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Issue No. 174 | March 25, 2025
I … just … I cannot believe it was a real tweet.
I still can’t believe it.
Before we get to the news, congrats to Jen P. and the other person who hasn’t responded to our email yet on winning our Turtlebox giveaway from last week.
I realize that Jen P. is, ahem, also my wife’s name and initial. I can assure you that nothing nefarious was done within this giveaway and that there is an actual other Jen P. who lives on the east coast who will be receiving a lovely Turtlebox Ranger from us once they’re back in stock.
Speaking of … today’s newsletter is presented by Turtlebox.
Currently obsessed with: The Ranger, their most portable, lightweight Turtlebox yet. They took everything you love about Turtlebox durability, performance, and sound quality, and packed it in a smaller, adventure-ready design. It’s still waterproof, drop-proof, and built to handle the elements—just in a size that you can take everywhere.
The Brian Harman of speakers.
The built-in magnetic side mount is an amazing feature and perfect for golf (if I could pry it away from the rest of my family).
Wherever you set up camp — in the kitchen, on the course, at an actual campsite or perhaps even hunting with the 2023 Open champion — the tunes are locked in, and you can stay on the move.
OK, now onto the news!
It may end up being the tweet that birthed 10,000 memes. I’m honestly not even sure where to begin. I guess the easiest place is with a couple of thoughts off the top regarding a true “where were you when” moment on Sunday evening.
• I was out with my wife and friends, and found myself staring at my phone for like a minute straight. Not scrolling, not typing, not sharing.
Just staring in disbelief.
• I showed it to my wife and another mom and they wondered aloud if it was AI-generated or if these were wax figures. I had to — think about this — convince two other adults that one of the most famous humans that has ever lived did in fact distribute the information that he clearly distributed through his social accounts.
That’s how odd the whole thing was.
• It’s the second photo that does it for me. The rest of it, I can kinda/sorta get there. Let’s go through each piece in as painstaking detail as humanly possible.
• The standing shot in front of the ivy is whatever. The “Love is in the air and life is better with you by my side!” is basically what any wealthy 50-year-old couple might say. It’s a mad lib billionaire relationship post. It could be what Bezos or Larry Ellison might say. Whatever.
• The “we look forward to our journey through life together” is genuinely confusing! I had a pays-attention-to-this-stuff golf friend text me seriously asking if they got married. What a curious way to announce a relationship.
• I’ll defend the privacy note. This is what rich, powerful people do. They take control of a narrative. There were enough rumors swirling that forced the Cat’s hand to announce. For the sake of the rest of his family — his kids and her kid(s) attend school together — he had to do that. But then the pivot to privacy is obviously going to follow that up. That part actually makes sense to me. Maybe the only part that makes sense.
• Which leads us to two things: The second photo and the edit. Shout out to the Zapruder film — it is fitting that Tiger released this news in the same month the JFK files were (kinda?) released. Two cultural moments that may go down as the most studied in all of recorded history. Golf Twitter doesn’t have many moments anymore where everyone just starts firing off jokes and takes. This was a great one.
• Let’s tackle the photo first.
I just … why?
Why not simply post the ivy photo and move on? First, who took this? Second, who approved it?! I think it might be the least comfortable two humans have ever looked in a single photograph. So uncomfortable that I could be talked into a “they did it for the memes” theory — 6D chess stuff.
I keep staring at it expecting it to change like how the characters in Harry Potter can move around in photos or portraits. I keep expecting her to roll over and them to look normal instead of caressing his neck like he’s on a ventilator!
• Also, I’m not sure why I expect the man who wears this to have taste in how he presents himself to the world. That might in fact be on me.
• As for the edit, it screams of someone with the keys coming in after Cat’s original post and attempting to at least clean up the syntax. If you haven’t seen it, there was an amendment to the original tweet.
Original: At this time we would appreciate privacy to all those close to our hearts.
Edit: At this time we would appreciate privacy for all those close to our hearts.
I’m thankful that someone is thinking of the grammar. I would bet lots of dollars that Tiger, wresting control from his team, posted all of the original stuff and — at a loss after seeing what happened — his team was dying to edit all of it but knew he would be incensed so they settled for a simple to-to-for change.
Normal Sport Q4 merch alert.
• As is always the case with personal stuff in Tiger’s life, there is plenty of unintentional humor, but it all simply masks the sadness of a life that has never been able to be fully lived, a person who was never allowed to develop real friendship and community.
I think about this quote all the time. All the time. It is maybe apocryphal (I cannot find the source), but it is crushing nonetheless (and easy to envision him saying).
There's another sort of sad story about Woods that goes like this. He was asked about his favorite thing about going out on his private yacht and he said something like "staring at the fish because they don't stare back at you."
