Reflections on 100 Newsletters

Issue No. 101 | August 9, 2024

Hey,

Today’s newsletter is a bit of a look back on writing the first 100 Normal Sport newsletters and a look ahead to what’s next. It’s personal, but then again, all of them are to me. I’m hopeful that it’s encouraging to you.

Thank you for being on this journey with us. It’s been even more fun than we thought it would be.

When I was a child — probably 9 or 10 or 11 — my grandfather gave me a magic set for Christmas. It was honestly nothing special, but I was enthralled with it. Making cotton balls disappear in plastic cups, tricks with handkerchiefs, vanishing coins. The whole thing.

It was, I realized even at a young age, a tremendous gift.

But it was not the plastic and the cloth that constituted the gift my grandfather gave me. No, it was something that would stay with me for far longer than any of the items in that magic set. It was the gift of learning to perform.

What I realized after receiving that magic set that I did not know before is something that has stayed with me for my entire life. It’s something I sense when I read books or watch musicals but perhaps most of all when I have a chance to write this newsletter.

I’m enamored with the idea of giving people a show.

And I do not mean that in the derogatory, sleight-of-hand kind of way. I don’t mean that what I’m doing is performative or fake.

I mean that there’s nothing I enjoy more than watching an actress or a singer on Broadway empty the tank at some throwaway matinee on a Thursday afternoon simply because he or she loves the craft, lives to deliver what just one or two or 10 or maybe 5,000 people came to see.

My desire for this newsletter is that when you see it in your inbox, you cannot click on it fast enough, cannot wait to discover what insane minutia we uncovered over the past few days. That you must rush into the theater.

We do not optimize these issues for clicks or for growth or anything else content sherpas will tell you that you must focus on as you’re building your little media empire. All we do — our north star — is to write and illustrate the best stuff we possibly can to delight and inspire you, the reader.

None of the rest of it really matters.

I just read a few of the responses from our survey last week — not all of them, but a random handful — and I have to say I walked away thrilled with the perspective many of you have of what we do.

In a world that seems bent on machines teaching, informing and entertaining humans, we give you the very thing (maybe the only thing) those machines will never be able to give: Our hearts.

That’s a bit self-serious and perhaps overstating things, but this newsletter has evolved into something I’m not sure I saw coming. It is silly and ridiculous and we’re never not gonna talk about fire ants and giant metal dinosaurs on golf courses. But it has also become the sort of place where we can talk about golf and life and how those two so often interact.

So thank you for reading this newsletter. It has become important to me, possibly more important than I imagined it would. Why? I’m not totally sure. I suppose the best way to explain it is that I know there is a congregation of people that I know will understand what I’m talking about and where I’m coming from.

I recently re-read something I wrote to celebrate one year of writing this newsletter, and this part in particular stood out.

I am certainly trying to figure out golf and pro golf alongside you, but I would probably add that I’m trying to figure out life and parenting and my career alongside you as well. That’s a scary thing to admit, but if we’re honest with ourselves, it’s the same boat all of us are in.

To celebrate 100 newsletters, I wrote down a bunch of somewhat scattered thoughts on where we’re at, where we’re going and what in the world we are doing.

1. I’m so grateful for everyone who filled out the survey last week. Wow. Like I said, I read through a few of the responses and testimonials, and felt pumped enough to believe that I could perhaps beat Noah Lyles in the 100 (if he was running a 200). We had a meeting on Thursday about what we learned from the survey, and there were so many great takeaways and so much helpful feedback. Not all of it was rainbows and fairy dust, but all of it was incredibly instructive. Thank you for that.

I think the survey actually reminded me or conveyed to me that this newsletter feels like as much yours as it does mine. That’s a very cool (and perhaps unusual) thing.

2. A tiny quote from the survey that lit me up.

“It's a sincere product.”

To me, there’s no better endorsement.

3. I think I have mentioned this before, but this newsletter is the work throughout the week that I find myself avoiding the most.

Wait, what … why? I thought you loved writing it?

Well, I do. Nothing delights me more. But it’s also the hardest thinking and researching and editing I do in any given week. I don’t know whether it’s great or not — that’s for other people to decide — but I know it is among the best stuff I produce because it is also the hardest.

The other day, I stumbled into this thread from somebody who started something similar to Normal Sport but in the political news space. One of the tweets in the middle of the thread rocked my world.

The best thing is also the hardest thing, which is the exact reason it’s the best thing. No amount of iterating or leveling up or optimization or indexing, even while using all the tools at your disposal will ever, ever change that.

4. Personal is a superpower: If you have been reading for, like, more than three days, you know that one of my things is how much I appreciate golfers who aren’t afraid to put their hearts out there. Max Homa comes to mind. Not afraid to say how much it means. Not afraid to cry when it’s great or when it bottoms out. Something I have realized in writing this newsletter is how little writing and sportswriting is personal. There are obvious, formal, journalistic reasons for this. But I think it creates a bit of a vacuum for the personal writing to thrive.

And by personal, I don’t mean “here’s more about my wife and kids!” Rather, I mean “hey, here is how I am processing and understanding and reacting to this news or this outcome as a golf fan.”

You guys spend a lot of time following golf so of course it’s personal! We should acknowledge that more. Of course you like certain guys and dislike others. Of course we should speak to that and attempt to interpret it. It’s actually strange that it doesn’t happen more often, but this is the reason places like NLU are thriving.

Honestly, there’s just not much (good) writing in general from the perspective of the emotionally intelligent fan (sports or political or otherwise). That is sort of the vein I think Normal Sport has hit at times: Yo, all of this is so absurd, but also this one thing affected me in this specific way emotionally. That’s how we all live life. I think it should be more of how we communicate as well.

