Issue No. 267 | October 31, 2025 | Read Online

Greetings!

I have greatly enjoyed this week of working on our Rory-2025 Masters book this week. We republished a 2025 Masters piece for Tuesday’s newsletter, and while we have a few new bits and pieces for today’s, some of it will also be republished Rory stuff from earlier this year.

We don’t have a release date yet for the book, but we do have a title —> The Weight of Rory. One thing I want to call out before I show you a few screenshots from our current iteration of the book is how important our membership is to projects like this.

The support of our members allows us to have space to cook a bit in the background and to not have to produce an unreasonable amount of content to keep the machine running. We are grateful for that and would love for you to join Norman’s Army right here.

Here are three fun screenshots from the book as we edit our way through it (it has also been hilarious to footnote the book eight months after it took place).

TODAY’S SPONSOR

Today’s thoughts are brought to you by our friends at Seed Golf.

This time a year ago, I didn’t know anything about Seed. Now? I believe they make the best golf balls I’d never heard of, which sums up their entire aim. 

And as our header illustration suggests, some poor trick-or-treaters simply looking for king-size Reese’s tonight are about to be met with world class spin rates instead.

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OK, now onto the news.

5 Almost Golf Things Worth Sharing This Week

1. The Data Golf contest we did last week was so much fun that we decided to do it again. This time, though, instead of responding to this email and absolutely obliterating my inbox, we are asking that you put your guess right here.

First one to get it gets a $25 gift card to our pro shop.

2. I haven’t been reading enough over the last few weeks as we’ve been working on some of the business aspects of Normal Sport, but I did catch this from KVV on the Old Course and the improvements that are currently being made to it.

I thought it was both lovely and quite sad. It is, of course, what is required given the unwillingness of the governing bodies to rein in the distance plight that threatens to render the following illuminating question moot: “Do you still want to go to St. Andrews"?

3. We dropped Episode No. 5 of the Normal Sport Show on Thursday, and it’s a fun one. Jason and I jamming on how Normal Sport started and why we started it.

If you ever find yourself struggling to explain to someone why you spend time reading a golf newsletter that’s barely about golf, just send them this. Hopefully it will help you.

Subscribe at the following places.

Spotify
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4. I wrote the following on Rory for our short-lived blog (which I realized was going to be just too much to keep up with). I imagine it was missed by most people for that reason (among others), and in keeping with the theme of republishing Rory pieces in the newsletter this week, I wanted to post it here.

It’s on his Irish Open victory …

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled into this wonderful quote by C.S. Lewis. It is about bicycles, but it is barely (and I mean barely) about bicycles.

There are other — probably better — ways to describe the career and life of Rory McIlroy, and I have explored many (maybe even most) of them.

But on Sunday, after he went eagle-birdie-birdie-birdie to win the Irish Open for the second time, this was the one that stood out to me. The one I immediately thought of.

Watch this.

Rory kind of stumbles through his first quote in an interview with Sky, unable to look at the person interviewing him and to really engage the questions.

You can always tell when he’s about to fall apart.

Here’s what he said.

But that wasn’t even the best thing he said. That came in the next quote when he summed up the way I feel about golf, which is that, yes, wins matter and history matters and strokes gained and championship putts and all of that matter. But ultimately, they are shadows of the moments that matter most.

There are innumerable things I have enjoyed about covering Rory McIlroy’s career. The list is lengthy and could legitimately take up a book (and literally is taking up a book).

But the through line for me — and the one I have written about quite often — is the preservation of his own joy. For the game, for the sport, for the life he gets to live, for the world he inhabits.

Success in adulthood dulls even the most exuberant youthfulness. Even the highest levels of achievement become normalized.

Think about your own life.

When you were 17 — if you were anything like me — making even $1,000 at a job made me feel I was a millionaire. And now, probably all of us are beyond that, have gone on to some category of thriving, whether that’s financially or in other areas of life. And yet, how rarely do we think about, consider, recognize and state that fact out loud.

How often do we exude gratitude?

For me, the answer is … not as often as I should. For Rory, it seems, the answer is … more frequently than most.

I asked him about this once. How does he maintain his love for a game and a career that just constantly beats it out of you? He said that this has not always been the case but as his career has gone on, he’s tried to get better at it.

This was from the summer of 2022.

In his 30s, Rory's disenchantment and re-enchantment with the golf has consistently ebbed and flowed. Winning helps, certainly. But winning — unlike that ubiquitous Nike ad — does not take care of everything.

There is something in his heart, though, that receives the re-enchantment, even if he is sometimes quick to forget it (just as he was in the months after winning the Masters). It is — we all know people like this — easier to harden one’s heart against such things. The harder you get, the less complicated life becomes because to be re-enchanted with anything is to once again risk being heartbroken.

Rory undoubtedly lives a charmed life. And yes, there are missteps. There are mistakes. There are moments and seasons I’m sure he’d love to have back. But the through line has always been joy. Delight. Genuine gratitude. That he gets to be Rory. That he got all the gifts. That people still, even after all those years, are there to see him and to watch that.

Cynicism with the world seems to be a natural drift for us all. I feel it. You likely do too. Re-enchantment with this place and these people? It seems silly, maybe even foolish at times. But what joy it leads to. What depth it brings about.

Let’s wrap it up with another Lewis quote. One of my favorites of all time. One that seems to apply here and probably to some other places if we think about it long enough.

It is about stories and people. It is about Rory, and it’s also not.

We all had dreams as kids. Most of them probably never came true. Not as many as Rory realized. But some of them did for us, too.

The question I am asking myself today: Am I enjoying the wonder of the world as much as my childhood self thought I would have?

I have lost the enchantment, sure, because enchantment belongs to children.

But the re-enchantment?

That belongs to us all.

Thank you for reading our handcrafted, algorithm-free newsletter about golf. We put everything we have into every newsletter we write, which is why they are frequently 1,801 words. Everything you read and consume was created from scratch by two humans who are absolutely obsessed with the game.

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