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Issue No. 159 | February 20, 2025
I somehow ended up with a $500 gift card to this online retailer. I’m going to give it away to one of the next 10 people who become a paid member of Normal Sport.
Good luck!
Today’s newsletter is presented by Meridian.
I’m going to sit this one out, and give the reins to one of our readers, Brittany S., who recently emailed us this bit of encouragement.
Just wanted y’all to know that I bought my husband a new Meridian putter after reading about them in Normal Sport and he LOVES it. Won’t stop raving about it.
He also beat his four friends in their “Winter Classic.” He claims this was “due to his putting being dialed in.” Is this possible for a guy who shot in the 80’s? I’ll let you decide.
Anyway, I also introduced his other friend — who is a scratch golfer — to the brand, and he said they look legit. I think that officially makes me a sicko.
Brittany S.
Ed. note: Nothing much more devastating than getting your Winter Classic event in quotation marks from your wife.
Glad he loves the putter though!
OK, onto the news.
1. Trevor Immelman uttered a phrase on Sunday about the Cat that I loved.
He said that Tiger has had a “hall of fame career at multiple venues,” which is both hilarious and also unquestionably true.
Here’s my quick and dirty list.
ANGC (5x majors lol)
Torrey (7x wins and a U.S. Open)
Bay Hill (7x wins)
Muirfield Village (5x wins)
St. Andrews (2x majors)
Medinah (2x majors)
Firestone (8x wins)
Doral (4x wins)
TPC Sawgrass (2x wins and a U.S. Am)
Has he had a hall of fame career at each of these venues? You could probably take Doral and Muirfield Village off the list, but everything else is probably a hall of fame career!
It also reminded me of the great Bill James quote about Ricky Henderson.
As Bill James once said in response to the question of whether Rickey Henderson is a Hall of Famer: “Cut him in half and he’s two Hall of Famers”
FanGraphs
You could probably cut Tiger into eighths and he’s eight hall of famers. Maybe more.
2. I have been thinking a lot this week about the evolution of Normal Sport. How do we continue doing the newsletter well and potentially begin to grow in some other areas? I would love your input, both in terms of your answer to the question below but also your commentary on it.
I think there’s a lot of value to be found in the middle here ...
Anyway, here’s my question …
3. This is so stupidly niche, but I cannot wait until somebody goes full Chris Webber in TGL with timeouts.
Can you imagine?
Tom Kim, gesticulating wildly at the head ref because he didn’t have enough time to aimpoint a four and a half foot putt for the Cat, but he’s out of TOs because Tiger used them all earlier trying to figure out if the yardage had a 1 in front of it or not.
And the end result of all of that is that Min Woo Lee gets a free 2 foot putt to win the hole.
This post will continue for Normal Sport members below, and includes riffs on …
The White House (sure …)
Tiger as one of golf’s great talkers.
My current U.S. Ryder Cup team.
Welcome to the members-only portion of this Thursday’s newsletter.
Thank you, as always for supporting Normal Sport.
I hope you both enjoy it and find value in it.
4. Oh cool, a New York Times article about the future of golf. This should be good. I am excited!
In the actual article …
• President may be violating unwritten rules of not pushing your own self interests as POTUS.
• Mayor Eric Adams had charges dismissed.
• This is possibly relevant because he once “resisted pressure from the New York City Council in 2022 to cancel a Saudi-backed Aramco Team Series at Ferry Point.”
• The sentence, Mr. Trump’s allies point to ethical quagmires that President Bill Clinton and President Joseph R. Biden Jr. faced during their time in office, including Mr. Biden’s son Hunter’s convictions and eventual pardon by his father.
• Yasir Al-Rumayyan’s ties to Bedminster and Bedminster’s ties to the PGA of America, but not the PGA Tour.
Me after reading it …
I sure do love covering the golf.
5. If you missed it, I interviewed Matt Considine of NewClub two weeks ago for the newsletter. His answers to my questions were fantastic, and this part stood out to me the most.
