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A few notes before we get started.
1. Time to announce some winners! First, for the $500 gift card to a golf outlet of your choice just for purchasing Normal Sport 3, congrats to Seth S.
We also had three Frame Coffee annual subscription winners: Robert W., Jake V., Dan P. Congrats to them!
2. This month’s newsletter sponsor is TRUE and they’re giving away four pairs of TRUE Lux Hybrid golf shoes (photo below) to Normal Sport readers (one every week this month).
What do you have to do to win the shoes? Simply be subscribed to the newsletter (which you already are). The first winner is Doug M.
Three more to go!
For now, a note from the TRUE founders.
TRUE Lux Hybrid
TRUE linkswear is a company rooted in the game of golf. Brothers Ryan and Jason Moore grew up playing and working on the family driving range. Ryan grew into a 5-time PGA Tour winner and Ryder Cupper while Jason caddied early in his career.
No matter how big of an event the duo was part of, one thing never changed — they couldn’t find a golf shoe they enjoyed wearing, a problem they vowed to correct. Out of that pursuit arose TRUE linkswear, one of golf’s fastest rising footwear and lifestyle brands.
Mission No. 1 was creating a modern, comfortable golf shoe that looks (and feels) like your favorite running shoe. In 2023, TRUE launched the LUX Hybrid which emerged as the go-to footwear for players on nearly every major tour, led by the likes of Moore, Joel Dahmen and Christina Kim.
There is much more to golf than professional events. There is a lifestyle that surrounds the game that TRUE has embraced, creating footwear and apparel that is equally appealing in any setting.
During Kapalua last week, I was feeling frustrated and maybe a bit bummed by the lack of juice at what is traditionally one of the best events of the year.
Perhaps this was my own personal problem related to Rahm leaving for LIV, which has affected the way I view pro golf a lot more than I thought it would. I think that is the case because he is a genuinely thoughtful and interesting person, and that is not the way I have traditionally categorized LIV. Maybe I’m just annoyed that I can no longer write LIV off as “the league of mostly ridiculous charlatans and hucksters.” It feels legitimate now. This is the point of signing Rahm.
Anyway, Hawaii was falling flat for me. Whatever you want to say about LIV, they have snagged a lot of characters, which means that the Tour is left with fewer characters than it had before, which means it has a higher percentage of automatons than it had before.
That’s maybe a bit unfair.
It’s also might be a bit true.
Enter …
Jordan Spieth is no longer a Tier 1 player. He is not what we thought he was going to be from 2014-2017. He’s not Rory or Rahm or even Cantlay or Morikawa. Over the last two years his strokes gained neighbors include Cam Young and Sam Burns. Good players but hardly titans.
What he is, though, is a character.
Jason Page, who illustrated this and every newsletter you read, recently sent me this clip of an analyst from — of all things — a snooker tournament. This quote sums up why I feel the way I feel about Spieth.
“You should bring a rule out where you get rid of boring snooker players. The [goal?] for snooker is to be fun. Boring snooker players just drag the game out, just get rid of them. Fine them, do something. Make them play snooker instead of just draining the life out of everybody.”
Spieth is just the exact opposite of that. Watching him try to get around Kapalua without his best stuff (or maybe it is his best stuff?) was the hit of joy I needed last week. He plays the game like a child uninhibitedly explores a new venue, like a park or pond or playground. As a parent, all you see is danger while the child only sees a kingdom.
(Greller is the parent, by the way).
One dirty secret of pro golf is that not everybody who plays it loves it. That seems inconceivable to those of us who are simply trying to finish our day jobs so that we can go play golf as much as possible.
Spieth does not seem to be one of those players. There is some wiring in his brain, some strand in his DNA that makes him obsessed with being great at the game. Plenty of people talk about being sickos, but what many of them mean is that they know the inside baseball language and want you to think that they’re part of the tribe (which is totally fine and normal).
Spieth is actually a sicko. The sickest sicko.
It is strange, isn’t it, that this milquetoast dude from suburban Dallas who looks like a lot of the other milquetoast dudes from suburban America can make you feel something that nobody else makes you feel.
We could spend an entire book (and maybe we should) exploring why that is. All I cared about last week in the midst of my Rahm-induced gloom was that it existed.
I suspect I’m not alone.
Who is the most underrated golfer in the world? I put this on Twitter this week, and the answers are as varied as they are humorous.
It’s a question I thought about a lot last week during Kapalua. Max Homa nominated Tyrrell Hatton.
The answer is Tyrrell Hatton
— max homa (@Maxhoma)
Jan 9, 2024
He’s definitely in the conversation. So are Scheffler, Rahm and Rory (because people don’t really understand how good they actually are) as well as Cantlay, Fitzpatrick, Cam Young, Russ Henley and J.T. Poston.
