Issue No. 139 | Dec. 20, 2024

Here’s the scene …

It’s a Wednesday afternoon exactly one week before Christmas. I now write emails for a living. My kids eat $20,000 worth of groceries every year. I need to somehow make all of this work. I’m standing in the middle of an arena that was a dirt field 18 months ago. There are lights flashing everywhere. Roberto Castro is pounding 4 irons into a screen the size of a water tower. Tron and I are getting steep on something. Mark Russell walks up, and Tron starts pressing him about digital TIO (!). A rotating putting green is spinning in the background. Russell starts enthusiastically informing us about Andrew Lupe’s high school basketball career. I turn 40 in like 10 weeks.

How in the world, I wonder as I’m standing there, did all (or any!) of this happen?

Onto several things I’ve been thinking about this week.

10 Golf-Adjacent Thoughts I Had This Week

1. Since about the third hole of Tuesday’s match, something has been rattling around in my brain. It’s a quote from Colin and Samir — who you guys know I love — who did an interview with a guy named Ali Abdaal, and it’s about how media gets made.

Here’s what Samir said.

“A format is the most powerful thing in media. Period. Finding a format is the whole thing, in my opinion. You look at some of the most powerful shows. Hot Ones. Hot Ones is a format. Sean Evans … can explain the format really well. I’m going to interview someone, and we’re going to eat progressively hotter and hotter wings.

“When you find a format, you can get better at that format, you can collaborate within that format, you can build a team around that format, you can build a brand around that format. Formats are the key that unlocks success in media.”

I would add to this quote that it’s not really enough to just find a format. That’s step one. Step two is that the format needs to actually be good. And I’m not sure any of these made-for-TV matches have reached the level of good formatting yet.

2. I don’t know how you can watch what transpired on Tuesday and not walk away feeling … bored, tired and uninspired. I like most of the guys playing, and I love covering all four of them. Generational type guys who are all fascinating in a different way.

Yep, that sums it up.

But the format is not good.

On Wednesday evening when I should have been writing this newsletter, I found myself watching Bryson and Tom Brady try to break 50 from like 4,400 yards.

This is a good format. But why is it good?

Two main reasons.

1. The format is excellent. It has a great hook. It’s packaged well but not too well. It’s short enough, fast enough and compelling enough. Bryson talks to his guests about any number of things. Within a great format, you can do anything.

2. I — and I cannot believe I’m saying this — actually care about the outcome.

You can have No. 1 without No. 2, but you absolutely cannot have No. 2 without also having No. 1. Bryson — against all odds (?!) — has created an outcome that I care about. I care about whether he and Brady can break 50 or get close. Not as much as I care who wins the Masters, but definitely leaps, bounds and galaxies more than I care about how much crypto Scottie was handed on Tuesday night.

3. This is The Match’s primary problem. I do not in any way care about the outcome. In all good reality television, the outcome matters to us, right? This is why we watch Survivor or the Bachelor or American Idol. We might not always be able to articulate it along the way, but we care at least a little about the outcome. It’s the same with a good book. You think mystery novels sell because the writing is good?

What was it Aaron Sorkin said?

Intention and obstacle.
Intention and obstacle.
Intention and obstacle.

You create intent in a character, and then you put an obstacle in their way. Said a different way … getting people to care about an outcome.

Think about the golf you love. The Masters. The Open. The Ryder Cup.

The Ryder Cup is actually a terrific example of what I’m talking about. It’s not necessarily played on great golf courses, but because you care deeply about the outcome, it always works. The PGA’s greatest asset is that people give a crap about the Ryder Cup. The PGA has built worlds on top of this singular truth.

LIV doesn’t work not because it has bad players or goes to bad courses. It doesn’t work because, buddy, I do not care about the outcome of LIV Jeddah.

Why in the world would I?

4. All of this begs the question — what actually makes us care about outcomes? This is probably the hardest question to answer in all of this, but it’s the only one the folks running any of this should be considering.

Here’s one problem: It’s very difficult for me to care about the outcome when I’m unconvinced that the people involved actually care about the outcome (this has been true with most — maybe all — of the matches).

Off the top of my head, here are three reasons I care about outcomes.

Curiosity in what happens (Breaking 50).
Empathy for the characters (Survivor).
Historical relevance (Claret Jug).

The Match doesn’t really hit on any of these. Maybe if it was truly LIV vs. PGA Tour on a bigger scale (8 v. 8 or 12 v. 12), it would land. Maybe. But even then, it probably takes longer than anyone thinks it should.

5. Speaking of outcomes for which my care has waned over time …

I was in the kitchen the other day, thinking about how little leverage I have with my four kids. If I attempt to discipline them with a consequence, but they don’t care about the consequence, then what leverage do I have to encourage them to obey?

This has been one of my more dispiriting realizations as a parent.

More often than I would like, I take a stand on something only to be worn down over the course of hours and hours of their wheedling and needling. It is exhausting.

Jay Monahan is me, and the Saudis are my kids.

