Is that a Srixon?

Edition No. 15 | June 23, 2023

Hey,

It’s been a bit. Long enough in fact that there’s now a new Rickie Fowler (Michael Block) and an old Rickie Fowler (Rickie Fowler). Long enough for Brooks to drink the Wanamaker dry. Long enough for Ryder Cupper Wyndham Clark to win twice. Long enough for Jordan Spieth to transform into a middle-aged dad. Long enough even for Yasir and Jay to unexpectedly become BFFs.

Side hustles, as many of you know, are difficult, and my day-to-day responsibilities took an absolute nuclear missile to the face increased as soon as the Chairman of All The Oil (CATO) went on CNBC with The Commissioner (the other TC).

The content gods always deliver, of course, it’s just that sometimes I prefer them delivering with Bryson serving as the vessel and not a fraught geopolitical tussle in which you also need to be steeped on authoritarian government structure, antitrust litigation and the long-term effects of both global terrorism and multinational mergers.

But the content gods do always deliver.

Onto the news.

Normal Moment(s)

All very routine sports stuff.

1. Is that a Srixon?

I have no photographic evidence of any of what I’m about to tell you, but if you think I’m creative enough to fabricate something as detailed as this story from scratch then you believe me to be more creative than I actually am.

At LACC last Sunday during the final round of the U.S. Open, I found myself in the middle of a Normal Sport moment. This is unusual. Normally, NS moments happen via screenshot or someone else’s story, they don’t unfold in front of my face and certainly not like this one did.

I was tailing Scheffler and Rory in the second to last pairing and meandered over to where Scheffler took a legal but 🙄 drop behind a tree because there was a cable about 1/16” in diameter protruding off a Shotlink tower next to the 7th green. That in and of itself is normal sport-y enough, but it’s also not the point of the story.

As I chatted with a USGA official about why, exactly, Scheffler got the drop he got (apparently a “corridor of impediment” or some equally ridiculous phrase), a golf ball fell down out of a tree between where we were standing.

I stared at the official, who, without missing a beat, said “Is that a Srixon? I bet that’s a Srixon.” I looked down, and it was. I looked back up at him, amazed and perplexed.

“That’s Hideki’s ball from three groups ago,” he explained as if it was in fact the most normal thing in the world. “We were waiting for it to fall, and I guess we finally got some wind.”

He had no idea, of course, that this exchange would eventually become 9,000 words in an illustrated book later on this year.

2. Captain Mutombo

Future Ryder Cupper Gordon Sargent took 284 strokes at LACC last week. And while everyone can always make the case that they could have saved a shot here or that if a couple of breaks had gone differently they could have been 7 under instead of 6, Sargent has perhaps the most legitimate case I’ve ever seen that he should have shot a stroke better than he did.

This, you see, was somehow a missed putt.

But it wasn’t a missed putt because it ran around the interior of the rim before horseshoe-ing out. No, Sargent buried it center cut with perfect speed, and the cup — like some mini golf gag — spit the thing back out. The video, if you somehow haven’t seen it, is astonishing.

The USGA had to run out and tap the cup back down because it had apparently been yanked out of its original spot by a caddie who had pulled a pin a few groups earlier. Imagine, if you can, Steph shooting a free throw in the fourth quarter of an NBA Finals game, the free throw going through the net and then, before it fell from the bottom of the nylon to the floor, the ball going the other way and coming up out of the rim for a miss.

Now imagine, if you must, that this had happened in one of the final two or three groups on Sunday afternoon instead of to Sargent at the beginning of the round. A lost Open on a rejected putt would have been the most watched sports video of the last several years. It would have legitimately been an international story. The type that would have gotten the “I know Anderson Cooper is on vacation in Maldives, but we need to get him on the horn and get a chopper up over LACC on Monday morning” treatment.

Also, the reaction — given the first few days of complete and total angst about the lack of difficulty around LACC —was predictably chef’s kiss good.

3. Tucked

It got buried by [gestures at almost everything in the golf world right now], but this beautiful moment from the Scandinavian Mixed delighted me to no end. Imagine seeing this at a Bears-Packers game!

4. How?

Cam Young drove a ball not just into a cart but into the ball holder inside the passenger’s side of the cart. The odds of a ball landing in a cart have to be one in several thousand. The odds of one landing in this specific spot? One in Wembanyama.

Question of the Week

When will we see another Tiger, and who will it be?

My sons and I were flipping back and forth between the LSU-Wake game on Wednesday night to the final round of the 2000 Open at the Old Course.* My oldest son’s first question was, “Dad, why are Tiger’s sleeves so long?” which made me howl.

As we watched, though, the thought that kept scratching the back of my brain was whether I would get to cover the next Tiger Woods.

It never feels like there will be another, but there always is. I don’t believe it’s anyone currently playing professional golf right now, but there will come along someone so singular, so driven, so preternaturally long off the tee, with the perfect golf body, the ideal upbringing and all the outlier factors. He will be so great that the doubt we all had that Tiger would ever have a successor will seem almost unreasonable to so many people in the future.

We will have legitimate arguments about whether this player is the same caliber as Tiger, and it will feel like a real — not manufactured — conversation. This always happens (always!). It’s happening right now with LeBron and Mike Trout, and it will happen again in golf. The question is when, not if. The question is who, not whether. The question is at what point will we know, not whether we will ever know at all.

*Padraig Harrington — who finished T27 at the U.S. Open last week — finished T20 at that Open Championship, which I find to be completely and totally incredible.

One Thing I Loved

I love feeling nervous at the end of a major. It is extremely stupid that I, a lowly member of the crooked media, would feel anything at all, but there is truly nothing like the last few hours of a close major. So much history is just hanging out there, and it is buoyed by so little oxygen.

