Issue No. 98 | July 23, 2024

Hey,

I am driving to Colorado as I write this week’s newsletter. More accurately, my wife is driving while our kids watch Moana in the back of the car.

I’m sure none of you can relate to this.

Unfortunately for them, I have about 923 thoughts on that Open. Unfortunately for me, I’ll have about 45 minutes to write them all and another hour after they go to bed tonight if I’m lucky.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) for you, this will be the only newsletter this week. The license plate game is my canvas for the day, and I’ll be rafting and fishing and sneaking in golf with my oldest for the rest of the week.

But enough about that. Troon needs the full treatment.

Onto the news.

But first, a shout to this week’s newsletter sponsor, Holderness and Bourne. While they do not sell the brollies needed at last week’s Open, Jason beautifully depicted what they would have looked like if they did with all the lovely H&B patterns we have come to love.

You can check them out here.

27 Thoughts on The Open

1. In the words of Brendan Porath who I believe was quoting Spencer Hall, I’m just going to start writing numbers and words as fast as I can and see what happens and where we end up by the time we reach Amarillo.

2. I realized during this Open that I have become a sucker for the “aging great in his late 30s or early 40s trying to eke one more big one out of the body and the clubs” narrative. Perhaps it is because I have aged alongside guys like Rose, Scott and Horschel, but I found myself so compelled by their respective views of careers with windows that are smaller than they seem.

Strangely — to me anyway — in the midst of what turned into an all time great Open test with so many different players in the mix on Saturday and Sunday, I somehow found myself … rooting (pretty hard!) for Justin Rose?

How did this happen?

It must be a passage of time sentiment. Nothing does me in more quickly or easily. Remember the scene in Interstellar where Matthew McConaughey has been on a different planet, one where time moves at a much different pace than it does on Earth, and he gets back to his ship and calls his kids and sees that they have aged by decades? It destroys me.

It is fun to root for 23-year-old superstars because you feel like you’re experiencing their first peek at perfection. It feels new all over again. Like you haven’t seen 15 or 20 versions of it before.

It’s more personal to root for 44-year-old former superstars because you feel like you’re experiencing their last glimpse at greatness. Like you’re seeing an old man remember that he does in fact remember how to ride a bike.

It feels intimate and vaguely vulnerable.

The 23-year-old doesn’t yet understand how quickly he will become the 44-year-old, but you do. We do. I find it easy to root for Justin Rose now because I know that he knows how fast it all goes. How quickly Ludvig Aberg will be gray and stuff. How short the winning windows are. I know how much he appreciates even a chance to do something special.

There is an innocence to someone young winning an Open. There is a gravity, though, to someone who is older. Because when you’re of a certain age, you can always convince yourself — no matter if you win or you lose — that you’ll get the chance again. But when you’re of a different certain age, you know the truth that winning an Open Championship — a tournament which has hosted 11 consecutive first-time Open winners — in your late 30s or early 40s conveys: That this was it. That time does not stand still.

That you’ll almost certainly never get that opportunity again.

3. Hockey Twitter may have usurped Memphis Twitter on Sunday as the contingent of folks who hates me the most after I said that no trophy in sports is better than the Claret Jug. Not even the Stanley Cup.

I stand by it. And I’m not sure it’s even all that close.

The case for the jug over the cup …

• Older.

• More subtle.

• You don’t need a small army to carry it around.

• More utility (you can drink OR pour things out of it).

• It’s available to (a lot) more than 800 people in two countries or however many NHL players there are.

• Global (see above).

We have gone too far with the Stanley Cup. It’s fine. It’s great. But the mystique around it is too much. Heck, you could talk me into — off the top of my head — the Heisman, Olympic medals, the Ryder Cup, the World Cup and the Wimbledon plates all being better than the Stanley Cup!

4. As was pointed out by many, we cannot do blue boxes for pars at the Open. And we certainly can’t do darker blue boxes for doubles. That is truly sociopathic stuff! Let’s go blue for pars, gray for bogeys and slightly darker blue for doubles. What?

As Barry noted, here’s what it should look like.

5. I read through approximately 345 transcripts last week, and pulled some of my favorite stuff. Here’s a good one from Shane Lowry.

That maybe looks like a throwaway, but the first line is everything: You go out there and put yourself out there in front of everyone and give it your best.

There are probably a dozen reasons a certain group of players (I’m not going to name names but I have a few in my head) is good enough to win majors but will never actually win majors. This is one of them.

The courage of truly putting yourself out there, of embracing the discomfort of leading, of really going for it is not something everyone has. Lowry does, and he’s an Open champ. I appreciate this about him. It’s something that sounds so easy and obvious, but if you have ever competed at anything beyond a recreational level, you know it can be the most difficult thing in the world.