If you believe this New Yorker article from 2022 about something that happened in 2018 (!!), then Jay took a stand that he ultimately couldn’t uphold as news came out recently that the PIF is investing money into PGA Tour Enterprises. This is not surprising, but it’s still a bummer.

This is disappointing in a lot of ways, but more than that, it’s just tiring. We could have saved so much time, energy, virtue signaling, morality campaigns and insane Phil interviews if, you know, Jay had just done the deal he did in 2024 with the Saudis when they first proposed it six years ago.

This is armchair quarterbacking at its finest — the Josh Allen of armchair quarterbacking — of course, but the reason CEOs are paid $23 million is not to send emails and lead meetings. It’s to have vision. To peer around the corner and steer the organization in the correct direction.

By that simple (and, I believe, fair) definition, Jay Monahan has failed his organization and, more broadly, the world of pro golf. That’s an unfair reality rooted in the fact that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time — this could have happened to anyone — but it’s a reality nonetheless. One that will be on his resume for the rest of his career.

6. I did a Spieth pod on Tuesday with Andy and Joseph LaMagna, and we talked about … pretty much everything we could talk about as it relates to Spieth.

Somehow I forgot to make one point, though. And that point is this.

We hear all the time that if you’re not innovating, you’re regressing. We hear this in business, and I think it can be applied in a lot of ways in golf. How many times, though, have we seen players change their swings or chase speed (Rory and Tiger even!) and lose part of what made them great? How thin is the line between always innovating and demolishing your own secret sauce?

Brandel gets steep on Spieth’s swing here. It’s excellent and illuminating. And it makes you wish — no matter the why that went into it — that more great players would stop changing what they do to chase the very few qualities they don’t already have. It never seems to work out for the better. Or maybe what makes them great is that irresistible urge to get 1 percent better, and you can’t have one without the other.

Either way, the video is terrific.

7. Ok, I actually have more notes on The Match from Tuesday.

• I just don’t think it can be live. It doesn’t work. Maybe it works if there’s more than one match on the course (and by the way, I don’t think it’s crazy to envision a LIV-PGA Tour Ryder Cup-style match in the future). But with one match there’s too much time to fill, and the result is that you get the Chuckster breaking down the minutia of a LIV-PGA Tour deal, which nobody needs or wants. 

• Consider this re: live vs. taped — Bryson and Brady hit ~100 shots in 60 minutes. Bryson, Brooks, Rory and Scottie hit ~175 shots in 250+ minutes. Not a good ratio.

• I’m also told it can’t be taped. Why? When your sponsors are gambling companies, the money goes away if it’s taped. To which I would reply that this is a short term gain at the expense of creating a good long term product.

• I love Bryson in Reebok. I don’t know why, but it works. I also loved the jacket. We need a Bryson Wayne’s World “We Will Not Bow to Any Sponsor” ad ASAP. Golf has to have characters, and he’s one of the best. 

• Would listen to a one hour pod of Bryson trying to explain crypto to Scottie, who, like me, does not understand how any of this works.

• Rory is infuriating, at least in part, because of what you saw on Tuesday. The free-swinging, swaggering superstar who made a room full of other superstars look pedestrian. It is a reminder of how much his near misses at majors are mental. But this is somehow also why he’s so compelling! Sigh.

8. I heard an amazing Tiger story from someone I spoke with at TGL. This person was running a commercial shoot with Tiger years ago, and it involved a drone, which Tiger kept trying to hit. He would hit a piss missile iron right at the drone, and the drone would dodge out of the way because its cameras could sense that something was flying directly at it. So Tiger would hit one at its new location. He was making the drone dance back and forth by hitting shots at it. Preposterous stuff! And a potential commercial that would have been among the best of all time.

9. I did a one on one with Wyndham after TGL media day on Wednesday. We chopped it up about the U.S. Open, remaining at the top of the world, Oklahoma State and a bunch of different things. At the end, because we were talking about whether players would attempt more aggressive shots at TGL (they will), I asked him about the best shot he’s ever hit, which always seems to get players going, and his answer did not disappoint.

“I have a shot in Vegas, It's on the… let's see, it's Shriners, TPC, Summerlin 10, 11, 12. On 12. There's water. It was underneath the tree. I had no shot, and I was playing a money game. I could chip out and hit a wedge on, try to make par. Or I could skip it off the water and try to hit it onto the green. I decided to skip it. Skip, skip, hit into the bank and went to 15 feet, and I made the putt. It was the greatest shot that two people saw.”

SICK! 

“In competition, probably my up and down on 11 at LACC, even though it's a flop shot, the difficulty in the circumstance and to hit that and get that up and down. I mean, that should have for sure probably been a bogey. I almost made it and basically had a tap in. That's probably one of the best shots I've ever had.”

10. And so here we are at the end of the year. Our Normal Sport team is going to take most of the next two weeks off ahead of Kapalua, which we’re excited about. But in the meantime we’ll be thinking about how, you know, maybe Tiger should be deployed to New Jersey. They seem to have a drone problem that perhaps he could assist with.

Thank you also for reading until the end.

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