Issue No. 158 | February 18, 2025

I am on a plane, headed back from my first in-person TGL experience on Monday, an eight-hour marathon that went by surprisingly quickly. It was a great chance to mix it up a bit, see the festivities in SoFi Center and spend some time with Jon Sherman, who has become a buddy (and who may or may not have a Normal Sport Q&A coming soon).

One thing Jon said to me on Monday — as we watched Justin Thomas do somersaults on a rotating disc of a green and discussed the future of TGL is this …

We don’t know what the future of any sport is going to be.

I found this to be a great point, and we agreed that, outside the NFL, it seems like every sport is experiencing their own version of the Great Unbundling. That is, what do these leagues look like on the pro level when the days of galvanizing millions of people around a specific entity for the sake of community are long gone? People are finding their community, finding their people, finding their tribes in a thousand new places. And while pro sports are one of those places, they are no longer one of only a handful.

This says very little about TGL and more about media and our society in general, but it did get me thinking about TGL and the future and why the entire landscape could look so different than it ever has before.

(As an aside, and a nod to the header image: Could we someday see a Tom Kim pacer drone like Eliud Kipchoge used to break 2:00 in the marathon? We might! We might need to! You can click on the header image for more …)

Onto the news.

But First!

Today’s newsletter is presented by Seed Golf, who is the official golf ball partner of Normal Sport and, along with Experience Ireland Golf and Travel, is sending a Normal Sport reader (and their friend) to Ireland for a once-in-a-lifetime trip.

We’ll draw for this trip on March 1, and you can find out more details right here.

How do you enter? By becoming a paid member of Normal Sport — part of the Normie Club.

Over the next two months, most (not all, but most) of our Players Championship and Masters coverage will be behind the paywall. You’re not going to want to miss out on that as those are two of the events that provide the most normal stuff of the year.

We will be pouring ourselves into those weeks, and if you want to follow those events in as much absurd detail as possible, you will have to be a paid member. Might as well do it now ahead of the March 1 drawing so you get an entry into the Ireland trip, too!

OK, now onto the news.

A Mea Culpa

I regret to inform myself (and all of you) that I already need to issue a mea culpa about something that I said, like, four newsletters ago. A friend had texted about what was going on inside Ludvig. I believe he said, “Is there anyone in there?”

Here was my response.

We still have a ways to go before Ludvig matches Rick’s career, but I know what I watched on Sunday. Ludde has all of the gifts, sure, but we already knew that. What was a bit new was how predatory he looked.

When you watch pro golf events, there comes a time when someone discloses themselves as the killer in the room, and then from that moment on, it is of great surprise if anyone else wins the golf tournament.

That happened at Torrey on Sunday. Not until late, but it happened.

Ludvig’s disposition is wonderfully situated for winning professional golf tournaments. I don’t mean his skills. Obviously you have to hit the ball center-center on repeat and have terrific hands to be a top 10 player and to win signature events.

I mean his demeanor. How he carries himself.

He’s cool and he’s cool and he’s cool and he’s cool … and then he kills.

As an aside: Nobody in the game makes celebrations look better than Ludvig does. This is, ahem, not a high bar, but it’s one he clears with ease.

Lastly, there was something his girlfriend said in the aftermath on Sunday that stuck with me. It was something that is maybe a little odd for a girlfriend to say, but given her background in high-level tennis, it checks out and adds some good context to the entire thing.

Acts like a champ, is a champ.

Despite being Data Golf-pilled and Moneyball-pilled, I still believe in magic. Still believe that there are intangibles at work in the world of sport that cannot be contained in a spreadsheet and never will be. Some teams have them, others don’t. If you have ever played or been around sports — even low-level youth sports — you understand this to be true. What is also true is that some people have them and others don’t.

It’s some weird amalgamation of self-belief, prioritization, luck and preternatural constitution with a bit of polyjuice potion mixed in.

Ed. note: For those of you who didn't pay attention during potions class, polyjuice lets its user appear as someone else, like turning into the nightmare who rattles off four birdies in his last six holes to win The Genesis.

That it is inexplicable, even for veteran players and analysts — that many describe this thing as “it,” as in, “He just has it” — is entirely the point.

Acts like a champ, is a champ is going to stay with me for a while. Ludvig has always obviously looked like a champ, and while those closest to us relationally are not always the most reliable narrators, her phrase was easy to see play out in real life on a monstrous stage on Sunday.

It also sounds like he wants the ball (which is obviously not a given).

A meme for the ages.

“I think it's important to have fun,” said Ludvig. “Like you said, it is a business and … we're professionals, but you still need to have fun. I'm still trying to win a tournament.”

“Coming down the last couple holes is the most fun you'll ever have, I think, and that was the case today and I think I used that to my advantage. Yeah, winning is fun, but also being in that situation and in contention trying to win and sort of everything that goes through your mind and the adrenaline and the excitement and the nerves, everything that comes with it is really fun.”

