When the Aliens Took Over Hazeltine

Edition No. 33 | September 22, 2023

Hey,

A late Friday send today as I’m 1. Trying to get prepped for a flight to Italy on Monday (nbd) and 2. Fully immersed in writing Normal Sport 3.

Two quick notes for the rest of the fall.

1. The Friday newsletter will probably be a bit shorter than it has been. That’s mostly because we’re grinding on Normal Sport 3, and my extra time is going toward that right now (and also because I’m offensive coordinator for my 9-year-old’s flag football team, and I’m mega-stressed about improving the three and a half plays we run every Saturday).

2. We are going to rebrand this newsletter shortly after the Ryder Cup. This is going to be jarring — maybe not Portrush to Memphis jarring but jarring nonetheless. Mostly because anytime you take something you’ve been showing people and start calling it something different, it’s going to be a bit disorienting. Which is why I’m trying to get ahead of that by telling you right now.

Why rebrand? It’s a good question that I will have more answers to, but like I mentioned last week, the short version is that I have a vision for all of this beyond just Normal Sport.

Normal Sport (the book and the Twitter bit) is absolutely part of that vision, but we’re expanding to include a little more beyond simply that very silly (and very fun!) schtick.

I know that’s vague for now, but you can vote and leave equally vague feedback here if you want.

Onto the news.

But first

At some point over the last nine months — in the process of building the newsletter you are reading — newsletters became my primary outlet for learning. I can’t get enough of them. Business, money, health and of course golf.

One newsletter I have developed an affection for in that time is Jon Sherman’s Practical Golf. I’m not a big “here are 10 ways to drop four shots off your handicap” guy, but Jon writes about how to improve your game in such a personal, meaningful way that I can’t stop reading.

You should subscribe to his newsletter. You’ll certainly think about your own golf differently.

He also offers a free chapter from his book about hitting driver better (which I need given that I’ve sworn off driver for the rest of 2023 and have been hitting 3 iron-3 iron-8 iron on par 5s) that will get you signed up for his newsletter as well.

Rohm

I had not seen the video below of that famous Rory-Reed match. The PGA got Reed to sit down and talk through it, and he does a great job of giving little insights that only he would have known.

Three things I remember from this match and that week.

1. The putt on 8 was an out-of-body experience. It felt like I was watching myself watch the entire thing. It went beyond how is it possibly my job to cover this madness? straight to have the aliens finally taken over?

2. I have imagined telling my 12-year-old self that I would be standing next to Tiger Woods at a sporting event, and we would both just be straight up laughing our faces off about the same preposterous set of circumstances and then that I would see Michael Jordan while walking to the next hole doing the same. And even my 12-year-old self is like, Dude, please just chill and be normal. That’s a bit much.

3. That entire week definitely changed my career and may have changed my life. That sounds like a ridiculous thing to say about an exhibition golf tournament in semi-rural Minnesota, but I think it’s true, although it’s somewhat difficult to explain.

That week was the first time I can specifically remember all of this feeling different. Whatever NLU was building, whoever Porath and KVV and so many others were becoming in their careers. It was a week where the world I’m in seemingly began to shift. I’m not sure I understood all of that in the moment, but looking back on it, that Ryder Cup was the inflection point for a lot of the golf folks you now read, listen to and follow.

I remember Soly — who was still doing NLU part-time but was starting to get a bit of traction and was certainly well known inside golf media circles — going on Golf Channel during the week to talk about the matches and the Ryder Cup as a whole. I’ll never forget a well-known golf writer, who is a bit older than I am but was sitting near me in the media center, saying something about Soly’s GC appearance that implied, And they’ve got this idiot on TV.

And now this idiot helps run a multi-million dollar golf media company and would not hire the gentleman who identified him on Golf Channel even if he applied to work for $1 a year.

