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Issue No. 153 | February 6, 2025
So much to get to below, but since I flipped on the LIV boys in Riyadh as I was finishing the newsletter up, and this was the very first thing I saw, I thought I should share it.
totally normal sport
Today’s newsletter is presented by Seed Golf.
One of our sayings around here is that we partner with businesses who make good products and have great stories. Seed Golf is one of those.
Seed was founded on the belief that a great golf experience shouldn't cost a fortune. Golfers of all abilities [raises hand] benefit from using a premium, tour-grade golf ball, and their aim is to bring that sort of performance at an affordable price.
Can confirm that their golf balls look and feel spectacular but for a fraction of the price of the big boys. There are plenty of other value golf ball brands out there, but most of them don’t test as well as Seed. And more importantly for the most vain among us [raises hand again] … they aren’t as aesthetically pleasing either.
OK, onto the news.
1. Well well well how the turntables …
Golf fans the week of Torrey: Pace of play stinks!
Golf fans on Sunday at Pebble: Not showing the golf at all stinks!
Sunday was hilarious and ridiculous. At one point, CBS was showing a 9-point Ohio State-Illinois game with 25 seconds left and Golf Channel was showing replay of Callum Tarren’s range session from Bahrain, all of this while Rory McIlroy was making birdie on one of the five most iconic par 3s in the world to take the lead in his first ever win at Pebble.
I don’t even know who to blame, but if anyone is at all serious about a thriving future of the Tour, there has to be some sort of meeting of the minds from all these places to figure this out and do what’s best for the fan.
The Tour has to put pressure on all of its broadcast partners to get the actual product in front of the people who want to consume it. And yes, I (of all people) know it’s streaming on cbssports.com, but that’s not good enough in 2025. It’s just not.
2. I’m obsessed with these stupid, arbitrary clubs. I think it’s the “I read a lot of Bill Simmons growing up” part of me. He used to make up ridiculous clubs like the 50-40-90 club, and they just made sense in my head. It was a way to think about the game that nobody really talked about casually.
Anyway, I’m into the PGA Tour wins-major wins clubs.
The 70-9 club (two members), the 60-8 club (three members) and the 50-7 club (four members) are all extraordinarily scarce and probably beyond the reach of anyone playing right now.
The only golfers who currently look like they could join significant clubs are Scottie and Rory. Scottie is a bit younger so we’ll get to him later. But let’s take a look at Rory after his 27th PGA Tour win last week at Pebble.
He’s staring at the 30-4 club (10 members), but there are a few others that he could reach. The most significant and prominent that is also feasible is the 40-6 club. It has just seven members right now.
Let’s do the math here for Rory, who is currently at 27-4.
He wins 10.5 percent of the events he plays and has lived at that clip for fifteen consecutive years (which is crazy). Aside: Other than his 27 Tour wins, he’s also won 12 European Tour events (that weren’t majors or WGCs) and one in Australia.
He needs 13 more PGA Tour wins to get to 40 so he needs to play ~130 more PGA Tour events while still winning at that high level.
Another 130 events for him is going to be another 7-9 years or until he’s 44. That’s not inconceivable but certainly not a slam dunk. It will be close.
The six is easier in some ways. Seven more years of majors is 28 majors. Can he win two of those? He should be able to. Will he? Nobody knows.
Regardless, the 40-6 club is truly bonkers. Here it is.
Snead: 82-7
Woods: 82-15
Nicklaus: 73-18
Mickelson: 45-6
Hagen: 45-11
Palmer: 62-7
Hogan: 64-9
Watson is just outside of it at 39-8. So is Sarazen at 38-7. Nelson had 52 wins but “just” five majors. Cary Middlecoff was 39-3. Vijay went 34-3, and Jimmy Demaret was 31-3.
Obviously there are some other exceptions like Gary Player (9 majors) and Seve (5), given that they did not play the majority of their golf on the PGA Tour. The PGA Tour has only been the obvious best world tour for the last 35 or so years. So this is a bit of a modern stat and doesn’t tell the full story for guys like Seve and GP. But it’s still a good one.
Sometimes the rhetoric around Rory amuses me. We’re not talking about, like, a souped-up Rickie or a slightly better version of Adam Scott here.
