Greetings!
We are giving away this OGIO carry on bag this weekend. The version we’re giving away is the “Scottie prison shirt” orange version. And we’ll be giving it away to a Normal Club member. If you’ve been considering becoming a member, you can do so here and you’re automatically eligible to win the $350 piece of luggage.
Winner will be announced in the Tuesday newsletter.
Name drops today: Michael La Sasso, Justin Rose, C.B. MacDonald, Tiger Woods, Werner Herzog, Thomas Paine and Lee Westwood.
Today’s newsletter is sponsored by Turtlebox, and their new limited edition fighting lady yellow Ranger speaker.
I got my hands on one for a little unboxing on our podcast this week, and I believe I described the color as somewhere between “Open leaderboard” yellow and “the color of the flowers that make up the logo of the first major of the year” yellow.
More importantly, I was holding it as my wife rolled through the house later in the day and said, “I’m in love with that color.”
More importantly than the color, though, Turtlebox will be powering our outdoor Super Bowl party on Sunday with their party mode feature: connecting the fighting lady yellow to the two or three or four other speakers that make their way out there.
Can’t wait!
OK, now onto the news.
Two mea culpas from Tuesday’s newsletter. The first was pointed out by an astute reader.
I said Djokovic was born in 1986. He was actually born in 1987.
I said Rose reached world top 40 in 2003, but it actually happened in August 2002.
Thank you, as always, for pointing out what I got wrong. Genuinely! It’s great to know and not the last time it will happen.
1. I’m not sure what series of events led me to a point in my life where I created a business that makes other people — at least a couple other people — think of me specifically when they see these headlines.
My 20-year-old self has a lot of questions, but I also think it’s hilarious that this is what we’re known for. Sports are so dumb sometimes (most of the time?), and it’s right to acknowledge the absurdity and to not take all of it so seriously all of the time (only when Spieth is in contention).
[Jason here] We spent the first 15 minutes of our weekly team meeting talking about the unforgettable moment in sports history that Kyle noted above.
It reminded me of the beautiful Werner Herzog film ‘The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner’ (1974) about a ski jumper who actively protests against the event organizers who want him to jump dangerously farther. I hope that if one positive thing comes out of penis-gate, it's that some of you will enjoy the film.
2. I would watch a video of LKD explaining … basically anything at this point, but this on the claw grip is tremendous. The term “axis of the wrist joint” was used. Perhaps multiple times. So was “I was very stroke aware” by Rose himself.
This such a tiny, ridiculous thing (tons of normal sport in here), but it also explains why the No. 3 player in the world became the No. 3 player in the world at 45 years old.
3. We’re going to talk about the OWGR news, but I first want to note that I had an actual problem with Lee Westwood tweeting this about LIV receiving probably more OWGR points than it deserved.
My problem?
You can’t brag about never reading a book and then also say that you stand on the side of the not idiots.
4. As for my actual LIV-OWGR take, I thought the outcome was … fine.
As Soly pointed out in the NLU mid-week pod, it’s much easier to win a LIV event than it is to finish third at the Phoenix Open, and yet the winner of LIV Riyadh this week and the third-place finisher at the Phoenix Open this week both get 23 OWGR points.
The most amusing part is that almost everyone on LIV (see Westwood above) — including the league itself — is saying things like, Why are we being cut off at the top 10 receiving points. This is different than any other tour is treated!
Yeah man. I do wonder why that is.
Maybe it’s because …
The board’s overriding aim was to identify an equitable way of ranking the best men’s players in the world, including the top performing players in LIV Golf, while taking account of the eligibility standards that LIV Golf does not currently meet and the fact that it operates differently from other ranked tours in a number of respects.
OWGR (bold and italics my own)
5. Here are some of those eligibility standards.
• LIV Golf’s average field size of 57 versus the minimum of 75 set out in OWGR regulations.
• The restrictive pathways to join LIV Golf with two spots filled from the Asian Tour’s International Series and three from a “closed” promotions event which does not offset the turnover of players exiting the league.
• Self-selection of players with players being recruited rather than earning their place on the tour in many cases.
• The addition/removal of players to/from teams based on their nationality rather than for meritocratic reasons.
For my purposes, the OWGR remains a not very useful place to rank the best men’s golfers in the world. It is more or less a vehicle to determine who gets into major championships.
So I think this middle ground is a pretty decent place to land. I would have been fine with awarding no points because of how far short LIV falls of the criteria (see above), but it’s also difficult to be taken seriously if your organization doesn’t acknowledge Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau as actual professional golfers.
This threads that needle for the most part.
I have a few more OWGR notes, a final Australian Open take, some PGA Tour-ESPN thoughts, the most Acquired golf thing I’ve seen to date and an extraordinary Thomas Paine quote for our Normal Club members after the jump.
