Edition No. 75 | April 16, 2024

Hey,

Thank you to everyone who joined the newsletter over Masters week. It was an extraordinary few days both on the course but also for this absurd newsletter. I think the “gained new followers” rankings from Masters week may look like this.

1. Ludvig
2. Normal Sport newsletter
3. Max
983. ZJ

As is almost always the case after a Masters week, I’m equal parts exhausted and exhilarated. So much goes into that week for everyone involved every year, and the fun part for me this year was that a lot of my emotional investment in the event and the week was put into this newsletter.

I hope you enjoyed it. My heart was certainly in it and in covering that tournament with all the enthusiasm and emotion that it deserves. If you’re new, you cannot unsubscribe and you will receive driving range pool noodle emails until the end of time can always unsubscribe, but we promise to continue to put our whole hearts into making this the best golf (and a lot of times not golf) newsletter we possibly can.

I posted our final two Masters merch winners below.

Congrats to Michael M. from Tallahassee & Brian P. from St. Louis.

Onto some final thoughts on the Masters. I normally write this as a Twitter thread, but I’ve started turning some of those longer tweets into little sections of the newsletter.

I don’t know if that’s a good decision from the standpoint of building an audience, but I like the quiet of writing to one person at a time instead of the whole world descending on a single sentence or two and turning it into whatever they want. It’s like the difference between proprietary computer code vs. an API (not the Bay Hill one, you sicko).

Anyway, final thoughts from Augusta.

Also, shout out to Holderness and Bourne for sponsoring. We illustrated them up and down this newsletter (see image below) and they outfitted me all week last week at Augusta. You can (and I hope you do) check out their stuff here.

The only thing that didn’t get gusted last week? The Holderness collar stays

15 Final Masters Thoughts

1. As Masters week winds down, I am perhaps most intrigued by the idea that folks (even sickos) are having a difficult time grappling with Scottie as a truly dominant golf figure. Tiger was very obviously a generationally great golfer, and that one was easy to understand. He had The Look. He had The Swing. He had true swagger. It all made sense in our brains.

It was not difficult to reconcile.

Beyond Cat, the players who have flirted with the generational moniker are Brooks (who is almost as easy to reconcile as Tiger, DJ (same), Rory (yep), Rahm (maybe not as much as the other three but still yes) and then Spieth and JT. Those last two are a little tougher to get your mind around in terms of their look matching their dominance, but they also aren’t as good as Rory, Rahm, DJ and Scottie. Of those four, Scottie is by far the most difficult for folks to watch and consume and think, “Yeah, he’s That Guy.”

Why is that?

Because make no mistake, he is That Guy.

Since January 1, 2022, he is 100 shots better than the second best player in the world (Rory). One-hundred shots. And in that same time, Rory has been 100 shots better than Patrick Cantlay.

In other words, Scottie is gaining two shots a tournament on the No. 2 player in the world and four shots a tournament on the No. 8 player in the world.

Here’s the full list I put together. In a similar number of events played since January 1, 2022, Scheffler has gained roughly a total of ...

100 strokes on Rory McIlroy
150 strokes on Jon Rahm
200 strokes on Viktor Hovland
250 strokes on Max Homa
300 strokes on Collin Morikawa
350 strokes on Hideki Matsuyama
400 strokes on Talor Gooch
450 strokes on Rickie Fowler
500 strokes on Lucas Glover
550 strokes on Nicolai Højgaard
600 strokes on Erik van Rooyen
700 strokes on Matthias Schmid

All of these golfers are currently in the Data golf top 150. Scheffler has been significantly better than all of them over the last 25 months.

He has played, without question, the best sustained level golf we have seen since Tiger Woods lost to Y.E. Yang at the 2009 PGA Championship. And yet, this is not how he is perceived.