6. I don't know who needs to see this or how to make it happen, but I feel conviction around the fact that the Open should end the golf season. The last event in a sports season should be the best and most celebratory moment -- we were talking the other day about it as a type of crescendo. And the champion golfer of the year walking up the 72nd at an Open is the best and most celebratory event in golf.

Does this mean you have to move it back a week or two into August? Fine. What does it mean for the FedEx Cup? In a more global scenario, I don’t know that I care about that. Is this a logistics nightmare? Maybe. Will the five (six?) families in golf ever get together and decide something like this? I’m dubious!

If you need to start the golf season in November or December, do it. But it would be so absurd to have the first round of the NFL playoffs after the Super Bowl, and yet that’s what we’re about to get.

7. My guy Jamie Kennedy — who is brilliant in general, a great dude and a lot smarter about golf than I am (all of this is a plug for you to follow him) — started calling the career major records of players, Wikipedia grids.

It’s a great name and a nod to the fact that these things should be built out even more (there is so much you could do with the coloring). Anyway, Jamie collects outliers. Crazy great ones or absurdly weird ones.

One of my favorites he posted this week is Matteo Manassero’s.

Apparently he only plays Opens at Troon.

But in all seriousness, to go 30 majors without an appearance, and to have that stretch follow the fact that his best major performance is still 2009 is wild stuff.

“The Open is very special,” he explained. “The walk on 18 is the best. There's nothing like it, with the huge stands and the clubhouse in the back. It's golf at its very finest. It's pure.”

When he was asked what led to him getting back here, his answer was great.

“I had the right people around me, and I was doing the right thing. I would say that, and also the fact that I wanted to live these moments again probably.”

8. How good is 8? I know I mentioned this at the end of last week, but a 120-yard par 3 with no penalty areas and guys go wild-eyed and have no clue where to leave it or what to do if the wind is above 0.5 MPH (sorry, 0.9 km/h).

Twos and eights. Three feels amazing. Five sometimes feels amazing.

My gosh, it’s so good.

9. Great normal sport scene here ahead of the final round.

Biggest event of the year, and my guy is jammed in a vehicle with five other humans 20 minutes before it starts.

10. This is maybe the most first world of all the first world problems, but one thing that irritated me so much during the event is when the broadcast would pull the name and the score from the bottom right corner after a player holed his putt but wouldn’t tell you how the score changed (or if it did at all). It didn’t happen every time, but I thought that was so bizarre.

11. This was low-key one of my favorite moments of the entire week. Fooch has seen it all, and his guy just had his heart ripped out by one of the great final round 65s in the last two decades.

So what does he do?

He goes up to Xander, holds him by the neck and congratulates him and speaks to him.

Here’s what he said afterward.

Awesome stuff. Golf rules. Also, we need more neck holding in the States. There’s nothing more intimate than grabbing another man’s neck and saying something kind to him!

12. I’m not really sure what to do with Xander. He obviously has the gifts. But just as obviously, he doesn’t make me feel things. He said on Sunday that this is on purpose.

“The same way I don't get really angry, I also don't let myself get too over the moon because to me it's the same thing,” he said. “If I'm sitting there snapping a club, that would be the same as me running around fist pumping. It would take too long for me to adjust before my next shot to hit a good one. I've kind of embraced this sort of SoCal, laid-back kid, but there's obviously a fire burning deep within, or you wouldn't have a couple majors sitting by your side.”

So he’s difficult to latch on to. Fine, so is Scottie at times. But Xander also doesn’t say things that make me think like Scottie does.

I guess my best on Xander is that he is actually who everyone thought Rickie was going to be.

And while the lack of emoting and the lack of commentary is sometimes difficult to look past, greatness is a universal language and the admission from his camp that he had to learn to get past failing a bit under pressure — something KVV talked about in the Sunday NLU show — is interesting and relatable.

13. Not to brag, but I got to watch the world feed all week (zero commercials), and it was unbelievable. The language on the world feed was amazing, too. Like you were standing right next to every player. More f-bombs than a college football coach down four touchdowns at halftime! While we’re here: A half-baked idea I had during Open week is that cursing should be fine to air during these events. The reason it’s half-baked is that I’m not sure I want my kids hearing it, but the texture and context it adds is kinda great!

14. Another half-baked thing I’ve been thinking: We care far too much about whether a player gets to drop their ball closer to the hole and not even close to enough about whether the new lie is similar to the old one. I’m a moron and don’t have a golf background so that’s where that is coming from, but just something I’ve been considering during two Scottish tournaments.

