Q&A: Shane Ryan

Issue No. 126 | October 25, 2024

This week’s Q&A is with Shane Ryan, whose golf writing I have enjoyed for a long time. I even once, way back when I covered golf for CBS Sports, got to blurb his book, Slaying the Tiger.

Ah yes, there I am, trying to run my editorial reviews grift in which I draft off the brilliance of other writers in the hopes that someone will read my stuff as well.

I’m kidding about all of it, of course, other than that Shane is a brilliant golf writer, a hilarious colleague at the events we attend together, a terrific friend who is generous in ways that belie the amount of time we spend together and oh yeah, he’s also the author of one of the great hypotheticals in sportswriting history.

Hope you enjoy the interview!

Shane

KP: You wrote a book called Slaying the Tiger that several of my friends said helped get them into golf. Looking back on that experience -- back when we all had no idea what we were doing -- how did writing that book shape the way you think about pro golf now?

Shane: First off, let me just say to you and your readers that I've greatly enjoyed the new era of Normal Sport, and that beyond the top-tier content, it represents an aspirational vision for digital writing, and that if you love this stuff and haven't yet paid Kyle, you should be sent to a Siberian gulag to smash rocks with your forehead for a decade. The man has like 19 children! (Seriously, though, great job, and as weird as it sounds, great job to your audience for supporting this ... literally everyone in sports media should be rooting for you, and for projects like this generally).

Ed. note: As a general life rule, I am broadly anti-Siberian gulags, but I do appreciate Shane’s kindness in saying this and can promise there will be an opportunity for you to support Normal Sport monetarily in the near future. We are currently building that framework (agreement), and want to make sure we publish it in a way that makes sense and provides value to readers. OK, back to Shane.

As to your good question: I haven't really thought about [it], but I do remember that in order to pitch the book, we had to frame it around some kind of central conceit—in this case, "Hey, the young stars are starting to take over a sport dominated by Tiger!"—because publishers like the idea of overarching narratives and trends.

For good reason, probably. But deep in my heart I was always thinking, “Just get me out there and let me write a book, screw the theme.”

Now, I was lucky in that the concept we pitched actually came to fruition in 2014 with successful seasons by Spieth and Rory and Jason Day and etc.—I think it would have been bad if David Hearn and Bo Van Pelt split the four majors—but as I researched and interviewed and then put the book together, my bias was confirmed: What really matters is telling stories about people and/or institutions, but that as long as the stories are good, the rest almost doesn't matter.

So it's kind of funny that the framework of the book, reflected in the title "Slaying the Tiger," and which I definitely referenced during the promotional phases because it's a better pitch than "F*** you, go buy my book," was something where deep in my heart I always felt like, "Who cares? Do you like sports? Just come read about Matt Every, or what Bible study is like on the PGA Tour, or how Paul McGinley sold Graeme McDowell on playing with an antisocial French guy at the Ryder Cup."

So regarding the coverage of pro golf, I think it cemented the idea that what editors tend to love for big projects, which is a broader umbrella trend, pales in comparison to the power of a good personal story.

Now that I'm reading your question again, though, I think I should probably answer the part about actually covering pro golf. In that case, I think the principles I learned were to suck it up and endure humiliation in the attempt to speak with players in a personal setting, try to be really close to the action to get details that nobody else can see, and most of all to take risks in the writing.

Especially then, and less so now, there was a certain uniformity to golf writing, and I think people were really appreciative of someone who tried something new.

As for golf itself, I think I learned pretty quickly that it's a world of money where both the players and the people with power don't share my background, experiences, values, or pretty much anything else.

It's an alien landscape, vastly different from how 99.9999% of Americans experience life, and I think one thing that people who follow golf never quite understand is how strange and isolating living inside the professional golf bubble can be, and the kind of human being that lifestyle produces.

Nobody ever believes me when I say this, but I would never want to be a professional golfer, especially post ... 1990? It seems like a grueling and disorienting life that can break you in various ways even if you succeed and ultimately isn't worth the money.

I try to understand the people involved through that lens.

KP: Here's something I don't think I've ever asked you but have always wanted to know: Your worldview is not one that is predisposed to a sport that is broadly viewed as stuffy and inaccessible. How in the world did you ever fall in love with golf to begin with?

Shane: It's just another case of "life happens while you're making other plans," I think. I had no interest in golf when I was a kid, but then when I was a teenager I started to be interested in tournaments like the Masters and Ryder Cup.

But I never even played golf until I was over 30, and covering it for a living was a total accident.