Maybe my favorite part of being in this space is meeting fellow entrepreneurs like you who share a genuine care for golf. Many of them are committed to leaving the game in a better place than they found it. I think this dedication mostly stems from personal experience and stories where golf has changed their life for the better.
While we may not be tackling global issues like curing cancer or colonizing Mars, there's a shared belief that golf and its benefits for others are worth our focus and effort, even if the financial rewards aren't as lucrative as in other industries.
Matt Considine, Normal Sport Newsletter No. 154
Yes!
Golf has changed my life in so many different ways. My career, sure, but also the way I interact with my friends and so many other men in my community. It has been the conduit for relationships that I wouldn’t otherwise have. It is not everything — to put that weight on a transient activity like golf would be foolish — but it is almost certainly the most meaningful non-human entity that exists in my life today.
I appreciated Matt putting that into words for me.
6. Joseph LaMagna appreciation post. His weekly column for the Fried Egg has become a must read for me. This week he took on the U.S. Ryder Cup projections, and it was great. It’s also an excuse to propose my U.S. squad if the event started next week.
These are the absolutes, no questions asked.
Scottie
Xander
Morikawa
JT
Cantlay
Bryson
From there, it gets a little weirder. This is the “I think you take them because I’ve seen them in that environment and I mostly trust them” group.
Finau
Burns
The “Not in love with them but the course setup is perfect” duo.
Wyndham
Brooks
Lastly, the “Shrugs … no idea what to do here, but this feels right for now” crew.
Russell Henley
Maverick McNealy
Tons of recency bias with Mav, obviously, and if you pick from a pool of Denny, Akshay, Spieth, Poston or English and replace one or both of those last two, I’m not going to complain a ton.
It’s difficult to see those top six doing anything to not be on the team in September. The bottom six, though? It’s going to change a lot over the next four months.
7. My personal “man, he is great at just talking golf” power rankings.
Max Homa
Shane Bacon
Tiger Woods
Tiger was in the booth on Sunday, and the parts where he just got steep on what certain putts were going to do or what players were trying to do on specific shots was golf nerd nirvana. Specifically, there was a moment late when Scottie was trying to make 3 at the last to give himself a chance at a playoff. Nantz threw it to the Cat, and he was so engrossed in the moment that you can hear the pause as he pries himself out of the zone to offer a note on it. It’s so awesome. You can listen to it at 0:32 right here.
8. I went to TGL on Monday. All three matches. It was quite fun, and the golf was extremely entertaining. One thing I noticed that seems to contrast … pretty much everything else in golf: There’s rarely any mention of money as it relates to the players.
(To be clear, there is a lot of talk about how much the start up costs were and also about the equity players are receiving, but not the involved from week to week).
And while it turns out that there is a purse for the league — and obviously equity for a lot of folks involved — it does feel intentional that I had to Google that just to make sure.
To be clear, this is a good thing!
And though I am hesitant to comp LIV and TGL because they are very different things, I do think it’s instructive that it’s impossible to talk about LIV without talking about the money involved and it’s almost impossible to talk about the money involved in TGL because nobody really knows what it is. It is not pushed by the league or the broadcast.
This provides a bit of a reprieve when you talk to players. Here’s Sahith from Monday afternoon after his team lost to JT’s Atlanta team in a thriller.
“I love this team,” he said. “I have so much fun being out here. This is the most fun golf I've played in a really long time. So just fires me up to be with these guys, and I'm already looking forward to the next one.”
Maybe you think TGL is dumb or not for you. I understand! I think I am beginning to land on the fact that it is a bit of a professional answer to YouTube golf. Do tweaks need to be made? Sure. Nobody involved would say anything other than that.
The format can be fun and good, though!
But I also have to have a reason to care. And it’s beginning to seem like the reason I should care is because the players involved seem to care a lot more than perhaps anyone thought they would. The lack of money talk accentuates this and is in some ways, maybe counterintuitively, a break from everything else going on in pro golf.
