Edition No. 69 | March 29, 2024

Hey,

Momentum. It’s not something I consider often, but I suspect it influences more of my life than my first instinct would make me believe.

Here’s an amusing way I saw it said recently.

We all feel this in all sorts of ways.

If I eat healthy two days in a row, it’s easier to eat healthy on Day 3. If I run three weeks in a row, it’s easier to run the fourth. Perhaps this ease is only a minuscule change, but minuscule changes add up over a long period of time.

Seinfeld calls it not breaking the chain.

Here’s another way I saw momentum talked about recently.

This is true!

All that to say, there is momentum with this newsletter. I feel it in the energy I have around it, see it in the responses you send and experience it in people sharing it in different ways. That’s a thrill for me, one I wanted to note in here because you’re a part of it, too.

I also always want to encourage you to go chase some momentum of your own. And to remind you that if and when you lose it, to have grace for yourself in getting going once again.

Also, an ask: If you love or have enjoyed this newsletter, share it with a sicko friend. I had lunch with someone this week that I met because one of my friends shared it with him. Now me and this person are friends. That’s pretty cool, and it reminded me to ask you to do something I don’t normally ask, which is to share our site with the people you know and love who genuinely think about things like which golfer’s major total least fits their talent level (I have thoughts … later, some other time) and whether those pool noodles JT was using on the range affected the 2024 Masters.

Onto the news.

14 Golf-Adjacent Thoughts This Week

1. I went on a mini-rant on Tuesday on our CBS Sports golf podcast about gambling, but wanted to jot down a few thoughts here.

The first thought is that various leagues are partnering with gambling companies (DK, FanDuel, whatever) because it’s a (lucrative?) revenue source. This is pretty straightforward and obvious.

There is another truth that is interacting with this one too. This is not a golf-specific problem, but it does affect golf. Future non-NFL TV deals are less certain than they were before.¹ This must bring about some concern from various leagues over maintaining a certain revenue floor.

Why is there concern?

Well, if your primary revenue source — and for all sports leagues outside of whatever the Savannah Bananas are doing, TV deals are the primary revenue source — is more ambiguous than it was in the past, and if your constituents are concerned about not making as much money as before AND if you have another country trying to buy them off to begin with, well, you can see how it would be easy to be concerned with revenue streams and potentially do deals with entities that might not be the best long-term partners.

I’m not saying gambling shouldn’t exist. What I am saying is that when you partner with gambling companies because you think it brings about more engagement in your sport but then those same companies train an entire generation of sports fans (and people) that watching sports is only fun if you have money on it, and then those same people eventually lose all their money gambling and are no longer engaged in your sport because of that.

Well … that’s kinda on you.

2. Speaking of gambling! I said recently that I’ve gotten steep on the Ohtani gambling story. Like, I can’t stop reading, thinking or talking about it. And since I have nowhere else to put this, I thought I would drop it here.

Me, an internet sleuth: The biggest problem with the entire thing can be seen in the two highlighted screenshots below. 

Both of these came from The Athletic,² and you can immediately see the problem. On Monday, Ohtani’s crisis communications manager quoted Ohatni saying that he paid off the debt. When Ohtani retold the story this week, he said that he didn’t find out about any of this until Wednesday when the Dodgers played their first game. One of those has to be a lie!

They could do what they’ve been doing and pin it all on the interpreter — they said something like, He wasn’t even communicating with Ohtani about the media inquiries! — except that it was the crisis communications person who directly quoted Ohtani to ESPN. No interpreter involved.

I apologize for being obsessed with this absurd story, but I needed to get that off my chest. Thank you.

3. This piece on ESPN trying to get the NBA or NFL to buy equity in its business is … fascinating. Basically, like if Comcast tried to get the Tour to buy Golf Channel (which, maybe they will).

Anyway, these two comments on that story caught my eye and reminded me a bit of where golf is at (and are not unrelated to my first point above!).

There’s no promise, no guarantee that revenue in any business will keep going up and to the right forever. But when that is the expectation of the members of your league … you can see how that pressure could (could!) lead to a lot of problems.

4. Almost everyone: “Scottie is boring.” Me: “Scottie is the best press conference in golf right now.”

Q. It's been five years since kind of your parting thoughts on the Korn Ferry Tour about the best part of life and sharing it with people around you and kind of building those relationships.

