Issue No. 112 | September 17, 2024

Hey,

I watched part of the first half of Falcons-Eagles on Monday night before getting the kids down and diving back into Nate Silver’s excellent new book on risk. So this morning, my boys and I watched the highlights before school. Kirk getting it done in Philly for my guy Zac Robinson. Great stuff.

Then I stumbled into this clip of the Mannings and Matt Ryan chopping it up on the final drive. It’s so good. You don’t even need to watch the entire thing, just 30 seconds or a minute of it, and you’ll get the point.

The ManningCast reacts to the entire @AtlantaFalcons game-winning drive ⬇️
— Omaha Productions (@OmahaProd)
3:25 AM • Sep 17, 2024

And it made me think — as I often do when I see clips of (or watch) the Manningcast — about how different what they do is from what Troy Aikman and Tom Brady do in the booth. All are talking football, but I do prefer the informality of it and aspire to it myself on a professional level.

That is, the tone and beat of this newsletter is preferable when compared to other forms of more formal writing. I do the other stuff so that I can get back over here and find flow. I share this not to comp myself to three world class NFL QBs, but because I want you, the reader, to continue to know how much I love writing for you.

Onto the news.

One Thing I Loved

I believe Joseph LaMagna was the first person who introduced me to the idea of consequential golf shots. It’s not more golf shots we’re looking for when we watch golf. It’s not even better golf shots we’re trying to find. It’s more consequential ones from players whose outcomes we care about.

There are a number of different ways to reach this end.

Majors matter, and every single shot from Thursday morning on at the Masters, PGA and both Opens means something.

Don’t believe me?

I feel this at the Players Championship, too. It means something to win the Players. Every shot carries a different weight than Colonial or Kapalua. It is also true of national opens. I’m not totally sure why this is the case — and it is certainly not as true as it is at major championships — but there is a real meaning behind being the Irish Open or Scottish Open champion.

Golf courses like we got last week at Royal County Down exacerbate this, of course, because if it’s almost impossible for a good player to hit a bad shot (like it was at Valhalla) then there is not as much consequence to each individual swing.

Royal County Down is temptation and delight personified. Every shot seemed like it could either set you up for 3 or 7. That helps.

Then there are the team events.

I found myself emotionally invested in tee shots on par 4s on Friday. Every shot has so much gravity because so often you’re desperately searching for half points on Sunday afternoon wishing they had been put away in foursomes on the opening day. Team events bring with them the most consequential shots in all of professional golf.

After a couple of months’ worth of mostly inconsequential golf shots — I just don’t care all that much how 20 of the best players in the world divvy up $100 million — last weekend’s menagerie of consequences across the globe was quite a welcome experience. One that I personally think we could get more of with a smaller schedule at better venues but also one that the people in charge are not necessarily incentivized to want.

Normal Sport

1. The Hilton lady back there on the couch (bed?). Is that a bathrobe? What? Imagine trying to make 4 with a woman in a bathrobe standing inside an air conditioned box about 40 yards in front of you just staring at you.

2. I saw the highlighted sentence below and just lost it. Fans were posting on social media that they were stuck for hours waiting in lines for buses at Jiffy Lube Live.

What a sentence. What a sport.

3. This shirt is honestly kind of incredible. Good enough to wear ironically for sure.

It did lead to this comment which made me chuckle.

4. Imagine traveling back in time to three years ago and showing this screenshot to Blockie. I wonder what he would have said.

5. It’s an honor.

6. By the way, here’s that QR code from Rahm’s ring. “Papa, when will I be old enough to scan your QR code?" is a thing that runs through my head every time I see it.

FTFY (and yeah, please scan it)

Mea Culpa

I wrote last week that the USPS is funded by taxpayer dollars. It is not funded by taxpayer dollars. It is self funded. Why was I writing about the USPS? I have no idea, but I would like to state for the record that I am happy for my taxpayer dollars to go to the USPS because I think it is an amazing and magical service that is both taken for granted and also taken advantage of.

Data Golf Corner

There was a lot of “welp, Rory just can’t close” rhetoric from the weekend, which is both fair and unfair. Fair because that’s two three putts in the last three holes that cost him monstrous national opens. Unfair because, well, we’ll get to that.

