Issue No. 123 | October 17, 2024

Really, it’s true.

If you want to skip ahead to the reason you opened this email, please proceed to point No. 6 below. Though I recommend reading the entire thing.

Onto the news.

The 2025 Ryder Cup

But first. A thank you to this week’s sponsor … the Ryder Cup!

If you enter your info right here, you are eligible to be selected for the opportunity to purchase what will be one of the more insane golf tickets of the last few years.

Because demand outpaces supply, the Ryder Cup randomly selects folks who are then eligible to purchase the tickets. Registration is open until 11:59 ET on Oct. 22 and those selected will be notified on Nov. 4.

Now really onto the (very Ryder Cup-centric) news.

16 Golf-Adjacent Thoughts This Week

1. I don’t know if the Ryder Cup ticket prices thing is actually interesting or if it’s just the middle of October and the Dunhill is done and the team golf is over with and we have nothing else to talk about.

Regardless, Ryder Cup ticket prices have become a talking point this week.

Shockingly, I have some thoughts. Thoughts which are complicated by the fact that Ryder Cup is, you know, sponsoring the newsletter this week. Good timing for all!

And while I absolutely do want you to go sign up for the opportunity to purchase tickets because the Ryder Cup/PGA of America is supporting this newsletter and I want to support the Ryder Cup/PGA of America, I am also going to give what I hope are some mostly unfiltered takes on the entire situation.

My wife asked me why I would do this? Why I would give my thoughts on such a sensitive situation. I didn’t have an answer other than, “I can’t help myself!”

But the real answer is that the most valuable thing I can engender is not the money any single sponsorship brings in but rather your trust in me to be truthful. I remember Andy Johnson telling me one time, “If you don’t have the trust of your audience, then you don’t really have anything at all.” I believed him then, I believe him even more now.

2. No company is obligated to price anything where any of us think they should price it. Contrary to some of what has been implied, product pricing is not immoral nor illicit. Businesses are incentivized by profit.

That having been said, there are two things that fascinate me about all of this. The first is that there are some interesting misaligned incentives going on here. The PGA of America — which, again, is sponsoring this week’s newsletter! — is not necessarily incentivized to produce the perfect crowd demo to help the United States win the Ryder Cup.

Aside: I’m presuming that we all believe an event with higher ticket prices generally produces a less rowdy and difficult environment for the opposing team in any sport. An assumption, but broadly-speaking, a safe one.

The PGA is incentivized, rather, to survive and thrive as a business. Just as the European Tour is incentivized not necessarily by its team winning the Ryder Cup but by surviving and thriving as a business.

You could argue that the stakes are even higher on the Euro side where Ryder Cup revenue literally floats the entire business operation for the next four years.

The Ryder Cup environment was 10 percent less rowdy than it could have been because we priced the tickets low enough for corporations but too high for the common fan? But who cares because at least we still get to provide purses for the Irish Open and Dunhill Championship.

The Denver Broncos would never price AFC Championship tickets beyond what the average fan who creates a great environment for the Broncos to win the game could pay because the incentives of winning that game and making it to the Super Bowl are aligned throughout the organization.

In golf, this is more collateral from a fractured environment in which various organizations host different events and the players kinda sorta belong to all of them.

3. This one is probably more intriguing to me, but the business decision of pricing two Ryder Cup tickets at $1,500 seems good in the short-term and perhaps bad in the long-term for the Ryder Cup.

It begs some questions.

Notably: Why is a Masters badge for all four days nearly half the price of one day of the Ryder Cup? Could Augusta National charge [literally anything] for a four-day badge? Yes. Just as it could negotiate a price with CBS or ESPN for [literally anything] to carry the Masters on their channels. Instead, it has made business decisions to deflate pricing and engage in a contract with ESPN and CBS in which no money is exchanged for them to broadcast the event.

This is fascinating!

Augusta National loses out on so much money in the secondary ticket market (i.e. scalpers), but its brand is protected because you know what everyone is talking about every April? Wait, how is the Masters only $115 to attend for four consecutive days (as long as you’re on the list)?? It also ensures that your long-time golf fans, the sickos like my grandfather who got on the list to get badges back in the 1980s (!!), continue to get to enjoy the preeminent product in the game.

