The Best C-Suite Golfer In History

Late again. I’m sorry for that. This week’s excuse: I was dealing with one of the 10 best golfers of all time getting up in my mentions, claiming the commissioner of the biggest golf league in the world rejected his $1B project and asking me to get him on the record about it.

Normal stuff.

Before we get to this week’s newsletter, I want to remind everyone that if you haven’t grabbed a paperback copy of Normal Sport 2 yet, we have a few left. We’ll be shipping them (by “we” I mean my cadre of children will be shipping them) around March 21.

💀 Normal Moment(s)

All very routine sports stuff.

1. There are Some Things Money Can Buy

Like TV time for an executive smack in the middle of a Hovland-Spieth-Rory-Scheffler-Hatton-Kitayama slugfest. Have you ever thought about how weird it is that executives of these companies that sponsor golf tournaments are on the broadcast on Saturdays and Sundays?

Again, it’s something that’s been normalized for us in the golf world, but this tweet from DFE contextualized it for me in a way I hadn’t thought about before.

In golf, we get commercials (regular), commercials adjacent to the event (playing through) and commercials inside of the event (CEO interviews). Honestly Mastercard (and Wyndham and RBC and everyone else), put your logo on the bottom left corner of the broadcast, give me a once-an-hour reminder that you are paying for a commercial-light or commercial-free event, and your q-rating in my house wins the PIP.

Another idea: if a c-suite member wants to hop in the booth, they are absolutely going to have to break down some golf. Hey Bill, glad your Q3 growth exceeded expectations, do you have any takes on Jordan Spieth’s strokes gained putting from Phoenix through Riv?

2. Between the Hedges

Sometimes the simplest Normal Sport moments are the ones that are the easiest to miss. Thankfully JRay is here to remind us that the 15th at Bay Hill involves professionals hitting shots over a thruway.

🍶 Sauce-fest

If you’re unfamiliar, Tour Sauce, a term invented by the NLU boys is basically stuff pros do that nobody would ever do in an actual round of golf or if you did you would probably get your ass kicked.

You likely already know this, but that’s where the NLU logo comes from — somebody pointing their club to warn a big group of fans where a golf ball is headed. Nobody at your weekend haunt would ever do this, thus … Tour Sauce.

All of this is pretty Normal Sport-adjacent, and we got two absolute TS gems over the last week.

1. This quote from Jon Rahm when he was asked if he celebrated his win at Riviera.

"No. I had a photo shoot early the next morning."

As low-key saucy as it gets.

2. Kurt Kitayama marking a putt for $3.6M that was probably less than 1mm from the hole.

This was actually even saucier than it looked because there was a non-zero chance he was going to do something to make his ball fall into the hole, at which point the USGA HQ landlines would have lit up like the apex of an NPR summer pledge drive.

💧 Legal Drops

A look at what’s cooking.

📊 The Golf Record: We finally named the golf stats website we’re working on. It will be called The Golf Record (until it gets dragged on Twitter and we get shamed into calling it something else).

Out mission is simple: To document golf history.

We’re starting with historic scores at the Masters, expanding to historic scores at other major championships and then reevaluating where we go from there.

If you want to sign up to receive updates on our progress or are interested in what we’re building, we’ll start sending info over the next few weeks and should have a functioning product (that we absolutely want feedback on) the week before Augusta. Sign up here.

Drop: End of March

💭 Idea of the Week

If you don’t know who Gold Boy is 1. I’m stunned you’re reading this newsletter and 2. Let me introduce you to the anthropomorphic hunk of digital metal the Tour debuted last year. Second in absurdity only to its VR Shrek that popped up on TikTok behind the Island Green (read that sentence a few more times).

Gold Boy got (rightfully and humorously) eviscerated by GolfTwitter™️ and apparently the Tour put him on the chopping block for the 2023 edition.

This is the exact wrong move! Instead, the Tour should have gone full wink-wink and put Gold Boy all over the property in 2023. Lean into it. Print the Gold Boy shirts Shotgun Start coined, and sell them ironically.

The people who didn’t get it wouldn’t care, but it would galvanize the people who were in on the joke and show some self-awareness that is rarely present in the world of big business and sport.

💭💭 Idea of the Week II

From the “sometimes Twitter is actually good” files, it appears that Shane Bacon and I are doing a pre-Masters podcast about which players have more (and fewer) majors than they “should.”