The other thing I remember about that week — and I spoke about this in an interview with Meg Schuster (no relation to Todd or Neil that I know of) for the article she wrote about the Rory-Reed match for the Ringer — is that it was the first time I remember players taking notice that a big group of us were trying to cover golf with more humor and heart than they were probably accustomed to.

I remember walking off the course on Sunday ebullient, just completely full to the brim with the type of thrill you’re only innocent enough to embrace for a very small window of your career. The grounds were obviously crowded, and almost everyone there was either literally or figuratively intoxicated. As I, along with a handful of other people, started to ascend a bridge you had to take to get back to the media center, I felt somebody’s hand on my shoulder.

At this point in time, if you would have put $200M on the table and said, “Does the Northern Irish fellow with four major championships have any idea who you are or what you do?” I would still be flying commercial.

But he did, and that probably 20-second chat in which we barely talked about anything at all had a comically outsized effect on how I thought about my career and my work thereafter.

It was … this is perhaps obvious, but I’m not too proud to admit it … validation. Not that Rory knew who I was or what I did — for trying to collect the affection of folks you’re covering is a fool’s errand. It was validation, however, because somebody who so clearly cared about all of this began to acknowledge a trajectory of caring that he saw in me.

Using personal power to empower others is a rare and good thing.

Like I wrote about the Walker Cup recently, there may be better weeks, and there may be more astounding events to cover and there may even be more historic moments than Rory-Reed for those first eight holes.

But it’s hard to envision — nearly impossible to imagine — any week of golf ever being as impactful as that one was. And I certainly feel confident saying that none of the rest of them will ever be quite that much fun.

Greatline

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.” -Sirius Black (Harry Potter, Goblet of Fire)

• This is a good spot for your business to show off what it does.

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Crooked Golf Media

👉️ This from Ethan Strauss on the shuttering of the NYT sports section is good. I like his angle that it’s OK to call things that aren’t very good, “not very good.” In some circles that seems like some sort of unfathomable road to go down, but it shouldn’t be.

👉️ I can’t watch it yet — not sure if I’ll ever be able to — but I’m proud of DJ Pie and Co. for making this film.

👉️ This on 35 lessons about newsletter publishing is specific to newsletters, for sure, but it’s also tremendous advice and instruction for any media business.

👉️ Brian Phillips on how Wordle is ruining his life is exactly what you would expect from Brian Phillips writing about Wordle (among other word games!).

👉️ For the second consecutive newsletter, we have a Thomas Levet sighting. This one is a wild story from Jamie Kennedy about a lake jump gone wrong.

Love Your Work

One thing I have been thinking a lot about recently — as it relates to this newsletter and my work — is how much heart matters over style and almost everything else as it relates to being a content creator.

Consider the content you love.

I guarantee you some of it includes terrible podcast artwork, a lousy website, poor font choices and bad intros or outros on YouTube. But I also guarantee you that most (if not all) of the people you love reading or listening to or watching are also people who lead with their hearts, who really care about what they’re making.

The holy grail of course is somebody like MKBHD who does both, who puts together incredible branding without losing the soul of what he’s doing. That’s seemingly impossible, but it’s also why he has 17M YouTube followers and gets quoted by Tim Cook.

Anyway, the thing that reminded me of all of this was a Jamie Kennedy tweet which highlighted the Euro team leading with its heart and the American team reading a script.

I’m not trying to overstate this and make it into something that it’s not. Stuff like this has almost nothing to do with who wins the Ryder Cup. It was simply a subtle example of what I’ve been thinking about — call it authenticity or relatability or genuineness or whatever you want — of late. It’s a good quality in a person and one that can absolutely make or break a business.

Congratulations

To reader Quinn Boyle (Canada), who won our TRUE shoe giveaway after we hit 5,000 readers. We’re planning on doing more of these in the future — including a big one the week after the Ryder Cup — but congrats to Quinn and best wishes on Mike Weir’s Presidents Cup captaincy next year. Min Woo might have to carry more than he can handle.