9. Speaking of TGL, one of my favorite things about it is the overhead camera. I would love to hear somebody — maybe my guy LKD? — nerd out on some of these positions during the broadcast.
Does that meet the audience where they’re at?
I don’t know, but I know I would enjoy it a ton. And it has been my experience that if you cater to the highest common denominator and bring people with you, that is normally a really good thing for your business.
Thank you also for reading until the end.
You’re a complete and total sicko for reading a golf newsletter that is 1,941 words long.
Here’s to our next 500.
Issue No. 159 | February 20, 2025
I somehow ended up with a $500 gift card to this online retailer. I’m going to give it away to one of the next 10 people who become a paid member of Normal Sport.
Good luck!
Today’s newsletter is presented by Meridian.
I’m going to sit this one out, and give the reins to one of our readers, Brittany S., who recently emailed us this bit of encouragement.
Just wanted y’all to know that I bought my husband a new Meridian putter after reading about them in Normal Sport and he LOVES it. Won’t stop raving about it.
He also beat his four friends in their “Winter Classic.” He claims this was “due to his putting being dialed in.” Is this possible for a guy who shot in the 80’s? I’ll let you decide.
Anyway, I also introduced his other friend — who is a scratch golfer — to the brand, and he said they look legit. I think that officially makes me a sicko.
Brittany S.
Ed. note: Nothing much more devastating than getting your Winter Classic event in quotation marks from your wife.
Glad he loves the putter though!
OK, onto the news.
1. Trevor Immelman uttered a phrase on Sunday about the Cat that I loved.
He said that Tiger has had a “hall of fame career at multiple venues,” which is both hilarious and also unquestionably true.
Here’s my quick and dirty list.
ANGC (5x majors lol)
Torrey (7x wins and a U.S. Open)
Bay Hill (7x wins)
Muirfield Village (5x wins)
St. Andrews (2x majors)
Medinah (2x majors)
Firestone (8x wins)
Doral (4x wins)
TPC Sawgrass (2x wins and a U.S. Am)
Has he had a hall of fame career at each of these venues? You could probably take Doral and Muirfield Village off the list, but everything else is probably a hall of fame career!
It also reminded me of the great Bill James quote about Ricky Henderson.
As Bill James once said in response to the question of whether Rickey Henderson is a Hall of Famer: “Cut him in half and he’s two Hall of Famers”
FanGraphs
You could probably cut Tiger into eighths and he’s eight hall of famers. Maybe more.
2. I have been thinking a lot this week about the evolution of Normal Sport. How do we continue doing the newsletter well and potentially begin to grow in some other areas? I would love your input, both in terms of your answer to the question below but also your commentary on it.
I think there’s a lot of value to be found in the middle here ...
Anyway, here’s my question …
3. This is so stupidly niche, but I cannot wait until somebody goes full Chris Webber in TGL with timeouts.
Can you imagine?
Tom Kim, gesticulating wildly at the head ref because he didn’t have enough time to aimpoint a four and a half foot putt for the Cat, but he’s out of TOs because Tiger used them all earlier trying to figure out if the yardage had a 1 in front of it or not.
And the end result of all of that is that Min Woo Lee gets a free 2 foot putt to win the hole.
This post will continue for Normal Sport members below, and includes riffs on …
The White House (sure …)
Tiger as one of golf’s great talkers.
My current U.S. Ryder Cup team.
Normal Sport is supported by 500+ sickos who can’t get enough. By becoming a member, you will receive the following.
• The satisfaction of helping us establish our business.
• Access to the entirety of our Thursday newsletters (like this one).
• Entry into giveaways like our Ireland trip.
• All behind-the-paywall coverage from major championship weeks.
• First dibs on the Seamus head cover we’re dropping soon.
By clicking below to join the Normie Club (still testing that name), you will have a front row seat to what we’re building. It won’t always be pretty, but we promise it will always be honest and earnest. And we will put everything we have into providing you the value you’re paying for.
