Issue No. 109 | September 6, 2024

Hey,

We have a slightly modified home page. It looks awesome (mostly because I had nothing to do with it, shout out to Jeff Smith for the work). You can also read a refreshed Normal Sport about page right here, which tells part of our story and what we’re trying to do with all of this.

I hope you enjoy it and would love it if you sent it to a couple of friends you think would enjoy reading about ridiculous golf things twice a week.

Onto the news.

A Few Sort-of-Golf Thoughts This Week

1. Unusual inputs yield uncommon results. That’s the phrase I came up with when talking about the 2024 season with Andy Johnson and Joseph LaMagna on the Fried Egg pod this week.

It’s a phrase I kept coming back to when I thought about the three major winners in 2024: Scottie, Xander and Bryson.

Scottie: I wrote about this on Wednesday, but his way of life and his practice habits are both a bit unusual for the modern professional golfer. Obviously there is the spiritual side, which I’ve written helps him hold the tension between not caring enough and caring too much.

But from a golf standpoint, he’s a bit different as well.

In a world in which nobody will even take a club back unless they have a Trackman staring down the line, Scottie does it differently. Watch this video. That’s unusual. Look at this tweet. That’s unusual.

Unusual inputs yield uncommon results.

Bryson: Do we even need to recap all of it? The part of Bryson’s career that I respect the most is that he got to No. 7 in the world and was like, “Yeah, I don’t see a clear path to No. 1 so I’m going to drink nine milkshakes a day to get 2 percent better and then try this and then this and then that,” and he wasn’t afraid to tear it all down.

It may have led to the disintegration of his small intestine and it may not have taken him all the way to No. 1, but you have to either be crazy or have some massive stones to become one of the 10 best in the world at your craft and start trying a bunch of new stuff (I feel the same about Hovland even if it hasn’t really worked out).

Xander: This is the one that didn’t get enough attention. It’s not unusual to change swing coaches, but it’s unusually difficult to do so when the only swing coach you’ve ever had is your dad. You can think Stefan is crazy (because he says completely crazy things), but you also have to credit the humility it takes for father and son to look around and say, “We need help.”

That’s an extremely difficult thing to do, one that I’m not sure everyone would have undertaken. But again, unusual inputs yield uncommon results like these.

JLM pushed back on me as it relates to survivorship bias, or only affirming what the people who have found success are doing and ignoring that there might be 100 other people who tried the same things and failed out of golf.

I get that, and you for sure have to be stupidly gifted at golf to begin with, but my point is that when the margins are thin at the top of the major championships, sometimes it’s the unusual inputs that end up pushing you over the edge and bringing about uncommon results.

A few more thoughts from this week.

2. If you have read Chris Clarey’s excellent biography of Federer (or even if you haven’t), this obituary of Fed’s old coach, Peter Lundgren is terrific.

The end of it was very much my wheelhouse.

3. I did my annual “putting doesn’t matter over a long arc” research earlier this week. Here are the aggregate money numbers for the top 10 in strokes gained for each category. This includes FedEx and Comcast Business money (quite a sentence there).

SG driving: $118M
SG approach: $131M
SG around the green: $64M
SG tee to green: $172M
SG putting: $49M

Xander absolutely carried the putters, too. He was 10th in putting, which means we were a couple of Thomas Detry made 15 footers from that category looking more like $22 million and not $49 million.

Poor Keith Mitchell was the only top 10 player from tee to green who didn’t make at least $4M. He “only” made $1.8M. It’s honestly kinda tough to look at.

The three best players from tee to green this year made like $110 million. As always: Drive for show, flush long irons for dough. Putt if you want to win. Basically just be Hideki.

4. I saw this extraordinary quote this week from a cat named Soren Kierkegaard, who was a Danish theologian. Previously the only Danish theologian I ascribed to was the great Thomas Bjorn, whose philosophies I only know from a great quote he once had on Rory after a bad Ryder Cup session in Paris: “The only thing I said to Rory is ‘We go again.’”

Anyway, the quote from Kierkegaard …

Most people rush after pleasure so fast that they rush right past it.

We know this quote to be true because we see it and call it out as it relates to our kids: Enjoy your food! Slow down! Don’t try to just get to the next thing!

The lie we tell ourselves, though, is that when we are adults, this quote is no longer true. But the reality is that sometimes the quote is even more true when we are adults than it is of our kids. An unfortunate (and sometimes frustrating) thing to have to continue learning.

5. I thought this thread was captivating, and I mostly agree with it. At the very least, it’s worth reading through.

I think a lot of people who play golf and consume most of it on television would be astonished by two things in person.