Is it because he wasn’t as hyped as Rory and JT? Is it because of the goofy looking swing in which the finish looks like a middle-aged man trying to griddy off the tee box? Is it because he looks and acts like a 45 year old in (allegedly) a 27-year-old’s body? Is it because he likes to blow the leaves off his lawn and has LeBron’s 2012 hairline? Is it because he doesn’t carry himself like an alpha?

I suspect all of these reasons contribute bits and pieces to the overall narrative, and I understand why he’s a little difficult to accept as a potential top 25 player in the history of this sport. However, I think his quiet, standard-deviation dominance is both aspirational and sustainable. He knows himself (an extremely underrated aspect of being great) and understands how he operates best within the context of the pro golf landscape.

Just because he doesn’t stare down contenders who stand between him and many major titles and f-bomb every missed putt doesn’t mean he’s not one of the most competitive dudes on the planet. You know what’s unsustainable? Fake toughness. Talking. Yapping. Jawing about what you’re going to do.

You know what’s underrated? Escaping the left-right combo he took on Saturday afternoon from a course that sucked lesser players into its maelstrom and a field that had him on the ropes.

After a double bogey-bogey start to the second nine, he hit an “I have to make this” 5 footer on 12 and let ‘em know they missed their chance on 13 with a 30-footer straight into the heart of the event.

It reminded me of the great line about Joe Frazier from one of my favorite columns ever by Mark Kram on Ali-Frazier III, the Thrilla in Manila.

I read this column a couple times a year.

It’s easy to confuse greatness with the appearance of greatness. One hunts pressure and the other runs away. In an era where players seem to be more in love with making Trackman sing, Scottie wants to get you in the ring to see how deep into the fight you can go. And if you cannot go the distance, he won’t need to make it known. For it will be plain as day in front of us, for all the world to see.

Greatness takes on different shapes, but its common thread is this: Greatness is relentless in its pursuit of the fight. Scottie is a total dog in a sport bereft of them. He craves the discomfort of leading late, which is more unusual than you may think.

He is That Guy.

It might not look like you want it to or as you believed it would. But he’s more special than we thought.

And buddy, there is no end in sight.

2. The slam is in play. Truly, it is. If Spieth took it all the way to the 70th hole at the Old Course in 2015, then Scottie can take it somewhere special this time around. I’m rooting for him to win Valhalla because there’s nothing more tantalizing than somebody taking a slam to the third major. Whooo boy, I get chills just thinking about him winning Valhalla and leading Pinehurst on a Friday night. A real run at the slam is almost inconceivable outside of the Cat, but what a dream it would be. And what a gift to golf. Just imagine, trading talk of equity ceilings and future board seats for a potential Open-Open slam at Pinehurst and Troon.

Whew, send help.

3. I wrote about Scottie’s relationship with the Lord a bit in last week’s newsletter, and then I got steep on it in my gamer for CBSSports.com.

In the aftermath of the event and that column, I saw some very politicized “Yeah, tell ‘em what’s up” rhetoric around what I wrote. Let me be very clear here: I’m not here to bastardize Christianity for that sake of your political beliefs. That’s not at all what this is about, and if you think that’s what’s going on, then you need to read a little closer.

Equally, Scottie is not looking to leverage his faith for the sake of winning green jackets. Whether you believe in God or not, his testimony is a powerful one: That there is contentment to be found outside of success. That we are not tethered to our achievements and our glory.

That there is a better way.

Sean Martin said it better than I could in the tweet below.

That his worldview happens to be a tremendous path to winning major championships is no weird coincidence. The Bible is truly a call to a better and more satisfied life. We all feel the pull of dissatisfaction. We all feel the tentacles of discontent. And this way does not mean life is without its trials and its devastations. My life is a testament to that reality.

What it does mean is that, like Scottie has voiced, there is freedom in knowing this is not the end. And that no matter what, there is eternal security in trusting God.

What a good and gracious gift. Scottie talked more about it in this excellent pod with Webb Simpson, Ben Crane and William Kane.

4. A thought I had this week that sounds completely and totally insane (also a very normal transition from the previous point): Ludvig Aberg is a cross between Alex Honnold and Cade Cunningham.