My answer, though?
There are a couple of ways to look at this. The first is who’s the most underrated in terms of the golf they are currently playing. In that case, Scheffler is a pretty good answer even though he’s No. 1 in the world because people are not understanding that he’s performing every week at a Tiger level (more on that below).
The other way is a more long-term view in which case Rory and Rahm are good answers because, I mean, come on.
To be that good for this long is a joke.
Which brings us to Sungjae, who is 12th in strokes gained over the last six months (one spot better than Rahm) and 11th over the last two years (better than JT, Cam Smith, Zalatoris, Spieth and Fleetwood).
Strokes gained isn’t everything, but it’s useful for extended periods of time. And it’s difficult to fake it for that much time.
ALSO, he’s younger that Morikawa, Scheffler, Zalatoris and Hovland and just 18 months older than Ludvig! He’s been awesome at Augusta National and has a 33 percent top 25 rate at the majors he’s played.
If I threw this blind profile at you, there would be salivating over just who in the world this young, successful, ball-striking wonder was.
It’s Sungjae. The most underrated golfer in the world right now.
Scottie Scheffler has lost to 141 individual performances over the last 25 tournaments dating back to November 2022. A quick scan of his tournaments played in that time, and he has faced somewhere around 2,500 or 2,600 individual performances in those 25 events. And only 141 of them have been better than him in a given week. Staggering.
This one is going to get some mileage.
👉️ This piece by Chris Kirk’s wife, Tahnee, on his alcoholism and the way both of them have dealt with it is excellent.
👉️ I went on a podcast called the Long Game with somebody I met on Twitter named Dave Gerhardt, who runs his own community for marketers and started a golf podcast on the side. Dave and his co-host Casey are smart, funny and I went deep on my story, Normal Sport and some thoughts and ideas I have for the future. I come on at the 7-minute mark. Hope you enjoy it.
👉️ This story on Roger Federer increasing his wealth by $600M after leaving Nike is stunning and a version of what Tiger probably could do if he wanted to.
👉️ If you (somehow?) haven’t seen Soly’s response to Brandel on TV coverage and commercial load, it was amazing.
👉️ This interaction between two people I don’t know on the complete and utter failure of a recent podcast they did was terrific.
If you want a child to know the truth, tell them the truth. If you want a child to love the truth, tell them a story. -Andrew Peterson
One of my goals this year is to be on Twitter less than in past years so this section might be a bit soft until we hit the major weeks. Still, this was great.
With the news that Tiger and Nike are splitting, everybody was sharing their favorite Tiger commercials, and these three stood out to me.
This one is barely about Tiger, but the storytelling is just extraordinary. Nobody is better than Nike at letting you fill in the gaps that they left out. DJ Pie talks about this often — let the reader/watcher/listener do a little work with their imagination. Nike is incredible at this.
This is probably the one I remember most as a kid. I can’t remember where I was the first time I saw it, but I was legitimately astonished. I had no idea this was a thing that all pros could do, and I remember talking with so many people about the commercial. I was just in awe of it. I thought this — and not his course management, shot discipline, lag putting and swing speed — was what made Tiger as good as he was.
Speaking of filling in the gaps. The ability to make a commercial with nobody speaking and only the sound of glass breaking three separate times and have that commercial convey what this one conveys is almost more impressive than the ability to find these three windows.
Speaking of Tiger, Jason Page put together some potential logos for him as he ventures off on his own. The pants inspiration in the first one came from this extraordinary photo of Tiger wearing more fabric on his legs than someone his height has ever worn.
New year, same me trying to consume every piece of content in sight.
One constant for me throughout, though, has been how much I enjoy writing, the act of it, the study of it, the thinking about it.
Words matter, but so does the rhythm of those words, their cadence and the way they are constructed in just the right way to get inside our hearts.
I loved this clip from David Perell recently of Ray Bradbury talking about writing. Here’s what he said.
“You must never think at the typewriter. You must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway. You collect a lot of data. You do a lot of thinking away from your typewriter. But at the typewriter, you should be living.”
“The intellect is a great danger to creativity because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things instead of staying with your own basic truth — who you are, what you are, what you want to be.
I've had a sign over my typewriter for 25 years now which reads: ‘Don't… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— David Perell (@david_perell)
Oct 14, 2023
I love that. I have always pushed back on the idea of being a robotically objective journalist or writer, although that is not to say that facts don’t matter because they very much do.
But you’re always going to get my thoughts, or perhaps more specifically, you’re going to get what I’m feeling because 1. Nobody is objective and 2. Reading writing that is without feeling is like reading the ingredients on the back of a shampoo bottle. You can do it. You’ll probably learn something. They are factually correct.
But did that alter the trajectory of your heart or your life by even 0.1%?
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