McErlot

Edition No. 28 | September 5, 2023

Hey,

Work on Normal Sport 3 began yesterday. We will have a pre-order link soon. Things are happening. Writing and talking about golf is about as cool of a job as I ever could have dreamed of having as a kid.

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Normal Moment(s)

All very routine sports stuff.

1. McErlot

I was watching the 2018 Ryder Cup finale (which I would contest is actually not one of golf’s greatest rounds) last Wednesday evening (as one does), and I noticed this guy taking pictures of players through a bottle of wine he was apparently just lugging around Le Golf National.

Golf is strange for [gestures at all previous newsletters and entire Twitter feed] reasons, but one that always amuses me is that when you buy a ticket to the event, you don’t purchase an actual seat. Imagine that in another sport.

I’m going to Nuggets-Nets on Monday night.

Cool, where are you sitting.

[shrugs]

In golf: Might post up on the fourth hole to watch players hit 7-irons into a funnel pin, or might buy a bottle of wine and take photos of players on the 16th tee box through refracted glass. Sure.

2. Ground Game

I flipped the Walker Cup on Sunday morning to watch it with my boys, and this came on a few minutes into coverage. It may have been taking place farther down the Eden Estuary, it may have been taking place in the third fairway. One of my favorite parts of links golf is that you truly don’t know.

Also, imagine ESPN showing golfers chopping up Brookside next to the Rose Bowl while the Rose Bowl is going on. What a sport.

3. Snapped

Anne Van Dam went full Bryson at the Women’s Irish Open last week as she was being carted to the first playoff hole. She tossed the rope over her head, but it snagged her driver, which snapped under the tension of being extended several feet beyond what was intended.

Two amazing facts:

1. This was her second broken driver of the week (another came at the hands of an unnamed airline, but I think we all probably know who it was*).

2. She hit the longest drive of three players on the playoff hole with her 3-wood (but still lost).

4. Grizzly Adam Scott 

At a normal sporting event, I suppose this wouldn’t be a surprise. At a golf tournament? How frightening would it be to come around the corner of the 12th green and see a bear coming out of the woods toward the 13th tee?

5. Elmo’s Havemeyer

I can say two things with supreme confidence.

1. I’ve never seen this Elmo screenshot.

2. I’m so glad Mike sent it to me.

Also, who threw this set together?

Hey Donna, I think we’re good. I got the stuffed clown, the dump truck, the dinosaur bedsheets and the poster of Tiger at Pumpkin Ridge holding the Havemeyer minutes after he completed that five-down comeback in 38 holes against the Florida kid Steve Scott who said he couldn’t watch Tiger swing because he didn’t want to get washed away by the gravity of watching the greatest golfer of all time swing a club but he listened to it all day with his back turned and said recently he hasn’t forgotten what it sounded like. What it sounded like, Donna!

I got the cars poster and the plastic bowling pins, too.

*I have no idea which airline it would be, but folks seem quite opinionated about airlines so I thought it would be fun to rile everyone up a bit.

One Thing I Loved

What’s weirder: That a golfer who earlier this year tied Jose Luis Ballester Barrio for fourth at something called the Calusa Cup and has one more PGA Tour top 10 finish than I do is going to play with Rory McIlroy against Brooks Koepka and Jordan Spieth in Rome at the Ryder Cup.

OR

That a podcaster who goes by several different names — none of which are on his birth certificate — predicted two years ago in an RV outside of Whistling Straits that this is exactly what would happen?

What got lost, while Tron stunted on the digital world this week shortly after Ludvig stunted on the actual one and (easily) landed a Ryder Cup spot in the process, is just how improbable all of this was even as recently as the beginning of this year.

We did a whole long podcast about all of this with all parties reading CVS-length receipts that you can listen to on the NLU feed when it comes out on Tuesday night or Wednesday, but it’s worth revisiting briefly before Rome arrives.

Luke Donald, whose rhetoric about Ludvig Aberg has at times made Tron seem chaste, gushed back in July about how this could in fact take place.

"[Donald] told me there have only been a few [players] that he's played with for the very first time that have the 'wow' factor,” said Golf Channel’s Nick Dougherty.

“One of them is Rory. That was back in 2008 at the Dunhill Links. Now he says Ludvig Aberg is one of those guys as well. He said his driver is a huge weapon, he makes the game look effortless. He added that as long as he continues to show form, he will definitely be considered for the [Ryder Cup] team. ... This guy is going to be a superstar."

Everything gets normalized with time. Everything. If and when Ludvig wins a major (which will require, you know, playing in one), we will look back on these rosters and say, Oh yeah of course Ludvig was on that team. Of course. Of course.