I got on Data Golf’s excellent pressure tool to look at Rory against some contemporaries and how good they all are at closing out tournaments.

There are a million ways to look at all of this, but I picked all pro events in which the player was in first, second or third going into the final round.

A reasonable spot from which a great player should win golf tournaments.

Some notes and thoughts.

• The first column is what Rory did at the Irish Open this year. The “SG vs. expected” is Data Golf’s secret sauce that is “strokes gained relative to our model's expectation.” Rory played pretty well on Sunday at Royal County Down, gaining 1.3 true strokes to the rest of the field, but played slightly worse than expected.

• The broader numbers in the next four columns are far more interesting though. Rory is not a great closer (we’ll talk about that). But it also doesn’t matter because he just overwhelms the top of leaderboards. Since he turned pro, he’s been in the top three going into the final round 83 times. Eighty three!

• The best career comp for Rory is probably DJ. He’s been in the top three going into the final round of events 54 times (not including LIV so you can throw in a handful more).

• There are two ways to win events. 1. Be a great closer or 2. Be in the mix a lot. It’s tough to do both. Even Tiger — at least since 2004 — barely has a positive SG vs. expected number (+0.28).

• The plus/minus number is something I took from somebody on Twitter from a while back (I wish I could remember who made it — if you’re reading, my guy, please write in!). It’s just total xWins after final rounds minus total xWins before final round divided by total events. So on average, Rory loses .05 xWins per final round where he’s in the top three going in. Xander and Scottie lose also. Bryson gains almost .1, which is a lot.

• In other words, when Bryson is in the top three going into the final round, he increases his chances of winning by how he plays in the final round by 10 percent. That’s a ton.

• Bryson, a closer. Who knew? A great closer. Maybe the best closer.

Me finding out this information 👇️

• As for why Rory is not a great closer, I think that answer is … maybe not obvious, but right out in front of us. He cares a lot about everything around him, maybe cares the most. So winning majors and winning Ryder Cups and winning Irish Opens at the place where you’re from, all of it is difficult.

Not impossible because of the gifts, but it’s hard to turn the self-awareness switch off and to forget it all and to go blank in a good way and go win events that mean something to you. Does that mean you’re not clutch? I have no idea. I think it adds to the humanity, though. The part that’s easy to relate to and be compelled by.

Or maybe that’s just what I tell myself.

Meme of the Week

This one will be tough to top, and the answers are exactly as expected.

Also I am glad this is my service to all of you.

So here you go, amen corner boy, here are the best ones in ascending order.

The Rex Grossman drop from out of nowhere got me. Also, Rex Grossman and Cam Young have made roughly the same amount of money in their respective careers. Not sure what to make of that.

This one is so on the nose that it’s almost believable. Like, I could absolutely see Phil stringing these sentences together in some capacity.

We Believe …

As we build out our site, I am writing a “we believe” manifesto of sorts. Just a list of things that, if somebody somehow stumbled onto our site and wondered what we were all about, could find this document and think either, “Buddy, I am in” OR (more likely), “What are these people talking about?”

Instead of grinding on this and dropping it on the site randomly one day, I thought I would just write them a few at a time and then put them into a bigger document later on.

At Normal Sport, we believe that …

• The Ryder Cup is the greatest golf sporting event in the world, and it is not particularly close. I tell people who ask, “What’s the best event to attend?” that there is not even a great runner up. It’s Michigan-Ohio State on a golf course. A Steelers-Ravens playoff game but in a field instead of on one. There is truly nothing like it.

• The proper ranking of the best major championships is as follows.

The Open
Masters
U.S. Open
Players (kidding!)
PGA Championship

• The idea of par at big events nearly causes more consternation than it is worth. Par for a tournament means close to nothing. It is a placeholder. A lens through which to watch golf on TV or in person. A mechanism or a trick to use because we would all be horrible at keeping track of total strokes across different numbers of holes with 156 golfers involved.

You could make the Masters a par 62 next year, and 275 strokes would probably still get a jacket.

And yet, par emotionally affects (even triggers!) so many people. Part of this is because broadcasts have traditionally done a poor job of showing strokes gained or how much better a player was on a hole compared to the field on a given day. That concept is truly the only thing that matters.

Here’s a fun thread of beliefs other folks have.

