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I used to listen to the Dan Patrick Show religiously. Basically my age 22-28 listening years were some diet of Bill Simmons, How I Built This, This American Life and the DP Show. I guess it’s probably no surprise then that I somehow ended up as an … entrepreneurial golf newsletter writer.
But I remember one of DP’s things – one of the through lines of his career really – was the idea that you should remove your emotions and your biases from the presentation of your content.
This always struck me as completely absurd.
Wait, I want to become less of a fan so that I can try and entertain and inform other … fans?
DP loved the Reds, but he – as self-awarely as possible – always distanced himself from them. He would talk about them but not in a personal way. I loved the show, but this always bothered me. I wanted to know how he felt. I wanted to know how the Reds were affecting him.
This was very much an ethos of writers and thinkers from his generation, which I understand and respect from a professional perspective.
But we started Normal Sport to do more or less the opposite of this.
I do not have a traditional journalist’s background. Never went to journalism school (shout out to Bubba for never getting a lesson), never worked at a newspaper, none of it. In fact, none of our team has traditional schooling in this arena.
Because of this, we have entered into covering golf in our own, quirky way. It’s probably how we landed on the tongue-in-cheek Normal Sport name, the strange side-eye sheep logo and why we began writing 2,500-word illustrated emails about golf that we expected people to read (and then, for some reason, they did!).
How did all of this even start?
I’m honestly not totally sure.
Logistically, there is a timeline. I got into sports media when I was 26 by starting a website called Pistols Firing, where I covered Oklahoma State football, hoops and recruiting, all from my home in Dallas, Texas. It was a subject I knew at least something about, and I just wrote and wrote and wrote and did it all over again basically every day for nearly 10 years.
In 2013, I added “professional golf writer” next to “professional college basketball recruiting writer” to my Linkedin profile. That was the year I was hired by CBSSports.com to cover golf, which I did through writing, podcasting and television for 12 years, through September 2024. I actually did both of those jobs for a while, but in 2020, I sold Pistols Firing, which – even though I was still at CBSSports.com – left a bit of a creative and entrepreneurial void in my career.
At some event along the way – maybe the 2020 U.S. Open? – I started noticing ridiculous golf things like players taking their clothes off to play shots out of the mud, players using pool noodles as driving range tools and some even getting into Yoga poses to properly identify their golf balls.
I started documenting these moments on Twitter, and Jason Page helped me illustrate a book about all of them. We self-published it and sold it on a homemade website. Normal work. Several thousand people even purchased it!
We went on to make two more of those books and even physically printed the second and third ones. It was all great fun. Mostly great fun, anyway. Publishing and printing logistics are about as fun as four putting from 10 feet.
A newsletter emerged from those books. It made more sense to cover all of the very normal stuff as it was happening because most of it had a short shelf life anyway (not a lot of people care about giraffes romping down fairways at the Magical Kenya Open eight months after the fact … that anyone cares about this in the first place is somewhat astounding, to be honest).
So we started the newsletter for two reasons. To cover topical golf things in the moment as they happened and as a way to build up our distribution list for the books. But we discovered along the way that the newsletter is actually … a business, and one we very much enjoy.
It is a business because it has found an audience, and we believe there are a few reasons it has found a – I cannot stress this enough – very niche and specific (and sicko) audience.
Here are a few of those reasons.
Good golf coverage is funny. And we want to be funny. We want to talk about Johnson Wagner whipping golf balls into the side of a grassy knoll at TPC Sawgrass. This is something that we aim for. We believe coverage of almost anything can and should attempt to be funny.
Why?
Think about how weird life would be without humor. What if you engaged in relationships and conversation in the same way the news has traditionally been distributed. That would be insane, and people would consider you insane for willingly accepting this. This is not how anyone wants to go through life, and yet we begrudgingly accept it in the way we receive sports news and information. The “I read Bill Simmons growing up” part of me has always pushed back against this.
Good golf coverage is human. We noticed that because golf is an individual sport, it is devoid of the rabid fan sites that pop up to provide, ahem, enthusiastic home team coverage. Because of this, much – not all, but much – of the written golf coverage we encountered was either investigative (shout out Joel Beall) or a touch on the informational side.
The famous Robert Frost quote comes to mind: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
I don’t know how many tears there are (outside of Rory’s near misses), but it gets at the truth I mentioned above about DP. I want you to feel what I feel. And I want to feel it because I know you feel it.
I want to be invested because that is a natural human endeavor with something that we all spend so much time on. I want to experience golf alongside you and talk with you about it through my writing, not just bring you information.
Good golf coverage is personal. The most unique thing about golf is that almost all of the people who are interested in following it also play it. It is the most relatable of all pro sports (especially when Spieth starts to roll downhill a little bit … figuratively or literally).
Because of this, it’s easy for fans to connect it to life.
It is the most relatable, communal game in the world.