Normal sport.

The former because he seems to truly not feel pressure in the same way other players feel pressure. In Free Solo, Honnold goes in for testing and his brain literally doesn’t register fear the same way normal brains do. It’s why he can solve the Boulder Problem 1,700 feet off the ground.

I walked with Ludvig over the last few holes on Sunday, and he looked and acted the exact same way on hole No. 68 of the tournament — while trying to solve the Down Four And Behind The Trees On 15 Problem — as he did on hole No. 2 back on Thursday. I’ve never seen anything like it.

He may truly be wired different than the rest.

The Cade Cunningham comp is because he seems to get better as the level of play (in this case, the golf course) gets better.

I watched Cade’s year of college basketball at Oklahoma State. He was a physically dominant freak. But he was also smarter and more anticipatory than all of his teammates. He would throw passes not where players were but where he envisioned them to eventually be. He would cut to spots that should have opened up space for teammates who weren’t paying attention to what he was doing.

As soon as he got to the NBA, and joined better, smarter teammates, he immediately became a better player. Except he didn’t really change, he was simply around players that accentuated his gifts. That’s what major championship courses do for Ludvig. They accentuate his gifts. He has a lot of them. And he seems to quite enjoy the fight, which in many cases is half the battle.

“… it's just very encouraging and I want to do it again and again I think.”

What a perfectly Ludvig way to say it.

5. Just breaking in here to remind you that while only eight golfers played the tournament under par, Scottie played it in 11 under. His 21 true strokes gained is the best performance at a major since DJ won the 2020 Masters at 21.4 SG.

That year, Bryson won the U.S. Open with 24.6 (!) SG. The funniest SG stat in recent memory is the 2016 Open, in which Phil gained 26.5 SG on the field …and lost.

6. I thought a lot about Max all week. I wrote this on Twitter, and since I’m not sure I can say it any better, here’s what I wrote on Sunday morning …

Max is relatable because his career has had a crazy arc. He's gone from not even being able to keep his card to being a top 15 player in the world and a Ryder Cup star in six years. That's a fun and interesting narrative.

But he's likable because he's vulnerable. Combine those two realities (dug-out-of-the-dirt success + vulnerability), and you have somebody who is extremely easy to root for. There is a strange and perhaps silly thing that Max does that has always stood out to me.

When he goes on the NLU pod, he always ends it by saying, "Love you guys." It is a thing that maybe a lot of us say to our friends, but most of us don't talk to our friends in front of thousands and thousands of people. It's not a big thing, but it's a sign of his willingness to be vulnerable at any and all times. Being vulnerable (in other words, truly caring) as a professional golfer means getting your heart shredded over and over again.

If he wins today, he will weep. If he loses today, it will hit him at some point later on and he will also weep. I find it endearing when people care that much about their craft, their work, the moment that they're in. His quote. The one from Saturday. "If I catch myself thinking about what could go wrong, I let myself dream about what could go right."

Dreamers are easy to root for, especially when they have fashioned success from tremendous failure. Especially when they share what they have learned along the way. Especially when they're willing to give you their heart because they truly don't know any other way to live.

7. On Sunday, within three holes, Tiger shook hands with an 83-year-old man who called a Masters that Sam Snead (who was born in 1912!) played in and also a kid caddie who was in elementary school last time Spieth won a Masters.

Golf rules for innumerable reasons, but the connective fabric that makes up the Masters and the majors is certainly near the top of the list.

Also, what a tweet.

8. Bryson, man. He’s almost so absurd that things that should be a bigger deal sometimes feel normalized to the point that they don’t seem like a big deal at all. Like, if Adam Schenk said in a press conference that the USGA approved his 3D printed irons on Monday, people would be freaking out.

With Bryson, it’s like, Yeah, I mean I get it. Sounds right.

This thread from Will Knights on how ridiculous his irons are is good.

Preach.

Here’s another good comp.

