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Issue No. 149 | January 28, 2025
Last week, we ran a Q&A with my mom which …
Led to several “your mom” jokes from my wife. Cool.
Was probably the most feedback I’ve ever gotten on a Normal Sport piece.
That’s awesome. I’m proud of the Q&A and proud of my mom for the way she thought through everything. Here’s a nice response from one reader.
Hey Kyle - What a great read. As a parent of three twenty-something kids, this is such a great reminder of what moms do for their kids.
I can't imagine having the talent that your mom had and just putting it away, for any reason. But she did it for the best of reasons. It's a really great reminder of what an enormous responsibility mom's take on when they are raising their kids.
I will call my mom tonight, and probably choke back some tears when I thank her (which I haven't done in a long time) for all the time and effort she put into raising my sister and I. And then I'll gently remind my kids to thank their mom once in a while, too.
Jason B.
If you haven’t read it, I would be honored if you did.
Onto the news.
Today’s newsletter is presented by Holderness and Bourne. In a recent newsletter, I mentioned how awesome I think their colorways are. Specifically, I was talking about the recently released resort collection.
Even though the below shirt isn’t part of it, the theory still applies.
Sure, it’s difficult to mess up red, white and blue in a Ryder Cup year, but they don’t just throw the flag hues onto a shirt and call it a day. There is clearly thought and detail that goes into everything they make.
Which is why you see stuff like this from a lot of people in golf …
OK, now onto the news.
by: Jason Page
Like many of you, I loved last week’s interview with Kyle’s mom. I’ve been thinking about it all weekend. What hit particularly close to home for me was how she talked about confidence’s effect on her game.
KP: What did golf teach you about yourself?
Mom: I realized that I did not have very much confidence in myself. I realized I was not very mentally tough. I was playing against Amy Alcott, Nancy Lopez, Hollis Stacy, Carol Semple and others on a national level.
I could hit it as well as they did, but I could not score. I would get so upset if I did not hit it perfect because I did not have the confidence that I could get up and down. Golf is such a mental game and I just did not have the mental toughness it took to be successful on a big stage (or a medium stage for that matter).
Normal Sport Newsletter No. 148
I would get so upset if I did not hit it perfect because I didn’t have the confidence that I could get up and down. As a golfer, I feel seen. As a visual artist, I’m totally exposed.
There’s a lot of overlap between golf and art. They’re both direct activities: make a mark on paper, hit a ball there. They are also individual pursuits that you do in your style, a representation of your own abilities and character.
Trusting my own style is something I’m constantly wrestling with on course and on paper. Even as I’m writing this, I’m thinking about what kind of text this should be.
Just write, you idiot. Just hit the ball.
In golf and art it’s easy to say, “I should be doing this like that and then I will be successful.” Like when Viktor Hovland basically said I didn’t think my golf swing looked pretty on video and I wanted it to look better.
I was thinking about this on Sunday after a team chipping lesson. Our pro started by explaining the drill — chip six balls from five greenside spots and count points for how close you hit to each hole location — and then emphasized that the highest scorer from the morning session used a 9 iron.
We all listened confidently with 56, 58 and 60 degree wedges in our hands. I also used a 56, a club I rarely use around the muddy greens of Amsterdam, for the first four holes. And scored enough points to find myself in last. On the last hole, a downhill cross-green chip, I switched to the trusty PW. I hit the first two to 2 feet, drained the next two and hit the last to a foot to finish in second.
Am I using this story to say I’m a great chipper? I am not and I am not. It just made me realize, again, how misleading it can be to search for something else before understanding your own idiosyncrasies.
Like a pro saying they want to play like they did when they were young. Like Picasso saying it took him a lifetime to paint like a child.
Lastly, I struggled with Kyle’s mom’s portrait because 1. portraits are hard and 2. I was stuck on my preconceptions of how a 70’s style image should look instead of trusting my hands to make my own kind of image. The first version stunk because it was trying to be something else.
The final version was like my golf game when it’s good. Loose, playful and energetic. I’m happy how it captured the eclectic times of the 70’s women’s pro golf circuit. She didn’t make it to the top levels of the tour (who does?), but she was right there with them playing in her own way.