We’re talking about probably one of the 20 best golfers who has ever lived!
“I think he's the most impressive player I've ever played with,” said Sepp Straka on Sunday.
3. In last Tuesday’s newsletter, I threw out a poll about which event folks were most excited for. Here are the results.
This is probably the order I would have voted, too. And it’s the order (and also the degree) to which I enjoyed these events.
Pebble ruled. It was incredible. But it doesn’t really negate anything I wrote last week about the Tour. If anything, it accentuates the fact that the PGA Tour season — the actual one — should be 20 weeks long and do as Michael laid out below.
I’ve said this before, but entry points into PGA Tour events is old software code that’s been hacked together but really needs to be blown up. You want pathways for guys that are playing hot on the PGB Tour or in college into the Tier 1A events, fine, I’m fine with that. But no more Spieth exemptions and no more 45 events that are all ostensibly equivalent PGA Tour events every year. You fall out of the top 70 or whatever, we’ll see you in Silvis, buddy.
Leverage the idea of scarcity of both top players and top tier events to make your top 20 events really mean something special.
This post will continue for Normal Sport members below, and includes riffs on …
A USGA prisoner’s dilemma.
The Charley Hoffman-Rory rift (not to be confused with a tuft).
Jason Day’s preposterous attire.
Welcome to the members-only portion of this Thursday’s newsletter. Thank you for supporting Normal Sport, and I hope you enjoy it!
4. Remember the prisoner’s dilemma from, whatever, high school or college economics?
If you forgot, here it is, explained.
In the original scenario, two prisoners are being interrogated separately for a crime they committed together. Each prisoner has the option to either betray their partner (defect) or remain silent (cooperate).
Here it is in picture form.
Because you don’t know what the other person will decide, the +EV (shoutout Patrick Cantlay) thing to do is to betray your fellow prisoner. If you stay silent, you get an average of 10.5 years in prison. If you betray, you get an average of 5 years in prison.
There are two prisoner’s dilemma-adjacent things going on in golf right now.
The first can be found in Rory’s response to Charley Hoffman, who was critical of, uh, a bunch of stuff last week. Here’s how Rory responded.
… what every player has to do is look out for themselves. We have to do what's best for our own individual careers, and yes, at the back of our mind try to do whatever we can to help the Tour, but I think the best way for any of us to help the Tour is to tee it up and play as best we can.
Rory at TGL on Feb. 4
Rory also said a version of this at Pebble last week.
The problem, of course, is not that everyone is looking out for themselves. It’s that the people looking out for themselves are also in charge of making decisions that affect the league as a whole.
I’m going to scream about this for as long as it takes, but what is best for the individual is often not best for the whole … which is why the players should not be running the league!
5. The second version of this is what the USGA did on Wednesday in granting LIV players non-OWGR pathways into the U.S. Open.
The USGA is incentivized to do this very thing.
Because the U.S. Open exists independent of the other majors and other leagues, its decisions may affect those leagues but they only directly benefit or hurt the USGA.
Aside: These are not true prisoner’s dilemma situations because information is not truly withheld between the actors, but they qualify in spirit. They are of the same ilk.
You can see the problem here, I’m sure.
The USGA makes itself better — the U.S. Open is (marginally) stronger than it was before — at the expense of the entire golf landscape. Admission of LIV into the majors legitimizes and validates LIV in a way that is incredibly problematic for both the PGA Tour but also golf as a whole. It encourages LIV, even in a tiny way, to continue acting independent of the other leagues and does not encourage LIV to reunify with the PGA Tour, which would create a stronger and more capable top golf league.
Like I’ve written, I have accepted all of this, and I’m fine with it. But — barring a new Tiger Woods coming along — these organizations should know that short term gains like this one have a longer term cost. If LIV and the PGA Tour continue to coexist alongside one another for the next 20 years, that devalues the entire system, which, somewhat ironically, probably eventually devalues the U.S. Open as well.
6. I absolutely loved this ranking from Roberto. Finau is No. 1, 2 and 3 for me. He looks like he’s swinging a spatula.
7. Scottie’s T9 at Pebble last week was his third-worst finish since March 1, 2024. Here are his finishes in that time. Three (!!) finishes outside the top 10 in his last 25 events.
