Edition No. 48 | January 19, 2024

Hey,

We’re trying something a bit new this week. Following Tuesday’s regular newsletter which was full of the week’s most normal moments, the best tweets I found, a few quotes I’ve been thinking about and of course Jason’s excellent illustrations, I wanted to send a bit of a different version to close out the (work) week.

This one will include less multimedia and be more focused on my writing. The style is more like Normal Sport 3, where I just started writing down numbers and thoughts and then more numbers and more thoughts.

One of our goals for Normal Sport is to become the most unique publisher of golf text + illustration in the world. To build a heartfelt and humorous (and perhaps bizarre!) world that delights you and helps you see life a little bit differently than before.

So here a few thoughts I had on golf this week.

6 Thoughts on This Week

1. I just finished Morgan Housel’s excellent The Psychology of Money, and started Same as Ever, in which he discusses a series of ideas, philosophies and human behaviors that never change.

He had a really fascinating part about the 1950s that reminded me of everything that’s been going on with LIV and the PGA Tour over the last two years. Here’s part of the idea, excerpted from this CNBC article about the book.

During the 1950s, very few people lived in financial circles that were dramatically better than everyone else. Smaller houses felt fine because everyone had one.  Everyone went on camping vacations because, well, that’s what everyone did.

By the 1980s, that had changed. Changes in the tax code, among other changes, created a group of ultra-wealthy individuals: “The glorious lifestyles of the few inflated the aspirations of the many,” Housel concluded.

What did people do? They looked around, saw that some people were doing better, some much better, and they got envious. And then they got mad.

Housel notes that envy has been given a much greater boost than in the past thanks to social media, “in which everyone in the world can see the lifestyles — often inflated, faked, and airbrushed—of other people. You compare yourself to your peers through a curated highlight reel of their lives, where positives are embellished and negatives are hidden from view.”

“The ability to say, I want that, why don’t I have that? Why does he get it but I don’t? is so much greater now than it was just a few generations ago. Today’s economy is good at generating three things: wealth, the ability to show off wealth, and great envy for other people’s wealth.”

Envy triumphs. Same as ever.

But Housel goes a bit deeper, which is what makes this book satisfying: Besides demonstrating that envy is a key element, what else does this nostalgia for the 1950s illustrate?

This nostalgia, Housel says, “is one of the best examples of what happens when expectations grow faster than circumstances.”

There are probably other ways you could describe the last two years of professional golf, but I’m not sure you could find two better ones than …

1. Envy triumphs. Same as ever.

2. One of the best examples of what happens when expectations grow faster than circumstances.

2. If you weren’t awake at an insane time last Sunday morning, you probably missed Rory and Tommy walking off 18 at the Dubai Invitational together. Rory had just overcooked his tee shot into the water, and Tommy poured a 3 on top of him to swipe a win on the 72nd hole.

If you were on the receiving end like Rory was, it must have been pretty jarring.

And yet, there they were walking off with their arms around each other like a Duel in the Sun re-enactment.

It made me laugh as I tried to imagine Tiger with his arm draped over a competitor who had just Mongolian reversal-ed him at the last to win a tournament.

It also reminded me of Jaime Diaz’s excellent profile of Rory from 2015.

This is the quote from Rory I think about all the time.

"Now I want to win at golf all the time. I feel like golf has allowed me to be competitive at something in life—and my fitness has become part of that—and I feel like I've developed a bit of a ruthless streak on the golf course over the last few years. But I've no real ambition to be the best at anything else. If we're playing a game of cards, or a game of pool, or whatever it is, I'd happily let someone win just to keep them happy."

On Sunday, Rory seemed almost happier for Tommy than Tommy seemed for himself. This is not to say that Rory is not a maniacal competitor because … [gestures at the Ryder Cup].

But this general worldview and specifically his disposition after a loss is most unusual for one of the most prolific winners ever. For a 33-time champion at the professional level who just gave a tournament away on the final hole to flush it that quickly and celebrate his buddy’s success is … not normal.

We underrate a lot of Rory’s accomplishments — I don’t know that we really internalize the truth that his trajectory is to be one of the 15 best golfers of all time — but we maybe underrate his combination of giftedness and humanity even more.

3. I thought Webb Simpson’s recent Q&A with Golfweek was really good, which I mentioned in the Tuesday newsletter.

This part in particular caught my eye.

Golfweek: Are players overvaluing how much they are really worth?

Webb: “Probably. For the amount of eyeballs on our sport like you touched on, I think so. The amount of money we’re playing for is astonishing considering how many people watch our sport.”

I feel like I (and a lot of other people) have been saying that!  