It shouldn’t mean as much as it does, but that doesn’t change the fact that it does mean so much.

I love that it only happens (at most!) four times a year and fewer in years where there are blowouts. In a culture that truly seems to believe that more is almost always better, the scarcity of truly meaningful moments in golf — the type that unfold in 60 minutes but will be discussed for 60 years — is as nerve-wracking as it is refreshing.

Media Diet

👉️ Bryan Curtis wrote a really good piece on what it’s like to cover golf right now. I was interviewed for it. So were a lot of the folks you probably follow and read.

👉️ Sean Martin wrote a great Max Homa profile that’s fun to read whether he missed the U.S. Open cut or not (he did).

👉️ Joel Beall on why the U.S. Open was so quiet was probably the best reporting of the week.

👉️ KVV’s thread on working yourself into a logic pickle over rolling the ball back and easy U.S. Open setups was great.

👉️ This story on Rickie sending champagne to a lowly social media intern after winning the Deutsche Bank is really good.

👉️ Dylan Dethier on Rickie “not leaving LACC fully satisfied but going out of his way to make sure everyone else did” was awesome.

👉️ Andy Johnson helps everyone understand what par means and why a lot of golf courses should be par 68 or 69.

👉️ LKD hollering about how Rory played the 14th and then getting steep on why he was so frustrated is the good (and sociopathic but mostly good) stuff.

👉️ I was very proud of the piece I wrote on Sunday following Wyndham Clark’s win: Rory McIlroy, a fool who still dreams. The ones I’m most proud of are almost always the hardest to write either because the level of clarity of mind you have to get to or because the line between cheesy and beautiful is thinner than Chesson Hadley.

👉️ I wrote a long thread two weeks ago about envy, contentment and how bad of a job I’ve been doing at letting what others say and think about both my work and the work of those around me dictate all of my joy. It was less a cry for help and more of (hopefully) an encouragement to those of you who oftentimes feel the same way. Watch the Dax Shepard video twice.

👉️ Speaking of Rory, we put my essay about him from last year’s Normal Sport 2 on the website for free. You can read it here.

The Infirmary

True sicko behavior within the golf community.

I’m proud of this man who got ahead of a potentially hazardous situation by stepping forward to disclose his illness. I told him so and asked him to go see someone immediately.

By the Numbies

63: In 14 tournaments in 2023, Scottie Scheffler has lost to 63 golfers. To put that in perspective, Jon Rahm (who has four wins this year) has lost to 74 in his last four starts alone.

LA460CC

There was a lot of golf course talk last weekend at the U.S. Open, most of which I’m unqualified to discuss.

What I do agree with, however, is something that was voiced by Andy and KVV, which is that we’ve entered a space in time where, as the organization setting the golf course up, you can protect low scoring by setting up courses that have high shot values in manufactured ways. OR you can accept that modern technology has erased some of the shot value that used to exist, set up the course the way it was meant to be played and in a way that encourages the highest feasible shot value and realize that scoring is going to be low (this is another way of saying what KVV said below).

Those have, somewhat sadly, become the two options. The USGA is in such a no-win situation. If they set it up difficult, and it howls and bakes then all the players hate them and shot value gets erased. If they set it up a little easier and it doesn’t howl or bake then everyone who wants carnage hates them. Modern equipment has erased so much of the middle ground.

But nobody has ever shot 62 at Augusta! That’s true, but it’s also true that Augusta just spent like $1M per yard it moved No. 13 back, and it’s equally true that a day is coming and probably soon where someone will shoot 62 at Augusta if nothing is done about equipment.

More than anything, the tornado of scoring at LACC made me sad that technology is what it is and we don’t get to see the best ball-strikers, best strategists and best thinkers perform at the apex of their powers. We get to see a lot of performance, but not the peak of it, which is a huge bummer from both an historical and modern perspective.

These are three terrific, logical, smart thoughts on the subject.

 Meme of the Week

Garrett Morrison may have dropped the meme of the year on everybody at the beginning of last week. It could not have been more timely or perfect.

These four also amused and delighted me, and I will be saving them for future use.

How is This App Free?

I don’t know how I stumbled across this video (OK, I do, I was diving into a former Texas A&M golfer’s Twitter profile, which is completely and totally normal and reasonable), but — and I don’t want to overstate this — this might be the funniest video I have ever seen.

These tweets from LACC were tremendous. The person who runs the Art but Sports account is, I hope I’m not underselling this, a genius if in fact he or she is not using AI to run the account (I was told he or she is not).

A 46!

Deep Fried is in the pantheon with Antifaldo and ANGC Burner of parody accounts. This is terrific stuff.

I think this was my favorite tweet of the week. It’s so perfect.

Wonder if he could have used that stroke later in the week.

[Sigh]

This slayed me. The fact that it’s the Butterfield Bermuda and not just the Bermuda makes the entire thing work.

This was about Wyndham Clark’s drive on 18.

Speaking of pantheons, this one is in it. One of the all-time great early Golf Twitter moments.

This got me good … and might be true.

Love Your Work

I get questions every once in a while about how folks can get into media, golf or golf media. One of the ideas I almost always propose is finding a niche — and if you think you have a niche, dig two more levels down, then that’s your actual niche — and owning it. One that somebody should go all in on in a humorous, helpful way is breaking down the rules of the game.

Is that a business? I don’t know. But there’s definitely an opportunity for someone to really own that sliver of golf. If you can dice up the rules in clever, irreverent but informative pieces and help me learn while making me laugh, I would find real value in that given that I’m 11 years into this and still am not totally 100 percent sure of almost any rule.