Normal Sport 2 Paperback Drop

It feels like Padraig Harrington is running this newsletter given how much experimenting has been going on with different visuals, font sizes and unique sections so far.

Slightly different look this week, and I’m sure that will continue to evolve throughout the year. Bear with us.

Also, thank you for reading.

We sent four newsletters in Feb., and the response and feedback have been pretty amazing so far. If you’re new here or somebody forwarded you the newsletter, you can subscribe below along with 4,651 other absolute sickos.

💀 Normal Moment(s)

All very routine sports stuff.

1. Woodstock

Akshay Bhatia — who finished T49 at the Honda Classic — spent more time with his shirt off at PGA National than Ronaldo in an Instagram video. Justin Ray had the best line on it: “This man performed on the main stage at Woodstock in 1969.”

2. Honda Odyssey

That’s how you might describe Chris Kirk’s 72nd hole on Sunday. He tried to hit the Rory 2014 shot into 18, and it … did not go as planned.

Surely, you’ve seen the replay by now, but if for some reason you haven’t, Kirk banged one off the rocks surrounding 18, and it ricocheted into the lake running up the right side of 18 nearly hitting a Honda sitting on top of the water for promotional purposes. All very normal, run-of-the-mill fodder at a world class sporting event.

To recap: The eventual winner of the Honda Classic nearly broke the windshield of a car in the waning moments of the tournament, which led to a kinda serious but mostly joking discussion about whether he could have taken TIO had the ball found its way inside the car and what officials would have done had it set off some sort of alarm as the tournament concluded.

Greatest sport.

3. Sure

Imagine time traveling this screenshot to 2017 and trying to explain the entire thing to your dad — a casual (but not sociopathic) golf fan — while he’s busy watching the back nine of the U.S. Open.

💧 Legal Drops

A look at what’s cooking.

📚️ The paperback edition of Normal Sport 2 is now available for pre-order and will ship March 21! We printed 100 of them — they’re $30 each with free shipping, and I suspect they’ll go pretty fast.

📊 Golf Index: I’ve been hollering about how lacking historical data is on Twitter for several months now so we (Joseph LaMagna, Kyle Porter and our developer, Brian S., who isn’t on Twitter because he actually gets things done in his life) just decided to build it ourselves.

The goal: To organize golf history. Plenty of golf statistical sites look forward and are predictive. We actually want to look backward for the sake of further contextualizing the sport.

Our developer this week: From 1934-2022, there have been 86 Masters. In those 86 Masters, there have been only 1,530 unique individuals to occupy the 7,014 playing spots. This means if someone gets to play in the Masters for the first time, they will play on average 3.584 more Masters. 

Me:

Drop: Sometime before Masters.

By the way, if you already read or listened to NS2, I would love it if you would review it on perhaps the only good social media site, Goodreads. If your review is the same as Tyrrell Hatton’s of ANGC, so be it. Thank you!

♥️ One Thing I Loved

Let’s talk about sobriety.

Honda champ, Chris Kirk, has been shockingly open about his battle with alcoholism and depression over the last few years, and I’ve been struck by two things here.

1. Constraints: It is perhaps counterintuitive that guardrails would lead to freedom. In an age in which culture might say that personal independence and satiating self are to be valued and pursued above all, sobriety is a good reminder that the right constraints lead to the freedom that our hearts desire.

2. Transparency: Kirk said in his post-round presser on Sunday, “… to be able to connect with people and … for somebody to say, ‘I got sober because of you, and my life has changed because of you,’ you can't really describe how unreal that is with words.”

Transparency feels terrifying, but it can actually be empowering and build self-confidence. This is upside down! It doesn’t make sense at all, and yet living in the light and not in the shadows is how we were designed to function as humans.

📱 Overheard on Twitter

As a parent who, uh, doesn’t mind letting his kids watch some Bluey or perhaps the entire library of Masters final rounds on YouTube, I felt this one deeply.

💡 Trivia (and giveaway)

Congrats to Jon J. who correctly answered last week’s question and received a free NS2 audiobook. This week, I’ll give away one of our new NS2 paperbacks (see above!) to whoever gets this one correct.

If you only counted his Arnold Palmer Invitational victories, where would Tiger Woods rank on the all-time PGA Tour money list?

