Edition No. 58 | February 23, 2024

Hey,

I have said this in various places, but I have been working hard to not be on Twitter as much this year. It has been really life-giving, tbh, and counterintuitively made me more productive on that app when I do happen to log on and fire off some takes or read what other people are up to.

It has also helped me make writing and sending this newsletter more of a habit, whereas last year my sending pattern looked a bit like Spieth’s driver spray chart.

Anyway, I get home from a 5th grade baseball coach’s meeting on Thursday night, hop on Twitter for a few minutes for the first time all day and like the fourth thing I see is something about how a grandmother in Florida pulled her granddaughter out of school to take her to Charlie Woods’ pre-qualifier qualifier so that maybe she could catch his attention.

And …

[deep breath]

…

Here are a few thoughts on golf this week.

13 Golf-ish Thoughts This Week

I have been thinking about a lot of random golf (and non-golf) things recently so this one is especially varietal.

1. Something I thought a lot about this week was the Niemann invite to Augusta National. I wrote a whole column about it for CBS Sports, and the focus of it was on how the major championships are the big winners of the LIV-PGA Tour nonsense. That has been true for the entirety of the brouhaha, and it remains true now.

This is a longer point that we don’t have time to get into now (but I would love to dive deep on at some point), but any new world order in golf needs to explicitly acknowledge that the majors are at the top of the pyramid. They are the context. They provide the prism. They bring the lens through which everything else must be viewed.

I know this is difficult because [gestures at six different companies all sort of interacting but also sort of not], but golf could thrive a lot more if this was explicitly acknowledged by everyone involved because it would give fans a through line that they could follow instead of various loose ends.

2. Care to guess who gave this quote recently?

"It has evolved into a [game] of hitting harder, of hitting without thinking. It does not require … preparation to find the winning shot. Most of them play similarly. I don’t like it. I like the tactics."

It was not Rory McIlroy talking about the 10th at Riviera, although change a few words, and this is basically what he said on the broadcast on Sunday. No, it was … Rafael Nadal talking about tennis. Harder may be marketable (though it also may not be), but tactics — in both sports — will always be more beautiful.

3. My friend Dalton Mabery writes a really cool blog/newsletter, and he had a line in there that I have thought about a bunch.

Here’s the excerpt.

This is true in professional golf. You know how many people can go out and shoot 65 on the courses these guys play? A lot! Certainly a lot more than 150! But you know how many guys can shoot 68 when they’ve been on five planes in three days, can’t find their swing and don’t know what their schedule looks like past March? A lot fewer than the first number.

It’s the same thing in my job. Anybody can write one great article or blog post. But can you do it every day for 10 years? Can you do it when you don’t really want to or when the kids are hollering or when your editor needs it by 8:30 and you have nothing in the tank?

It’s a different deal in those situations, which is true for all of us in all of our jobs. I think one-off high performances are overrated and showing up to formulate a high floor of performance when you don’t have the goods is incredibly underrated.

4. I received a few letters to the editor this week. Here’s one of them from Brett Hudson, who is a professor at Alabama.

He wrote me about what I wrote on JT and what it means to have equity in a business a few newsletters ago.

Here’s part of what I wrote …

Here’s Brett, agreeing with me broadly but also noting that JT might be an outlier and is probably not the best test case here …

My take on your take on JT: I agree with your general premise that players getting equity through the SSG deal should make them more likely to participate in "the game" in other ways that ultimately grows the value of the Tour and thus their own net worth. Or at the very least have people around them that tell them they should do this because it makes them more money.

JT feels like a special circumstance for me, as he has very clearly not been motivated by money. You probably remember better than I do that sick quote he had on No Laying Up super early in his career where Soly asked him about his first big check on tour and he more or less said "I know I'm gonna make a lot of money playing golf, I was more excited about playing well and being in the hunt."

As a golf fan, I hope the equity makes them do the things we think the equity will make them do in terms of creating a true entertainment product. If a certain someone is so pissed off about money that they launch a hat protest during the Ryder Cup, I'm guessing other players would jump at the chance to grow their own net worth if it means doing something entertaining or fun on the side — there's already a big precedent for that with all of the sponsor events they go to for the millions from Titleist and Taylormade and such. I just think JT seems to be in the minority in that money is far lower on his list of motivators than it seems to be for many of his fellow Tour members.

