Jordan Spieth, Millsaps OL Coach

Normal Moment(s)

1. “It’s Very Dangerous”

I think the “pro squatting over his ball, pointing at it or generally clearing the brush around it” has supplanted everything else as the No. 1 “everybody is tweeting at me right now” normal sport moment of any given event.

When this happened at the ninth hole on Sunday, Nantz quipped, "It's very dangerous. You almost need to practice a game of pick up sticks in your hotel room to be sure you're ready for the pine straw the next day."

Very dangerous! What a sport.

2. Leaf Blowing in a Kilt

Not even sure what to say here. Imagine showing somebody who doesn’t follow golf this photo and asking them what they believe this man is doing.

Shane Bacon texted me the pic and noted that RBC Heritage might be the top normal sport week of the year. After what we got over the weekend, I’m inclined to agree.

3. Call Your Own Fouls in a $20M Event

I hadn’t really thought about this one before, but with the Grizzlies-Lakers playoff game going on at the same time as the RBC Heritage, it struck me how odd it would be if Ja and LeBron had to tally their own box scores in a temporary tent with tartan tablecloths following the game.

To everyone who (derogatorily) responded to me, “it’s almost like they’re different sports,” congratulations on getting the joke.

4. Sure

I’m just going to feed ChatGPT photo after photo, and I feel confident it will be able to write Normal Sport 3 on my behalf.

5. Makeup Call

Grace Kim won the Lotte Championship over the weekend after putting makeup on before playing the 72nd hole. True story. Normal sport.

One Thing I Loved

A moment, quote, sidebar or tidbit I enjoyed thinking about this week.

I think Matt Fitzpatrick’s SG trajectory is a good life map for the rest of us.

Let me explain.

Fitzpatrick has improved his SG number in nine of his last 11 seasons as a golfer. This can’t happen. It’s impossible. You can’t improve by a quarter stroke year over year for a decade straight. But … he has, and it’s one of the reasons I think he’s going to be the No. 1 player in the world at some point.

I went deeper on all of that in this article, but it’s worth noting here that constant improvement in anything in life is rare because we don’t believe in long-term trajectories. Or at least we don’t behave as if we believe in them.

To improve like this from 2011-2023, Fitzpatrick either 1. Had to be obsessed with personal improvement with no concern about future outcome, 2. Had to trust that the work he put in in 2014 would result in success in 2023 or (most likely) 3. Some combination of both of those things.

This path is pretty rare and so we don’t really know how to categorize someone when this presents itself. We are used to the Rory story or the Morikawa story or the Spieth story where whatever you were at 21 or 23 or 25 is within a standard deviation of who you’re going to be.

I don’t have the data on this, but I would imagine it is mostly true in professional golf that you end up within a standard deviation of where you started out. Whether you’re a 0.00 SG guy when you leave college or a 2.0 SG guy, that’s more or less what you’re going to be for most of your career for most guys. Fitzpatrick seems to be the outlier here, but his #traj also provides a pretty good life map for the rest of us.

May I trust that the work I’m putting in on my writing (or my real estate endeavors or my development as an attorney) pay dividends when I’m 42 or 46, and may the outcome be whatever the equivalent of beating Spieth in a playoff in one of the tournaments of the year is in my profession. And even if that doesn’t happen, may I be satisfied knowing that I gave the very best I had to give to whatever it is that I do.

Another Thing I Loved

Yooooooooooooooooo! [Sam Ehlinger voice] Sheeeee’s baaaaack.

Over the weekend it was a referendum on the RBC Heritage and how its field rating is higher than the Masters field rating and how crooked that is.

I’m going to ignore the logical fallacy that you could, in fact, have 40,000 golfers ranked over No. 1,500 in the world and it shouldn’t really affect the field rating to dive into a good point that was inadvertently brought up.

Take a look at the OWGR field rating and winner’s points for these three 2023 events.

In the last month, the Players had the best field and the second-most points allotted to the winner. The RBC Heritage had the second-best field but the fewest points allotted to the winner. And the Masters had the worst field but the most points allotted to the winner.

The reason for this is because — as Joseph LaMagna pointed out in his excellent Finding the Edge newsletter (which you should subscribe to) — the points for the majors and Players are set no matter who plays those tournaments.

Aside: The European Tour actually used to have a set floor for its events (albeit at a much lower level) before it was removed last summer, thus creating a truer model of who the best players in the world actually are instead of an artificially inflated one (on the Euro side anyway).

You could make the argument that the majors (and Players) should have built-in points floors because they’re majors. They’re more difficult to win for reasons (history, prestige, mind games etc.) beyond simply who is in the field.

Based on this setup you could argue that the OWGR is saying these majors are the benchmark for how all other tournaments should be measured (which I believe is true) no matter who is playing. These tournaments matter.

useGolfFACTS, again some what accidentally, makes a good point here. It’s not that the RBC Heritage field should be rated lower than the Masters. It is objectively (well, if you ignore all the LIV-OWGR debate) a better field than the Masters field, which includes several amateurs and former champions and is about half the size of the Heritage’s field. The better question is whether the points allocated to the winners of majors should be more closely tied to their tournament’s field rating instead of the Masters (and other majors) having a set number.