Obviously a lot has changed for you in life since that year, but what's kind of your recollection of I guess do you still feel that way and how important is it to kind of maintain those close relationships through the craziness that life might have --

SCOTTIE SCHEFFLER: “Yeah, I definitely stand by that statement. It's funny, it seems like you think my life would have changed a lot, but it really only has changed out here. At home it hasn't changed that much. That will change significantly in the next month when our baby comes, that'll be the big change.

“But at home, no. We still have the same friends, still have a great support system. It's really special to be able to go home and celebrate with friends. Winning is fun, but it only lasts a few seconds or a few minutes, I should say, then you've got to go get started doing all the other stuff so you don't really get to soak it in too much. But when you get home and you get to celebrate with people and those that we're closest to, those really are the most special times and it was nice to get a bit of that last week.”

There are a number of reasons Scottie can sustain his spot as the No. 1 player in the world. That quote — if you really read between the lines there — is one of the most important.

5. This tweet made me laugh out loud. Possibly mean-spirited, but IYKYK.

6. Sahith had a terrific idea here.

As someone who has been an advocate for Spencer Hall’s idea that there should be a regular person in the swimming pool and on the track for Olympic events, I am very much an advocate for Sahith’s idea.

You could honestly do it at the same time as the other players are playing every round (or just the weekend). Just send them last off No. 10 so they would finish on No. 9 and be out of the way. It would be a hybrid of YouTube golf and Tour golf, and you could change up who it is between guys like Shane Bacon, the Good Good guys, Soly, whoever. It could be awesome.

7. This is wild to think about but also very true. As someone who is currently framing golf through the lens of a Golf Channel reporter as a 1910s baseball player, I appreciate the re-frame of the Too Online Job here.

8. Speaking of re-framing things, Rick Gehman took the idea that I threw out a few newsletters ago about communicating how good Scottie is in non-golf ways, and here’s what he ended up with. Always read his newsletter.

Here’s the explanation of that chart.

9. I came across this David Foster Wallace excerpt recently and was reminded that DFW had a gear I am unfamiliar with — like how I would imagine Antoine Rozner feels watching Jon Rahm on the range.

The excerpt below on a middling tour pro is something I try to allude to often — that athletic achievement sometimes might not best for our thriving as humans! — and while I think you could push back against everything DFW is purporting, it’s still beautifully written.

10. F1 and the PGA Tour are different in that one offers contracts, and the other does not. But this tweet amused me because I think it gets at something that has started to annoy me about the Tour.

11. A thought: If Spieth is cocaine golf, Scottie is decaf golf. The Decaf Boy.

It fits perfectly!

He’s also the most disciplined player in the world. Imagine Spieth trying this.

12. While watching the Rangers-Cubs game last night,³ I noticed this OPS+ graphic for hitters. Me, a casual viewer who has not paid attention to MLB for quite a while, knows what OPS is but does not know what OPS+ is (I presume it’s just OPS normalized with 100 being league average, or something like that).

ESPN is showing that it doesn’t care about me, a casual viewer who has not paid attention to MLB for quite a while.

That’s a good thing.

They should be catering to viewers with more baseball literacy than me. If they keep putting it up there, I can eventually Google it and figure it out. So they’re pandering to the highest common denominator (not lowest) AND educating me, a baseball idiot, in the process. That’s awesome and something that I hope golf adopts more and more in the future!

13. Speaking of building the right business model, I’ve been researching a guy named Packy McCormick recently. Some of you probably read his business newsletter, but it’s the business model of his newsletter that I’ve been obsessed with.

I stumbled into a few old articles from him on what his plans were for his model. Some were written back in 2020 or 2021, and they have changed — he now runs a fund that fits nicely into what he does with his newsletter.

But the sentiment below about newsletters and online businesses is something I’ve felt but maybe never said out loud.

A lot of it feels … gross.

Instead, he give his three early takeaways, which I would mostly agree with.

He writes more about his business model and his newsletter here. It’s honestly worth a read if you’re a content creator. My big takeaway from doing a deep dive on his path to monstrous success in the newsletter world?

Nobody has any idea what they’re doing so you might as well pick something sustainable that you enjoy. If you do it well and put tremendous effort into it, things will have a decent chance of mostly working. The degree to which they work is simply a function of luck.

14. I love hearing about how people scale businesses like this. And also about people who are obsessed with a very weird, niche, specific thing, which these guys clearly are. A delightful 11 minutes here.

Thanks for reading until the end.

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

If you go to anormalsport.com, you’ll see the URL changed by a letter.