And here are a few you guys dropped in our poll last week. Thank you, as always, for participating. Also, retweets below do not equal endorsements (!), but all of these are excellent and interesting.

“Final round scoring by 3rd round leaders on the PGA tour is the most fascinating stat in all of sports.”

Timely comment for this particular newsletter.

“You will never have a round of golf where it feels like you didn't leave at least one shot out there.”
“I believe that Phil Mickelson might just be the 3rd greatest golfer of all time....”

He is not.

“Tiger Woods should have won more than he did. I could list the reasons why, but you know what they are.”
“If Dustin Johnson hadn't signed on with LIV for the original LIV tournament at Centurion, none of the other big names (Brooks, Bryson, Smith, Niemann, maybe even Phil??) would have gone and this whole mess would be over by now.”
“Jack Nicklaus was better than Tiger and it’s not nearly as close as people want it to be. And yes, I know the ‘plumbers and firemen’ argument.”
“That professionals on instagram giving me lessons from a pristine bunker are useless. Give me a lesson from a matted down bunker with an inch of hard sand and let me know how opening up the club face wide goes.”
“That pace of play is doing more damage to professional golf than LIV and the Saudi's ever could. Also, equipment should be handicap specific. Pros shouldn't be hitting 460cc drivers for the same reason the MLB doesn't use metal bats. But I don't care if my dad does.”

Preach!

“US teams (Ryder, Solheim, Curtis, Walker) will never understand what it takes and means to really be a team.”
“Covering your bar tab when YOU make a hole in one is the dumbest thing in golf and possibly sports.”
“Kenny Perry - Duval/Mickelson - TW1 (Watson) - TW2 (Woods) in 2009 is the greatest coulda woulda shoulda of near misses at the majors in a calendar year.”
“Mark James single handedly blew the 1999 Ryder Cup and the whole complaining about Americans jumping in Olazabal's line was just a ruse to cover up how bad James screwed up that Cup.”

We’re cooking with gas now!

“PGA players should be required to play at least one tournament a year where they have no caddy and have to do everything themselves just like us commoners. I want to see a whole field of push cart mafiosos.”

And one more from Twitter …

Overheard on Twitter

“There is no Plan B. There is also no Plan A. I have no idea what I’m doing.” -Doug Boneparth

I identify with that.

Corrupt Golf Media

👉️ Brody Miller did such a great job with this story on Tyler Johnson and Charlie Golf Bag Co. This part resonated.

And Tyler insisted on everything feeling personal, because that’s what the root of this company is about. That story takes longer, though. Each shipment must be delivered with a handwritten note.
Early on, he’d hand stamp each outgoing shipping box with the Charlie logo, rolling out the ink, stamping one side, laying them all out overnight to dry and then stamping the other side in the morning. There’s no production facility, and until recently, there was not even a tape dispenser. The waitlist grew and grew.
The Athletic

👉️ Tron’s recent GHIN and Tonic was excellent. I always enjoy and appreciate his breadth and learn something new when he talks or writes. Also, good explanation of how the handicap system actually works.

👉️ SMartin on Jamie Lovemark is excellent writing, researching, communication and storytelling. I love Morikawa and Scheffler stories. The ones who hit. I also love the stories about the ones who don’t. Sometimes even more.

👉️ Short, but Shane on the relief of making it through the KFT and onto the big stage is terrific.

👉️ Patrick Cantlay getting into real estate is amazing.

👉️ This by Beth Ann Nichols on Lauren Coughlin’s rise is excellent.

This part stood out. It’s such a simple lesson and yet so difficult to learn.

In the run-up to the Solheim, Coughlin came out to Robert Trent Jones Golf Club on four separate occasions to get used to the property. The first time McNamara walked the course with her in July, he said something simple that made a world of difference: “What you do is good enough.”
“I don’t need to be doing anything special,” said Coughlin. “I don’t need to be trying too hard. I don’t need to want it too much. All I need to do is just go be myself and see what happens.”
Golfweek

👉️ This Rory x The Cranberries video is sublime.

👉️ HAS to be the best Ryder Cup team of all time. Can’t even be close!

The 2007 Walker Cup played at Royal County Down went down to the final shot on the final day. How many can you name from the victorious American team?
— Michael Wolf (@bamabearcat)
2:28 PM • Sep 12, 2024