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Edition No. 92 | June 26, 2024
Hey,
Two quick housekeeping notes before we get rolling this week.
Over the last month, we changed our sending email address from whatever whatever @ beehiiv.com (which is the email service we use to send this newsletter) to kyle@normalsport.com, which we thought was more personal and intimate.
In the process of doing that, we noticed more and more emails started going to spam (this is not that unusual when a change like this is made).
In light of that …
If you missed last week’s, here are my 16 final thoughts on the 2024 U.S. Open (could have been 160 tbh).
And …
Please search for any Normal Sport newsletter from the last month that’s in your spam and send it back to your inbox.
Also…
If you could add kyle@normalsport.com to your contacts, I would appreciate it a lot.1 Or at least as much as ZJ appreciated Rory’s Ryder Cup tirade distracting the golf world from his myriad blunders in Rome.
Onto the news.
Young Cam: And this is to shoot 59 at the Travelers Championship.
This year, and what Scottie is doing, is turning into one big by the numbies section. Here are two new ones for you.
1. Scottie has had Rickie Fowler’s career in the last 100 days. 😧
Six wins: ✅
Players: ✅
Major: ✅
And Rickie doesn’t even have the major! This is insane and not a shot at Rickie, who I think has had a really nice career. Rick is 18th on the all time PGA Tour money list, and Scheffler has had his entire career since March 1!
2. Speaking of money, there’s a stat put out by the Tour that doesn’t get talked about much. It’s called percentage of potential money won.
Here’s how it works. If your only event in 2024 is the U.S. Open then your potential money won is $4.3 million, or the amount paid for first place.
So your percentage of potential money earned in that scenario would be whatever you actually earned divided by $4.3 million. Bryson’s number for that event would be 100 percent, Rory’s would be 54 percent and on down the leaderboard.
Add these up for the 10 or 15 or 20 tournaments a player plays over the year, and you get total percentage of potential money won.
I started going back through different years, and it became clear that an excellent year is 25-30 percent of potential money won, and Tour average is 5.5 percent.
This is a good stat because it basically shows how good you were in the events in which you played. Sometimes the whole “he has 15 top 10s this year!” gets lost because there’s no context around whether a player played 15 or 150 or 1,500 events to get those 15 top 10s.
Anyway, Scottie’s number this year is 59 percent, which is genuinely jaw dropping (for further context: Tiger in 2000 was at 63%).
Even crazier, he’s not even leading the stat.
The best number I found? Tiger in 2008.
78 percent!
Here are Tiger’s finishes in that injury-shortened year.
He won four tournaments and lost to five golfers. 😂
Makes you think.
1. The Travelers always seems to deliver the goods, even in the most unexpected ways. On the last hole of the tournament, a group of protesters painted (smoke bombed?) the 18th green, which led to 15 human beings on the green at one point in the waning seconds of a $20 million event.
The visuals are incredible.
Grown men trying to sop up substances out of the turf like a parent trying to clean up milk covering the counter after a sippy cup topples over.
What a sport.
But what really got me good was the clash of levity (see BP’s tweet below) with the seriousness with which all of this was — and probably needed to be — treated (see Dottie’s quote below that).
The officer did a great job not leading with the crown to avoid the flag
— Brendan Porath (@BrendanPorath)
8:25 PM • Jun 23, 2024
Here’s what Dottie said at one point as everything was beginning to return to normal (not a shot at Dottie, either, she was doing a great job of reporting in the moment!): "The grounds crew is out here with brooms and blowers. They're ready to make a move if they have to."
Brooms and blowers, ready to make a move! Guerrilla warfare on a golf course! Amazing, amazing stuff. 🤣
Also, Scottie’s very strange year with police officers continues.
And somehow this is, like, the 27th weirdest thing that has happened so far in golf in 2024.
2. Can we talk about how hilarious and incredible it is that there was a signature event — ostensibly one of the most important golf weeks of the year — both before and after Pinehurst.
This would be like the NFL giving you this schedule.
January 10 — Round 1 of the playoffs
January 17 — Super Bowl
January 24 — Round 2 of the playoffs
I know that golf is different and not like football or hoops, but this schedule cannot abide. I still have 300 thoughts from the U.S. Open that I’m trying to reconcile, and I look up and they’re handing out a purse as big as Nick Price’s career earnings in Cromwell!
