Edition No. 76 | April 20, 2024

Hey,

If you thought I only had 15 final thoughts on the 2024 Masters, then this is either going to be an amazing or horrible email for you to receive. Of course — of course — I have a few follow ups, tidbits, nuggets and theories as I continue to process the first major of the year.

One note here: We officially made the name of what you’re reading, the Normal Sport newsletter.

We had played around with the Normal Sporter, which was cheeky and fun as an obvious riff on the New Yorker name. But we decided to drop the -er for the sake of simplicity. Everything else we do is called Normal Sport so we thought it would be easiest to understand if that was actually the name of the newsletter as well.

Here are my (actual) final thoughts on Augusta (probably).

17 Final Masters Thoughts

1. I love major championships. Love thinking about them, love watching them, love experiencing them, love discussing them and love considering the historical implications of them. They are the best. I could write a newsletter about the majors every single day and never tire of it. I’m actually jealous that Geoff Shackelford had this idea and has executed it quite well.

Anyway, I think the Masters affects the way we think about, consider and receive players perhaps as much as (if not more than) the other 51 weeks combined. Part of this is because it’s the one major that is followed by the most casual people. If Casual Golf Fan has a Golf Opinion about a player, there is a decent chance that it was formed based on what happened at the Masters or within the context of the Masters.

Another reason for this is that Augusta National requires players to do a lot of media. They talk … a lot. Many of them after every round. This creates a sort of state of the union for most stars and superstars, complete with a pre-tournament assessment of where their games are at as well as a post-tournament evaluation of their trajectory.

All of it is great and also a lot to take in (which is why we’re currently 32 thoughts into a post-Masters breakdown).

2. In light of all of this, there are two charts that are really fascinating me right now. The first is true strokes gained at major championships. True SG is basically strokes gained but with field strength considered. So if your raw SG in a major is 20 — you were 20 strokes better than the field average — then your true SG in that major is going to be higher (probably 22 or 23).

I asked the good folks over at Data Golf for an updated list, and they sent me one with the top 200 major performances going back to 2004.

Here are the top 25.

• Phil has three of the top 12 performances on this list, and only one was a victory. There’s an alternate world where Phil is a 10-time major winner.

• Was the 2016 Open any good?

• I don’t remember Goosen’s 2004 U.S. Open being that crazy.

• Somehow I also don’t remember Bryson’s 2020 U.S. Open being that crazy either, and I covered that one! He beat Xander by 10, though, and Xander finished 5th.

• I’m not sure I think of Tiger’s 2006 PGA as his most dominant performance since 2004. I probably would have had to think more deeply, but that’s not the first one that comes to mind.

• Tiger’s 2019 Masters, by the way, not in the top 200 major performances since 2004. The top 200! Marc Leishman gained more strokes against the field in his T5 at the 2014 Open than Tiger did in his 2019 Masters win. That is both astonishing and infuriating. But this is the point of putting yourself in the mix over and over again. Some of them are going to fall in your lap.

• Somebody tweeted at me that Scottie had his C game last week. If the 14th best major performance since 2004 is Scottie’s C game, then we are dealing with something different than even I imagined.

Here are Nos. 26-50.

• I’m always amazed every time I think about how close Spieth was to the slam in 2015. He missed a playoff at St. Andrews by one and was on the wrong end of Jason Day’s historic performance at Whistling Straits. Four golfers from the grand freaking slam.

• I certainly did not have Lee Westwood’s 2010 Masters ahead of Brooks Koepka’s 2023 PGA in my mind.

• Woody Austin!

• Anthony Kim!

• SG numbers are imperfect (but still interesting) measuring sticks. Example: If a player is up four late in a tournament, that player is not going to put the pedal down like he would if it was, say, a Mickelson-Stenson situation. It doesn’t create a massive change in the data, I suppose, but it’s not surprising to see multiple players (Phil, Stenson or Goosen, Phil) on this list because of the way tournaments play out.

3. The other chart is major championship xWins, which is related to these true SG charts. A player receives xWins (expected wins) when his performance at a major reaches a certain level of SG against the field.

Example: Phil and Stenson both reached 25+ true SG against that 2016 Open field, which is an insane number that gets you about .99 xWins (you’re expected to win ~99% of the time you gain 25+ true strokes against the field) but doesn’t amount to any actual wins (as Phil unfortunately found out).

Here’s the corresponding chart. The true SG is on a per round basis so 5 is equivalent to 20 for a tournament and 6 is equivalent to 24.

You can go back and aggregate a player’s cumulative xWins at majors over a number of years, which is exactly what I did dating back to 2010. Scottie now ranks No. 5 on that chart and, based on the numbers, could be considered a bit unlucky that he only has two major championship wins.