🔥 Question of the Week

Do you (actually) know what strokes gained is?

I’m asking earnestly because it became clear that not everyone does. Sports Illustrated noted in its new rankings system that “strokes gained is not calculated by all world tours,” which is comical considering all you need are scores to determine strokes gained. Pretty sure all tours keep track of scores.

For example: We can know that Horton Smith gained 17.5 strokes on the field in the 1936 Masters because we have all of the scores from the 1936 Masters. I don’t believe Clifford Roberts was juggling ShotLink satellite dishes at the 1936 Masters. We have made the SG equation far, far more complicated than it ought to be.

🔥🔥 Question of the Week 2

With Adidas out, what should DJ wear at Augusta?

I casually tossed this out on Twitter, and the collection of responses deserve 2023 Nobel consideration. Here are two of my faves.

• 0% chance DJ goes through the effort to swap out an entire wardrobe -David B.

• Vuori or On Cloud. -Mark H.

The second one especially slayed me for some reason.

🥗 Media Diet

👉️ Claire Rogers’ 23-year-old sister — who doesn’t follow golf — has been reviewing Full Swing, and it’s been kinda incredible. The lesson in there (one I have to revisit often): It’s usually best to not take yourself too seriously. We don’t need people who don’t follow things covering them, but we do need the folks who cover them to maybe dial it back a bit on the self-importance [raises hand].

👉️ Joseph LaMagna, who I think is one of the best young minds in the game, absolutely obliterated Sports Illustrated over its new world rankings.

👉️ Andy Johnson wrote this really great — and perhaps more importantly (?) — pliable piece on what the future of elevated event fields should look like. By pliable, I mean that you can build your own fields based on your desires and parameters using his baseline, which to me is some of the best kind of content that is created.

👉️ Tim Urban’s new book — What’s Our Problem — is extremely interesting. You might not agree with parts of it (I don’t agree with parts of it), but who cares as long as it gets you thinking (like Andy’s piece). What greater outcome is there for writing than that?

🏥 The Infirmary

True sicko behavior.

Last week I was at an early morning church event here in Dallas, and I noticed a man sitting to my right with a polyester briefcase on the floor in front of him. The laptop-shaped bag was dark gray with orange lining around the outside of it.

I stared at it for a few seconds and thought the only normal thought that anyone would ever think: “Why in the world,” I wondered, “would anyone bring a Trackman inside of a church on a Tuesday morning at 6 a.m.?”

Send help.

🔢 By the Numbies

5: The number of humans in the world who have been better at playing golf (i.e. taking the fewest number of strokes to get the ball in the hole) than Chris Kirk so far in 2023.

2: Data Golf ranks the best 50-round runs for everybody going back — it appears — as far as 1995. Tiger (obviously) ranks first on the list as he averaged 4.1 SG per round on fields for 50 straight rounds during part of his crazy 2000.

Vijay Singh is second on the list at 3.1. I’m sure Tiger had a few runs between 3.1 and 4.1, but it’s ordered by person not by 50-round run.

Already in 2023, we’ve seen two players — Rahm and Rory — hit their own personal apex. Rahm is at 2.9 (he ranks fifth), and Rory is at 2.7 (he ranks ninth). It’s not even March!

🗣️ Flagged

From Dream Golf: The resort’s slogan—“Golf As It Was Meant To Be”—seemed to many visitors nothing more than a straightforward expression of the truth.

🤳 Meme of the Week

I should have included this one last week, but it’ll get recycled throughout the rest of 2023. Use wisely.

💰️ Thanks, Phil

Once we hit 5K subs (currently at 4,651), I'll give away a pair of my favorite TRUE golf shoes. The catch is that the only folks eligible are those who have shared the newsletter using the link below.

Once the 5K number is hit, I'll randomly draw from everyone who has racked up at least one referral. Every additional referral will count as an additional entry into the giveaway.

Example: If nine people each share with one other person but you share it with 7,000 people, you own 7,000 of a possible 7,009 entries. You're more likely to win the shoes than Rahm playing me over 72 holes from the back tees at ANGC right now.

If you’re new here, you can subscribe (I think I’m supposed to say smash the button) below.

KPMGR: 1. Rahm | 2. Scheffler | 3. Rory | 4. Homa | 5. Morikawa