1. How sick the approach play and around the green play is.

2. How big the misses sometimes are off the tee.

Here’s the thing, though. The misses are big not because players are wild but because they are long. I am not the first to point this out, but the farther you get from a point, the easier it is to get offline.

Us amateurs are the yellow lines. Pros are the red lines. We are both the same distance from the middle of the fairway, but the pro’s miss is a lot narrower because he or she is also a lot longer.

Not sure how we went from Sam Dekker to yellow and red lines, but this segment is brought to you by some of the stuff I’ve been studying as it relates to my own game (shout out Jon Sherman and also Arccos).

6. We need to normalize saying “put the little dog shoes on … [whoever gets blown out on a Sunday].” As in, Xander put the little dog shoes on Rose and Billy at Troon this year. Or Rory put the little dog shoes on Xander at Quail Hollow. I need it.

7. When 2024 started, I did not envision that by Sept. 6, the No. 4,121 player in the world would be ranked ahead of both the No. 12 player in the world and the No. 15 player in the world. But here we are.

8. This description of what DJ Pie did with the editing on the reversed Old Course video is excellent, and I agree with it. It’s also a lot of what we’re aiming for at NS.

Here’s the reversed Old Course video if you haven’t seen it.

9. Here’s one I’ve been thinking about quite a bit. This is not unique to golf, but I think more and more folks will simply pay places like Normal Sport or SGS with their time and/or money to summarize what they need to know in between the majors and the Players and then watch the majors.

Is this a good thing? I don’t know, but I believe it is and will continue to be a trajectory.

And while this seems like it’s a LIV/PIF/framework agreement problem, I might argue that it’s actually a post-Tiger problem. In the post-Tiger era, golf is just not appealing as a Big Niche sport. As a Small Niche sport still? Absolutely. But I think part of what the Tour is going through right now — and this is something I discussed on the Fried Egg pod — is that what it thought was an up-and-to-the-right ratings bump over the last 20 years was actually just Cat Inflation.

Combine that with Phil hollering about equity and valuations and a Players Championship that lacks three of the 15 best players in the world, and yeah I just think that’s bad for the Tour BUT possibly good for places like this one.

10. Golfers as QBs as fast as I can comp them off the top of my head.

Ludvig-Burrow
Phil-Rodgers
Rory-Mahomes
Scottie-Brady (I said it)
Bryson-Caleb
Morikawa-Stroud (CJ not Chris)
Xander-Lamar
Herbert-Wyndham (I’ve been corrupted by the Ballknowers)
Spieth-Allen
Sahith-Purdy

I have no idea if any of those are good. The Rory-Mahomes one is more Young Rory and Young Mahomes. Like, can you believe some of this stuff?! And the floor of consistency being what it is.

11. The more I think about it, the worse the Homa over JT pick gets. I went deep on this on CBSSports.com, but the TL;DR version is as follows.

Strokes gained rankings among eligible Americans.

Player 1 
Last 3 months: 16th
Last 6 months: 13th
Last 12 months: 5th

Player 2 
Last 3 months: 63rd (!!)
Last 6 months: 34th
Last 12 months: 18th

As you can guess, they took player No. 2, which is Homa. Player No. 1 is JT. Homa is the third best eligible American named “Max” over the last three months.

I don't really understand that. If you're taking Homa for his leadership, intangibles and energy, listen, I am all for that. Those are all good reasons to take a player to a team event, reasons I actually used to advocate for JT (of all people!) in the past.

It's just that I think you get all of those things with JT, who also happens to be playing much better golf right now and isn’t driving it all over the planet.

12. I really enjoyed this interview with Emma Navarro’s coach.

Here’s the money quote.

There are so many great (and varied) golf-tennis parallels, especially when it comes to the “pleasure derived from just striking the ball.”

13. I enjoyed this term from Blaine about navigating the internet in 2024: ad frogger. I think that’s a good way to describe trying to dodge the avalanche of ads so that we can catch a glimpse or two of what we’re trying to read.

I’m not positive what Normal Sport is going to eventually turn into, but I do know that it will never be a version of ad frogger.

14. And lastly, this on AI — which I agree is fundamentally dehumanizing technology! — is excellent.

I’m not broadly and sweepingly anti-AI, but I do believe that we will sometimes submit our humanity to technology in the name of something (efficiency! speed! profitability!) that we don’t even actually desire.

That feels like a worrisome, perhaps even dangerous, path. But also one that will provide opportunity to places like Normal Sport and others who maintain the humanity in their voice.

That will become increasingly rare, which means it will also become increasingly valuable. A difficult (but important) thing to remember.

Thank you for reading until the end.

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

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