I've told this story so much that I always feel like I'm reading from a script, so I'll keep it short, but basically, when I worked at Grantland in 2012—which was itself a lucky job for me to get, through circumstances that seem too far-fetched to believe (basically, I wrote a blog that 100 people read that Bill Simmons somehow found)—I asked to go cover the Ryder Cup.

Nobody else at Grantland wanted anything to do with golf, and probably because I was a grinder workhorse journeyman type, they pitied me enough to send me, and then Bill Simmons liked the story I wrote from Medinah on Sunday, sent me to a few more events in 2013, then an agent got in touch with me, we did a book proposal, and suddenly in 2014 I spent 30+ weeks on the PGA Tour getting rebuffed by Steven Bowditch and attempting to write a book.

From there I made contacts with Golf Digest, and now here we are, ten years later, and I'm a certified member of the Corrupt Golf Media with 75 Jay Monahan bobbleheads on my desk.

But what that broad strokes story doesn't tell is that I started playing in 2013—I figured if I was going to cover this game, I should know something about it—and now I'm completely obsessed.

Did you know I broke 80 last year, Kyle?

I hope so, because I wrote about 15 articles about it in Digest. And as I plan to write in this week's Golfpocalypse column immediately after finishing all 20,000 words of answering these questions, I think I've managed to fall even more in love with the game in the last two years despite the professional golf world doing its best at every turn to make us want to jump off a cliff.

It's a really special sport that has enriched my life, and I'm very glad I play now so I can appreciate and even love the recreational half of things. More and more, I gravitate to the stories you can tell outside the morass of the top levels.

KP: I have this theory that those of us in sports media who are at or around our age are all derivatives of Bill Simmons. You worked for and with him at Grantland. In what ways did his influence both as a reader and an employee shape the arc of your career?

Shane: I remember when I had my horrifically boring summer job at the Department of Labor in Albany, NY during college, I would wait for the latest Bill Simmons column like I was a dying man waiting for a rain cloud in the desert.

It was really eye-opening to discover somebody who wrote like that about sports, and it came at a time where it felt so engaging and so relevant, to the point that when I watched the Yankees beat the Red Sox in 2003 while studying abroad, one of the main things I cared about was what Bill Simmons would say the next day.

Is there anybody who comes remotely close to that now? I think the answer's no, and I also catch myself wondering what would happen if another Simmons came along right now ... is the [pretentious voice] FRACTURED DIGITAL LANDSCAPE at all conducive to someone like that making any headway?

It's part of why I'm following your project with such interest, I want this to be a world where an engaging and obsessed-in-a-good-way writer like yourself can make money and succeed on his own, and I would imagine for you that there's a little bit of fear that things are so thoroughly f***** that only someone with 3 million followers can make it happen. I absolutely don't think that's the case, and in a lot of ways the internet gives more opportunities to people like you, not less, but it's also interesting to think how unique Simmons was to his time and place. Drew Magary is the closest comparison we have now, but even he made his bones and his reputation in a different internet ecosystem, and is now writing for a site that is wonderful but that you wouldn't call mainstream.

So as a reader, the clear influence Simmons had on me was to show the possibilities of writing informally, at length, and outside the dull structures that had become the norm. Re: Simmons as an employer, this will be a disappointing answer, but while he launched my career and was really good to me, he and I never met in person, and I was way too low on the Grantland totem pole to be directly answerable to him in any way.

I have nothing but good feelings toward him, but he wouldn't know me if he passed me on the street.

KP: You have an eclectic smattering of interests from other categories outside of golf, which is part of what I think makes your work so good. Give me 2-3 non-golf people that have really shaped the way you think about the world.

Shane: I don't know why I'm finding this question so difficult. I would like to have some really impressive answers, but in terms of how I think about the world, it's such an untraceable amalgam of influences that it becomes hard to pinpoint any one human being.

I will say that I think certain artists inform my "aesthetic" of what I want to write like when I'm at my best. At the top of that heap would be Wes Anderson the film director, who (as you and I'm sure many of your readers already know) makes these very funny, heavily stylized films that some people find distancing, but that I find incredibly affecting to the point that I, a person who rarely cries in life, reliably lose it at certain inflection points in the same movies, every time.

I think what Wes Anderson captures for me is the elemental poignancy, the deep sadness, of the most gutting and inescapable part of life, which is simply that time passes.

I'm sure this is reductive, but sometimes I think that all great art can be distilled into how effective it is at capturing the beauty and the longing tied to that very simple fact.

