Normal Sport is presented by Seed Golf this week. An Irish golf ball company presenting our coverage of a golf tournament started in Scotland, played this year in England and attended by an American (Jason) who currently lives in the Netherlands.
Sure, absolutely. Let’s do it.
Check Seed out right here.
Open week.
With all respect to the United States Masters — which I absolutely love and has played such a pivotal (and disproportionate) role in my career — the best week of the major season has arrived.
Related: Also the most normal.
Why?
It’s not just the coat hangers for me, although the coat hangers are amusing. If you didn’t catch it on Monday, the most recent major champion — like the best golfer in the world from a month ago — was swinging his club with a coat hanger in his hands on Monday at Birkdale.
One reader pointed out that he’s prepping for the wrong major prize.
But beyond that, what makes normal sport so normal sport is often the unpredictability of nature and the elements. There are innumerable examples.
And it is at The Open that these examples seem to most often disclose themselves. It is the least tamed, the most “see what she brings ya’ today, boys” of all the major venues. And so it leads to just the oddest (and often most amusing) adventures imaginable.
Every year. Every Open. I cannot wait.
Oh, one quick note before we get rolling: Our email provider — the good folks over at beehiiv — remind us every once in a while to tell you to check your promotions and spam folders and drag emails into primary plus mark messages as “not spam.” This (hopefully) benefits you and it definitely helps us. Thank you for enduring our email deliverability PSA.
Name drops today: Fred Ridley, Martin Del Potro, Tim Ferriss, Jude Bellingham and Young Tom Kim.
Today’s newsletter is presented by our friends at Charlie Golf Co.
CGC founder, Tyler Johnson, recently posted a video of golf clubs he and his team have built toddler (and junior) golf bags for. They include Brookline, Winged Foot, The Park and Eastward Ho, among many others.
A sampling.
Why am I writing about this? Why does it matter?
Well, it matters because, yes, buying an individual golf bag from Charlie Golf Co. is a great way to support a business run by a great dude and golf sicko.
But also, if you run any kind of B2B operation — a golf shop, an organization that needs to provide cool client gifts, anything — you should get in touch with Tyler. He will make both the experience and product feel great.
And now, onto the news.
Birkdale bunkers presented by Seed
1. This was something co-host Hayden pointed out on our podcast last week, and I was thinking about it as Young Tom Kim (YTK) closed out his fourth (!) PGA Tour win on Sunday at the Ruh-Nay-Sonce Club.
The (relative) lack of variety in PGA Tour venues has shaped not only who the stars of the PGA Tour currently are but also how one becomes a star on the PGA Tour.
Extreme example: If every Tour event was played at Torrey Pines with the rough up, Bryson, Rory and Rahm would each have 50 wins. That scenario is not entirely indicative of the current lack of variety of courses and setups on the PGA Tour, but it’s also not that far off.
YTK winning the Scottish is a good example. YTK is never (I mean never) going to win a modern PGA Championship with its brawny setups and the length you need to contend.
But he has shown in recent years that he can absolutely contend on fast and firm tracks where an entirely different skillset is needed.
The conundrum here for organizations is that going to fast, firm golf courses often rewards “non stars” so why an organization want that? The reason for this is because “stars” were made on PGA Tour courses and setups that are less varied.
So it appears as if fast and firm identifies more of a random champion and makes for a lesser event, but the truth is that maybe if there was more variety in the courses the Tour goes to, guys like Tom Kim would be bigger stars because they would win more frequently.
One pathway to identifying winners (and thus stars) is not necessarily better than the other, but it’s worth acknowledging that they are different. Which I think is a truly interesting discussion when it comes to professional golf.
There are some guys — like Scottie and Rory — who would thrive no matter what the course setup was. But others need specific parameters to be great. That pro golf has mostly (mostly, not always!) in the modern era determined that those parameters should be to identify who can hit the ball the farthest is a bit of a bummer to me.
Which is part of the reason this stretch of golf in Europe is so refreshing.
2. Almost everyone watching the Wimbledon final: Let’s talk about the prince’s beard.
You, golf sicko and major championship aficionado: Let’s talk about the chairman’s hair.
3. We just dropped some new gear in our pro shop.
It’s awesome — much of it is built by Normal Sport partner, Holderness and Bourne — and buying some is a great way to support our business. Click on any of the photos below for a link to that product in our store.
   |   |
This post will continue below for Normal Club members (all 1,056 of them) and includes thoughts on Wimbledon, Jude and the torment of golf.
By becoming a member, you will receive the following …
• Access to 100 percent of our content this week.
• An invite to our Slack channel where we watch and talk golf together.
• A free digital copy of our Rory book.
• 15% off to our pro shop.
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.
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!
Kyle is a perfect curator of the necessary moments of levity that accent a sport that will drive most of us insane.
It's a treasure trove of the important, the seemingly important, and — importantly! — the unimportant stuff. It's an asset in my inbox.
Few make the sport feel as fun and as thought provoking.
Kyle is the best columnist in sports. That he has channeled those talents through strokes gained and Spieth memes is a blessing to 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, sometimes emotional, always entertaining. It also has one of my favorite writers in the biz at its foundation.
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 approaches coverage of the game with both conviction and curiosity
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.
.svg){kind=spacer}
