Do You Want to go to St. Andrews?

Normal Moment(s)

All very routine sports stuff.

1. Switch Hitting

Adam Schenk had to turn his club over at the end of the Valspar last weekend to get his ball back in play.

Imagine Mike Trout squaring off vs. Shohei Ohtani on Tuesday night except Trout, who does not hit left-handed, had to hit left-handed because there’s a tree in the other batter’s box.

What an insane, wonderful sport.

2. 🐿️ 🐿️ 🐿️

Caddies jogging in the wake of squirrels always makes me chuckle, especially when they’re dodging paint cans used as tee markers (see below). This actually happens in other sports as well, but it is often treated as a Halley’s Comet event. SportsCenter will do 20 minutes on a chipmunk that invades Wrigley.

In golf? I would imagine at least one caddie chases one animal at pretty much every single tournament. Sometimes that’s squirrels like this one, sometimes it’s giraffes.

Also, if this is a safe place, my broader squirrels take is that they’re disgusting animals that have somehow become normalized because …? We see them at parks, on streets and in our front yards and the general consensus is oh what a cute animal. [Michael Scott meme] No! No! They are rats with furrier tails! Vermin!

Let’s move on.

Legal Drops

A look at what’s cooking.

📊 The Golf Record: The data is ready, and we’re loading it up this week. One thing I’m curious about is what kind of stats — specifically related to the Masters — you want to be able to query.

One I thought of the other day: Jack Nicklaus is 12th all time in scoring average at ANGC. The catch is that he’s played 163 (!) rounds and his scoring average has undoubtedly diminished over time. There should be a way to query who has the best score through their first 50 rounds or 75 rounds or whatever. This is part of what our site is aiming to solve.

If you want to sign up to receive updates on our progress or if you’re interested in what we’re building, sign up below. Drops: End of March

Idea of the Week

I’m not totally sure whether my take is that Michael Greller, after caddying for Spieth for nearly a decade, should become a therapist or that he needs a therapist. Regardless, I think Greller is therapist-adjacent, which is fascinating especially in light of this exchange last week.

Greller is paid money to listen to the ramblings of someone addicted to doing things that deep down he knows are probably not great for him while trying as lovingly as possible to coax him back toward reality.

May we all have friends that are as good at doing this in our own lives as the best caddies on the PGA Tour are at doing it for their players.

One Thing I Loved

I come at golf from a pretty non-traditional background. I played baseball growing up, didn’t go to journalism school and never played the game competitively. This has its advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages, though, is the ability to look at golf through the lens of somebody who hasn’t grown up in the echo chamber of the game.

There are so many branches to the rollback debate. I’ve spoken with a lot of people who have made a lot of great points on both sides of the discussion. The tentacles that emerge from the crossroads of equipment, agronomy and championship golf are endless.

Howevah.

The entire discussion can be reduced to this question: Do you want to continue having Opens at St. Andrews?

That’s it.

Obviously that’s reductive and not inclusive of the other 10,000 questions and points, but if you want to boil it down to one thing, that’s the thing.

I’m not saying you should want that or that you shouldn’t want that. I’m saying that the answer to that question will lead you to your take on the golf ball.

Why?

St. Andrews is being massacred by the modern game. Scoring sometimes reflects this and sometimes does not reflect this, but if the trajectory we are currently on continues, having an Open at St. Andrews would be tantamount to having a U.S. Open at The Cradle. You can do it, certainly, but is that still championship-level golf?

Maybe you don’t care about St. Andrews. In fact, many of you don’t. And that is totally fine! Maybe history doesn’t matter to you. Maybe you’re fine with building 10,000-yard golf courses to replace the ANGCs and Winged Foots of the world. That’s not me, but maybe it’s you, and that’s OK. But let’s at least admit that our options are either to roll the ball back and keep the historic places or to keep the ball and start getting the excavators out.

One defense I’ve seen against rolling the ball back is that they haven’t raised the rim in basketball just because LeBron can out-leap John Havlicek, they haven’t lengthened football fields just because Josh Allen’s arm is twice as strong as Bart Starr’s arm. The miss here, though, is that almost every other sport has defenses that are evolving at the same rate as offenses. Golf? It’s kind of tough for land to evolve.

Fine, plant more trees, grow the rough, make greens 11 square feet. By the time you do all that, though, players will have gained the requisite distance to make those defenses inconsequential anyway.

Or.

Just keep rolling the ball back. Does this change the game? Maybe, but more than changing golf, I think it preserves the integrity of it.

We probably underrate the importance of history when it comes to golf, especially as it relates to the majors. Perhaps I’m simply scared of change or evolution, but I can’t help but think that having every U.S. Open at an Erin Hills would diminish the game as a whole.