LIV has turned everything on its head (see No. 1 in above) in an unsustainable way. This is the part that is frustrating as a fan of the professional game. This is also the point where a lot of people say, Phil was right, though! Idk, was he? Maybe to the tune of bankrupting everything in sight! Feels kind of like robbing Peter (Malnati) to pay Paul (Casey).

There’s a quote in Shipnuck’s new LIV book from Claude Harmon about how Brooks Koepka’s value has finally (finally!) been met.

“Brooks is finally getting paid like a Super Bowl-winning quarterback, which is what he is worth.”

What?!

What are we talking about?!

(I literally underlined this quote and wrote LOL in the margin of the book).

Three times as many people watch regular season NFL games on Thanksgiving as watch THE MASTERS (Brooks Koepka at the Masters, no less).

The counterargument, I suppose, is that the Tour has done such a bad job managing its product that the money in the game is far less than what it should be. I’ll listen to that! But Super Bowl-winning QB levels of money?

Get out of here.

Anyway, Webb talked about how to sustain the current amount of money in the game: Private equity. This is what the Tour has been seeking from both the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia and other entities, like the Strategic Sports Group.

“That’s why I’m glad SSG is coming on board, because the way I see it, without SSG, kind of where we were, it’s not sustainable to keep playing for $450 million, or however much we do on Tour, without some kind of subtle to major shift in how we’re thinking about everything.”

SSG, by the way, is the Strategic Sports Group, which is more or less a group of billionaires who made their money in a variety of industries but now all own sports teams (and have made even more money in that industry). The Tour has selected SSG to be a partner in its newly-formed organization alongside (well, maybe alongside!) the PIF.

4. That brings us to a different question: Is private equity a good thing for a sports league?

Here’s more from Webb.

“[SSG was] very clear that they weren’t making us this offer because they love the PGA Tour or because we love golf in and of itself. We’re doing it because we feel it’s a great opportunity for us to get a return on investment. That made me feel good that they see this as an opportunity.”

“In terms of how quickly will they get it back? I didn’t study economics in college but they seem like the type of group and team to come alongside right now to give us exactly what we need. We don’t need to re-shape a ton of things but we’re in a dire situation with LIV being a threat, and for the first time ever players are not seeing the PGA Tour as the greatest place in the world to play. They are the right group to help us bring that image back.”

I’m always (always!) dubious when you get private equity involved in anything that has a soul (which, I guess kinda up for debate whether golf still qualifies there). However, I did feel some hope after listening to this recent Course Record podcast with Roberto Castro and Dan Ferreira.

They went deep on SSG, and you should listen to the whole thing. Here’s the money quote from Castro.

“Just a lot of experience on this list. This not the ‘nouveau, has some money, wants to dabble in sports’ crew. This is a very experienced, probably very operationally efficient operators of sports businesses.”

I’m not sure you would call the PGA Tour “very operationally efficient,” but I’m also not as concerned about that part (although it does matter). I’m more concerned whether they can take a middling product — regular season golf — and make it something great for fans.

Can SSG do that and also create the value pro golfers want? Normally, value gets created prior to everyone getting paid. In this instance, it’s almost the other way around. Everybody is getting paid, and the Tour now needs to create a value for its product that justifies that continuation of that money. That’s … not great (especially when you’re not a start up!).

To listen to that Course Record podcast, though, is to receive some hope that, yes, all of this can happen. But in sports — and maybe especially in sports business — hope and reality are almost always two different things.

5. People got Mad Online about this tweet.

There is no ranking, they posited, that could possibly show Jon Rahm outside the top three in the world … and if one does, it is automatically discredited.

The problem? Math.

Six golfers have been better at getting the ball in the hole in fewer strokes over their last X number of rounds than Jon Rahm has over his last X number of rounds.

Does this mean I would pick Xander Schauffele over Jon Rahm in a major this year? Absolutely not. Does it, to go further down the list, mean that Eric Cole (ranked 13th) is a more accomplished or better golfer than Brooks Koepka (ranked 47th)? In no way.

It means what it means, which is that when you consider all rounds in all tournaments, Eric Cole has been better than Brooks Koepka over the last X number of rounds. That’s not an opinion or a take or a political statement. It’s just mathematically true.

There is some beauty in this. Golf, probably more than any other sport, is the toughest sport in which to argue “I’m actually a lot better than what the results show,” especially over any extended period of time.

Example: I shot a 94 the other day with some friends after hitting what felt like 44 chips over 18 holes and was hollering at home about how much better I am than what my score said. My wife looked at me and said, “I don’t think that’s how it works. You’re the golfer your score says you are.”

Tough scene. But also true.

6. You want to know why I love covering golf? Because we can get a Schrodinger’s Cat-Carl Yuan comparison, and it makes complete and total sense.

A Schrodinger’s Cat-Carl Yuan comp!