If you’re not one yet, you can sign up right here.
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Best of luck in the OGIO giveaway. Their gear continues to rule.
6. I did look up what somebody like Michael La Sasso — who just signed with LIV — would have to do to get into the top 100 in the world and start getting invites to major championships.
The OWGR numbers are a bit convoluted, but the 100th-ranked player has roughly 55-70 total OWGR points. So let’s say most of the point distributions for LIV look like they do at LIV Riyadh this week, and La Sasso does this at the 12 LIV events.
• Win
• 8th
• T12
• 2nd
• T11
• 7th
• T15
• T20
• 3rd
• T14
• T12
• 5th
That would be an insane season and give him around 55-60 points. Throw in the fact that these field ratings will likely get better over time as players rise in the OWGR and point distributions will increase. So now it’s not a crazy path for a La Sasso to take LIV money and play his way into the majors. Difficult, yes, but arguably not as difficult as, say, finishing 7th in six consecutive PGA Tour events.
LIV, without question, got a more-than-fair deal here, and it’s one that I do wonder if the OWGR will look back on and think, Man, we should not have done that.
7. There are have been some interesting texts flying around recently about the PGA Tour and ESPN.
Point No. 1: The Tour has seemingly started leaking news to ESPN where it formerly leaked it to other outlets.
Point No. 2: Brooks’ return at Torrey, broadcast on ESPN+, was also shown on actual ESPN in the middle of the day.
In a vacuum, maybe this is nothing. They could be one-off things. But given Brian Rolapp’s history — working so hard on the NFL’s media rights — I don’t think any of it is accidental.
You want to be thought of as bigger than you’ve been? Start getting news on the home page of ESPN. Start interrupting the Pat McAfee Show in the middle of a Thursday. Again, that’s not the biggest deal in the entire world, but it’s standard deviations away from where the PGA Tour has been over the last 10 or 20 years.
8. This on the future of the Australian Open is amazing. TL;DR their CEO is proposing a number of changes, including the following.
Five-set women’s matches.
Removal of the referee chair.
Removal of lets.
Player benches that look less like benches and more like Justin Rose’s RV.
I think the entire thing was stunning to read because it reminded me that leagues — or major organizations — can in fact play offense and not just back foot everything like the Tour has done in recent years. Everything mentioned in the article had either a compelling reason that benefitted fans or a good business component (or both).
It honestly reminded me a bit of how ANGC has operated for a while.
Iterating on the previous year’s event, adding a few things, taking what didn’t work away. It's tougher to do at an organization that operates 48 weeks of the year instead of two, but again that’s another reason for the Tour to cut down how much it is producing — so it can have an offseason to actually refresh the product.
9. I got this great email from a reader this week about the Scottie-Tiger corner I’ve been on.
Scottie couldn’t possibly be a more perfect answer to the question “what did we learn from the career of Tiger? What was the lesson?”
Don’t burn too bright. Take it slow. Stay planted. Perspective and grounding matter, maybe more than anything else. Your wife and caddie and support team will carry you, so make great choices and treasure those relationships.
You hear people say stuff like “Ludvig was built in a lab for modern golf”. Scottie is the generational talent you’d build after watching Tiger’s career.
Sam L.
I have never articulated it in that exact way, but it’s such a great way to frame all of it. Scottie is Tiger while also somehow being very much the anti-Tiger.
10. I believe I dropped it in here already, but I want to point you to the second part of NLU’s deep dive on C.B. McDonald. This Spotify comment resonated with me.
I have been obsessed with the idea of Acquired for ____________ but especially in golf. Would I like to be involved in such a project at some point? Absolutely, I think it would be in my wheelhouse from an audio/video standpoint. But I’m also glad that it’s being brought into the world more and more.
For those who don’t follow Acquired, they basically tell decades-old or even centuries-old stories about amazing companies like Rolex, Nintendo, Costco and many, many others. It’s only 8-12 episodes a year, but you can’t get the product anywhere else, which is why they charge $3m per half season to be the presenting sponsor.
If I was running NLU, I would break this out into its own thing and not just fold it into the week-to-week podcast feed. It is so much work, but something like this has a chance to stand alone in the golf (and maybe sports?) world as one of the best pieces of content available to fans.
11. Not unrelated to the point just above!
A reader sent me this quote from Thomas Paine (no relation to Billy) this week. I love it.
What we obtain too cheaply we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.
Thomas Paine
Reading that in a world obsessed with what was produced 5 seconds ago.
I wonder if Paine was the author of that quote Lee Westwood tossed out there earlier in the week …
Thank you for reading our ridiculous (mostly) golf newsletter.
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