15. This is insane: The only golfers who have finished top 10 in all four majors in a year and won two of them are Palmer, Nicklaus, Player, Watson, Tiger, Spieth (of course) and now Xander.

Truly one of the great major seasons ever.

16. Troon: Where you're going to have to navigate quartering winds up to 30 and avoid all the gorse and putt your face off and the back nine plays 4,800 yards when the wind is into you oh yeah and there's a train on 11 that you need to consider so you're not taking your club back when it goes by at 145 km/h 25 feet from where you’re trying to hit the toughest drive in golf. Normal sport.

17. Once I saw this, I could never unsee it. Every time they showed Thirston, this is what I saw.

I mean every time.

18. The shot I’ll think about from this week is that Scottie 3 wood into 17. Just one of the great shots I have ever seen. In that weather. In that jacket! With that much at stake. And the way he got it to barely check up at the end.

The embodiment of this gif for me …

19. This tweet got me. I bet Memphis Twitter and Hockey Twitter are nothing compared to Scottish Twitter.

Also maybe not wrong …

20. One thing I was thinking about on Saturday when everybody was playing with their hats backwards is whether Justin Rose is the first human in history to wear a Morgan Stanley hat backwards. Also, people were taking my backwards hat tweets wayyyy too seriously.

21. I kept thinking about how sick it would be if somebody drove one across a bridge on one of these holes with the tiny burns.

And then Brian Harman did it!

22. Alex Noren with the most relatable dad quote ever: “I'm trying to get my kids into golf so I can play golf with them so then I don't have to be doing other stuff. That's maybe what I'm trying to do now.”

23. This is such good content. I honestly don’t think I could break 128 from those tees in that weather!

24. On Sunday, I was watching the world feed and the broadcasters called it “the most demanding Open Championship” and the “perfect Open” because of how many different ways it has tested players — dry at times, different winds

It would be difficult to disagree.

Here’s Horschel.

“I enjoy hitting little bunt shots. “I get tired of golf where you're making full swings and you lean into a certain number and it stops. I like when you have to be creative and find a way to get around the golf course, and I think I've always done that well for the most part.”

It was the toughest, best test of championship golf I can remember.

And those weeks are not a given because you have to get wind and weather and everything kind of has to break the right way. But when it does … I think sometimes it’s just hard to explain to somebody who is a causal how much different that kind of golf is, how much harder it is than the 3M or the Chuck Schwab.

But not harder in a manufactured “we’ve dialed the greens to 19 on the stimp” way. Harder in that you have to do everything at the very best level at which you have ever done it just to have a chance. It is the best physical, mental and emotional examination in golf (maybe in sports).

We got a lot of it this year at the majors, too! The Masters had an obscenely windy day. Troon had four of them. Pinehurst was so tough and exacting. The Halla was the Halla, but the other three majors made watching regular PGA Tour golf feel unrecognizable by comparison.

25. Also, hard agree here.

26. This from Thriston was the perfect ending. Just hammering one into the face on 18. Then he got up and down!

And as Drew pointed out, if the face hadn’t popped it all the way out, Thriston probably wouldn’t have made par, finished top four and gotten into next year’s Masters. What a stupid, amazing game.

27. I woke up sad on Sunday about the last round of the Open.

This job is sometimes just a job. Do the work, pay the bills, get the insurance and so on. But those mighty major weeks are the greatest joy. It doesn’t feel like work. It feels like time but not work.

It feels like the least laborious work in the world.

I was sad because the 16 most important days of this golf year are over, and while there will be other ridiculous, very normal stuff that happens, there is nothing like the energy and delight of covering a windy, chaotic Open. Nothing.

I could spend another 3,000 words describing and explaining why this is true, but because I must go and be with my family I will simply trust that you understand what I am saying. That viewing and discussing the tense, wonderful moments of an Open Championship, it’s not a transaction.

So much of our world is transactional. You pay this and get that. You spend this and get that. So little of it is experiential. And yet, somehow, even through the television (the telly!), this tournament feels like an experience. 

One you get to talk about with your friends. One you get to go and try to recreate in your own much-less-skilled ways. One that you remember.

One that brings you joy.

Non-Open related note from the illustrator: One fun thing about illustrating Normal Sport for four years is having ideas on the cutting room floor that come back to life later. Case in point is this sketch from July 2022.

It was made for the inaugural LIV event at Trump Bedminster but now feels prophetic thanks to Bryson x Trump’s Break 50 video, right down to the red and blue shot tracer (chef’s kiss). The absurdity level in our current golf reality is incalculatable.

Thanks for reading until the end.

You’re a sicko, and I’m we’re grateful for it.