I do wonder if we’ll look back and wonder if we actually underrated this stretch.
8. Couple of TGL notes here.
1. One upside-y thing: Data Golf recently put out a newsletter about how few times we see rivals face each other. TGL forces that. This is a good thing.
2. After Rory’s quote about how competitive Tiger looked in their TGL match, there was a lot of chatter last week about how people were comparing TGL to the PGA Tour or major championships.
Me reading that chatter …
I don’t think any serious person is comparing the Masters to … an arena simulator league. And it’s an OK thing to say that it was cool and fun to see a facsimile of that psychotic tour level competitiveness from Tiger and Rory on a Monday night in January in a made-for-TV event.
Tiger was locked in to the match in the same way he was locked in to the PNC in December. Nobody — not Tiger, not Rory, certainly not me — thinks the PNC or TGL is at the level of winning a Tour event. But the format delivered Tiger legitimately caring about the outcome, which is both awesome and also perhaps the most important thing to date that has happened regarding the future viability of the league.
9. This stat on Shane Lowry is completely insane. Maybe more insane than Scottie’s run.
Also, Dylan’s response was perfect.
Is there a better trio of par 3s to have your aces on? Maybe 12 at ANGC instead of 16? Postage Stamp instead of Pebble? It’s pretty close to the triumvirate.
10. How are these two gentlemen in the same industry?
11. Shane brings up a very amusing point here. To shoot 3 under or better on one side of the course, you almost have to make a 3. The only straightforward solution is to birdie two par 3s and a par 5, but that can’t be a combination that happens all that often. Where’s Justin Ray when you need him?
12. Here’s a theory I have or believe in.
I’m never going to be the best writer in the world.
I’m never going to be the best sportswriter in the world.
I’m never going to be the best professional golf writer in the world.
What I can do, though, is create the only 3x/week golf newsletter that’s barely about golf, complete with amazing illustrations and curated news and information from other people I know, enjoy and trust.
That’s a very, very specific thing, and it should (hopefully!) or lead to a better business than if I, for example, started a podcast and became the 17th best 39-year-old white guy with a semi-daily golf podcast.
Thank you also for reading until the end.
You’re a sicko for reading a golf newsletter that is 2,384 words long.
Also, we still have a few Normal Sport journals left if you want to snag one!
Issue No. 153 | February 6, 2025
So much to get to below, but since I flipped on the LIV boys in Riyadh as I was finishing the newsletter up, and this was the very first thing I saw, I thought I should share it.
totally normal sport
Today’s newsletter is presented by Seed Golf.
One of our sayings around here is that we partner with businesses who make good products and have great stories. Seed Golf is one of those.
Seed was founded on the belief that a great golf experience shouldn't cost a fortune. Golfers of all abilities [raises hand] benefit from using a premium, tour-grade golf ball, and their aim is to bring that sort of performance at an affordable price.
Can confirm that their golf balls look and feel spectacular but for a fraction of the price of the big boys. There are plenty of other value golf ball brands out there, but most of them don’t test as well as Seed. And more importantly for the most vain among us [raises hand again] … they aren’t as aesthetically pleasing either.
OK, onto the news.
1. Well well well how the turntables …
Golf fans the week of Torrey: Pace of play stinks!
Golf fans on Sunday at Pebble: Not showing the golf at all stinks!
Sunday was hilarious and ridiculous. At one point, CBS was showing a 9-point Ohio State-Illinois game with 25 seconds left and Golf Channel was showing replay of Callum Tarren’s range session from Bahrain, all of this while Rory McIlroy was making birdie on one of the five most iconic par 3s in the world to take the lead in his first ever win at Pebble.
I don’t even know who to blame, but if anyone is at all serious about a thriving future of the Tour, there has to be some sort of meeting of the minds from all these places to figure this out and do what’s best for the fan.
The Tour has to put pressure on all of its broadcast partners to get the actual product in front of the people who want to consume it. And yes, I (of all people) know it’s streaming on cbssports.com, but that’s not good enough in 2025. It’s just not.
