Issue No. 140 | January 7, 2025

Happy 2025 and welcome back to the Normal Sport newsletter. We could not be more excited about this year. Before we get to Kapalua, here’s a little preview of our envisioned weekly rhythm.

We are — like last year, with varying degrees of success — going to attempt to publish on a Tuesday/Thursday/Friday (or Saturday) schedule.

Tuesdays will be what I think of as a classic Normal Sport newsletter. Absurd stuff from the weekend along with some deep dives, heartfelt thoughts and other interesting fodder I’m reading.

Thursdays will likely be random, sometimes-connected-but-often-not thoughts. The first few will be for everyone, but the majority of Thursday posts will be for paid members only. We will also experiment in this space. For example, instead of random thoughts this Thursday, I’ll do 10 or so predictions I have for the year.

Fridays will remain our Q&A day.

If we have updates — new sponsors, giveaways, announcements etc. — you can expect those on Mondays. The only variation to this will be either 1. Weeks when I’m out on vacation (which won’t be a ton) and 2. The big six weeks (Players, four majors, Ryder Cup). On those weeks, we will publish on a closer to daily schedule.

I am publishing this to let you know, sure, but also to keep myself accountable to it. After a fun fall focusing on the business side, Jason and I feel refreshed and recommitted to the content side.

Let’s get right to it.

But First

Today’s newsletter is presented by Holderness and Bourne. While we only publish three days a week, H&B is always cooking. They just dropped what they’re calling their resort line, which is perhaps a unique January drop but also brilliant because it has me clamoring for warmer weather than the beanie and gloves I’ve been playing in for the last month. You can check out their resort line right here and also see it below.

Where did all the Heroes go?

On Saturday, my 11-year-old and I were throwing the football in the front yard with Kapalua on inside. I asked him, “Who are the five most interesting or compelling characters in golf? Like, who are the five guys — not that you like the most — but that you care the most about whether they win or lose?”

His response: Tiger, Bryson, Rory, Rahm, JT.
Mine: Tiger, Bryson, Rory, Scottie, Spieth.

Argue with those if you want, but let’s say you extend it to 10. A fairly reasonable list of 10 includes Tiger, Bryson, Rory, Rahm, Scottie, Xander, Phil, Brooks and Spieth. I suppose you can throw Morikawa or JT or Hideki in it if you want and take out Xander, Phil or Spieth.

Anyway, the point is not really who’s on the list. The point is how few of those guys played Kapalua last week. Of the list of 10 above … we saw one at the Sentry! One! And any reasonable combination of the top 10 most compelling guys includes at most three guys who played last week.

All of the players who didn’t play have their reasons, of course, but this would be like playing Week 1 of the NFL season next year without Allen, Ja’Marr, Tua, Herbert, Rodgers, Jefferson, Stafford, TJ Watt, Myles Garrett and CJ Stroud.

When LIV started, I noted that it depleted the Tour of all of its villains. Now, it seems like the heroes have disappeared as well.

The fuel that leagues run on is the hero-villain narrative. This narrative always makes for the best stories. This is true in every sport but it is especially true in individual sports like golf, tennis and racing. We don’t follow tennis because Djokovic is, like, 17 percent better at hitting a forehand than Stan Wawrinka. We follow tennis because Federer is Bond and Djokovic is every villain Bond has ever run up against.

It’s tough to have heroes without the villains, but it’s impossible to have heroes if the heroes don’t (or in some cases can’t) show up.

There are a couple of other things going on in golf right now as well and they are connected. The first is that attention in golf is being split up. Not just between the Tour and LIV, but — more interestingly — between pro golf on CBS and NBC and amateur golf on … YouTube.

Lastly, something I have been screaming about for like eight years now is finally starting to settle in. There has been a lot of slack in the pro golf line for a while. A lot of excess created by the Cat. A lot of inability to determine what could be attributed to Tiger and what could be attributed to the leagues he was playing in.

I don’t really agree with Hank Haney on much, but I absolutely (mostly) agree with him on this.

I think these two tweets tell you everything you need to know about the current era in golf regarding Tiger’s influence.

Last week at Kapalua was the intersection of a lot of these different trends (or at least the realization of it for me).

Again, I don’t know that there’s anyone to blame, necessarily, but I have concerns about investment money entering an organization (the PGA Tour) that needs to make it back but doesn’t seem to have the assets to do so.

Here’s what I wrote a few newsletters ago.

Think about the Tour like a legacy media company. How are those doing? In the era of the media long tail, the Tour desperately needed to monopolize, and for reasons both in their control (LIV) and outside their control (golf is a very easy sport to put on YouTube), things are seemingly going the opposite direction.

Shane Ryan laid all of this out quite well in a recent thread. Here’s how it started.

Again, this is a problem at least partially related to the fact that nobody seemed to consider that, you know, Tiger wouldn’t be around forever. When players are demanding QB money, they are doing so based on the growth of golf in a world that Tiger built. Without him — i.e. the world we’re currently in — does that line continue to go up and to the right? I’m dubious!

Here’s how his piece ended.

I would quibble with some of the details. I don’t know that “professional golf” has lost all sense of proportion, but I do think the PGA Tour — which based on how we all talk about it, is most often synonymous with professional golf — is in a difficult place. It can (and will) survive, for sure, but those billions from SSG … man, where is the return?

One thing to note here is that there will be another Tiger. At some point. From somewhere. Maybe not the cultural phenomenon Tiger was but 90 percent or 95 percent there. This happens in every sport. There will never be another Jones, Nelson, Palmer, Nicklaus … and on and on it goes. But there is. And that could change everything.