And what's weird about it is this feeling has always been with me. I remember being a kid, being eight years old, and one day just being overwhelmed by the fact that my parents would die one day, and that I'd die too. And now that I have kids, obviously that feeling is magnified to the nth degree, and what I'm glad I didn't know as a kid is that not only does time pass, but it passes faster and faster.

I've written before about the metaphor of the train, where you look out at the train tracks, and at the start of your life, when the train just begins to chug along, you can see each individual train track, but by the time the train gathers steam, they begin to blur together, and how those are the years of your life. There's an acceleration to this experience we have of being human, where if you gave me 82 years, I have technically only lived half my life at this point, but in fact I know that my experience of life lived is far greater than 50%, and that I am now truly hurtling forward in time to the conclusion.

As many great writers have said, time is a thief.

Where was I? What did you ask? Oh yeah! So I think Wes Anderson is really good at mining the beauty inherent to our fleeting existence, and definitely shaped how I want to tell stories, even though I don't make movies.

Vladimir Nabokov, to give yet another pretentious answer, was similar.

And finally, Vladimir Putin. 

Just kidding. My holy trinity of artists are Wes Anderson, Nabokov, and Stuart Murdoch of the band Belle & Sebastian. I think what ties them together is emotional sincerity tied to a kind of bold and surprising humor.

Aside from the obvious answer of parents and friends and all that, I think those three dudes were really formative for me, especially in my 20s when I was kind of consolidating a million different thoughts and feelings and learning how to write.

KP: Your U.S. Open piece this summer. My gosh, it was extraordinary. You and Brian Phillips are the ones who most consistently make me say, "Welp, I can't do that." Who is that for you? Who do you read or follow in sports that you're like, "I just don't think I would have ever even considered writing or thinking about that"?

Shane: Nobody. I'm at the top, and below me I see only the pathetic grasping of inferiors.

Obviously I'm kidding. I'm always flattered when you compliment my writing, and knowing that you liked something like that piece carries me through the times when I'm writing some blog titled, "Watch Austin Eckroat get OWNED by this sassy turtle!!!!"

Not to throw the flattery right back at you, but I really do like reading your stuff because of how good you are at writing and how much you care.

I inevitably compare the two of us in my head, not about writing, but about worldviews, because there are so many very apparent similarities. And I think the differences are interesting. I think I'm more cynical than you, and I've had the thought before that our respective cultures are very obvious in the places where we're different. Like, if you were born to lapsed Catholics in upstate New York and I was born in a religious culture in the south, would we just be the same exact people in reverse?

But I think what's great about what you do, and what I'm trying to do more of, is that everything you write is personal. I don't know if you would say this consciously and I hope I'm not putting words in your mouth, but I think similar to me you've rejected the notion of "objectivity" in writing about basically anything, and embraced the truth that it's impossible and less interesting to separate ourselves from the subject matter.

Yes, this is a slippery slope to being completely inside your own head, but I'd rather start here and regulate than the other way around.

I also think there's a spirituality in almost everything you write that I strive for too, even though our core beliefs on that topic would be pretty different. (One of the pieces I have in my head to write, and which I want to do soon but which scares me, is a comprehensive essay on what God means to me.)

I don't know why I went into that tangent, but anyway ... in terms of golf writers, who I find myself reading the most are my friends Luke Kerr-Dineen and Joel Beall at Golf Digest. The three of us are all so different, which makes me appreciate what they do and the intelligence they bring to their writing so much.

They are very smart and talented, even if many people are saying I am much better looking. One of the really great parts about the last two years for me has been becoming friends with them. And outside of them, I imagine we have some of the same favorites, like our boy KVV or Brendan Quinn or a million others.

I wish I had a better answer for you when it comes to other sports writers, but the honest truth is that outside of golf, I don't really read a ton of sports writing. For instance, I'm with you in really liking Brian Phillips, but I can't remember the last time I even heard of him writing something. I'm sure he has, I'm just so out of touch.

So with sports I'm mainly focused on golf, and along with the people mentioned, I love reading good younger writers like Gabby and Brody at the Athletic, Sean (who you just interviewed) and James and Dylan at Golf.com, and of course everyone else at Digest where I feel so lucky to work until AI gains the capacity to write 9,000 words on Rory each week. It feels like a really good time for golf writing.

KP: How do you climb into the zone? That place where you're just flowing when you write? What does it for you? Specific music, setting? Take me there. Give me the goods, Shane!

Shane: Do as many drugs as you can, all at the same time, run a mile in six minutes, and hope something hits.

(Note: don't do this.)

Honestly, I wish I knew. Any kind of flow state I enter comes about by accident, without preparation and without the aid of substances.

