🤔 Opening Thought

We promised to deliver a weekly newsletter every Tuesday morning that has now gone out on Friday morning and Wednesday afternoon.

💀 Normal Moment(s) of the Week

Three quick ones from last week in Phoenix.

1. Xander Burrow

Xander got relief from this spot at TPC Scottsdale, apparently, because his feet were in burrowing animal holes. I’m not here to debate the veracity of this claim — although if we’re going to adjudicate the rules using two officials who disagree, we might as well just use three and get a consensus — more so to comment on how hilarious this is.

Like, can you imagine if the Super Bowl later in the weekend was decided by a man with a walkie talkie bending over to determine if a hole in the field was big enough for a field mouse to scurry into?! Yes, Patrick, I see the opening, but no, I don’t think even a baby fox could fit in there. It’s still fourth down.

2. Swingin’ Sahith

Remember the game you played as a kid where you threw somebody a baseball bat and put one hand over the other until somebody reached the top to see who hit first, but part of the deal was trying to squeeze two fingers between the other person’s hand and the cap of the bat? Yeah, that’s what this was.

Related: The Sahith part of the Sahith episode in Full Swing is good.

3. Tom Booker

Again, this is the type of thing that gets normalized on a weekly basis, but if you really study and internalize the photo, you’ll remember just how completely absurd it is. We have a 20-year-old professional athlete standing 9 feet from a miniature dump truck wearing the attire of another professional athlete while pumping up everyone in an arena that was constructed specifically so humans could drink alcohol and watch golfers in basketball jerseys swing metal sticks.

Can you imagine this in another industry? Joe in accounting is raising the roof in a Yu Darvish jersey while trying to complete a vlookup formula that will finish off this month’s books!

💡 Trivia Question (and Giveaway!)

Congrats to Andrew H. who correctly answered last week’s Phil Mickelson question and was the fastest to do so. This week’s is a little tougher. Same deal, though, winner gets a hardcover copy of Normal Sport 2.

What was the difference in money Harry Cooper earned for his first L.A. Open win and his second?

💭 Idea of the Week

This comes from reader that comes from reader, Nick T. who read this thread about how good even poorly-ranked pros are and tossed this out there.

Your last tweet made me think of my million dollar idea… every year on Wednesday they should have a +2, 3-5, 8-10, etc. handicap try to hit the “shot of the year” from the previous year’s tournament.

For example, if the U.S. Open goes back to Brookline, drop someone in the Fitz bunker and try to hit the shot. It does two things: 1. Shows how far away regular golfers are from full-time hitters and 2. Provides more context to the tournament that particular year. I consider myself a top 1% golf fan and I don’t remember the Travelers last year, but if there was a great shot on the drivable 4 let’s see some amateurs try to replicate it before the tournament.

Two words: Hell yes. Can you imagine some poor 7.3 trying to hit a second shot into the 16th at TPC Sawgrass and just heeling ball after ball onto Todd’s Island?

It’s a great idea, and it gets at something that was discussed last week in Phoenix, which is that every Tour event needs an identity. Not that everything has to be the Phoenix Open, but every event needs to have its own thing that it’s known for. The elevated status helps with this, but everything that can be done — like the idea above — to accelerate this, should be done.

🎁 Upcoming Drops

A weekly look at what we’re cooking up to release over the next few weeks and months. You will hear about the actual drops in this newsletter first.

📖 Normal Sport 2 Paperback Edition 

That’s right, we’re printing a paperback edition — probably 100-200 copies of it — that will be available for purchase soon.

Drop: Sometime before the Masters.

📊 Golf Reference Site

I’ve been hollering about this on Twitter for several months now so we just decided to build it ourselves. Our goal is to have every Masters score ever shot loaded into the site before this year’s Masters.

Drop: Sometime before Masters.

🔥 Question of the Week

This one got passed around in Phoenix a lot, and there were some amazing answers. I think at one point Jim Nantz and Trevor Immelman were hollering about it in the booth (they weren’t). The question, which is intended for you to use with your own friends or the circles in which you run or on the course with folks because it engendered some terrific conversation among the people we were with, is as follows: What is one thing that is nearly universally beloved that you’re out on or don’t think is that great?

My answer: Seinfeld (hate to see it)

📚️ From the Chronicles

Here’s one from Riv week 2021.

Max Homa beat Tony Finau in a playoff after 1. Hitting his approach stiff on the 72nd and missing a short putt that would have won it, and 2. Hitting his drive up against a tree on the first hole of the playoff. He said afterward that he called his wife between these two moments and she told him to “forgive quickly,” which is beautiful as a golf phrase and maybe even more so as a life mantra.

His interview was as good as all of this gets. I think Tour golf sometimes feels a little like a sanitized Trackman contest between NetJet-sponsored corporations so when there’s true union between a person and a place that both have some real depth, it feels even more meaningful than it otherwise would.

“Been watching this tournament my whole life,“ said Homa through tears after he won. ”It’s the reason I fell in love with golf.“

How unique is that? Though golfers sometimes grow up dreaming of winning specific majors, once you get out on Tour, you can sort of apply that dream to any of the four. Because that’s broadly true, major dreams are realized four times a year. But how often does somebody who’s from somewhere -- truly from somewhere -- go on to win the specific event that formed his life as a kid which also only happens once a year? That’s even more rare than winning a major championship, and that reality was written all over Homa’s face.

-Normal Sport 1

Man, this was a fun one to read back on. One of the goals with this newsletter, which was stated a week ago, is to help you fall (even more) in love with golf. I didn’t remember Homa saying this, but I’m pretty good being on the same page as somebody who so clearly has such a deep affection for the game and is so willing to put it on display.

Again, contrast this to Brooks Koepka’s Full Swing episode which many of you will watch later this week. Loving something – like, truly loving something – and being willing to admit it, is an act of vulnerability that most of us are unwilling to engage in because it opens us up to criticism from others. Max stares down that fear on a daily basis, which is something we could all probably work on doing more often.