3. I now get tweets like this all the time. I don’t know whether I’m proud of the crowdsourcing or dismayed that people see metal dinosaurs on golf courses and immediately think of me.
4. I stand with Big. Given the political season we’re about to enter, if voted in to the position of Golf Czar, I promise more playing the ball as it lies and more normal sport moments like the one below.
Read my lips: No new TIO.
5. Sure.
Normal Sport crossover.
(CC: @KylePorterCBS)
— Dominic Cotroneo (@Dom_Cotroneo)
8:46 PM • Jun 23, 2024
6. How about this hilarious bit on the European Tour (the genesis of all hilarious bits) with a marshal holding up a frowny face or a smiley face depending on whether a player hits the green.
Incredible stuff.
Sent that a little too hard...😬
#KLMOpen
— DP World Tour (@DPWorldTour)
1:50 PM • Jun 20, 2024
As Jason Page — our illustrator and part-time editor — pointed out, this should be implemented into all areas of pro golf.
Slow play warning? FROWN
Scummy TIO relief? FROWN
Spieth hooking a wedge under and over a tree from jail? Kyle personally holding the smiley sign
We have a couple of different submissions this week.
The first is that, like Antifaldo, the first thing I saw on this bag of [double checks] Totino’s orange chicken pizza rolls (???) was the HyFlyers logo.
Send help.
The second is a Venn diagram of two of my favorite things: The NYT’s Connections game (which, I’m told, is a game a sports media company the Times recently purchased for $500 million will be implementing!) and Jordan Spieth’s Grammy-nominated rendition of Si Woo shaking that ass.
I posed this very simple and straightforward question on Twitter, and it got 1M impressions, which is wild. Here it is: Who are the five best golfers of the last 10 years.
It was definitely a Bryson-imposed question because I think he’s in the conversation, but after thinking about it for more than 15 seconds, I actually think the five are pretty straightforward (in no particular order).
Brooks
Rory
DJ
Rahm
Scheffler
Players on the fringe: Spieth, JT, Bryson and Morikawa.
Bryson will get there. Morikawa might, too. Spieth is my biggest problem. Because in the last 10 years he has a Masters, a U.S. Open (on the moon) and a Claret Jug. He also has 13 worldwide wins in that time and has gained 1.5 shots per round.
Here are the splits for my five.
Brooks: 5 majors | 15 worldwide wins | 1.30 SG
Rory: 0 | 22 | 2.17
DJ: 2 | 21 | 1.85
Rahm: 2 | 20 | 2.14
Scheffler: 2 | 16 | 1.87
OK, who are you taking off that list for Spieth? Not Brooks. Not DJ, Rahm or Scheffler. Rory? Has Spieth had a better 10-year run than Rory?
I know Rory would trade his 10-year run for Spieth’s because he would be tied with Arnold Palmer on the all time majors list. But I can’t remove the literal best player at getting the ball in the hole in the fewest number of shots across 770 rounds for a decade straight just because DJ three-putted the 72nd hole at Chambers.
Spieth’s highs have been higher than Rory’s, but his lows have been much lower, too. The consistency is not there with him, which I guess you could argue about Brooks, too, except that five major wins is a lot different than three.
Also, this made me chuckle.
"In my experience, high-achievers focus a great deal on becoming the person they want to be at work—and far too little on the person they want to be at home." - Clayton Christiansen (via Morgan Housel)
👉️ This from Porath on a U.S. Open of real consequence was excellent.
It was highly consequential for the majors, as a whole, and their continued separation from everything else. In recent years, the U.S. Open has been delivering these banner days for competitive golf. Two years ago after Brookline, I wrote, “It’s not bad to want something more for pro golf, so long as you realize what we have now, at the most significant moments, is already quite good.”
This was not just good. It was the best.
Fried Egg
👉️ When I read this from Andy Lack on why Pinehurst ruled, I am reminded of what JJ Redick told Stephen A. in this excellent article by Bryan Curtis: “It’s our job, Stephen A., to educate people on basketball.”
Andy does a great job of educating people on golf in his short tweet on why Scottie’s frustration about hitting driver at Pinehurst is both illuminating and instructive for the future.
👉️ People have takes on the Presidents Cup standings. TAKES!
👉️ Speaking of frowny faces, how insane is this story about the Dutch Sports Federation not allowing its golfers to play in the Olympics because they don’t have a good chance to finish in the top eight?
What?! Has anyone there ever watched golf before?
👉️ This Wimbledon promo rules.
