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Issue No. 146 | January 21, 2025
I’m headed to the PGA Show this week with my friend and business partner, David Hill. If you’re there and you see us, come buy our last 35 newsletter ad slots for the year say hey.
Attending the show as a business owner is so much different than when I used to go with CBS Sports. I used to dread this week, and now I’m ecstatic about it. Thrilled to be in the mix and talk to people from different worlds than my tiny, myopic little viewpoint. Excited to chop it up and see what’s going on.
It’s probably a good life lesson, I suppose. The same event/activity/thing can either be great or terrible depending on my perspective.* Nothing about the PGA Show changed. Only I did.
Except for the 2016 PGA.
Onto the news.
Today’s newsletter is presented by Holderness and Bourne, which is another company that has changed a lot over the years. I asked H&B about what kind of change they’ve seen in their PGA Show presence, and they said that in 2016, their two founders were the only ones who attended.
This year?
They’ll have 20 employees, most of whom will churn through meeting after meeting to fulfill all the orders they will receive from PGA professionals looking to stock their pro shops for the spring and summer.
That’s awesome.
And it’s awesome to see H&B continually push colorways and patterns like they have in the Resort Collection. 10 years in the biz and still fresh. We like that!
OK, now onto the news.
Joseph LaMagna’s interview with Ryan Ruffels about playing Victoria Golf Club with hickories is exceptional. So good. Go read it.
Here was probably my favorite part.
JLM is asking him why he has to flight the ball with older equipment.
JLM: Why not just hit up on it and launch it? Can you elaborate on why that doesn’t work and why it’s necessary to shape the ball a little bit more?
RR: Because the spin keeps the direction back into play. As soon as I tried to launch it high, I lost complete control over the start line and the spin back to the center of the fairway versus when I kind of cover it, I could be like “Ok, I’m going to make sure this ball has a little tail on it like a fade,” so I would aim up the left and kind of pinch it out there low with a ton of spin to get it curving back into the fairway and vice versa the other way.
And the ball spins so much that if there’s any wind whatsoever and the ball gets up in the air, it’s going to get eaten up like we don’t know about with modern equipment. As much as we like to say “Yeah, when you go to the Open you have to flight shots”, ok, yeah a little but not to this extent.
With this equipment, if I had a 140-yard shot into a 20-mph wind, if I hit a normal shot, I would nearly say I probably don’t have a club in the bag to get there with the wrong flight. And that’s what I find really interesting. Like I could hit a driver with the wrong flight into the wind, and there’s potential that it spins out and has no chance of getting there.
Versus I could probably get there with a 5-iron with the proper flight. So I would say the curve back into the fairway, that’s how you control that golf ball, that’s how you control those clubs. And then also the wind is another reason.
Fried Egg
That entire quote is exactly why so many of us are so pro-rollback (of everything). That is such a more interesting way to play (and watch) golf, and actually creates a scenario in which the most skilled players would thrive and even get to show off on the coolest stages in the world.
There is more strategy in that one quote than in the entirety of some events.
Imagine going to watch Hamilton but it’s lip synced.
That’s how many of us feel about the modern equipment situation.
Also, here’s the Ruffels video. I watched the first few holes, and it’s as good as advertised.
Here’s one.
Two Sunday NFL playoff games across two different cities with massive logistics to consider and which were probably watched by more people than have watched the last 27 majors combined: 6 hours 40 minutes.
Three golfers playing 18 holes of golf in Palm Springs: 5 hours 40 minutes.
I’m not going to go on a long pace of play rant other than to use this as an excuse to drop this preposterous article in the Times about the Excel World Championship that my wife sent me this week.
What in the world do the Excel World Championships (yes, the Excel World Championships!) have to do with a pro golf tournament put on by the PGA Tour?
Well, the article is everything you want and more, but there was something buried deep within it that actually said the quiet part out loud about the Tour. When talking about what they wanted their “sport” to become, here was one of the quotes.
“Basically everything that they do to make it more fun for viewers makes it more traumatic for competitors.”
Taking extreme measure to fix slow play is unequivocally the best thing for fans even if it is traumatic for players. I don’t, to quote Rory, give a flying fig about how a forced acceleration of the game affects players. Truly. Players will always adapt (see: MLB).
I care deeply, though, about how it affects fans.
But as long as players are in charge of the league, nothing is ever going to change.
This got me good. It was a question asked to Tyrrell Hatton after his win in Dubai.
Q. Does it excite you, the prospect of playing in a Ryder Cup in New York, and what did you make of the comedian who [described] you as a wee Amish farmer at the Team Cup?
Hatton: He actually said that I looked like a bouncer for Tesco's. (Laughter) It was a pretty loose December [in terms of fitness] to be fair, so I'll let that one slide (laughter).
A wee Amish farmer and a bouncer for Tesco’s in back to back sentences. If Hatton doesn’t pull up to Bethpage in a horse and buggy, then why even have the event?
Amish 🤝 horse drawn carriages 🤝 Legion XIII
Remember my rant from a few weeks ago about Kapalua?
A fairly reasonable list of [the 10 most interesting golfers in the world] includes Tiger, Bryson, Rory, Rahm, Scottie, Xander, Phil, Brooks and Spieth. I suppose you can throw Morikawa or JT or Hideki in it if you want and take out Xander, Phil or Spieth.
Anyway, the point is not really who’s on the list. The point is how few of those guys played Kapalua last week. Of the list of 10 above … we saw one at the Sentry! One! And any reasonable combination of the top 10 most compelling guys includes at most three guys who played last week.
Normal Sport No. 140
Fast forward to Torrey and from that list we get … Hideki.
The two best events of the PGA Tour’s opening month of the season — formerly two must see events because of Tiger — and the of the 20 opportunities for the 10 most interesting golfers in the world to make an appearance, those spots have been filled by like 2.5 of those guys.
Does January now belong to the Euro Tour?
Speaking of the Euro Tour.
This influencer training video was yet another in a long line of elite Euro Tour pieces over the years.
One thing that I think they have done so well is lean into characters. They lean into Padraig’s nerdiness and Tommy’s geniality and Hatton’s insanity. Characters and formats are why people watch sports.
A great WWE video dropped recently (not a sentence I ever envisioned typing), and this was the opening line.
“It’s as real as our ancient yearning. Not merely for a hero but the villain as well. Just as they need each other, so do you need them to tell a story.”
The Euro Tour gets this. And while golf is not scripted and therefore there is some ambiguity when it comes to the characters, leagues can certainly help spotlight these heroes and villains in funny and interesting ways. Nobody in golf does that better right now than the Euro Tour.
I think this might be the only one we need this week.
Things that have stopped Scottie Scheffler over the last 12 months.
• Blade putter
• Officer Gillis
• Homemade ravioli
Might need to leave the cooking to Min Woo.
👉️ I did a pod last week with Larry the Golf Guy where I told my story and gave my vision for the future of Normal Sport. We also talked a little golf.
👉️ I’m pumped for Tyler Johnson, who quit his job last week to go full time on Charlie Golf Co. He wrote about that story here. If you have kids (or are interested in business), you should check out what he’s doing.
👉️ My friend Robert sent me this video on searching for the perfect throwing motion. I’m not done with it, but it’s awesome and the type of project you could do with so many little things in golf. People would find it even more compelling because everyone also plays golf.
👉️ I finished Ghosted over the weekend. I knew almost nothing about the author, Nancy French, going into the book, but her story is amazing. A great read.
👉️ I legit think this on Jayden Daniels is the future of sport.
• Yo. Yes.
• This comment got me pretty good. Extremely deep cut.
• Haha, this one was great, too.
Thank you for reading until the end.
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