Edition No. 53 | February 6, 2024

Hey,

This week marks one year since I started this newsletter. I plan on having more on that in the Friday edition, but know that it has been such a delight to have this outlet to write about both silly and serious (mostly golf) things over the last 12 months.

Our goal for Normal Sport is to become the most unique publisher of golf text + illustration in the world. To build a heartfelt and humorous world that helps daily golf fans see life a little bit differently than before.

One of my hopes that has spun off of that goal is that it’s half as much fun for you to read these newsletters as it is for me to cobble them together and try to make sense of it all.

Thank you for reading and following. Truly. I’m grateful for it.

The Global Home II

This is a bit of a modern letters to the editor segment.

Last week I wrote a bit about what a global tour could look like, and many of you responded to that. Here are a couple of the more interesting responses (that I thought the rest of you would enjoy me highlighting).

As always, inclusion of an opinion does not equal endorsement of an opinion.

One thing that became clear in reading through the responses is that people love the idea of a clear hierarchy. A pointy pyramid broadly across the golf world where it’s easy to fall out of the top 50 or top 100 or whatever the number is and where the very upper crust represents the most deserving players based on recent performance.

I don’t disagree.

The reimagining of what pro golf would look like if you could reconstitute it from scratch is such a fun thought experiment. There are so many ways it could be better. So many things you could do with it (more on this below). So much opportunity for the regular season of golf to be more intriguing and compelling than it currently is.

Stat of the Week

On Monday, I received an email this week from the good folks over at LIV with their 2024 media guide. I perused it for a bit, looking for some interesting content, and I stumbled upon this gem: Phil Mickelson claims to have made 47 holes in one in his lifetime.

Forty-seven.

This is basically one a year since he was six.

Let’s do some math on this.

The odds of a tour pro making a hole in one are 1-in-3,000. So we’ll start there. But Phil is not a normal tour pro (and I mean that any way you want me to mean it). He’s one of the 12 best golfers of all time. So let’s call Phil’s odds 1-in-2,500.

That means Phil would have to play 2,500ish par 3s a year. If the standard course has four par 3s then he would have to play 625 rounds a year or nearly two a day. That’s a lot, but it’s certainly not inconceivable.

The problem with the math is how many tournaments Phil has played. He’s not playing two rounds a day during tournament weeks, which means he’d have to play more at home. It’s certainly in the realm of possibility, but 47 is still a lot.

Other interesting things: Phil enjoys hitting a post apogetical fade. No idea what that is, but I have no doubt he’s the first to do it.

Also, Pat Reed said there are no shots that give him trouble.

Which … for sure.

Idea of the Week

I spoke about this on the Fried Egg podcast this week, but I’m kind of in on the team aspect of LIV.

Does LIV do it well and in a way that’s easy to understand? Not really. Are the team names and logos utterly ridiculous, even by new sports league standards? Absolutely. Does the individual competition get in the way of the team aspect, and vice versa? At times it does.

However, I’m compelled by guys hanging around the 18th green waiting for a teammate to finish up. I think the built-in carrot of, as Andy pointed out during that pod, helping your team move up the standings even if you are personally struggling during a given week is fascinating.

What I’ve truly been thinking about is two-fold though.

1. My kids and I were watching a LIV event when LIV first started and one of my sons asked me why there’s not a team that includes Rory, JT and Spieth for him to be a fan of and root for.

   Me …

   

2. If you split the team and individual play — as Rory recently implied could happen — now it gets interesting. Rory and JT in alternate shot bracketed match play against Rahm and Hatton in Spain? Buddy, sign me up. Spieth and Scheffler in best ball match play against Cantlay and Xander in Australia?

   I am in.

There is a tweet that I think about often from LaMagna after the Rory-Cantlay thing on Saturday night of the Ryder Cup last year. I think it’s part of what is lacking from regular season professional golf.

I had not thought about splitting the team and individual play until Rory started talking about the IPL a few weeks ago, and now I can’t stop thinking about it.

I have been pro team stuff from the beginning with LIV because I think it is something that compounds the product. It adds revenue streams, format options, offseason drama and I think (?) helps involve fans who are just looking for some non-major juice.

I genuinely hope this is part of whatever deal gets settled on between the PIF and the PGA Tour.

Quote of the Week

An all-timer from Rahm in his team announcement.

“I wanted to go down the warrior spirit mythology side for the team's name. The term loyalty is very important for me – I think it embodies the warrior spirit through its decisiveness and ready-for-battle mindset. During the Roman Empire, there was the iconic Legion XIII Gemina in Caesar’s army. They believed in the credo of faithful loyalty.” -Jon Rahm

The term loyalty is very important for me.