👉️ I try to mix in plenty of fiction into my reading diet, partly to keep my interest level in reading high. I read Daisy Jones and the Six in 24 hours over the weekend. I know I’m about eight years late, but it was excellent.
I wrote something for CBS Sports this week trying to compare Scottie’s 2024 to Tiger’s 2000. A fool’s errand, perhaps, but also the comps are kinda there. Or I thought they were.
And then I got run over by these stats from Data Golf.
Raw strokes gained per round
2000 Tiger: 3.93
2024 Scottie: 2.77
True strokes gained per round
2000 Tiger: 4.29 😮💨
2024 Scottie: 3.32
Expected Tour wins
2000 Tiger: 9.4
2024 Scottie: 4.9
Expected major wins
2000 Tiger: 2.9
2024 Scottie: 0.95
I mean … what? Tiger’s adjusted SG in 2000 was 4.29 (?!) meaning he was 4.29 shots better per round than the PGA Tour average. Per round!
Think about how good Scottie has been so far this year, how much he’s won. And his number still don’t even really compare to Tiger’s best stuff from 2000.
A couple of other points here — some of which I pointed out in that article — that mostly work in Scottie’s favor.
1. Scottie is playing mostly smaller field events than Tiger did. This probably helps his win rate because there are fewer players who could have the week of their lives and win. But it might hurt his SG a bit because there are basically only great players in the field, and the opportunity to beat a few bad players by a million and improve your SG number doesn’t exist.
2. PGA Tour fields are deeper now. Maybe not better at the top but deeper overall.
3. No, Scottie isn’t facing the best LIV players. But, well, there aren’t that many great LIV players, and plenty of good players skipped tournaments all the time in Tiger’s era too. Plus, there were no signature events then where all the best players were heavily incentivized to gather and play.
4. You don’t get bonus points for winning majors by 15 shots like Tiger did in 2000, but those performances do improve your overall SG numbers.2 Plus, 15-shot wins at majors are memorable historical moments (which I’m not sure Scottie has had yet this year).
So while I think Scottie’s season — with an Open win and sweep or near sweep of the playoffs — can actually be in the ballpark of Tiger’s in terms of wins3 and finishes (which is a crazy thing to say!), it probably won’t approach Tiger’s SG peak and will almost certainly not be as iconic as winning Pebble by 15 and the Old Course by eight in back to back months.
I’m not sure anything can ever touch that summer by Tiger in terms of historical significance.
Not the way it went down and the places where it unfolded.
The Jacket King
• I forgot to include this one last week after the U.S. Open, but it is excellent and very normal sport-y.
• Scheffs.
• This got me.
• Lol (kinda true!)
I noted recently that I read the Clayton Kershaw biography, The Last of His Kind. It’s worth reading the entire thing, but here are a few quotes that stood out.
Kershaw had not yet reached the point where the anxiety and the pain and the burden of the fifth day outweighed the joy and the community and the purpose that all those fifth days provided. His heart still beat for the game. Some days the beat felt fainter. But each day he still offered up his body and his mind and his spirit to the demands of the cycle. It was an addiction melded with affection.
An addiction melded with affection is such a great way to put it.
His dialogue with God had become fainter. “Sometimes I feel like an imposter when it comes to my faith,” he told me in October. “Because baseball has given a huge platform, right? Talk about whatever you want. And Jesus, ultimately, is what I choose to talk about. And I think that is what God wants me to do with my life, is use that platform. But sometimes when you don’t feel the Holy Spirit, or I don’t feel that, you feel like you’re just putting yourself out there without the conviction of doing it.
This was maybe the most human and — for other Christians, anyway — relatable quote of the entire book. Kershaw can seem … prickly at times, so when he’s honest and vulnerable like this, it stands out.
“This is it. I do love pitching. I do love baseball. And it is hard at times, but I don’t think I’d want it to be any other way. I don’t want it to be easy.”
I don’t want it to be easy.
I don’t either. Who would? Or rather, why would you? The path to satisfaction and gratification is, perhaps unfortunately, almost alwaysthe more difficult way.
Thanks for reading until the end.
You’re a sicko, and I’m grateful for it.
1 We will eventually go back to sending from that address but not until we’re sure the emails are not going to spam.
2 I believe Tiger gained around 30 shots on the field at that 2000 U.S. Open. Thirty!
3 Remember, Scottie has a Players win that Tiger didn’t have.