3D printed irons had to have been the most normal sport moment of the entire tournament, but somehow it also wasn’t the most preposterous thing Bryson did (see bottom of email).

9. Low key my favorite moment of the week was Scottie’s dad giving this quote to KVV (and you should certainly read the entire piece here):

Buddy.

As a parent, that hits hard. All that other stuff [gives dismissive wave] doesn’t carry weight comparatively. Who you are matters so much more than what you do even if our culture does not operate in a way that would suggest that.

Golf matters. The Masters matters. A lot. Especially to those of us who are interested in these worlds. But I find it both endearing and inspiring that the dad of the dude who is destroying worlds is more proud of his son’s kindness than his strokes gained numbers.

That’s how we all believe we would view the world from that perch, but I imagine it’s a lot more difficult to actually do it once you get there.

It also reminded me of this quote from the 2022 Match Play.

10. Press building questions that I was involved in or adjacent to during the week.

• Could you draw a moderately-to-scale map of Augusta National from memory?

• Could any media member hit a number on the radar gun higher than the highest score (83)?

• Could any media member hit a number on the radar gun higher than Johnson Wagner?

• More majors: Ludvig or Bryson?

• Who are you most confident will never win another major: JT, Rory, Spieth, Brooks, Morikawa?

• Over/under 5.5 majors for Scottie?

11. One irony of Masters week is that it’s the one week where many of us don’t have our phones and it’s probably the best Golf Twitter™️ week of the year.

12. Golfers to win two Masters by age 27.

Seve
Tiger
Jack
Scottie
What?!

One (other) question we were talking about in the press building all week: What’s Scottie’s ceiling. One person I talked to said he’s a 30 (wins) and 5 (majors) guy, which is basically a modern Phil if you adjust for a slightly more difficult tour now than when Phil was in his prime.

It’s crazy to go beyond 30 and 5 as a ceiling, right? Right?!

13. I was sitting in a Jersey Mike’s in Columbia on Monday afternoon grabbing something before my flight back home. Just sitting there eating and thinking about the week and everything that happened. All of a sudden, I look up at this little promo poster hanging in the window of the store advertising … I don’t know what it was advertising. But the folks posing in the ad caught my eye. A woman in the foreground and someone in the background who looked like … is that Ludvig Aberg? My brain is broken. I thought Ludvig was a Jersey Mike’s model plastered all over stores across the country. My “I have officially been watching too much golf” moment of the week.

14. Forget the final recaps, this unhinged episode of SGS from Friday is an all-timer. One of the best ever. This is a sweet thread, too.

15. I wrote this last week, but ANGC rules. It stands the test of time. It is a perfect examination of golf. Do you have the shots? How many shots do you have? Can you hit them under the gun? Can you handle all the additional elements? I cannot think of a golf course — major or otherwise — that is better at testing your emotional state than Augusta National.

The argument there, of course, is the U.S. Open, but U.S. Opens often feel manipulated so that they overwhelm golfers’ emotions. Augusta, when it was like it was this last week, is not manipulated at all. And rather than being emotionally overbearing, it sort of pokes and prods at you to see what you have inside. What your guts are like. What’s running through your brain. Whether you have heart.

These sound like ridiculous things that a golf course could draw out of a human being, but the greatest golf courses — and in fast and firm conditions, it may be the greatest golf course — are as emotionally demanding as they are physically difficult. There is a certain magic in that. I’m not sure I understand it, partly because I am architecturally inept, but even if I was more well-versed, I think there is a mystery in the earth demanding answers from its inhabitants (even its golfing ones).

Phil always says ANGC is a spiritual place, and I don’t think he means it in this way, but it does seem to be a place that connects players to their hearts more than any other venue.

I cannot get enough.

How Is This App Free?

There were so many great ones last week.

And the tweet that made me laugh the hardest last week came after Scottie talked about being secure in the cross …

Thanks for reading until the end.

You are a sicko.

This last week was awesome.