Issue No. 164 | March 4, 2025

Two things to note before we get to the goods.

1. We gave away a $500 gift card to Worldwide Golf (which sounds fake, but I promise is real). Reader Frank O. won it. Here is a nice thing he said about the newsletter.

2. Speaking of giveaways, we will draw for our Ireland golf trip giveaway on Wednesday at 10 a.m. Eastern live on Instagram. The pool will be anyone who signed up for our paid membership by March 1. Tune in! And if you miss it, we will disclose the winner on Thursday.

Onto the news.

But First!

Today’s newsletter is presented by Meridian, which is the official putter partner of Normal Sport. This week, we’re grateful that Arnold Palmer never got his hands on a Meridian putter. Otherwise he might not have have kept searching for the perfect flat stick and amassed the sickest of sicko collections.

We would never have gotten to see photos like … this one.

via Kingdom Golf

One of my personal favorite things about Meridian is how good they are about letting you in on the details of how they make their product. Speaking of Instagram! If you’re not following them there, they do a great job of showing behind the scenes footage of how their putters come together.

My takeaway from those videos is how customized and cared for each putter is. One of our values as a business is — this should surprise exactly zero people — care. Caring about the right things. Meridian cares about the right things — making world class putters for its customers — and we are glad to partner with them to bring you this newsletter.

Onto the news!

Honda Thoughts

Though I got briefly distracted by starting a top 10 “non-major shots that I think about at random times throughout the day more often than I should” list, which was inspired by this Twitter exchange, I actually did have a few Honda thoughts after watching …

• ZJ got within, like, six of the lead on Saturday, and I realized that the funniest imaginable outcome for this year’s Ryder Cup is ZJ winning some tournaments and somehow finding himself on the U.S. team, paired with Collin Morikawa on Friday in alternate shot. Even funnier than Donald Trump captaining the team.

• I find myself having terrific affinity for Michael Kim when he gets into contention. On Sunday evening, I was deep in the FedEx Cup points list, wondering if he already has enough points to get into the playoffs (close but not quite).

It’s a good lesson that when you let fans in on your world (in Kim’s case, via Twitter), they are, in almost every instance, going to be more likely to root for you than if you don’t let them in. There are definitely downsides to that, but for somebody like Kim, the downsides are a lot less than for somebody who’s already a star or superstar.

• I think I might agree with this. But not the Berger part.

• Joe Highsmith sounds like someone who moved to Dillon, Texas from the outskirts of Houston because his dad got the head job at a local bank to prove his worth to corporate for a couple of years before taking over the big boy bank in Houston. Joe, the new QB1 for West Dillon, is now going to contend for district titles with Voodoo for the next two years before landing a middling QB career at Abilene Christian University.

• The upshot of two essentially off weeks for the main Tour (Mexico and Honda) is that I am hungry for Bay Hill and the Players. Like, legit excited. Not “Rahm and Bryson are back” excited, but getting closer to that.

• 20 under at PGA National? With a 59? In this economy? I have to say I agree with Andy and JLM.

If you want to go deeper, I think what they’re getting at is emblematic of this idea that leagues (including the Tour) must placate newbies at all costs. Leagues are obsessed with casting wide nets. The problem with this? When you try to be all things to all people, you fail to — as my friend Drew Pond says — feed your core audience (basically people reading this newsletter). It is broadly a bad business idea in the long term even if it’s not obvious in the short term.

Normal Sport

1. Somebody made two aces on the Euro Tour last week and Jamie Kennedy — who you may remember from his Normal Sport Q&A last fall — got steep on how rare this is. Even more amusing to me than a pair of 1s in the same round was the fact that he started 3-1-3, which I believe makes him fully exempt to the Rocket Mortgage for life (if you understand any of that, seek help). Also good luck catching the guy who made three in a round!

2. I think it’s the security guard that does it for me.

I also got the following PR email from the good folks at PETA just after all of this went down with Billy Ho.

Coolest clubber on the course.

Yeah …

3. All I can think of every time the Trump-Vance-Zelensky convo pops up in my feed is what that video would look like if we get the Trump-Jay-Yasir version. That would be golf media’s salt lick. We would feed off it for years.

4. The fact that this has become normalized and nobody thinks, “Hmm, that is odd, this doesn’t happen in other sports” is why NS started.

5. Swiss Family Robinson sequel or a look at the South African Open Championship? What a strange, strange, strange sport.

Corrupt Golf Media

👉️ Sam Saunders says the API is not inviting Rickie and Spieth to Bay Hill because he wants the tournament to maintain some objectivity.

He goes on to note, without irony, that Rafa Campos wrote a passionate letter and deemed him worthy of the event, which, I have to say, is about the least objective thing I’ve ever heard (unless letter writing is criteria for getting in).

I am not really pro-Spieth and Rickie playing this particular event (especially after Spieth was whiny about it), but it doesn’t feel like we’re being totally straightforward with the reasoning from Saunders here.

I do appreciate that he eventually says the quiet part out loud.

I would like to formally and loudly declare the biggest thank you imaginable to the United States of America Uncle Sam!

👉️ Wyndham talking about how far away other great golfers are from PGA Tour level is excellent. It’s not so much what he says but the way he says it that is like, “Yeah, you have no idea how good we are.” It amused me.

👉️ I have been making it a general habit to go on any podcast or radio show that will have me to tell the Normal Sport story. This week, I ended up on the Granite State Golfers pod, which is focused on New Hampshire golf and whose listeners now know a lot more about Oklahoma State recruiting than they ever would have imagined.

👉️ I find Ethan Strauss to be a good writer and an even better thinker. His piece on LeBron and the NBA’s face of the league problem is terrific. The premise (at least to me) is that humans are never truly satisfied with success.

I noted this elsewhere, but it must be a jarring thing to reap every single thing you have ever sown 100x over and find that not only does all of that reaping not lead you to contentment but quite the opposite. It can lead to even greater discontentment than you have ever experienced.

This is counterintuitive but also very human. I have many thoughts on this, and most of them flow from this singular quote from David Duval after he won the 2001 Open.

“Is that all there is?”

There is for sure a book in there. I would love to write it.

How is this App Free?

• This absolutely destroyed me. It might only be a Venn diagram of like 39 people, but its a center-center tweet for those 39 people.

• So did this one!

• The Venn here is bigger, but it also probably cuts a little deeper for some folks.

Thank you for reading until the end.

You’re a sicko for reading a golf newsletter that is 1,670 words long.

Don’t forget to tune in to our Ireland giveaway drawing tomorrow on Instagram.

We are sustained in part (in large part) by readers who are fans that decide to join our membership. With the Players and Masters happening over the next six weeks, most of that content will be members only so it’s a great time to jump in!