I’m not even mad about the quote because [gestures at everything that changed since Rahm pledged his fealty two years ago]. I’m simply astonished at the lack of self-awareness in giving it. Rahm is, like, one of the most self-aware athletes in the world. He has to know know how this will be perceived!

I have thought, more than once, that the biggest achievement of LIV is not that it has signed so many major winners or that it has so effectively worked its way into a more mainstream consciousness but rather that it has turned so many self-aware people against themselves.

There have not been a ton of examples of this (because its first few signings were, uh, Bryson, DJ, Reed and Brooks), but the ones that are examples — and Rahm is certainly at the top of that list — completely confound me.

Normal Sport

I think about this tweet from Michael Wolf often. Golf is insane because of its environment maybe more than anything else.

This last week was a pretty good example of that.

1. Imagine walking up to the fourth green and being greeted with this just beyond a Crushers flag ripping in the wind.

2. The closer you look at this photo, the better it gets.

3. The two-stroke penalty on Rory at Pebble on Thursday was incredible. He played a shot based on a rule that was written in 2019. What he didn’t know is that it was re-written in 2023 because, according to a PGA Tour rules official, “all of us within the game, including the governing bodies, were very uncomfortable once the [2019] rule was written.”

It had to do with the fact that Rory took a drop straight backwards from a tree with the tree between him and the hole. The 2019 rule said you could drop within a club length of that line (which he did). The 2023 rule says your drop can roll within a club length of that line, but you cannot purposely drop within a club length of that line.

The USGA rule book is 244 pages (I should add it to my Goodreads list). Imagine trying to remember even three of them.

4. This got me pretty good.

5. /Adds 10 new pages to the USGA rule book.

The Infirmary

This is absolutely infirmary behavior.

And while I agree that 30 minutes is a bit excessive, I also don’t know what this gentleman is struggling with. Perhaps a quick left hook or the big right miss. Maybe just trying to get his swing thoughts in order.

I have a friend who recently told me he went through three new swing changes in his mind between an early December round and one on New Year’s Eve. Sociopathic behavior to be sure, but let ye who has not laid in bed at night wondering whether loosening your left hand during the takeaway is the best fix for heavy wedge shots from 120 and in cast the first stone.

Meme of the Week

This was excellent.

So was this.

Who Can Say?

I was watching Pebble last week, and I realized that the most exciting .03 seconds in sports right now is when Spieth starts early walking his putts.

Nobody knows what it means. Most of the time, not even him.

Could be dripped in center cut for his fourth consecutive birdie the green jacket measurements are the same thanks Fred.

Or could run 7 feet past on the low side, giving him barely better than 50/50 odds of completing a 2-putt from what was previously 30 inches.

Truly … I mean truly … who can say?

Crooked Golf Media

👉️ Eamon Lynch on Yasir’s kidnapping allegations is good and interesting. The ending really brought the last two years home for me.

If a day arrives when Monahan is forced to explain his organization’s adjacency to another Saudi outrage, it shouldn’t be overlooked that this partnership wasn’t brought about by the imperial ambitions of executives in Ponte Vedra or Wentworth.

It’s happening because the best players in the world feel entitled to compensation beyond their worth in any rational market. By presenting a ransom demand that only the Saudis will pay, golfers on the PGA Tour are forcing a deal that absolves them of individual decision-making responsibility. And if there’s a reputational price to be paid for that later, well, it’s like bad yardages or swing slumps. Someone else will take the fall.

👉️ Listen, you don’t love to see it, but this is good (albeit not actually implemented yet).

It’s crazy to me that the Tour still hasn’t done this. For me, a lot of the time it goes back to having too many events. If you had just one event a year, it would be easy to implement the technology. Same with two. When you get up to 49 of them, it gets quite a bit more complicated. The same is true for Shotlink.

👉️ I went on the Fried Egg pod this week with Andy Johnson and Joseph LaMagna to talk about whether LIV has a viable product now and whether the PGA Tour needs the PIF (it does).

👉️ Fascinating read here on a return to scarcity within media.

… as they would say in ecology, the ecosystem lacks the resources to sustain the herd. So its numbers will dwindle, the volume of inventory will shrink and, as scarcity returns to the equation, publishers will once again be able to charge competitive rates for offering advertisers access to the limited resource of attention.

👉️ I have watched this shot many, many times.

Overheard on Twitter

"Smart man says nothing is a miracle. I say everything is." -Norm Macdonald (via Brent Beshore)

How is This App Free?

Here are some finds from this week.

Tough scene to go from Geography 101 to the 300 level mergers and acquisitions class in the span of two weeks.

It’s funny because it’s true …

Man, this one got me. So perfect.

Man, I think this is mostly true … although I dare to remain cautiously optimistic.