like this post).
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• First look at our new gear.
Kyle's content is a product of a sick sense of humour, a clear passion for golf and unquestionable dedication to hard work. That's not normal!
Kyle sees golf in a way that no one else does—and we're all fortunate to get to share in that view through Normal Sport!
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Few make the sport feel as fun and as thought provoking.
It's a treasure trove of the important, the seemingly important, and — importantly! — the unimportant stuff. It's an asset in my inbox.
There’s been no one else in golf that has tickled my funny bone as often as Kyle Porter does. He’s been instrumental in ushering in a new era of golf coverage and it’s been a pleasure to be along for the ride in that.
I’ve always enjoyed your love for golf. So often I see favoritism showed to golfers in the social media world, but I enjoy reading you telling a situation how it is regardless of the person.
The way Kyle has been able to mold a silly Twitter joke (normal sport) into a must-read newsletter on the weekly happenings in our silly game gives a great look into why he's one of the smartest people in golf.
Kyle is one of the best in the golf world at finding and synthesizing the absurd, the thoughtful and the fun things that make being a golf fan worthwhile.
Normal Sport is exploratory, ometimes emotional, always entertaining. It also has one of my favorite writers in the biz at its foundation.
Kyle is a perfect curator of the necessary moments of levity that accent a sport that will drive most of us insane.
Kyle is the best columnist in sports. That he has channeled those talents through strokes gained and Spieth memes is a blessing to golf.