But until then, the Tour having one or two of the 10 most compelling players in the sport at one of its 12 best events is emblematic of where we’re at in golf right now. That isn’t necessarily bad for the health of golf as a whole (though I would probably argue that it is), but it leaves the Tour in a very strange spot moving forward.

One Thing I Loved

One thing I think about every time he wins is what exactly we’re looking at with Hideki’s career. After winning Kapalua on Sunday he now has …

• 1 Masters

• 10 major top 10s

• 6 major top 5s

• 10 Tour wins: Memorial, Phoenix 2x, WGC 2x, Zozo, Sony, Riv, Memphis, Kapalua

• ~$60M earnings

• 1 Bronze medal

• 6 Presidents Cups

He's two months away from turning 33, which makes him 18 months older than Spieth and three years younger than Rickie. It’s not unreasonable that his career would end up looking like this.

• 2 majors

• 20 major top 10s

• 16 Tour wins

• ~$100M earnings

• 2 Olympic medals

• 10 Presidents Cups

That’s wild. Like, not Ernie Els wild but not really that far off either.

Wait, is Hideki going to be a top 30 player ever?

I texted my friend Andy Lack, who just launched his own golf analytics business, because he keeps track of these things and has built his own Simmons-like pyramid of all time golfers.

Here’s what he said.

Normal Sport

One of my favorite parts of the normal sport bit is how many moments folks send me from sports that aren’t golf. I included a few of those below.

1. I watched the Scottie doc over Christmas. It’s excellent, and this is part of how it opened, which is perfect.

2. This cat has an amazing [checks notes] walkout song at darts tournaments. There’s choreography. The whole thing is incredible.

3. Many people sent me this one.

4. At the PNC, Dan Hicks noted that Gary Player has so many grandkids that he has a qualifier for them to see who plays with him in the PNC. So perfectly hilarious and on brand.

Question(s) of the Week

One of my friends sent me these four questions during Kapalua.

1. Will Vik’s insatiable need to tinker keep him from what he could have achieved?

2. Does Collin have that gear? No that gear? 

3. Is Ludvig’s lack of a pulse a net negative or positive. Like, is anybody in there?

4. In 10 years when I hit the max tab on Scottie’s price chart, where are we now? Middle? Peak? Plateau?

My answers …

1. Yes, but also his insatiable need to tinker is part of the DNA. Inextricably linked. Not sure you can have Oak Hill Vik without Tinkering Vik. That will probably be infuriating for the next 10 years.

2. He does not. Doesn’t mean he won’t win a lot and have a tremendous career. But I don’t believe he has that gear.

3. Is Ludvig just upgraded Rickie? Is that a fair question? Upgraded Rickie is a hell of a player, but it might just not be what we thought it was. Still early.

4. The hand injury is a bit concerning. But if he stays healthy, I think we’re toward the beginning of a slightly inclining plateau. Think Amazon for the last five years. We’re right here.

5. [Jason here] Since there was no question about the double pump, I took it upon myself to crowbar one in. The double pump is so back that we’re virtually certain there’s a Vik Double Pump Puma x J. Lindberg shoe in the works. 

With levels of ankle support and toe protection technology not seen since 1991 Greg Norman’s Reebok era (do click). Ok, maybe we’re not so sure about the Vik Pump, but we’d be fools not to believe that Bryson and Reebok will bring a new Pump shoe to golf.

The Infirmary

Sir … please seek help.

Corrupt Golf Media

👉️ The Tour Championship is probably going to a bracket. I think it’s a little odd that stroke and match play are both being considered. Head to head stroke play would be pretty weird, but overall I am extremely pro head-to-head matchups for this event (which I would actually just rather not exist at all).

👉️ Just two dudes working on their swings. Are those yellow objects tire stoppers or disguised GCQuads?

👉️ I enjoyed this from Roberto Castro on TGL’s Tuesday debut. How will it play out? Nobody knows.

👉️ Brandel’s piece on Twitter over Christmas was … interesting. It feels a bit like moving the goalposts around regarding the numbers — I am to believe, based on what I wrote above, that ratings are actually up? — but he makes some good points (specifically about Scottie and slow play).

👉️ I enjoy asking a “what was the best thing you read in ______” type question every once in a while. The answers to this one for 2024 provided me with probably more reading than I can do in the next 10 years. Maybe you can pick off a thing or two as well.

👉️ This is so sick.

Love Your Work

David has become somebody I look up to and admire, and his takes on writing and business and life are often spot on. This one is no exception.

This is also why I love Twitter so much.

Twitter — minus the absurd algorithms — is the most meritocratic writing platform of all time. No matter who you are, your ideas and thoughts and jokes can move the needle, can get you in DMs with folks you never dreamed of talking to and, like David said, land you at dinners with extraordinary people. It’s a place where your money doesn’t matter at all and your societal stature barely does.

A place where this humorous quip is true.

For a writer, this can be a dream and it makes all the muck — all the vitriol and name calling and ugliness — worth it.

Twitter is more than just a place about which we all say “I can never leave this app” when a great and funny exchange happens. It’s magical. The ultimate dinner party with the most interesting guests. You can converse with almost anyone about pretty much anything at any time. To our ancestors, that would have seemed like sorcery! Now, it happens all day every day.

I’ve been obsessed with the phrase “best story wins” of late. It’s true. In so many categories, it’s true. As one of my friends said recently, everybody has the same numbers and facts. Best story wins.

That’s how I have always felt about Twitter (which makes it frustrating when you see it get algorithm-ized like it has been over the past few years). Funniest joke wins. Most clever line wins. The ultimate meritocracy. Though the platform will inevitably change at some point, the truth of that line never will.

Best story always wins. Same as ever.

Thank you for reading until the end.

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