Issue No. 150 | January 30, 2025

I wrote a lot below about the state of golf as it relates to the PGA Tour and all of the weird and convoluted tentacles that touch the Tour so let’s get right into it.

But First!

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14 Thoughts on the State of Golf

On Saturday afternoon, while watching the final round of Torrey, I tweeted a thought that had been in my head for a bit. Here’s what I said.

There is a lot there, and because something like this has so many different facets and angles, I thought it would be fun to talk through it 10-thoughts style (or in this case, 14).

Buckle up, and let’s jump in.

1. My entire point in tweeting that thought was not to torch the Tour nor to prop up YouTube as some unparalleled bastion of tremendous competition. I am neither anti-Tour nor do I think YouTube golf is universally amazing.

My point was simply to acknowledge the reality of the situation.

And the reality of the situation is that most Euro Tour events and most LPGA events and most (all?) LIV events and, yes, most PGA Tour events fail to compel most golf fans — sicko or otherwise — into watching them.

That’s just the truth in a fractured, post-Cat world. Maybe it was always the truth or maybe this is just how all regular seasons in all sports go now, but it’s difficult to hide from this …

2. We could spend the rest of this newsletter on all the reasons these events fail to compel, but the most significant one as it relates to the PGA Tour is that there is now, at least to me, a pretty clear hierarchy of PGA Tour-sanctioned events.

And in a world with more options to enjoy all the hobbies that we enjoy (golf or otherwise) than at any other time in all of history, it’s extremely difficult to compel folks to those last three tiers when, as an example related to the original thought, I can go watch Andy and Bacon play Mid Pines with hickories instead. That’s just more interesting, fun and entertaining to me than the Farmers as it currently stands.

3. And Andy and Bacon playing Mid Pines with hickories is actually becoming more compelling to a lot of golf fans than Sony, AmEx or Torrey (to name a few) for a number of reasons.

1. It takes less time to consume.

2. The golf course is far more interesting than most Tour courses.

3. The audience knows the characters better.

And TFE videos are only a tiny sliver of the overall YouTube golf pie.

4. Scottie Scheffler proposed a solution to this on Tuesday …

Welcome to the members-only portion of this Thursday’s newsletter. Thank you for supporting Normal Sport, and I hope you enjoy it!

Here’s what the No. 1 player in the world said.

I mean … yes. And I am totally jazzed about this weekend. The best players playing Pebble on what is now tantamount to opening weekend of the PGA Tour season?

Way in.

And if this was the actual opening weekend — or the second weekend of the year after Kaplaua — then I don’t even know that we’re talking about any of this. But instead we have to pretend like the Great Mule March through Waialae, Palm Springs and La Jolla is the same (or close to the same) as Pebble this week. That’s absurd. It would be like the NBA throwing Donovan Mitchell and Anthony Davis in the G League for a month and pretending like it’s the NBA!

Those in between tournaments are fine, but they have become so different than the elevated events that we have to start acknowledging them as something else altogether or start doing something completely unique with the format.

5. Those reasons I mentioned the above about why YouTube golf is sometimes more compelling than PGA Tour golf? They represent threats to the Tour because they represent attention being pulled away from the Tour.

But there is a way to combat them if you’re the Tour.

1. Literally do whatever is necessary to keep rounds at four hours or less — I believe so much of this is rollback-related (shorter courses etc.) so that’s tough for the Tour since they don’t really make the rules. Although, don’t be anti-rollback!

2. Go to more interesting golf courses — This is also a little difficult because … infrastructure.

3. Bring back the characters that are over at LIV, specifically Bryson, Phil, Brooks and Rahm. I honestly don’t care what the Mules think about this. When your organization is under siege, the folks who bring about the least value should not get an outsized voice in the conversation.

4. Develop your own characters better.

One way to do that? Embrace the threat. Leverage it by putting your own characters into the arena with the YouTube Boys👇️ 

6. A lot of these things are small investments. On their own, they don’t move the needle. But small things add up. Here’s something from Joseph LaMagna recently on the Tour’s decision to continue giving out sponsor exemptions.

He’s talking negatively about a million little bad choices the Tour has made over the years.

But the opposite is also true. Little things can add up in a positive direction as well, which is my point about the storytelling and the pace of play and the going to great courses.

Rory talked this week about how shaving 20 minutes off a round doesn’t do anything. That is fair. But what if it was paired with 15 other positive steps in the same direction?

7. Speaking of Rory, he is absolutely correct here on golf as an entertainment product. He was asked about YouTube golf and TGL and all the different forms the sport has taken on over the years, even since he started playing.

Me reading that.

However, I don’t believe that anyone involved will actually trust that the idea of scarcity can lead to something better. Even the NFL is struggling to believe this. They went from 16 to 17 regular season games, and then they will want to go to 18 and 19, and then, Man, 20 is such a nice round number.

This is even more true on the Tour where the decision makers (the players!) are incentivized to create as many opportunities to make as much money as possible. It’s literally what I would do in their situation as well. But the dilution of a product — over a long enough window of time — is the death of a product.

8. Paige responded to my tweet with some disagreement, and her response got a lot of attention. Here’s what she said.

I find Paige to be a nice and pleasant person, and while I disagree with her on parts of what she said, we still had a nice DM exchange after the fact, which I appreciated. I generally believe that congenial disagreement among colleagues is underrated and necessary for health! (but that’s another newsletter for another time).