2. I’m obsessed with these stupid, arbitrary clubs. I think it’s the “I read a lot of Bill Simmons growing up” part of me. He used to make up ridiculous clubs like the 50-40-90 club, and they just made sense in my head. It was a way to think about the game that nobody really talked about casually.
Anyway, I’m into the PGA Tour wins-major wins clubs.
The 70-9 club (two members), the 60-8 club (three members) and the 50-7 club (four members) are all extraordinarily scarce and probably beyond the reach of anyone playing right now.
The only golfers who currently look like they could join significant clubs are Scottie and Rory. Scottie is a bit younger so we’ll get to him later. But let’s take a look at Rory after his 27th PGA Tour win last week at Pebble.
He’s staring at the 30-4 club (10 members), but there are a few others that he could reach. The most significant and prominent that is also feasible is the 40-6 club. It has just seven members right now.
Let’s do the math here for Rory, who is currently at 27-4.
He wins 10.5 percent of the events he plays and has lived at that clip for fifteen consecutive years (which is crazy). Aside: Other than his 27 Tour wins, he’s also won 12 European Tour events (that weren’t majors or WGCs) and one in Australia.
He needs 13 more PGA Tour wins to get to 40 so he needs to play ~130 more PGA Tour events while still winning at that high level.
Another 130 events for him is going to be another 7-9 years or until he’s 44. That’s not inconceivable but certainly not a slam dunk. It will be close.
The six is easier in some ways. Seven more years of majors is 28 majors. Can he win two of those? He should be able to. Will he? Nobody knows.
Regardless, the 40-6 club is truly bonkers. Here it is.
Snead: 82-7
Woods: 82-15
Nicklaus: 73-18
Mickelson: 45-6
Hagen: 45-11
Palmer: 62-7
Hogan: 64-9
Watson is just outside of it at 39-8. So is Sarazen at 38-7. Nelson had 52 wins but “just” five majors. Cary Middlecoff was 39-3. Vijay went 34-3, and Jimmy Demaret was 31-3.
Obviously there are some other exceptions like Gary Player (9 majors) and Seve (5), given that they did not play the majority of their golf on the PGA Tour. The PGA Tour has only been the obvious best world tour for the last 35 or so years. So this is a bit of a modern stat and doesn’t tell the full story for guys like Seve and GP. But it’s still a good one.
Sometimes the rhetoric around Rory amuses me. We’re not talking about, like, a souped-up Rickie or a slightly better version of Adam Scott here.
We’re talking about probably one of the 20 best golfers who has ever lived!
“I think he's the most impressive player I've ever played with,” said Sepp Straka on Sunday.
3. In last Tuesday’s newsletter, I threw out a poll about which event folks were most excited for. Here are the results.
This is probably the order I would have voted, too. And it’s the order (and also the degree) to which I enjoyed these events.
Pebble ruled. It was incredible. But it doesn’t really negate anything I wrote last week about the Tour. If anything, it accentuates the fact that the PGA Tour season — the actual one — should be 20 weeks long and do as Michael laid out below.
I’ve said this before, but entry points into PGA Tour events is old software code that’s been hacked together but really needs to be blown up. You want pathways for guys that are playing hot on the PGB Tour or in college into the Tier 1A events, fine, I’m fine with that. But no more Spieth exemptions and no more 45 events that are all ostensibly equivalent PGA Tour events every year. You fall out of the top 70 or whatever, we’ll see you in Silvis, buddy.
Leverage the idea of scarcity of both top players and top tier events to make your top 20 events really mean something special.
This post will continue for Normal Sport members below, and includes riffs on …
A USGA prisoner’s dilemma.
The Charley Hoffman-Rory rift (not to be confused with a tuft).
Jason Day’s preposterous attire.
Normal Sport is supported by nearly 500 sickos who can’t get enough. By becoming a member — for the price of a moderately nice round of golf — you will receive the following benefits (among many others!)
• The satisfaction of helping us build Normal Sport in Year 1.
• Access to our entire Thursday newsletter (like this one).
• Automatic entry into giveaways like our Ireland trip.
• All of our coverage from major championship weeks.
By clicking below to become a member here at Normal Sport, you can, like Serena Williams in SoFi Center, gain a front-row seat to the amusing, wonderful little world that we are working to build.