But to do that would be to mitigate (and perhaps even erase) three things that should not be mitigated:

1. That Ludvig was playing (and losing to) Bard Bjornevik Skogen and Sam Sommerhauser in the Thunderbird Collegiate as recently as the middle of April of a Ryder Cup year.

2. That his ceiling is so high and his talent so immense that he truly became undeniable to folks who have seen a lot of ceilings and tons of talent. (Again, this will seem obvious in retrospect, but it’s not right now and it honestly probably won’t be when the regular golf fan is watching Sunday singles).

3. And of course that my esteemed colleague and friend, Mr. TC, sat in an RV outside of a town in rural Wisconsin and, the week before Ludvig shot 72-71-70 to finish T9 for Texas Tech at the 2021 Blessings Intercollegiate, predicted that his beloved boy would in fact tee it up against much of the U.S. dream team — that happened to be celebrating a few hundred yards from that RV — at a course in Rome 24 months from then in one of the greatly anticipated clashes in the history of this event.

All three of those truths are wild, and honestly all three are probably being underplayed.

The most impressive part of it all, though? Donald asked Aberg to go play in Europe ahead of Rome just to get one last look. He asked Ludvig, who spent most of this year in Lubbock, USA, to go to the Czech Republic and Switzerland to put himself out there and his game on the line just to see if he could handle it. He put pressure on him to see how he would embrace it.

And Ludvig lost to just three guys over the course of the two events.

By the Numbies

30: That’s Team Europe’s average age this year. In 2021, it was 34.5. What’s maybe even more interesting is that the U.S. team’s average age was 29 in 2021 and is a little over 30 this year. That means the U.S. went from being more than 5 years younger on average to slightly older, which provides some context here from Soly …

Flagged

One point that I feel like I’m screaming from the mountaintop but is just not being heard by most people is that the Ryder Cup is a team event that has absolutely no resemblance to the John Deere Classic or Wells Fargo Championship.

Consider this, which I dug up from Shane Ryan’s excellent The Cup They Couldn’t Lose in which he praises the European way so throughly (and deservedly so!) that I thought at one point he might break ground on a Paul McGinley statue.

[The Americans] adhered to the mindset that a Ryder Cup among equal talents is essentially random, that sometimes they would play better, and sometimes the Europeans would, but all thoughts of strategy or team building were blown out of proportion. Call it arrogance, complacency, or lack of imagination, but they stuck to this belief even as the results showed a pattern that was anything but random.

The Americans has been too successful for too long on the strength of talent alone to study the lesson. In that sense, they were victims of their own success, and it would be years before they could humble themselves enough to learn.

The term “too big to fail” comes to mind. And this is the point of picking JT on the U.S. side (and, to a lesser extent, Lowry on the European side). I’ve gotten hung up on a lot of “but this guy drove it .00003 strokes gained better than this guy you should for sure pick him” stuff in the past, but that is not in any way how the Ryder Cup actually functions (as I spent 2,000 words explaining here).

Meme of the Week

I’m so happy for Shane Lowry that he was able to finish patching up the exterior of a window on the international space station after it came a bit loose and still had time to get back inside before Sky Sports broadcast the European captain’s picks. Very cool.

Crooked Golf Media

👉️ The Soly-KVV pod on the last four European Ryder Cups is so good.

👉️ Not golf, but Brian Phillips on Carlos Alcaraz is insane.

Alcaraz could win 30 majors. He could produce a decade of astonishing highlights. He could peak early and have a disappointing career. He could take $500 million to join a Saudi pickleball league.

I simply have no idea what to expect from him, and that feeling of wide-open horizon is as thrilling as his forehand.

How is This App Free?

Would listen at this point.

Buddy … yes. Except when they get older they stop asking for Bluey and start asking where Sargent plays college golf and whether his hip speed is as good as Tiger’s used to be (they didn’t ask that but they will some day … they did ask the college question though).

I’ve been mentally, emotionally and spiritually preparing for this moment for many months.

This sent me. Low key but so good.

Imagine paying $47 for that hat. Tbh, may be a Viktor Hovland Memorial “so bad it’s actually kinda good” situation.

I would counter with Collin Morikawa here.

Palermo by Morning.

Imagine using Instagram over Twitter.

The Infirmary

I am on a thread with Normal Sport illustrator, Jason Page, and a few other folks, and we were trying to congregate for a meeting this week. Jason said he was going to have a hard time making it because “I just got added to the guest list for my friend’s first European tour show on Tuesday evening.”

One of the other guys in the thread pulled me aside in person a few days later and said to me, “I thought Jason lived in Amsterdam, the European Tour isn’t going there this week is it? I thought they were in Switzerland and then Ireland.”

And he was 100 percent serious.