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Issue No. 127 | October 29, 2024
One of my favorite things about the Normal Sport bit is how many people tag me when something stupid happens on a golf course. My bit feels like our bit now, which is awesome and a thrill for me.
And it has extended beyond just Twitter or watching the Zozo in the middle of the night. This week, I got an email from reader Bryan S., who built this amazing Halloween decoration that inspired this week’s newsletter art.
It’s perfect.
Thanks for making it, Bryan, and thank you all for participating in this whole ridiculous thing alongside us.
Onto the news.
This emotional phone call between Nico Echavarria and his parents after he won the Zozo was wonderful. I always used to find myself identifying with the child more in situations like this one, and now I find myself identifying more with the parents.
Also, has there ever been a more mom-dad exchange than this one?
 Mom |  Dad |
[Chef’s kiss]
And I feel both sides of it!
Yes, what a 3-wood but also what a cool thing to tell your kid — and something we have probably all told our kids at one time or another — “cry, cry a lot.” What a lovely life lesson hidden in the middle of the night at a tournament in Japan.
I thought what Nico said afterward was great, too.
“I wasn't trying to cry or be emotional. I'm a very emotional person. [My girlfriend is] here so she was able to watch, but my parents are at home in Medellin and it's pretty late there. They stayed up all night watching the golf and I'm glad they did. Yeah, very happy and emotional just being able to talk to them because my parents are the reason I play this beautiful sport.”
This … ridiculous, absurd, outrageous (see below) … and yes, beautiful sport.
1. Ruoning Yin hit her tee shot somewhere in the below screenshot, which is hilarious. She also went on to win the event, which is amazing.
 |  |
2. This one reminds me of the time Jim Nantz was talking about Jordan Spieth moving pine needles around his ball and referenced playing “pick up sticks” in his hotel room. Very normal stuff.
3. The video of this is even better. Xander taking two swings, missing on both and then taking an unplayable. We have all — I mean all — been there.
In place of The Infirmary this week, here are my “my brain is broken and I can’t unsee stuff even when I’m not watching golf” World Series lookalikes. Strangely, all on the L.A. side though I’m accepting submissions for NYY.
• I can’t watch Max Muncy without seeing Tyrrell Hatton.
• I can’t watch Tommy Edman without seeing Xander Schauffele.
• And I can’t watch Kike Hernández without seeing Rocco Mediate.
• I also can’t watch Mark Prior without wondering if I’m 55 years old.
We built this little thank you page for anyone who signs up for the newsletter. So every new subscriber gets to share their story. They have been wild.
Here’s this week’s version.
Most obscure thing I’ve witnessed was on my bachelor party, we had a foursome playing at good pace, but the foursome behind us tried passing us just to learn that the group ahead of us was the slow group. Once we tried to keep our spot in line, considering we were ahead of them, they tried to fight us saying we had no respect for the game or pace of play. Normal interaction.
Jake S.
😂 No respect for the game!
Illustrator note: Has golf permanently infiltrated my mind? Yes. Did seeing Otherworld’s recent pod episode titled Zozo (Part 1) make me immediately picture Justin Thomas asking a Ouija board “Scotty, will we ever get back into average strokes gained putting?” Obviously yes.
Joseph LaMagna wrote a piece for Fried Egg in their newsletter last week that I thought was smart and excellent.
This week, we have a particularly egregious use case of sponsor exemptions. With just four weeks remaining in the FedEx Cup Fall, the PGA Tour heads to Chiba, Japan for the Zozo Championship – a no-cut, limited-field event. Every player in the field will earn FedEx Cup points simply for showing up, except the Japan Golf Tour members who are ineligible to earn FedEx Cup points.
Two of the four sponsor exemptions are going to Gary Woodland and Joel Dahmen, players teetering on the edge of the crucial Top 125 ranking in the FedEx Cup standings, while other players in similar positions are left as alternates.
What are we doing here? Why do Gary Woodland (137th in the standings) and Joel Dahmen (129th) get handpicked as sponsor exemptions while someone like Pierceson Coody (130th) sits on the sidelines? Because Woodland and Dahmen have bigger brands? The sponsor’s relationship with an agent?
A strong performance from either Woodland or Dahmen could very plausibly be the difference between having status on Tour next year and not. That’s ridiculous. Careers are on the line here. Sponsor exemptions shouldn’t exist at all, but they definitely shouldn’t alter the trajectory of players’ futures.
Fried Egg
As it turns out, neither Woodland nor Dahmen finished in the top 30 at the Zozo, but that’s not really the point, is it?
People were fired up about this topic, especially when I threw it out on Twitter. A lot of well, you just don’t understand how business works now do you?
Perhaps I don’t know how business work, but that again is not the point.
The point is that the PGA Tour, which purports itself to be this Ultimate Meritocracy is fundamentally not an ultimate meritocracy. They are, as Cat would say, stuck between release patterns. That is my only point. Either lose the sponsor exemptions or don’t call it “a true competitive meritocracy.”