What I will say is that I definitely recognize and feel the zone, and definitely have a sense when I've written something that is better than most other stuff I write.

The U.S. Open story was a good example. It sounds arrogant to say, but the minute I finished, I not only felt it was very good, but also felt it was going to get a lot of attention and that it would force all my enemies to praise me publicly. And I just admit that frankly because with almost everything I write, that's not the case.

But sometimes you get into the emotional flow, and it gets to a point where the small things, the little mistakes, just don't matter, because THE POWER IS IN YOU and you know the reader will be swept along in the same currents that are sweeping you.

Unfortunately, this is very rare. To even have a chance to exercise that flow state in golf you almost need something as striking as what happened at Pinehurst. What I strive for more often now is that David Halberstam/Robert Caro mode where you're hyper-organized, very prepared, and able to use all the tools and knowledge at your disposal to craft an incredible story, and maybe here and there you have room for a rhetorical flourish.

I can tell you what I can't do is listen to podcasts while I'm writing. I'm horrible at that kind of multi-tasking. Even in the rare times I listen to music, it has to be something instrumental or I'm listening too hard to the lyrics. I'm the kind of person where if I'm writing and my wife comes to knock on the door I'll go, "YES?" in a complete asshole tone, only to find out she's brought me food because she thought I might be hungry or something. It's amazing I can work in a media center, but somehow that doesn't bother me. Likely due to the soothing presence of Joel Beall, who will hum Enya's "Orinoco Flow" to calm me down when I become agitated.

KP: One of your corners has been the evolution of the Ryder Cup. Nobody has covered it better or more comprehensively. My question on that: What is the most underrated aspect of its greatness? The thing that seems small and stupid and throwaway but actually brings about tremendous meaning to that week. 

Shane: I love all the little strategic gambits, and how we can analyze and debate them endlessly. I loathe the people who are like, "you just gotta play better!" because not only is it not true, but it's not fun. If we're not getting angry at each other about the merits of playing alt shot first on Friday morning, why are we even alive?

That's part of what completely sucks about the current blowout era, it ends up meaning that none of this matters. It's hard to spend six hours doing a podcast on Padraig Harrington not knowing what version of Titleist Matt Fitzpatrick plays when the final score is 26-2.

But you said the word "meaning," and I have to say, lately the Ryder Cup is being stripped of meaning for me a little bit. It's very hard for me to feel romantic about anything in professional golf, and inside my own head the Ryder Cup is falling prey to that too. And yet! I still love it. The Ryder cup is Rory in tournament form, I cannot yet quit it. There's too much magic and history in the past. And I promise I'm not just saying that because I know they're one of your sponsors.

KP: You have been involved in a lot of different series and unique things over the years -- your Ryder Cup narrative pod comes to mind. What's the bigger project, maybe it's a documentary or screenwrite or YouTube series or something that's bigger that you haven't done that you have tremendous desire or aspiration to take on?

Shane: I would LOVE to sink my teeth into a multi-part podcast series where you can really do some in-depth research, lots of interviews, and thread a narrative over a few hours of content. If you're reading this out there, I encourage you to commit a series of bizarre murders at golf courses and then frame up an innocent man so I can do a hit podcast in 2026.

Alternatively, send me some good ideas.

I would also like to write another book where I'm just researching and don't have to travel. Please give me an idea, Kyle. I'm very tired.

KP: Do you care more about what players or other media members think about you?

Shane: As mentioned above, players are so alien to me that it's impossible for me to care what they think. I would think almost every one of them has no idea who I am. It's like asking, "what does General Secretary of the Communist Party Xi Jinping think of you?" A, he doesn't know me and doesn't want to know me, and B, if he took the time to have an opinion, I would have to take it with a major grain of salt. (Please note that I am not directly comparing professional golfers to Xi Jinping... except for Max Homa, who is just like him.)

Now, if Scottie Scheffler were to approach me one day and say, "hey Shane, I loved your blog about Austin Eckroat and the sassy turtle," maybe I'd start weeping for joy and prove myself a hypocrite.

But until then, I'm way, way more concerned about what my colleagues think of me, and I think it's way more of a reflection on my character than what Lee Westwood thinks, or whatever. I just try to show respect to everyone grinding at this biz, never take inexplicable, out-of-context cheap shots, and treat everyone with dignity. Except for that piece of s*** James Colgan.

Thank you for reading until the end.

You’re a sicko, and I’m grateful for it.

And thank you to Shane for his time.

I laughed a lot as I edited.

I don’t think anyone in golf makes me laugh more.

Go follow him!