Also got this, which was interesting, from a follower named Josh B: Random thought, but do you think this is going to unlock a whole new era of shotmaking off the tee? I could see Rahm or Rory just hitting low missles with no spin that on certain courses that just run out 80 yards.

One last thing here. I compared rollback to climate change, and this comment absolutely destroyed me.

Overheard on Twitter

With the release of GPT-4, four things just became more valuable. Your … voice, vibe, soul and story. Information wants to be free, but humans still want to be social. -Jay Clouse

Amen.

Media Diet

👉️ I go to Geoff Shackelford (among others) for any takes on equipment, golf courses, distance and the ball. We got all four with the USGA’s proposal last week, and Shack’s cheeky, amusing breakdown was good.

👉️ The Fried Egg’s recap of all the rollback news was equally good. If you’re sometimes confused by everything that’s going on with the golf ball right now (raises hand), this is a good place to start.

👉️ It amused me to think of Jay Monahan — feeling great after how the last year has gone and a strong Players week — surfing over to No Laying Up dot com and seeing that the player who has emboldened and empowered his league the most just said that he might play a reduced-flight ball in PGA Tour events because the only thing that matters to him is major wins and preparing for those weeks. Really good scoop by Soly and KVV, and buddy, this quote from Rory is what real power looks like.

👉️ Alan Shipnuck wrote over the weekend about LIV’s future and how it is trying to slow its burn rate and turn its product into something worth buying into (literally). I was particularly amused by the part that referenced franchises traveling with branding experts because, well, I think you know …

👉️ Will Bardwell outlined why the Tour should have an amnesty period in which it allows LIV players to return. Some pretty fascinating points.

👉️ KVV on the place where Danny Lee and Brendan Steele are kings.

👉️ Dylan Dethier examines what the Tour’s standings would look like if it used F1-like scoring.

👉️ Good Good is hosting a $100K golf tournament. No matter how you feel about Good Good or other creators like them, this is the future.

👉️ The Tyler and Bethany Toney (Dude Perfect) three-part series on I Am Second is excellent.

The Infirmary

True sicko behavior.

This is a leftover from Players week, but it absolutely slayed me. From The Refuge, NLU’s message board. If you understand any of this, you are part of the infirmary.

Bonus infirmary moment this week for me. I was texting a friend about a project we’re working on, and Jazz Janewattananond somehow got himself in the mix.

By the Numbies

17: From the “don’t let us get hot!” files, Jordan Spieth has gained strokes on approach shots in 17 of his last 18 rounds (technically one of them was 0.0). The blue line below is a top 25 iron player in the world, and he’s about to surge past it just in time to become the fourth four-time winner at ANGC.

Flagged

Quotes worth thinking about.

“Beyond the fact that it is a limitless arena for the full play of human nature, there is no sure accounting for golf’s fascination. Obviously yet mysteriously, it furnishes its devotees with an intense, many-sided, and abiding pleasure unlike that which any other form of recreation affords.” -Herbert Warren Wind

Is that any good? I swiped it from Geoff Shackelford’s new book, Golf Architecture for Normal People, and it’s quite a quote.

Obviously yet mysteriously on its own is in the phrases hall of fame. This is a thing that has made itself quite clear to me, and yet it it also a thing I am not sure I fully understand yet. The very best things in life, I think, are the most obvious and somehow, simultaneously, the most mysterious.

Meme of the Week

This screenshot of Adam Schenk at the end of the Valspar last weekend is perhaps as golf as a golf screenshot can possibly get. He needed 4 at the 72nd to get in a playoff, and this lie all but erased the opportunity, although [Jeter hat tip GIF] at his left-handed attempt to get it in the house (see above).

Alas, he made 5.

Golf would not be beautiful, of course, if there was no risk of it being cruel.

But seriously, how is this website free?

Love Your Work

Stealing this prompt from Matt here because I wanted to talk about it. If you’re a writer or a podcaster or a creator of any kind, one of the best ways you can think about your work is that you’re doing it for one person.

Literally have that person in mind and pretend like you’re making the content (article, tweet, podcast) for them. All of us have had the “this group chat I’m in is so funny, people should pay to get to read it” moment. Don’t lie, I know you’ve thought it. And that’s literally how you should think about creating in public, too. Write, talk to, draw for just one other person. In so many intentional (and probably unintentional) ways, this is what has made NLU, Fried Egg, Porath and so many others as successful as they’ve been.

Thanks, Phil

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KPMGR: 1. Scottie 1. Rahm | 3. Homa | 4. Day | 5. Cantlay | 6. Morikawa | 7. Rory | 8. Hatton | 9. Finau | 10. Spieth