It also retains control of ESPN and CBS and the experience of golf fans watching on TV.

All of that is brand protection and enhancement. Because to the Masters, nothing — not money in the short or long term — is as important as its brand. This is not the choice every business makes because it takes tremendous discipline, but it is a choice that I respect a lot.

4. All of this reminds me a bit of the great Acquired podcast about Nike where they talked about secondary markets, which is a lot of what we’re talking about here.

The PGA will absolutely sell all of its tickets, but it is erasing much of the secondary market (which, again, the Masters does not care about as much).

Here are Ben and David of Acquired on how Nike views the secondary market, specifically as it relates to its shoes.

Ben: The secondary market [for Nike] is huge. Some estimate $2 billion, some people estimate $6 billion category. Keep in mind, all of athletic shoes are 150-ish, somewhere around there, so still a tiny fraction compared to the athletic sneaker market broadly.
Acquired

David: The other way that Nike potentially could capture this value would be to massively increase their prices. This is really interesting. I think this is where Nike is different from the luxury brands that we've covered, the LVMHs, the Porsches.
Nike sells these incredibly limited edition, retro, and otherwise sneakers, but they sell them for $150, $200, maybe $300, not a lot of money. The instant that they get purchased, you can turn around and sell them on the secondary market for $5,000, some of these shoes, $10,000, maybe more. That is a very intentional decision by Nike not to capture that value.
Acquired

Interesting!

Ben: The point still stands. They make it up in volume.
David: Yes. I really can't think of anything else off the top of my head where a company is making such an obvious and clear choice to give value to other players in the ecosystem, whether those be companies or just people who are arbitraging.
Ben: Just like a luxury brand, they have to market the dream, but their mechanism for capturing value is entirely different.
Acquired

They come back to it at the end of the four-hour episode.

David: I think the thing that is so confounding here is the secondary markets. There is no question that the value of many Nike items is well above their selling price. I don't think that's the case for Adidas, maybe for some items, but I doubt as many as Nike.
Ben: I don't have a clear answer here. I think my best answer is, they want the most swooshes out there in the world. There are some sweet spot where they're willing to trade off profit dollars for that, for the continued brand presence, where the swoosh feels like a ubiquitous thing, a brand people celebrate and are excited about, and they just want it reinforced on everyone everywhere. They're willing to give margin dollars for that.
Acquired

We are obviously talking about very different businesses here. Nike is a product whereas the PGA/Ryder Cup is an experience. And while I think erasing the secondary market is part of all of this — and again, a not unreasonable business decision in the short term! — I also think this point by KVV is a big part as well.

The problem, obviously, is that you turn a raging party into a demure function, which could (but probably won’t!) prohibit your side from winning the event.

There are layers here, many of them.

And while I don’t necessarily agree with the way the PGA is going about this and understand where Porath is coming from here, none of it diminishes my love of the Ryder Cup nor my desire for everyone to experience it.

5. I will say, I hope the PGA — at the very least — considers tacking on an addendum that allows kids 12 and under (or whatever) in for free. There is nothing sweeter than getting to enjoy that experience with your daughter or son and to price that group out when there is an “unlimited” number of seats is not really something I agree with.

6. All of that having been said …

If you are a subscriber of this newsletter and win the Ryder Cup ticket lottery that makes you eligible to purchase two tickets to the event, the first person to email us (kyle at normalsport dot com) after he/she wins will have their tickets paid for by Normal Sport. You don’t have to buy the tickets first. You just have to show us that you received the opportunity to buy them. Additionally, one of our readers has offered to purchase the second two tickets for someone. Amazing stuff.

This newsletter is always going to be written from a fan’s perspective, and if we are not living out the back half of our mission statement — “to use humor and humanity to make the daily fan’s personal experience of golf feel meaningful” — then what are we even doing ?

7. Speaking of Cups, imagine going from the Old Course to Pine Valley to NGLA. Imagine …….. [stares] …….. Royal St. George’s being the worst venue in 50 years.

8. This concept from Shaan Puri is something I have always danced around but never articulated as well as him.

He wrote about asking on Twitter why people love reading biographies.