It’s one reason Shane Ryan’s piece on Rory at Pinehurst resonated so widely. You felt like you were there with him, watching him internalize what you were also trying to internalize.

When it becomes personal as a fan, it also becomes an outlet for us to talk about things that matter to us in our own lives. When Max talks about his dreams, it gives you the freedom to talk about yours. But if we don’t ever cross the line of making it personal then it becomes difficult to get to that place of our own vulnerability.

5. Humanity is a superpower, too: Again, there are #reasons there is not more humanity (or even empathy) in sports coverage and why the humanity and empathy that are there are mostly just implied.

I just don’t know that I agree with all of those reasons.

Golf is life, life is golf. They are intertwined. All sports probably are, but golf is especially so because of the way it is constructed and because almost everyone reading this has a personal relationship to the game in some way.

Most (all?) of us play, which is not true of almost any other sport. And so there is a unique empathy to be found in golf, and yet so few places enter into it. That is something I have found to be both powerful and difficult.

If you go too far with it, it’s like, “Hey, not everything is that deep.” If you don’t go far enough then it won’t land. But it is a line that few other places try and walk, which means it’s an opportunity to have a voice that people can (and want to!) relate to.

6. A quote I heard the other day that blew my mind (and that I agree with): “I want to be me at scale.” Yes, that is what I want, too. I can’t imagine enjoying anything more than writing this newsletter. I only want to be me at scale.

7. The other day, I scheduled the newsletter to go out at 8:55 or 9 or whatever. I went inside to get ready for the day, and while I was getting ready in my room, I looked at my watch, and it was 9 a.m. and I was thinking about how over the next 10 minutes people from multiple (I don’t know how many but more than, say five) countries would be reading words I wrote.

I think about the arc of history often and how much we take for granted in 2024. This is surely one of those things. Imagine telling a Roman emperor in the 100s that in the future they could write something down and nearly all humans in the world would at least have the ability to read it almost instantly.

I try to not take that for granted.

8. Here are some Normal Sport numbies since we launched 18 months ago.

• 100 newsletters published (now 101)

• ~250,000 words written

• ~200 unique illustrations

• 11,100 net subscribers

• 68.9% open rate

• 9.8% click thru rate

Those last two might not mean a lot to you, but they are both considered world class in the newsletter world, which I’m proud of.

9. And some other metrics that might interest you. Zero surprises that a Masters recap is the most opened newsletter (~75%).

• Most opened newsletter: 15 final thoughts on the 2024 Masters

• Second-most opened newsletter: LA460CC (an insane title)

• Most clicked-on newsletter: Does Tiger look like Michael Scott?

10. I saw this great quote the other day, and it hit me.

What I wrote about Scheffler and Dressel in the Tuesday newsletter. The stuff about caring. Man, I desire that in my own life. Some (I think most) days it’s there, but other days I’m left searching for it. Empathy is aspirational and, unlike a lot of aspirations, actually worthy of the effort.

11. One thing I have been thinking about with the Olympics is how insane it is that if you’re a 110M hurdler from, say, Algeria who has zero shot at the finals, much less medaling, your Olympic experience lasts like 12 seconds. You work for four years, travel however-many miles, and then that’s it. Insane behavior.

One of my favorite things about writing online and about this newsletter in particular is that, unlike the Olympics, I get to have another shot the next day or the next week. There’s always a next one. And while that can sometimes be overwhelming, it’s mostly a fresh and clean slate upon which to try and become better than before. I love that.

12. One term I have been using a lot recently within our business is the idea of a handcrafted newsletter. That sounds like strange terminology about a digital product, but that is essentially what we’re doing and that specific description conveys the care we put into them all.

One inspiration for me recently is this interview with a guy named Isaac Saul, whose Twitter I screenshotted above. He builds a handcrafted political newsletter daily (sociopathic stuff), and I think he’s among the best in the world at three things I care about a lot: humor in writing, humanity in writing and keeping it personal. All of that makes for something that feels handcrafted.

13. Someone whose work I respect a lot and reads this newsletter said this about Normal Sport: “I open these emails because of golf, but I'm rarely thinking about just golf when I close them, which I think is a pretty cool testament to what you're doing!”

🥹🥹🥹 

14. Membership is coming. One thing that was clear in the survey is that we have the readership and the model to build up a membership. That will happen over the next few weeks. It won’t be crazy. It won’t prohibit folks from reading. It will be low-key, but we will put enough compelling benefits on the table to make it worth your time and money.

Our working theory is that the premier product — the 2x/week newsletter — should continue to be free and that there are enough people who want it to exist that will support its existence. This idea is called unlocking the commons. It makes sense to me. I give money to NLU and Fried Egg, not necessarily for the extra content — although I do enjoy it sometimes — but because I want those places to exist. I think (hope!) we can do the same.

15. Being unique matters: You don’t necessarily have to be great. You don’t necessarily have to win awards. You don’t necessarily have to be the best writer or the best illustrator or the best anything. One thing I do think you have to do to thrive, though, is you have to be unique.

We are nothing if we are not unique. One of our behind-the-scenes mantras is to be something you cannot find anywhere else in the world. A hundred newsletters in, and I think we’re at least heading in that direction.

So thank you for reading. I’ve said this before, but without you reading we are just shouting and drawing into the void. Just spinning our wheels. Just aimlessly pounding drivers on the range.

That our words and pictures and thoughts and (sometimes strange) interpretations of golf actually land with an audience is, to us, just about the coolest thing in the world.