“It’s impossible to transform a miserable life into a good one by seeking an infinite series of perishable joys.” -James11804433 (pls get a regular name)
👉️ This on a new Doak-Keiser project in … the Florida panhandle (what?) is excellent. Great work there by Jay Revell and written in an informal (but informative) way. I loved it.
👉️ Jamie’s thread here providing context to Ben An’s siiiiiick driver off the deck to win on Sunday is just as good as Ben An’s driver off the deck.
👉️ Twitter is mostly stinky, but interactions like this? Pretty awesome.
👉️ Most clicked on Tuesday: Holderness and Bourne
👉️ Most clicked on Friday: Rory’s heartbreak (by Shane Ryan)
If you missed my Q&A with Shane Ryan last Friday, it was a blast may never be topped. He had so many great nuggets, and honestly I could just spend the rest of the newsletter discussing and reacting to them.
But instead I settled on just two.
Here’s the first.
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.
Normal Sport
This is a problem that is unique to about five people, but I agree with it.
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.
Normal Sport
I’m not positive how we started talking Wes Anderson on a newsletter about burrowing animal holes, but I am in the crowd of folks who believe the above to be absolutely true. Nothing — nothing — in art is as powerful as the passage of time.
Remember the scene in Interstellar where McConaughey’s character is gone for three hours on a different planet, but it’s actually like 20 years on earth and his kids are grown up? 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
It destroys me.
Augusta does this to me. Every year I go there is another marker in time — the passage of it, the increased velocity of it, as Shane noted.
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
Normal Sport
We talk about time in golf a lot but rarely in this context. Probably because it’s scary and feels overwhelming. But I also think talking about it allows us to at least somewhat solve the “how do I fully appreciate college until much later on when I have distance from it and realize how amazing it was” problem that pops up in every area of life.
Whew.
Is this still a newsletter about golf?
The best part about this new Stephen A.-Sean Hannity meme …
… is that it works both for Michael Greller and then Jordan Spieth, but then also for Jordan Spieth and then Michael Greller. An elite meme.
Speaking of memes! Here’s another great (and versatile) one.
• This made me laugh.
• So did this. Gosh, I can envision it.
Recently, I stumbled into a podcast , which is hosted by someone that — I discovered this week — is a subscriber to this very newsletter. A wild sentence.
Anyway, the podcast is called Rough Draft, and it’s about how different people and entities are building media businesses online.
One of the rabbit holes I went down after listening to a few of the pods was a conversation with the good folks over at Doomberg, a finance newsletter that I had never heard of but am apparently now obsessed with (this describes roughly 40%-60% of my time spent online … perhaps you are the same).
Anyway, the anonymous co-founder of Doomberg described his work and his life in a way that made me hit the 15-second rewind button on Spotify several times.
We have this belief here which is “Never succumb to the Disease of More.” We have achieved so far beyond our wildest imagination that the worst thing you can do is move the goalposts on what our expectations are from here.
When you catch lightning in a bottle, when you find what it is that you’re meant to be doing in life, just keep doing it. It’s not that hard. I show up, I make the number go up and I repeat.”
What a privilege.
Why would I spoil that privilege by infecting my days with activities that I hate doing in a pursuit of abstract digits online in a bank account somewhere. I live an extraordinarily blessed life. I’m surrounded by people I love. I get to do what I love all day. … I’m supported by people who love our work financially.
Why would I risk allowing the desire for some next level of wealth ruin the pleasure that can be extracted from having achieved what we’ve already achieved?
Rough Draft: Doomberg
Me listening to that.
Just speaking my exact language there.
To be clear, this is a very first world, privileged viewpoint. But that also doesn’t make it untrue. Even in building this business over the last month (and year), I can already feel my eyes bringing more stuff into view than my little typing fingers are capable of keeping up with.
When you catch lightning in a bottle, when you find what it is that you’re meant to be doing in life, just keep doing it. It’s not that hard.
Except that it is! Because we are all infected by the Disease of More. This is the human condition, and it takes reminders like the one above and, if we’re lucky, constant prodding from our friends and people who love us, to remind us that none of it matters. That it will never be enough.
One of the unintended consequences (but actually benefits) about doing this business full time is that I have not spent much time on Twitter. Instead, we have been building, planning, researching and selling in the background.
We have a little under 200 ad spots through the next 12 months that are currently unspoken for. The rest either have been filled or are currently being filled by our partners.
We would love to sell out of our remaining inventory before the year is up so that we can focus solely on writing and illustrating in 2025 as well as merch and our TBD membership program.
So if you have a service or business that you think might be a good fit to partner with Normal Sport, you can fill out our partner form right here.
Thanks for reading until the end.
You’re a sicko for reading a golf newsletter that is 2,389 words long.
I’m grateful for it.