You should listen to that pod when it comes out because it will be fun and good, but my actual point here is that the internet broadly and Twitter specifically are still sometimes magical. Could Shane and I have arrived at this conclusion and produced this piece of content outside of this exchange? Sure. Would we have? Who knows.

Elon’s “the internet’s town square” idea is kind of lofty given how much trash exists on the current town square, but the ideal of it still exists, and sometimes even shines through.

❤️ One Thing I Loved

You know what’s nice? Getting to write about the actual best players in the world to an audience of folks without an army of people that all have 7 numbers in their online names sending me Cam Smith chipping stats all day.

This will shock you, but I have some theories about Rory. Perhaps foremost among them is that he is extrinsically motivated.

I don’t think this is a shocking revelation to anyone who has followed his career. It has been fairly obvious — especially over the last five years — that he is driven by carrots, LIV being one of the biggest there’s ever been.

Two things I was thinking about as he spoke on Tuesday at TPC Sawgrass.

1. It’s kind of wild that he is, effectively, the greatest c-suite* golfer in history. Jay Monahan said he was in a 7-hour board meeting last Tuesday before he went on to finish T2 at the API. That is … not normal. There were plenty of “I sit in meetings all day and still play good golf” responses to this on Twitter, which is great because it’s pretty much exactly the same thing!

2. What’s even more interesting is that all of this (the meetings, the planning, the fight against LIV) actually might be a really great thing for him right now. Not the meetings themselves — nobody needs that — but the fact that he’s having to basically construct the future of the Tour and then is forced to sort of undergird it with his performance. Both in view of the rest of the Tour (why should we listen to you?) and, more tangentially, to stick it to LIV (you can never have this).

It’s not his preeminent extrinsic motivation, but after 14 years as a professional, most people not named Tiger Woods need some kind of carrot, and this is a pretty good one.

*Need to stop using that phrase.

📱 Overheard on Twitter

As a constant tinkerer and possible meddler, this one hurt pretty good.

💡 Trivia (and giveaway)

Congrats to Danny F. who correctly answered last week’s question and received a free NS2 paperback. This week, I’ll give away another one to whoever gets this one correct.

James Hahn ranked 168th on the money list last year and made $185,098. How much did the player who finished No. 168 on the PGA Tour money list in 1987 make in 2022 dollars (i.e. adjusted for inflation)?

🔥 Question of the Week

This was from a reader, and it got me good: Is Adam Hayes gonna end his career in the top 10 on the all time PGA Tour money list at this point?

A 🔥🔥 (and Correct) Take

Viktor Hovland is quietly approaching Hideki Matsuyama territory with some of his outfit choices. -Patrick McDonald

🥗 Media Diet

👉️ Christo Garcia’s thread on Full Swing was informed and interesting. If you watched the show, you should read his thoughts.

👉️ Joseph LaMagna’s thoughts on the new PGA Tour schedule are great. Very excited to be building The Golf Record with him.

👉️ Andy Johnson and LaMagna talked about how hilarious it would be if you could cash in FedEx Cup points for mulligans like they were Schrute Bucks on this Fried Egg episode. Destroyed me.

 👉️ This thread by Nathan Hubbard (brother of middle-of-the-road PGA Tour player Mark Hubbard) on the Tour’s future is great.

👉️ KVV getting steep on the merits of organized labor as it relates to professional golf had me howling.

🏥 The Infirmary

True sicko behavior.

I asked folks on Twitter which non-major championship shot they think about most often, and one fellow named Matt D. threw out there that he often thinks about a flighted, cutting driver Corey Pavin hit off the fourth tee at the Travelers one year.

Matt D., you may be — and I cannot possibly stress this enough — the sickest sicko that has ever existed.

My answer, by the way …

🔢 By the Numbies

1.84: That’s how many ball-striking (off the tee + iron play) strokes per tournament better Scottie Scheffler has been than the second-best ball-striker in the world (Luke List) since Jan. 1, 2023.

🗣️ Flagged

From Geoff Shackelford’s new book, the appropriately named Golf Architecture for Normal People: “From every conceivable perspective, golf is preposterous.”

That was the first sentence of the book!

🤳 Meme of the Week

A walkoff from Spieth. I will use this so much during the Masters if Spieth is in contention that Elon will have to rebuild entire server farms.

💰️ Thanks, Phil

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KPMGR: 1. Rahm | 2. Scottie | 3. Rory | 4. Homa | 5. Day | 6. Finau | 7. Sahith | 8. Kitayama | 9. Morikawa | 10. Olesen | 11. Spieth