And that’s an equally worthwhile pursuit.
Every week, I find myself ranking the golf events over the next several days. This week’s offerings include Tiger-Rory in TGL, Andy-Bacon on YouTube, Pebble and the first LPGA event of the year.
A broad takeaway I’m beginning to formulate: Golf as entertainment has seemingly moved away from primarily being about the PGA Tour and has shifted into being about … a lot of different things.
I’ll have a lot more about this in Thursday’s newsletter as I’m sure many of you saw my tweet over the weekend and all the fallout from it.
I stand by it, and I’ll explain all of that on Thursday.
Also, I’m curious.
At this moment, there is a kid who believes TGL is the only kind of professional golf.
I have nothing against Rick Shiels. I think his videos are fine and good. But I thought his recent jump to LIV was fairly gross.
Here’s why.
It doesn’t take a lot of Googling to find out how and why Shiels has been critical of LIV in the past. And while it’s not wrong for your opinions to change over time — and in many cases, it actually represents maturity — so many things about LIV just scream, “I actually do have a price!”
A question: Has anyone who has gone to LIV — player, broadcaster etc. — been genuinely excited about it? Or have they seen the money and just kind of talked themselves into it?
Just one time, I would love for someone — player, media, whoever — to receive a LIV offer and publicly decline it. Perhaps this is stupid, but I wish LIV would offer me $500,000/year to write this very newsletter but geared primarily toward covering its league just so I could film a video turning it down and talking about how there is so much more to a professional life than making it to the top of your wage band.
Everybody wants to make more money. It’s true of me. It’s true of you. It’s true of Jeff Bezos. This is the human condition. And while I don’t fault any individual for this desire, I find myself constantly frustrated by how it plays out as it relates to LIV because, like I wrote about a few weeks ago, “LIV continues to represent the broader cultural lie that the wind actually can be caught.”
It can’t. But that won’t stop us from trying.
Also, this from Reddit made me laugh.
On the opposite end of the spectrum!
This has nothing to do with golf, but I absolutely loved this quote from Madison Keys after she won the Australian Open over the weekend.
“I’ve done a lot of work to no longer need this. I really wanted it but it was no longer the thing that was going to define me. Letting go of that burden finally gave me the ability to actually play for it.”
Shades of Scheffler.
The tension between “cares a lot” and “it’s not my identity” is the hardest place to get to but also the best place to live and to compete. The holy grail of sports psychology.
It was a sad day of WDs at Torrey Pines Adventure Putt.
If Team A throws the hammer in TGL, these should be the outcomes.
Team B receives it, hole is worth 2 points, Team B gets to keep it for the next hole.
Team B declines it, hole is conceded to Team A for one point, but Team A gets to keep it for the next hole.
Always one of my favorites every year. This is … somehow a golf broadcast.
One of my favorite things to do is to take players from other sports (or even other industries) and try to find their golf comp. That could be anything from looks to performance to comprehensive ethos.
One I thought about during Bills-Chiefs was Mahomes as Brooks Koepka.
Not really that likable for the most part (although Mahomes is more likable than Brooks), but to get in the arena that many times and emerge in five of the last six as AFC champs is true championship stuff. Some guys have it. Some guys do not.
It being the most elusive thing in sports. It being the ability to seemingly tilt reality toward one’s self. It goes against everything we know about analytics and probability. There’s no number to measure it. There’s not even a name for it.
To quote Potter Stewart … You know it when you see it, and no matter how you feel about Swifties, the Kelce Bros. or Brooks holding up five fingers to Gary Woodland on No. 15 at Augusta National, we know what we’ve seen. And what we’ve seen in Mahomes and Koepka are a couple of tremendous champions.
👉️ This breakdown of the commercial load on Golf Channel for Torrey is extremely specific and enlightening. My only request? How does it compare to other sports?
👉️ More more more interviews like this one. Dahmen gets credit for it, yes, but the questions from Kira were also really good. Open-ended enough to allow him to riff but specific enough that he couldn’t use canned answers. Difficult to do as the interviewer.
• No notes here.
• The Lane Kiffin/Harris English comp is so good!
• This — this right here — is why Twitter exists.
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