CBS Sports
Don’t let the Twitter bros convince you otherwise … it’s difficult to imagine wanting to be Tiger Woods.
There is some freedom in that, at least for me. I get to live a life that I am content with with good friends in total anonymity. This “dream life” of the fabulously rich and famous is championed as the highest form of achievement and accomplishment, especially here in the United States.
And in the end, it is — like nearly everything else — extremely empty.
That is probably a leap to take from a couple of awkward photos, but given what we know about Tiger and his strange world, I don’t think it’s much of one. Given what we know about Tiger, that second photo says quite a lot more than he probably intended it to say.
1. Imagine someone taking a pickax to a basketball floor. That’s tantamount to what happened with Adam Hadwin at the Valspar when he took an iron to a sprinkler head and it flipped on. Obviously it was stupid and childish (and also difficult to believe he won’t make it right). But I am also so grateful it provided this incredible screenshot where he tries to jam the sprinkler back into the ground with his foot.
I howled when I saw it.
2. The person who gave these quotes won a PGA Tour event last week. And he gave the quotes after winning the PGA Tour event.
Yeah, it's still not great. I'm still hitting the same shots that I have been the whole year, really. I was able to time it extremely well this week. It felt like every single good shot that I hit I just saved it really well. Because the club is just not in a great place for me coming down. It's just not what it used to be. So I can't really rely on my old feels anymore because the club is in a different spot and I have to change my release pattern to make that work.
Viktor Hovland
To be clear, this is insane.
“I had no idea how the ball was coming off my hand, just grateful to have won the Western Conference Finals.” -Steph Curry
Same energy.
3. Also, this clip got me pretty good. Somebody having to explain to Hovland that the winner of an event sponsored by a paint company gets a mural of themselves, and he looks at them like they just said he had to play the Masters with a left-handed putter.
And if there’s anyone from Valspar reading this, we’ve got mural ideas.
👉️ Come for the J.H. Taylor quote, stay for the good Rory/Viktor takes by SMartin, who is the best at historical contextualization.
👉️ This by Eamon Lynch on why the PGA Tour should wait out LIV is really good and has some intriguing details like the fact that the Tour valued LIV at $500M.
My fear in all of this is that the outcome will be the Tour mistaking how bad LIV is for how good the Tour is. The value of disruption should be that it makes you better, but when a business like LIV fails, it doesn’t mean it failed because the Tour was great. It may have just failed because it’s terrible and has a terrible business model.
👉️ This should not be unbelievable to me, but to see it on paper is wild. The U.S. has nearly 30X the number of courses as Scotland? What?! Then you remember that Scotland is smaller than South Carolina and wonder how the U.S. actually doesn’t have more than 16,752 courses.
This video of Vik talking about his swing and his game is incredible.
Here’s the money quote.
I am hard on myself, yeah. But that's also why I'm good. If I wasn't hard on myself I probably wouldn't be out here.
Viktor Hovland | 2025 Valspar
Hovland obviously was praised for how open and honest he is about his game. He shares more than most and punishes his own imperfections, seemingly to the point of self-flagellation.
That is … unusual.
Most professional athletes prefer to place blame elsewhere. It can be advantageous to do so. If something is your fault then it can be easy to lose confidence about how good you are. And the mental margins at that level? So, so thin.
Anyway, I compiled a quick graph showing where Hovland lands on the “speaks harsh truths and is open about everything” axis. He has to be one of the most up and to the right players in the world here.
I picked six big names and they kind of span the entire graph.
Bring me your takes below.
Two entries this week.
First, from a reader …
Wanted to drop in a personal Certified Sicko© moment from work this week. I work for an aerospace and defense company as an engineer, and often work with requirements specifications that mandate use of certain engineering equations.
One such equation involves the use of a variable which is shorthanded as "SG"... which actually stands for Specific Gravity. I definitely spent an embarrassing amount of time this week wondering why stokes gained was shorthanded in a pressure equation. Normal stuff.
Brendan M.
No notes on that one.
And also we had a submission from my guy, Roger Steele.
Yes, Roger, I believe it is.
I loved this from Hovland.
Yeah, at the end of the day like, yes, it's awesome being at the top of the leaderboard right now, and have a chance going into the weekend.
But it's like I truly just care about the things that I'm working on. And if the ball is behaving and doing the things that I want it to do, I'm going to play a lot of great golf in the future. And if it's not doing that, it's harder to repeat what I already did the first couple of days.
You just want something that's sustainable. And if your technique's good you're going to play a lot of good golf in the future. That's just how it works.
Viktor Hovland | 2025 Valspar
The ultimate process > results guy. Could play safety for Belichick!
Thank you for reading until the end.
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