Greetings!
If you’re wondering where I’m at in life right now, here is a story that happened earlier this week.
On Thursday, I had an in-person meeting in Dallas. Pants, a polo (the Maxwell from Holderness and Bourne, of course), nice shoes, the whole deal.
My 12-year-old woke up and walked in the kitchen. He looked at me and said, “Are you playing golf today?” I said, “No, why?”
He responded (surprised), “You’re wearing a belt.”
So sloppily dressed am I that my own son thinks I only wear a belt to play golf. Not sure whether to be proud that I have turned this lifestyle into a career or embarrassed at the astonishment of my son seeing me in a belt off the golf course.
Regardless, I probably need to dip deeper into the H&B well.
Name drops today: Titanic, Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity, Betsy Ross, and LACC.
Today’s newsletter is presented by our friends at Charlie Golf Co.
The U.S. Open is over, but you can still celebrate 250 years of normal golf moments with the Charlie Golf Co. stars and stripes collection (OK, more like 125 years here in America).
When the founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence and Betsy Ross ripped through that first flag (allegedly) I’m sure they envisioned an entrepreneur in Iowa painting it on some wooden sticks so 7 year olds could know whether their feet are aimed in the correct direction while getting through the zone. This would have been among the top ambitions for these men and women. Surely.
And to honor that, I would like to point you toward the great Charlie Golf Co. limited edition stars and stripes collection of bags and alignment sticks. They — like everything Charlie Golf Co. makes — are awesome.
And now, onto the news.
I had a few disparate thoughts after my (alleged) final piece on the U.S. Open on Wednesday. You guys know I can’t just do one final thoughts newsletter after a major championship. Has to be at least two if not three. This one will be it, though. I promise. May the USGA stroke me two iced coffees at their next event if it’s not.
1. After Shinnecock, I started thinking about U.S. Open venues and how I would rank them. I’m not steep on architecture, and I missed out on going to a couple of these, so this is not a list necessarily rooted in golf course quality or playability, although both of those qualities do play into the rankings.
Instead, it is primarily a personal tiered ranking that is also answering the specific question of, “if all future U.S. Open venues were wiped off the board, and the USGA announced a new one for 2027 tomorrow, how excited would you be about that venue?”
Here’s my ranking.
I am sure everyone will have similar feelings and agree wholeheartedly.
• My broader point here is that Pinehurst and Shinnecock are it for me. The places. Pinehurst more so for the experience, Shinnecock more so for the golf course and shots.
• Brookline is a terrific mixture of the two.
• I probably struggled the most with where to put Chambers Bay and Erin Hills. I loved Chambers, but that might just be nostalgia. Erin Hills was good but also very easy (no wind), and I didn’t love the experience there as much as Chambers.
• Oakmont seems just objectively better than Erin Hills. Having said that, Chambers > Oakmont looks kind of silly when I see it on paper, but I do think that’s how I feel. Mostly because Oakmont feels like a difficult slog and Chambers feels like a unique (and kinda wild!) test of skill. Maybe too wild!
• I absolutely love Winged Foot as a golf course and a place. But the way they have to set it up now doesn’t make for a great U.S. Open.
• Similarly, LACC is a good course for me and you to play, but probably not a fantastic U.S. Open venue.
• Pebble … meh. It’s awesome. It’s Pebble! But I just don’t love it as a U.S. Open venue anymore. I’m not totally sure why. Maybe a combo of good but not great crowds and a course that’s tough to set up for a modern U.S. Open.
I feel pretty good about my S, A and E tiers. Everything in between I can probably be talked into or out of without a ton of effort.
2. I loved this from the Data Golf live blog during the U.S. Open.
My biggest takeaway might be that being on site reduces my attachment to how the course is playing. I’m still interested in the insights outlined above, but to a certain extent I’m just enjoying watching the test that is presented to the players.
Will C.
I feel this. It is more of a pure golf experience on site than it is a formula or a math problem. With that in mind, here are my five favorite holes in terms of the experience they provided at Shinnecock.
9 — Rocked, wish it was 18.
10 — Wild hole, guys hitting anything from 6 iron to driver off the tee is very cool.
14 — I have no idea if it’s a great hole, but I love how the green is bowled and how you can use the contours on a blind shot to get it close.
11 — It looks like it’s floating in the sky. Amazing golf hole.
7 — This was one of the cooler places to watch players (all players) hit shots all week.
Honorable mention: 6 (Joaquin’s opus) and 16 (Wyndham’s dagger).
3. DJ said something on the NLU pod on Sunday evening that I agreed with wholeheartedly and was feeling on the grounds. He said that it felt like we needed more buildup time to Scottie’s slam.
Maybe not Rory-like buildup, which felt like this …
But maybe a bit more than, 400 days ago I had only won the Masters, and now I’m one of seven guys to ever win all four of the major championships.
Some of this is due to Scottie’s unwillingness to engage in the grand slam conversation but some is that we just haven’t had time to discuss it. It felt more like he wa
s trying to win Shinnecock than that he was trying to win the grand slam last weekend. That’s fine, but I would prefer — if he ever does it — for it to feel like he’s winning both. Like it did with Rory. Like it always would have if Phil had won the U.S. Open.
This post will continue below for Normal Club members (all 1,056 of them) and includes a great Scottie quote on Wyndham, a bad Wyndham quote by Wyndham and my favorite scene from a week full of them at Shinnecock.
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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'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!
Normal Sport is exploratory, sometimes 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 approaches coverage of the game with both conviction and curiosity
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 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.
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.
Kyle is the best columnist in sports. That he has channeled those talents through strokes gained and Spieth memes is a blessing to golf.
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.
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