Subscribe now!
.svg){kind=spacer}
Issue No. 116 | October 1, 2024
Hey, I’m Kyle Porter. Thank you for choosing to read the Normal Sport newsletter. If you’re new, welcome. If you’ve been around for a while, thank you. As our illustrator, Jason Page pointed out, patrons who have just entered the gates should politely speed walk to their desired spot, and we apologize if there are already chairs on the front row.
Even though we have pumped out 115 newsletters over the last 18 months — all of which you can read for free right here — this is (finally) our official launch week, and today is my first day to work on this project full time.
That is a scary but also thrilling thing. I have so many thoughts and hopes and ideas about what all of this could be. Maybe too many. Things might be moving at a “Spieth is hitting his fifth into No. 12” speed right now.
Regardless, we have a lot to discuss about the past and much to deliver in the present.
First, if you’re not following Normal Sport on Twitter and Instagram, you can click those links. We will begin posting more content in those places as all of this gets rolling.
As for the newsletter this week, I will be writing about these four things before we get back to some more regularly scheduled programming (i.e. giraffes and pool noodles).
Monday: Big News
Today: Leaving CBS
Wednesday/Thursday: Future of Normal Sport
Friday: Q&A with Rory McIlroy on taking risks and what it means to care
Along the way, we will be doing a handful of giveaways, letting you in on the process of building our business and disclosing the details behind things like our name and logo.
As always, the plane is being built while it is being flown. But also as always, we’re going to do it with all the joy and earnestness and levity we can muster.
Our first giveaway: Can I interest you in a custom Scotty Cameron putter with a Seamus-built Normal Sport headcover? Instructions for entry can be found here on Twitter (and you can enter up to 10 times!). If you’re not on Twitter, don’t believe in Twitter and can’t participate in the giveaway, you can still be eligible by filling out this form.
Psssst: You can enter the giveaway on Insta as well.
Onto the news.
This is not the final putter and headcover, but you get the idea.
I am aware that this is a preposterous thing to remember … but the ceiling was blue. I do not know why, and I have always wondered that. Why – like, why in the world – would someone look at a ceiling and think, “We must paint it blue.” Not Carolina blue or teal or azure. No, royal blue. Deep, dark blue. Like the color of the European Ryder Cup uniforms, which is another image that, when I close my eyes, I cannot possibly unsee.
The ceiling in question is the 20-foot high sweeping, wood-paneled, skylight-laden ceiling at my in-laws’ house. It was that nasty royal blue when, back in November 2012 as my wife and I visited for Thanksgiving, I got a call that I had (somehow) been hired by CBS Sports to cover golf for them. It’s still that nasty royal blue now.
Everything else, though, has changed.
I had no business getting the job. None. Zero. Or I guess if you don’t care about journalism school or newspaper experience or column writing or basically any traditional form of sportswriting – if none of those things matter at all, even in the slightest – then I suppose I was at least moderately qualified because I … liked sports and could write coherent sentences.
No, to that point all I had done was start an Oklahoma State football and basketball blog, opining on wide receivers from Duncanville and quarterbacks from Frisco. I was consistent, but 20 handicaps are also consistent. The truth is, I wasn’t very good, and the dangerous part for me was that I thought I was.
For some reason, though, a couple of people at CBS closed their eyes and took a chance. That moment in that room with the blue ceiling – which still feels like it happened two days ago – completely changed my life.
I remember staring at that ceiling and calling my dad after I took the job. I told him the news, and his response after congratulating me was “... and they’re going to pay you?” I will never forget that.
They did pay me, meagerly at first and then quite generously later on. The truth is I would have done it for less than they paid me every single year I got to do it. I guess I can say that now. I was so grateful to get to do it at all.
I’ve told my personal career story many times before so I’ll keep it short. I was working in insurance before I started that OSU website (which I eventually sold). My wife encouraged me to start … something, anything. So I started that college football and hoops site, thinking – this is amusing to think back on now – that it would lead to a national sportswriting job. And then – what?! – it did!
What a providential and good gift it has been.
Monday was my last day to write for and work full-time at CBS Sports. After 4,300+ of those days – during which I estimate I wrote close to 3 million words (only 1 million of them on Rory) – I no longer work there.
That has been surprisingly emotional and difficult for me to say out loud and to type on my computer. We get enmeshed in our jobs, intertwined. They are not who we are, but they become a large part of how we spend our time. It’s the only job my kids have ever known.