“It's almost addicting to walk down those last couple holes and just want to do it again,” he added.

Acts like a champ, is a champ is the new Ludvig mantra until further notice.

Normal Sport

1. Absolutely 100 percent zero notes here. None.

I hope that’s a PrecisionPro Titan Elite.

2. Another no notes post. Nothing to add. Just chef’s kiss.

3. Professional golf in 2025 ….

4. What a tweet!

5. LIV playing Penn State football clips (what?!) to juice up Adelaide is really strange.

6. Speaking of Maverick, I was thinking about something when he hit his tee shot on the 71st hole on Sunday. It hit some unsuspecting fan, and instead of kicking out to the right with a probably clear shot at the green and making three at best or four at worst, it ended up in an uninhabitable area on the side of a bunker.

And it reminded me that tournament golf must be maddening. You birdie everything you look at for the first three hours. But then some local gentleman trying to get a glimpse of how good JT’s short iron move at the ball actually is, ends up standing 2 feet in the wrong direction, and next thing you know you're choked up to the steel with the ball at your belly button, praying for a four. Normal stuff.

Golf, truly a game of inches.

Corrupt Golf Media

👉️ JLM has become must read since before his time at the Fried Egg, and that has only continued since he joined. I loved his points here on why narrow fairways stink and why Australia needs to continue to host events.

👉️ I thought the Johnson Wagner commentary on Rory was pretty interesting. Wags kind of went at him for being myopic. But if you read or listen to the entirety of Rory’s statements (which I linked here), it’s kind of the opposite. Wagner explained more (and kind of doubled down) here.

👉️ This on why you should blog even if nobody reads it is pretty awesome.

👉️ I’m a YouTube Boi now. Or at a least a commentator on YouTube Bois.

👉️ Shaan Puri’s post on how to stop working so hard is helpful and good. I love the idea that you should find the product that is yourself, pushed out [to the world]. I do feel like that is what I’m doing (or trying to do) with Normal Sport.

Stat of the Week

Ludvig is 25 and 4 months. He has two PGA Tour wins. When Jordan Spieth was 25 and 4 months, he had 11 PGA Tour wins, including three major championships.

Facts only.

Checking in on LIV

Scott O’Neil popped off at the end of LIV Adelaide — which was a good and fine event! — about how LIV has the best players in the world.

I genuinely don’t want to spend too much time on this, but I cannot help a few thoughts …

1. There is no objectively reasonable world in which this is true. The most compelling data point I’ve seen is that LIV has 16 of the last 35 majors, which (still!) isn’t a majority, and it ignores the fact that it only represents nine players. The other 19 have been won by 15 different players, all of whom play elsewhere.

2. We are back to LIV lovers arguing with Data Golf. Said a different way, we are back to LIV lovers arguing with math. I get disagreeing with the OWGR — Jon Rahm is not the 49th best golfer in the world — but when you say things like “the math hates LIV” about independent places like Data Golf, then it’s just very difficult to take you seriously.

3. LIV’s strongest selling point is that it has great characters. Some of the best! Lean into that instead. You don’t need to try and convince me that Adrian Meronk is better than Patrick Cantlay. What you can absolutely convince me of is that your tour is more compelling from a narrative standpoint. You have Bryson, Phil, Rahm, Sergio, Poulter and Reed. All terrific heroes and/or villains. Lean into it!

4. None of this is not a big deal. Just a CEO saying CEO stuff. Except that it’s emblematic of the three-pronged attack that LIV has leaned on throughout. To say something like this, you either have to engage with delusion, distrustfulness or just straight up being dumb. Any of the three makes it tough to take you seriously over a long window of time.

5. Attention rules the business world. And LIV just doesn’t have it. After the disaster first week numbers (see below), the Adelaide numbers were fine but nothing amazing (though I will say the Australia numbers were terrific — tantamount to 2 million people watching in the U.S. if you account for the difference in populations). Although that’s kind of the point, right? That’s why leagues fight so hard to get in the U.S. market, because there are so many more people. I’m guessing the ~170K that watched in Australia is an amazing number for them, but does it move the needle for your business?

TGL’s numbers are, what, 5x-30x what LIV’s numbers are in the United States. I don’t know what the total global numbers are or what they look like on The Greatest App Ever Invented, but presumably if they were elite, LIV would let us know they were elite.

As an aside, these numbers quietly represent a strike against a unified world tour.

Time zones are difficult for big markets.

6. Co-sign every word.

Thank you for reading until the end. I have no idea what golf is going to look like five years from now or even five months from now, but I know we’re going to be as obsessed with covering it as we are right now.

You’re a sicko for reading a golf newsletter that is 2,237 words long.

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