It got ~500 replies, and my favorite was this:
“Entertainment disguised as knowledge”
It got me thinking, what else is entertainment disguised as knowledge?
So then I got curious – if there’s entertainment disguised as insight… then there must be the reverse too! INSIGHT disguised as ENTERTAINMENT
Shaan Puri

Insight disguised as entertainment. My short list.

Shotgun Start
Inside the NBA
Pixar

Here’s who Shaan had (it’s a better list).

South Park – a silly vulgar cartoon, that actually has a lot of insightful things to say.
Standup comedy – Dave Chapelle doesn’t really tell jokes anymore. He just tells the truth, in a way that’s disguised as humor.
Disney/Pixar – instead of going to bible study or being lectured about morality, watching a single Pixar movie will teach a valuable lesson while keeping you entertained (whether you’re 5 years old or 50).
Shaan Puri

I think insight disguised as entertainment is the holy grail of media. It seems so, so, so difficult to achieve, and then you’re weeping at the end of Inside Out, like, “I do not understand how they did that, they must be geniuses, all of them are brilliant, these are the smartest people in the world, they entertained my children and made me cry at the same time, this seems impossible.”

9. Apropos of basically nothing, this week I stumbled into this meme among my mountain of golf memes and it made me laugh pretty hard.

10. Very normal stuff here.

Oh hell yes. They’re using Jack’s quotes about Digital Jack against human Jack!
— Tron Carter (@TronCarterNLU)
10:57 PM • Oct 8, 2024

11. Last week’s Q&A guest, Jamie Kennedy, asked this on Twitter: You have the power to grant one mulligan to one player for one shot in golf history. What are you picking?

I turned the most common responses into a poll (vote below!).

12. Thought this exchange between two good (but never great) Tour pros was interesting. This happens to every generation, yes, but to hear from guys who are out there that golf is so much better than it used to be — even recently! — had me intrigued.

13. Here’s something I said on the pod I went on with Mike McGraw recently that I thought you guys might enjoy. It sets a type of vision for Normal Sport that I’ve talked about some but not extensively. Maybe it’s stupid or silly, but I want to share the NS vision as much as possible with you guys.

From a long term perspective … we've talked a lot about the content game and the, the internet game and the coverage game. That's a really hard business. You know, it's a hard business to to be profitable in.
I'm hopeful that I can be profitable enough as I've left CBS to start this venture that right now it's just a newsletter with 14,000 people on it, which I'm grateful for, but it's not quite a business yet.
I'm hopeful that it can be profitable enough that I can just write for a long time. I love writing. I love writing about golf, but I also love writing about life. My wife told last year, she was like, “You're not really a golf writer, you just use golf to write about life.”
And I was like, “Ohhh … maybe you should write because that's very well said. Maybe you should take my job here.”
But that's sort of where I'm coming from. Like I said, that the content game, the online writing game, it's hard to be super profitable. But I think if you congregate enough people, whether it's 15,000 or 30,000 or 50,000, you can start to build businesses on top of that, right?
We see this in different places. You get enough people together, then all of a sudden maybe you have a business that's really an events business where you're going out and you're hosting Normal Sport events and that's where you make your profit. Or maybe you create a product. One of the products that I have in mind eventually is there's not a good on ramp for my kids to get into golf.
I read Sports Illustrated for kids growing up, right? And there's no Golfers Journal for kids. And I would love to create that.
So you start to congregate enough people that have a similar worldview and vision and thoughts about the golf world. Then you can start to build businesses on top of that that maybe you don't even participate in.
Maybe I continue to do the writing to attract people and you have businesses that you build out on top of that. And if that was the case, I would love that because like I said, I just love writing. I would I would sit here all day and just type out words about golf, which I know to some people sounds incredibly boring, but I just love getting to do it everyday.
Better Than I Found It

14. A great quote I saw this week.

“Walking helps both the serenity and social interaction — a foursome will stay more together walking than when they’re in carts. Golf carts keep two people together, but not four, and conversation just fades or gets quickly interrupted.” -David McLay Kidd

15. Normal. Equipment is fine.