That’s probably a natural connection with a lot of sports, but even more so for one like golf where the viewership and participation Venn diagram is nearly a circle. For some reason, though, we don’t often write or speak toward this in golf coverage.
When we began looking around at what we are inspired by, we discovered that the places that are covering golf in fun ways from the perspective of the fan are podcasts or YouTube channels like NLU and SGS. In other words, most outlets that produce written golf news and insight do so from the perspective of the journalist, not the fan. And nobody really produces illustrated golf coverage.
This is how we think of ourselves.
So we saw an opportunity to differentiate ourselves when it comes to written/illustrated content. We saw an opportunity to create something that felt like it was funny and personal and human. And that it was made by people who are in love with the game because we know that’s where so many of our readers are coming from.
Golf is niche enough that almost all of the people who follow it do so with tremendous fervor. I am a casual football fan, which is not uncommon. There aren’t a lot of casual golf fans reading news like “Mackenzie Hughes’ strokes gained putting won him a spot on the Presidents Cup team over Cam Davis.”
If you’re in, you’re pretty much in. And we wanted to serve that exact market.
The sickos. The infirmary members.
How?
With hopefully humorous writing and illustrations that convey amusement about the game (giraffes and geese and Spieth yelling at Greller for a round number at Birkdale) but also speak to both the personal nature and the humanity of it.
We take little convos about golf we have with buddies and write them down and share them with other people. That’s an extremely personal thing. We set out to build something that hopefully makes you laugh one minute and then makes you feel inspired the next. Something that you actually look forward to reading because it brings about joy and not just more information.
We aspire to this.
We believe the golf media landscape needs something like this.
Here’s one last theory that undergirds what we do.
We believe that media outlets should generate revenue in three ways.
1. Partnerships: We believe online ads can be good (a handful of companies have proved this) but that bad ads are very bad. And most ads online are bad ads.
This is the one I always reference.
As part of our business, we are trying to create ads that are barely ads, but it takes the right partners for that to happen. Unlike many people in pro golf right now, we have said no to a lot of easy money thus far and will continue to do so.
What we desire is to build partnerships with businesses that have products that are great and stories that we love. But also businesses that we are able to easily integrate into what we do with this newsletter.
We aren’t going to just jam random ads into the newsletter for the sake of more money. That undermines our voice and your trust. We will however partner with companies that we love like Holderness and Bourne, Meridian Putters and hopefully many others in the future and continue to create fun, creative illustrations and copy that disclose our delight in their products.
2. People: We believe having some sort of paid membership is paramount to building a media business in the 21st century. It is not a silver bullet as some have alleged, but a variation of the 1,000 true fans theory and a necessary variable.
We also believe that while the primary reason for membership might be (and often is) folks giving money toward a place they want to exist, there are also a number of different extra benefits we can give you. Things like …\
And that’s just the start.
3. Products: Just like we have done in the past with our digital and physical books, we will continue to make products for the general public. We have all kinds of things in the queue right now – including some amazing merch drops planned for 2025 – with dreams for so many more. It’s difficult to envision this company ever becoming primarily a product company, but we believe this can and should be part of the composition of any strong media company in the 21st century.
The underlying truth about Normal Sport is that we kind of stumbled into all of this. We didn’t really mean to start a business. I always have a million business ideas, but this wasn’t necessarily one of them when it started unfolding. All of it just kind of … happened.
Building Normal Sport has been a deep delight for us because what we realized along the way, as we labored to create the best stuff we could possibly create for other golf sickos like ourselves, is that we really love the art of creating.
It feels like magic to make something out of nothing. To build newsletters and books and other products. It is a type of magic.
Our team – myself (writing and meme-ing), David Hill (business), Jason Page (art) and Jeff Smith (branding) – has bonded as we’ve built. Grown as friends as we’ve grown the business.
I have personally found a lot of joy in this quote from the Dispatch’s founding manifesto. I’m not totally sure what the Dispatch is, but I’ve read enough of these founding manifestos to recognize a good one. Here’s the best part of theirs.
If we’re wrong about all of this, we’ll fail. But failure in a good cause is better than triumph in a bad one. Besides, if we didn’t think we were right about what many people desire, we wouldn’t have tried this in the first place.
For us, building this business takes a lot of time, and it can be exhausting, but it rarely feels like work. It feels like what we’re supposed to be doing at this moment in time.
So here we are. Our words and our illustrations. But mostly our hearts.
Our official mission statement is: “Use humor and humanity to make the daily fan’s personal experience of golf feel meaningful.” Our vision: “Become the most unique publisher of written and illustrated golf content in the world.”
We will pour ourselves into the mission and let others decide on whether we’re hitting the vision.
Regardless, we will delight in trying to make each other laugh as we work on this project together. And we will do it in a way that brings us joy because we think (we hope, because our business model is kind of predicated on this hypothesis!) that it will bring you joy along the way as well.