Since 2010.

Some observations.

• Does it feel crazier that Spieth has 3 xWins or 3 actual wins?

• Ludvig now has nearly as many xWins (.35) as Xander (.37). He’s only played [checks notes] 26 fewer majors.

• Rickie has twice as many xWins as both Bubba and JT and two fewer majors than both of them. That is tough.

• Rory had a bit of luck early in his major career and a lack of it lately. All of that tends to even out over time, which is why I’m a bit bearish on Brooks winning many more. Also: Brooks is a reigning major champion so what the heck do I know?

• Matt Wolff with more xWins than JT is jarring. A fun what if is what if Bryson was hospitalized at the 2020 U.S. Open because he hadn’t taken a dump in like seven weeks from all the whey protein he was consuming and Wolff rolls at Winged Foot?

• Phil being third on this list from age 39-53 is bonkers. What a career.

• Impossible to get all the data, but I be there are a lot of guys who end their career with one major and also have something close to 1.0 xWins. Think Brian Harman or Jason Dufner. Just dudes who had the best week of golf of their career and didn’t threaten a major win after that.

• Jon Rahm at 1.1 is shocking to me. He hasn’t truly been in the mix at as many majors as it seems like he should have been.

4. I read Scottie’s Hilton Head transcript, and as I reflected on what he said there as well as at the Masters all week, it made me think about a great definition of humility from C.S. Lewis.

Scheffler seems … fairly unimpressed with all that he has accomplished, and yet to be at the level he’s at for as long as he has been, you have to have an almost comical level of self-belief. How can both of these things be true? The way they can both be true is found in the Lewis quote.

Here it is said a different way by the same author.

Scottie seems unimpressed with his achievements because, I suspect, he doesn’t think about himself as much as the rest of us think about ourselves. It’s a much more delightful way to live — considering others in lieu of self — but often it is not as fun in the moment as it is to think about ourselves. Thus we rarely do it.

He is extraordinary in many ways. This one perhaps most (and most underrated) of all.

5. I would like to say this now for posterity because it’s something I was feeling throughout the week at Augusta. It’s something I told my guy, Rick Gehman, as we walked around the course and talked about ceilings, floors and yelled at each other about how we would fix the entire sport.

That thing is this: I think Scottie is special. Like, I think we’re in the middle of something that 1. Is going to go on for a long, long time and 2. I think he’s better even than his statistics convey. I think he can win eight majors. I’m not saying he will win eight majors because things happen. I’m simply saying we’re currently underrating his potential because, as I wrote last week, it isn’t easy to reconcile who and what he is.

This is all very [waves hands over head and gestures at sky] out there there, ambiguous. But I do want my take on record. That I think Scottie is even better than his record indicates because of how well-rounded his game and his life are, and that I believe the trajectory — what is is right now, top 25 all time? top 15??? — is absolutely sustainable in a way I’m not sure somebody like Jason Day’s ever was.

6. In light of that, here is something I have thought about a lot ….

7. One thing that has struck me over the last few years is how wild the aerials of ANGC are. The property is strange to me because it somehow feels both expansive and also intimate at the same time.

I feel like these visuals somehow (?) get at that truth.

8. I wrote this somewhere last week — perhaps in this very newsletter — but Rahm was basically giving the following vibe all week.

If you didn’t see it, I’m not positive you were paying close enough attention.

Also a reminder that — when you’re that rich — thinking that any amount of money is worth giving away your competitiveness and pride for is honestly very sad. Of course we all want to have a lot of money, but to act as if money is the very top of the food chain when it comes to the most important things in life is to not really understand life at all.

9. My favorite shot of the tournament happened when Scottie walked up 18 on Sunday. What must that feel like? What are you thinking about? Are all the days spent alone as a kid trying to become great going through your head? Are you thinking about your parents, who ferried you all over the country chasing both goodness and greatness? Are you considering what it means to be a two-time Masters champ or perhaps to be a dad?

Scottie said nothing was going through his head, which given the way he has played, I absolutely believe. But I wonder what he thinks about when he sees this shot. Surrounded by everyone in golf, but alone atop the sport. I wonder if it feels like it looks … lonely and wonderful all at the same time? Our dreams have a cost. Scottie has been willing to pay less than most.

But it doesn’t mean that they were free.

10. Whew this was good.

11. The best walk of the golf year is Patrick Cantlay being serenaded at the 16th at Marco Simone to the improvised lyrics, “Haaaaaats off to your bank account” quite obviously the 18th at The Open. The second best? Let me make the case for the walk from 18 to the scoring hut at ANGC.