It’s an interesting question. I would probably lean toward the majors having that built-in floor (this is mostly a Masters argument, by the way, because the other majors will have a field more similar to the Heritage or the Players) because I think it’s a nod to the historical reality that the majors matter more than everything else.

Although I would happily listen to arguments for the other side of that.

One Thing I Didn’t Love

The slow play nonsense is completely out of control, and I will always (?) ride with Andy Johnson’s take that processing information is a skill that should be tested.

I think that take started when Bryson was doing differential equations to figure out whether he should hit gap wedge or sand wedge from 143 yards.

It’s a take that will stand the test of time and one that the Tour needs to adjudicate if it cares more about its product than its players (which, definitely up in the air given that the Tour is a membership organization).

Two other things on this — Matt Fitzpatrick’s caddie, Billy Foster, nearly falling asleep on the bag was amusing, and my fellow CBS colleagues had some fun with … their word choices.

Idea of the Week

We need a tool to normalize all PGA Tour money earned to the purchasing power of the current year. For example, Scottie Scheffler made $14M last season, which is the all-time single season PGA Tour record for money earned in a season (although it’s about to get obliterated by both Rahm and Scheffler’s 2023 seasons — both are over $12M).

Tiger made $10.6M in 2005, but that’s more than $16M in 2023 dollars. So if you re-worked the top of the single-season money list based on the eight richest actual seasons ever, it would look like this in 2023 dollars.

Ah 2004, the year Vijay won nine times with a negative strokes gained putting (which is, of course, impossible, but did actually happen).

I would also enjoy a percentage of total prize money earned statistic.

Idea of the Week II

Absolutely loved this from Joseph LaMagna. Can you imagine how Spieth would play merged holes?!

Media Diet

👉️ Shane Ryan made a Seve pod, which is absolutely must listen.

👉️ The Acquired boys were on My First Million, and it was predictably great.

👉️ I’ve been mega into NBA writer (and general media philosophizer) Ethan Strauss of late, and his discussion here of how the sausage is made was really interesting (and helpful to somebody like myself).

👉️ As Brendan Porath noted, it seemed this year as if your Masters ticket came with a pair of Hokas or Ons. So this NYT article — which has an exceptional lede — about why Hokas are so popular was interesting to me.

The Infirmary

True sicko behavior within the golf community.

Two different people self-identified as sickos this week. One is the best player on earth.

After Jon Rahm sat in on the broadcast following his Sunday round and gave us insanely good insight for 30 minutes, Trevor Immelman asked him when he would touch the clubs again. You could tell he expected Rahm to say something like, Not until the Tuesday of Wells Fargo week, but he zagged.

Rahm: "I'm beyond addicted to this game. I always say I'll take some time off and tomorrow you'll see me chipping in the afternoon."

Hell yes.

Then my guy Rick Gehman bought Homakawa Dodgers jerseys to give away to his newsletter subscribers, which is both 1. Hilarious and 2. Possibly the sign of an illness.

By the Numbies

2.02: In 2005, Tiger gained 2.02 strokes on his ball-striking alone (off the tee and iron play) and won six times. Going into Harbour Town, Scottie Scheffler had gained 2.02 strokes ball-striking since Jan. 1, 2022 and won six times.

We are underrating what’s happening with Scottie right now.

3: If Spieth had won on Sunday, he would have …

1. Twice in the last three years lost to fewer than five golfers at ANGC.

2. Had three victories between April 4-17 in that same time period.

3. Not won a green jacket since 2015.

Impossible.

 Meme(s) of the Week

You will be absolutely stunned to discover that this week’s memes are almost exclusively Jordan Spieth related. The first one came after Bacon suggested that Spieth should grow a beard for the PGA Championship and somebody threw it in the AI machine. The result was glorious madness (and possibly outdone by 80s Jon Rahm).

But the follow-up tweet from Antifaldo was even better. It had me howling.

This next one is pretty much the perfect reaction to Spieth getting up and down for par from 170 yards out (which seems to happen seven times a tournament).

A surrender cobra from Spieth and fans (use wisely).

And lastly, a “yo, watch this.”

How is This App Free?

I absolutely loved this comp from Jamie Kennedy.

I’m desperate for a Si Woo Full Swing episode.

This tweet is exactly what it looks like — Fluff testing a quartering wind for the greatest golfer of all time by holding a cig over his head. The video is mesmerizing.

This also slayed me.

Is this a good story or nah?

Non-Golf Take

Lastly, the normalization of cereal is bizarre to me. Not that it’s not good. It’s dairy + sugar — of course it’s good. But it’s strange to me that Big Breakfast has invaded our lives to the point that we’re fine with our children pouring dairy on sugar and calling that a reasonable start to the morning (to be clear, we are a cereal home). Same with pancakes, but another take for another day.

Thanks, Phil

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