The part that I disagree with most is that professional golf will always be king. Actually, I don’t even disagree with it. I think she’s right, but I think it’s phrased incorrectly.

I believe attention will always be king. It is the most valuable thing in the world. It’s why companies succeed and fail. It’s why politicians win and lose. It’s everything.

The threat to success in today’s world — especially in the world of sports and entertainment — is not that people hate you. It’s that they don’t care about you at all.

Here it is said another way by the founder of Red Bull, Dietrich Mateschitz.

Regardless, I think professional golf — specifically because of the majors — will actually always have the lion’s share of the attention in the world of golf as entertainment. But the Tour’s other assets such as Torrey with this leaderboard?

I … I mean I don’t know.

If I’m the Tour, I’m thinking about making drastic changes given how much attention has been lost — gradually since Tiger started fading from the scene and then seemingly all at once over the last few years.

9. It doesn’t get talked about a ton, but the Tiger Bubble is real, and because of that, I think the Tour’s up and to the right line is in real trouble. This one (via ProPublica).

Here’s Rory again.

Players don’t want their prize funds to go down.

Of course. Who would? But what do those negotiations look like in 2029, and will CBS and NBC just have to run commercials 80 percent of the time to cover what the Tour will charge for its media rights with the players continually pushing for more money?

There are a few solutions here.

1. Fewer number of events and less money included in media rights.

2. Same number of events and more money included in media rights.

3. Another Tiger comes along to float everything.

No. 3 seems unlikely (although plausible). No. 1 is obviously most preferable for the good of the fan, but it also obviously will not happen as long as the players are running the show.

10. One problem for the Tour as it relates to YouTube golf is that golf is too accessible. Shrink the game! Mostly kidding. But the Tour is fighting against something the NFL and NBA mostly are not, which is that everyone plays golf, and it’s often more intriguing to watch what feel like your friends — via parasocial relationships (more on that below) — play golf than it does a bunch of Korn Ferry grads you don’t otherwise know.

All of this is a perfect storm in some ways. Cat exiting stage left, LIV waltzing along to stick a stake in the ground and the rise of other forms of golf where we can get our fix. It honestly demands tremendous leadership from various pro golf orgnizations, and I’m not totally sure that’s what we’re getting right now.

11. Speaking of media rights, cable will be fully unbundled in 2030, and then what? What happens when Golf Channel isn’t subsidized by payments from the 99 percent of people who don’t watch it? What happens when the PGA Tour foists a 20 percent price increase on Golf Channel because Pat Cantlay doesn’t make enough money?

Here’s my guy, Simon Owen writing on his Substack.

The PGA Tour is almost certainly going to retain these rights in 2030, but is it going to be able to generate the same revenue it was making from Golf Channel over the last 20 years? Especially given where we’re at right now? I’m dubious! Then what happens, not only to prize money but to that $1.5B SSG put into the mix?

12. This was what the schedule looked like just two years ago.

Banger, banger, banger, banger.

I remember a 2-3 year stretch there where January-March was a thrill ride. It doesn’t feel like that this year. It feels like the opposite of that.

13. When competition is long and time is short, curators have tremendous value. I am a curator. SGS is a curator. The Sunday night NLU pods are curators.

The days of watching a game on your own and thinking about it on your own and maybe eventually talking about it with your buddies are ovah.

Why does this happen? Well, the first answer is time.

But I actually think it goes further than that. I’ve been looking for a place to drop this tremendous piece from Prof G’s website, and I think this is it.

On the modern media parasocial relationship …

This is going to sound weird, but Brendan and Andy feel like friends to Shotgun Start listeners. And this is not to say that only lonely people listen to podcasts but rather that we gravitate toward what is familiar (SGS and NLU) and away from what is not (Sam Stevens and Andrew Novak — again, no offense to anyone involved!). It’s also a good challenge to the Tour to tell more and better stories.

This is not necessarily unique to golf. It happens in all sports, and it’s unfortunate for the leagues, but the deals they signed five or 10 or 15 years ago might not hold up because the attention is gone. Maybe you can make money in different and more creative ways.

But the traditional way of consolidating attention and monetizing it? Nah.

14. In summary, I hope the PGA Tour improves. I hope the whole thing starts thumping again like it has for most of the time I’ve covered the sport. I hope this is just a small downturn. I hope Cat 2.0 comes along.

But I fear that the league got a little soft when Tiger had it on his back for 20 years and conflated interest in the Tour with interest in the Cat. That bill has come due, and a few other invoices along with it, many of them unfortunately at the same time.

YouTube golf and the PGA Tour are not enemies, but they are certainly rivals. Because if attention is king and there is only so much of it, then the Tour needs to start a long march back toward wresting it away from other places.

I agree with Scottie (and others) that elite competition at great venues is the only path. But a complete reorganization of the way the league is presented would benefit everyone in the long run. There are no fingers left to plug the holes.

This can be fixed. Absolutely it can. And to the Tour’s credit, they understand there are problems. I just don’t know that anyone involved has earned the benefit of the doubt when it comes to actually doing the work necessary for the job that is ahead.

I’m rooting for the future, though, rooting for the health of pro golf. Rooting for, as Seth Waugh recently noted, everyone involved to “look at disruption and challenge as an opportunity” because that’s exactly what it is.

Thank you also for reading until the end.

You’re a sicko for reading a golf newsletter that is 3,182 words long.

Also, we still have a few Normal Sport journals left if you want to snag one!