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Special Edition | March 31, 2025
Two things coincided recently that led to today’s announcement.
The first is that I am never not thinking about how to improve our business and this community. I fall asleep thinking about it, wake up thinking about it, probably dream about it in the interim. I constantly feel the low-grade din of ideas rumbling around.
The second thing is that during PLAYERS week, I got a call from someone I have a few mutual friends with named Joel. As it turns out, Joel runs a business called Splash Sports, which — I did not get this phrasing approved — digitizes office contests for people who are tired of hand-grading 221 March Madness brackets for the marketing department and another 189 for the sales folks.
Aside: When I was a kid, I ran a March Madness pool in my neighborhood and collected money from everyone on our street. Turns out, this is “technically illegal” and my parents made me stop.
“‘Technically illegal’ and ‘plausible deniability’ are not mutually exclusive if you’re asking me, Jon, and I know you are.”
Splash Sports has figured out how to run most of the games we love, legally, so that none of us have to go to jail. Turns out, they’re big into golf, too, which is why they contacted me, wondering if I would want to run a Masters fantasy contest.
My first reaction was, Hey, thanks but no thanks, I’m not a big fantasy guy.
The more I thought about it, though, the more compelled I was by the idea of running a majors-only competition for each of the four 2025 majors, starting with the Masters.
I won’t do anything for the Sony or Napa or the Deere, but the four majors (and possibly the Ryder Cup)? Almost all of us do that anyway — heck, I do this with my kids every year — why not do it together?
So that’s what we did. We created a Masters fantasy contest for paid members of Normal Sport (you can join our membership here). (Aside No. 2: Our paid members are part of what we’re now calling the Normal Club).
The game itself is pretty simple: You get to pick eight players from various tiers, drop one of their scores for the Masters and lowest total score wins.
It costs $0 to enter the contest if you’re a paid member, and we will pay out the following, completely funded by Normal Sport.
1st — $2,500
2nd — $1,000
3rd — $500
In fact, all four of our majors contests this year will be free for paid members.
We are doing this because 1. It’s fun 2. It will build some good community and 3. These contests are one of the ways we want to provide you value and say thank you for your annual membership with Normal Sport.
Our goal with this: Grow our community of paid members to 1,000 by end of year. We just hit 625 last week, and — I’m scared to say this out loud — I actually think we can get to 1,000 by the end of major season.
Many of you have joined the Normal Club simply because you want our business to exist. Some of you have become members so that you can read all of our major coverage, a lot of which will be paywalled. That’s great, we’re pumped about that!
But we also want to give you a ton in return and make you feel like this is not just a Ponzi scheme so that my kids can continue to eat.
One of our company values is care — giving legitimate thought to one’s business and its customers, shockingly, doesn’t seem to be a high value for a lot of founders/owners — and we hope that you can feel that we care about our community when we do things like this.
Here’s another fun addition we’re planning.
In the same way that pros get a Wikipedia page dedicated to their major wins, we will dedicate a normalsport.com page to our own major champions.
So if you win the 2025 Masters contest, you will have your name, photo and a quote trashing all the other idiots you beat who refused to roster Corey Conners even though he’s clearly playing well and has a great history at ANGC. All on our website.
I’m really excited about this, and I think it’s a nice win-win-win for everyone.
An email is going out to our paid members today, March 31, at 7 p.m. Eastern with a private link to sign up for this contest. If you become a paid member between now and then, be on the lookout for that email. If you’re reading this after that deadline, don’t worry, we still got you. We will send the contest link to paid members a few more times between now and the start of the Masters.
And if you choose not to become a member, we are still giving away an enormous number of items from our sponsors during Masters week to several of our readers.
Best of luck to all, and thank you for your continued support of this preposterous newsletter and organization.
Kyle Porter
Founder | Normal Sport