And that kind of puts us in a weird spot as golf fans, right? In every other sport, we want the athletes to be ruthless competitors, gladiators in the colosseum motivated by nothing but the thrill of competition and victory, so we get the best show possible. JT fits that mold. But somehow in golf, we almost have to hope they care just as much about how much money they make so they will do the absolute bare minimum to create a semi-watchable product for the fan. It's a weird deal.

Truly.

Great email, Brett. Thank you for sending it! Definitely changed some of my thinking on it.

5. Here’s another letter to the editor from … well it’s from my buddy David Hill, who is in charge of our ad sales and some business operations stuff at Normal Sport.

One thing I have been thinking a lot about lately that I thought you would tie into the TV ratings hype surrounding LIV: In Same As Ever, Morgan Housel talks about how throughout history innovation/disruption goes widely unnoticed until all of the sudden its a part of normal human life and people can't imagine living without it.

Everyone loves dogging on LIV's TV ratings, but it’s kinda silly when I think about it. They're still very much in their infancy and it takes time to build something that becomes a normal part of people's lives.

I remember when I first heard of Uber and Airbnb. They were creepy and not something I ever imagined using for myself. Now I can't even imagine seeing a yellow taxi driving through Richardson ... much less picking up my phone and calling one to get them to pick me up and drive me to the airport.

6. I was watching Riv last week, and they showed a Rory montage, and this was a snapshot from one of the clips. It really struck me. I rewound it and watched it a few times.

A lot has changed since then. Most obviously regarding this screenshot, Rory’s in Nike now and Tiger is not. But a lot of other stuff, too.

However, one thing is still the same.

At the end of the day, we’re all just boys (or girls) with dreams of doing something we think is special. Most of the time, those dreams don’t come true. Sometimes they do. What matters is not which bucket you fall into. What matters is what you do with what you get and who you become after that.

It can be easy to either mail it in after touching your dream or, conversely, hit eject when it fades away. What’s much tougher is embracing with gratitude the hand you’re dealt and delighting in life no matter the outcome. That’s possible, though, no matter the bucket. Even if it sometimes doesn’t feel that way.

7. I tweeted this question a few weeks ago: “If you could burn pro golf down and reconstitute it from scratch, what would it look like (in one tweet). The most amusing response I got was from @dunta90: “An open meritocracy free of greedy, morally absent players and a guy wanting to use our spot for political leverage. That’d be a good start.”

It’s the that’d be a good start that does it for me.

8. Apropos of nothing, here’s one I’ve been holding on to: It irritates (and borderline infuriates) me when Max Homa is referred to as a “social media darling.” It’s just such a “oh I saw three funny tweets from him one time” take and somehow both misses what he actually does on Twitter now (and how he uses it) and also the fact that, you know, HE’S THE NO. 8 GOLFER IN THE WORLD!

9. Speaking of the OWGR, I think I’m done with it. I’ve said this elsewhere, but it’s simply not useful to me any longer. I don’t know that this means the OWGR should capitulate to LIV, but LIV’s existence has rendered it useless as a tool to people like me. I need to know who’s playing the best golf in the present moment, and Data Golf (among other places) is a far more useful place to determine that than the OWGR. Maybe it always was.

10. I started working on this a bit last year with thegolfrecord.com — where we got every Masters score ever loaded into a database — but it remains insane to me that there’s not a Baseball Reference-like site but for golf. Insane!

There’s nowhere to view active OWGR wins leaders or winning percentage through X number of events or how many times 63 or better has been shot at Riviera. That’s wild!

I should be able to look the following numbers up — but in golf — for Brooks Koepka like I can for Bryce Harper in baseball.

11. I got an early copy of Jon Sherman’s new book — Foundations of Winning Golf — and it is excellent. I’ll have a longer review after I’m done, but his Four Foundations book reshaped the way I think about my own game, and I think his new one will as well.

12. Four of the 102 best rounds in the last 20 years (since 2004) have happened so far this year. That’s wild! You would expect ~5 a year for that amount of time, and we've already had four by the middle of February!

13. I finished the book Same As Ever this week, which means you only have to hear about it for the next three months. One quote I’ll be thinking about as it relates to golf (and one that could be its own book about golf) …

A question for you: What are the three to twelve principles that govern this field?

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