As the seas part and the mask drops, a player whose life was just changed gets to walk across the most important golf course on the major rota and consider all that has just taken place. It provides, as one media member I spoke with recently said, “a mini biography of a person.”

Think about what we’ve seen there in the last six years. Tiger and his kids. Hideki’s emotion. Rahm and Jose Maria hugging and crying.

On Sunday, I thought it was cool that Scottie waved four-time Masters champion, Ted Scott, on ahead of him.

Perhaps it was that he simply didn’t want to awkwardly walk alone with everybody else hanging back, but I read it as Scottie wanting to share the adulation with his buddy. It is emblematic of who he is (see point No. 4 above) and one of my favorite moments from this year’s Masters.

12. I posted the list of players who Scottie has gained shots on over the last two years. One of them is Erik van Rooyen, who is down 600 shots to Scottie since the start of 2022.

He responded to the tweet, which made me laugh.

Sometimes Twitter is actually good.

13. I enjoyed Rory’s echo of Tiger’s quote from earlier in the week — “I love golf” — when he was asked about hit upcoming schedule: “The next two weeks I'm playing Hilton Head, I'm playing New Orleans. I'll take a week off, playing Quail Hollow, play the PGA, take another week off, then play another four in a row. Loving golf at the moment. Loving it.”

It’s such an underrated aspect of a top player. I have written about this often, but many pros don’t love golf, not the way we would imagine they should. Some do, though, and I’m convinced all the top players either love it or are addicted to it in ways they perhaps cannot even understand. I’m not sure it’s possible to become a top player — even with all the talent in the world — otherwise.

14. Those Tiger and Charlie photos from the range on Sunday were arresting, weren’t they? I think part of it was the idea of a son teaching his father, especially when his father is probably the smartest and best in his given industry … ever. But I’m also fascinated with how Tiger contextualizes those around him. We say it often but everything in golf really does revolve around Tiger. What that means, though, is that so often we perceive other people in terms of how they relate to him.

Think about Neal Shipley’s caddie. We don’t think about him at all if his player is not in Tiger’s group. Now? I’ve thought about him a dozen times because of this screenshot. You could come up with a million examples.

So to see these photos is, yes, to think about fathers and sons and all the Wright Thompson voiceovers you can handle. But it’s also to think about the specific ways in which Tiger’s world gives those in his orbit — especially those as close as Charlie — greater texture and depth.

15. One of my favorite parts of the entire week was playing sherpa for my CBS Sports colleague, Rick Gehman. It was his first trip to the Masters. Wide eyed and tongue wagging would be one way to describe it. I counted 'em up on the way home, and I’ve somehow been to 14 of these. Nine for my job and five as a fan when my grandfather gave me his badges before I got to call this “work.”

So the joy for me has become seeing other people’s joy. Seeing them see the back nine for the first time. Watching them find all the spots they grew up memorizing. Experiencing their eyes lit up with fascination and delight.

I thought Porath said it well when he wrote about his experience of playing the golf course on Monday. He wasn’t talking about the specific experience I’m describing, but what he said applies to what I’m talking about as well.

That’s how I felt this week with a buddy there that I got to spend a lot of time with. There’s nothing quite like that.

16. Here are the Porter Masters family draft results (you get the field average plus 3 shots on rounds your players don’t play. So everybody who missed the cut received 77-76 for their weekend scores.

I stunted all over my 11-, 10-, 7- and 4-year-old as well as my wife who barely watches golf. Feeling good about that.

Also: Do a major draft with your kids. Put an ice cream date on the line. They’ll love it. You’ll love it. It is the best.

17. Here’s a truth a lot of folks think and some have said even though it feels a little weird to say it out loud. I will reiterate it here: Playing a non-Augusta course with friends you love being with is better than playing Augusta National with folks you don’t really know. This is my personal version of losing together is better than winning alone.

Easy for me to say, I suppose, but also I have the experience of both which perhaps gives me the authority to say it. And while I enjoyed my time playing ANGC back in 2017 and the folks I was with, there’s nothing better than going 18 with people I’m close to like I got to do this year on Monday after Scottie’s second.

Nothing like hollering about which one of us needs to get a lesson lined up with Randy Smith and which needs to fly to California to see George Gankas. Nothing like arguing about over or under 5.5 majors for Scottie. Nothing like trash talking over short-ish putts not conceded and hosels newly discovered. Nothing like winding down a week of history the way it started: With our phones down and our heads up, wondering what could possibly be better than this.

There’s nothing quite like golf.

Thanks for reading until the end.

You are a sicko.

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