Manny and Brandel

Edition No. 31 | September 15, 2023

Hey,

I always try to share something personal or even vulnerable in this first section. I’ve found that the people I’m most drawn to when I read or listen to content are the ones I feel the most connection to as humans. Humanizing yourself online is always risky, but I think it’s also most often (and perhaps unfortunately) the path to success.

All that to say, here’s a vulnerable and scary thing that I want to share with you: I have an ambition and a plan to expand this newsletter (and the books I’ve been writing) into something beyond just the newsletter and books.

I’m going to share more on that after the Ryder Cup, but I wanted to let you know that it’s coming, we’re coming, we’re bringing our luggage*^ and on a scale of 1 to David Duval double fist pumping at the 1999 Ryder Cup at Brookline, our excitement is much closer to the latter than the former.

Onto the news.

*Not a Keegan reference.
^Also, it’s actually not Louis.

One Thing I Loved

This was written earlier this year, but I loved Dylan Dethier’s profile of Brandel. It’s really good writing, interesting interaction and an example to me of how you can find interesting nuggets in almost everything you read, watch or listen to.

The line that stood out to me came when Brandel was talking about Brian Henninger, Colin Montgomerie and Frank Nobilo, all folks he has worked with during his career.

Here’s the quote.

But I so enjoyed all of those guys because they had something to say. And they they loved golf, but they also loved life outside of golf.

I’ve recently been very into various worlds. You may have seen the effect of this intrigue in this very newsletter. I’m obsessed with people who are obsessed with very specific things. Documentaries about weird worlds like Rubik’s cubers, Tetris and wine are to me as hanging sliders were to Manny.

And while Brandel is not talking about obsession, he is talking about the gateway to obsession, which is curiosity.

Golf is wonderful. The greatest sport. But I find that the folks in golf who I’m often most intrigued by* — both players and other media members — are very curious about [gestures at the entire non-golf world].

They are able to connect dots from different worlds and explain the OWGR or LIV or the U.S. Open by using examples from business or software or food or science.

As an adult, I value curiosity much more than I did as a child because I see how easy it is to lose and how difficult it is to maintain.

So to find other curious people is to find folks I will almost certainly get along with for two reasons.

1. I can presume that they have the humility engendered by beginning to understand how much they don’t understand (this is just another way to define curiosity). And of course it’s easy to get along with humble people.

2. I can presume that they have an imagination wide enough that they are still filled with awe at the wonder of the world. And it’s fun to be friends with imaginative people.

Golf is certainly part of this curiosity for so many of us, but to make it the only part is to miss out on so much.

*Tiger is an obvious (and big) exception here.

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The Infirmary

I mentioned the New York Times game, Connections, in Tuesday’s newsletter. It’s amazing, and I find myself playing it every day. Here’s how it works: They give you 16 words, and you try and sort them into four groups of four based on commonalities.

Example: Bass, Flounder, Salmon and Trout might all be grouped together because they’re all fish. However, it gets tricky because Trout and Salmon might also be a false fish flag if they give you Hunter and Edmonds. Then it would be Trout, Salmon, Hunter, Edmonds for Angels outfielders and Flounder and Bass would be grouped with two other words.

It’s all quite thoughtful and fun.

Anyway, one of my friends sent me this screenshot yesterday.

Along with this text: Send help - I just spent close to 30 seconds wondering which other words on here are connected with the US Open ….

Five Questions

This week we have Rick Gehman, who has become one of my good friends in the golf world. We’re on a podcast together where we holler about all kinds of things and sometimes even about golf.

Rick has quietly, slowly and impressively built an entire successful business around statistics, fantasy and gambling. I have so much admiration for his ambition, his drive and his entrepreneurial spirit, and he is someone I learn from almost every day as it relates to golf but also business and content creation. Also, his newsletter is must read if you follow pro golf on a week to week basis.

Hope you enjoy.

1. What is one weird, quirky, normal sport-y thing about golf that amuses you right now?

Insects play a major role in golf, at least compared to any other sport. Ants could be a burrowing animal, but fire ants could also be a dangerous situation. There's a bug on my ball, there's a bug near my ball. A bee flew past my ear, that fly landed on my cap. How about reptiles? There's an endangered toad on the green so we can't play. There are countless insect/animal interactions every year in this beautiful game.

2. What is the moment over the last five years of covering golf that made you say, "I cannot believe this is happening"?

Personally, there are endless examples, looking back, that I cannot believe I get to experience. There is one that really hit me in the moment. It was at The Country Club, in Brookline, which has a special aura and history to it already. The place is claustrophobic with every hole on top of one another, including the 3rd and 4th holes basically sharing the same fairways. It was Saturday and I was inside the ropes in that fairway with Rory McIlroy.

Scottie Scheffler was a group or two behind with Jon Rahm and Collin Morikawa in the group or two ahead. There were literally thousands of people in every direction and I was basically directing traffic with the game's best. It was surreal. It was the first time I stopped to soak it all in, at that exact time, and realize how fortunate I am.

I think I also literally said "I cannot believe this is happening" when Xander left two in the fairway bunker on No. 1 at LACC on Saturday. You could literally see how fast the world was spinning for him.