I want to acknowledge the sadness and grief I have felt over losing something I can’t believe I ever got to hold. Growing up, all I wanted to do was read, write and be around sports. Then I got to do all three for work. And yeah dad, they actually paid me.
Maybe this is just a me thing, but I always have a probably unhealthy amount of curiosity about what it’s like to work at different places, especially when it comes to media entities. When somebody like Bill Simmons leaves ESPN, I am almost irrationally interested in what it was like to be there and what is coming next.
Perhaps I am not alone. Maybe you are curious as well. Maybe that’s why you signed up to receive this newsletter. We will get to what’s coming next over the next few days. But first let’s talk about what it was like to be paid by the PGA Tour for my anti-LIV takes work at a media institution like CBS Sports.
I could tell you that it was wonderful and terrific and the greatest experience. Just as I have privately said to everyone I worked with, I will continue to say so publicly to anyone who asks. It was a Big Company, sure, but that job was the best.
However, simply telling you may make it seem like “well of course, this is what people in the industry say because they don’t want to burn bridges or cut ties.”
So let me show you instead, by giving you a story that almost nobody knows.
It’s the beginning of 2016. Early January. About a month after our daughter died in December 2015. I was reeling. Didn’t care about work or golf or any of it. Just in a whirlwind of emotion like I imagine anyone would be.
At the start of that new year, I was asked by CBS to cover the Super Bowl in San Francisco. I thought this was odd, but I told them that I would. I had covered a bit of college football for CBSSport.com but never the NFL and certainly not at the level they were asking me to cover it (i.e. the Tour Championship of football 😃).
What was even stranger was that they told me to take my wife with me. They got us flights and a hotel and a week in SF. What I began to realize is that, this will shock you, they did not need me to break down the Broncos’ Tampa 2 scheme against the Panthers (I have no idea what Tampa 2 is outside of choosing it in Madden and also have no idea if the Broncos even ran it).
CBS was basically just giving my wife and I a paid trip to San Francisco/Napa to help us grieve and spend some time together as a couple. I still get pretty emotional when I think about the kindness behind that act.
Who does that? Who even thinks to do that?
Corporations are corporations, but they are always run by people, and the people at CBS Sports could not have been more benevolent, kindhearted and wonderful.
Any frustrations I ever felt were Regular Job Frustrations, and those frustrations were always completely overwhelmed by the gratitude I have for the 12 years I spent at what I will always refer to as a dream job.
The thing about dreams, though, is that they cannot be concurrent. You can play two balls at once on the course — shout out to those worst ball 66s Cat used to shoot — but you cannot have multiple dreams at the same time (though I’m sure there’s a somnologist who will slide into my DMs with a different story).
By definition, one has to end before another begins.
The truth in all of this is that I was trying to carry two dreams with me at the same time. It is a very difficult thing to do, which I think became increasingly clear to everyone involved (including me) toward the end of my time at CBS.
I was not shy publicly or privately about voicing what I wanted the next phase of my career to look like. And — this feels insane to type — I discovered over the last few years of writing Normal Sport content that I really wanted it to involve this newsletter.
I believe deeply in writing and the idea of newsletters (which might be Dion Waiters levels of irrational confidence!) and think there is not just one business that could be built within this newsletter but possibly several (though I promise we will start with just one).
That ending at CBS in September, I have to say it went as well as endings go. How could I be bitter about losing something that I never deserved to have to begin with? And whether I knew it then or not, it was 100 percent time for me to leap into this new adventure. Two years ago was not the time, nor was last year.
Right now, though?
It’s time.
I told my boss on Monday — my last day of those 4,300 days — that I will always look back on those 12 years of writing and building at CBS Sports with only fond memories. Jobs are so rarely joyful, but that one was. Not 100 percent of the time every single day, but I do think there was joy to be found on 100 percent of the days.
So if you are reading this and do not work at CBS Sports, that is my story. If you are reading this and do work at CBS Sports, thank you for the way you treated me during my time there. I tried to tell as many of you as possible before I left, but you cared about me, put me in position to succeed and gave me every opportunity to do so.
Going to Rome, all those Ryder Cups — especially the Whistling Straits one — the Old Course with Rory and Viktor and Cam, all those Masters even the fake Danny Willett one that didn’t happen. I couldn’t have asked for anything more than what I got to experience. Thank you for creating and cultivating a dream. I gave you everything I had while I was there.
Now it’s time to go make one of my own.
Thank you for reading until the end.
You’re a sicko, which I’m obviously grateful for.
Go win yourself a Scotty!