I tweeted that Tiger Woods handed Justin Thomas a tampon at Riviera and then watched it on every major news network that night and stood in the room while Tiger apologized for it. Not exactly how I imagined those few days going.

3. What do you think people would be surprised to discover about running your own golf media business?

You don't have to be everything to everyone. You don't need to be ESPN or GOLF or CBS Sports. You can make a very good living (and enjoy it!) by being really special to 1,000 people on the internet. Being great at something, anything at all, is the key. Then you can find the people who care about the same things that you do. Additionally, the barrier to entry has never been so low. You are a microphone, webcam and ring light away from having a media company. It's like $300 of equipment and free editing software. Just start and never look back.

4. Who or what are your entrepreneurial inspirations?

I'm sure that my mom laid the foundation for many of my entrepreneurial traits. She ran her own company from home, so growing up I was witnessing how she balanced work/life. I was able to see her wear every hat for the business and how that could be done successfully. I don't think I realized it at the time, but the normalization of being your own boss happened very early for me.

Now, it's just a matter of being great every single day but framing "greatness" through whatever lens works best. Can I make a new improvement to my website, can I learn a new skill, can I increase revenue by 15 percent or grow my email newsletter by 1,000? It's basically the only way that I get to be competitive, and setting competitions with myself is how I can keep score.

5. What made you fall in love with golf? 

I love math problems, puzzles and riddles and golf is just a never-ending math problem with an infinite number of variables, equations and answers. The more you know, the less you know. The more you try to solve it, the crazier you seem. You can't run out the clock, and you can't play defense on your opponent. Then we pick it all up and do it somewhere else next week.

Rohm

Soly was telling us on one of our Ryder Cup pods about this abandoned farmhouse just beyond the 13th hole at Marco Simone. I also saw it in the NLU Film Room video on the course, and then the U.S. Ryder Cup account posted a photo of it earlier this week.

All that to say this: I have never been more sure of anything than I am that Jordan Spieth is at some point going to play a ball out of that house during the Ryder Cup. Also, these three responses sent me.

Meme of the Week

After writing the newsletter on Tuesday, I threw this very meme-able photo on Twitter and asked everyone do their worst.

The responses are highly entertaining in general, but this retort won 5&3 for me. The more you look at the photo, the better the response gets.

The Clubhouse

If you’re reading this — based on a quick scan of my audience’s demographic — there’s a good chance you’re a dad and probably a dad of young-ish kids. So I’d like to speak into that a bit because golf has become a really fun way in our home to build relationship between me and my sons and daughters.

One thing we do throughout the year is a major championship draft where all six of us (me, my wife and four kids) draft five players and get their total score from the major. Lowest aggregate score (including a MC penalization) gets a pint of ice cream at the end of the week. It’s a silly but fun way to generate more conversation and banter with one another.

For the Ryder Cup, we’ll be doing it a bit different. We’ll likely play the squares game you’ve seen on Super Bowl Sunday where you put your name in different squares based on what you think the final score is going to be.

Regardless of the game, it’s been a sweet thing in our home to enjoy competitions like this with our kids, and a pint of ice cream to them might as well be the $3.2M Brooks got for winning the PGA.

Parenting is hard.

Every day feels like a war within the war. Finding shared, fun interests (and who isn’t interested in winning ice cream?* is a small victory in what we all hope is a long line of them. It’s a way to show our kids that we care about what they think, that they have ownership (perhaps a minority stake) and agency within our family unit. Plus, it gives my wife an excuse to let them watch TV on Sunday while I’m gallivanting about in Italy, drinking wine with my friends and discussing Nero’s demise covering the Ryder Cup.

*I suppose the lactose intolerant among us would qualify.

Love Your Work

I have been considering this quote.

I had a conversation this week with a friend who has been successful in the (non-golf) podcast world for several years now. He’s just beginning to dip back into the writing world, and we were talking about how there’s just nothing more formative for thinking than writing. The quote, I believe, is “I don’t know what I think about a thing until I write it down.”

Independent of that conversation, I was reading about how the commitment one guy I follow — Nathan Barry, who built a $30 million software company — made to writing 1,000 words a day completely transformed his career.

I would argue that the reason writing is both formative and transformative is because enduring in it helps you become a better thinker.

Thinking is difficult. I am in awe of great thinkers — there are a handful in the golf world — and I try to get myself around them as often as possible. But what Graham doesn’t mention in the tweet is that writing a lot often leads to better thinking. This has been true in my career anyway. Most of us aren’t born as great thinkers. Writing often has helped me learn how to think better, which has helped me become a smarter writer … and on and on it goes.

Why is this true of writing? I’m not totally sure, but I suspect it’s because you can’t personality your way out of tight spots. When you’re holding a microphone or on camera, your personality, if it’s compelling enough, can overwhelm everything else (which is an entirely different skill).

Writing is far more naked. You are what your words say you are. In that way, it’s a bit like golf. You are the golfer your score says you are. To me, that’s thrilling, and it has forced me to dig it out of the dirt, so to speak when it comes to putting sentences and paragraphs together.

I’m still not the thinker (or writer) I aspire to be, but this realization — that thinking is a skill that is both important and can be improved — has been quite impactful to me as an adult and something I never considered as a child but is certainly something I want to impart upon my own kids as they grow up and try to figure out the world.