Greetings!
Given that it is Wimbledon championship weekend, there are two World Cup games today, Rory leads the Scottish Open and of course the ISCO Championship is thumping over in Louisville, I promise — no really! — to keep this newsletter short. Just a couple of takes and (after the jump) an announcement about some new gear.
Also, tomorrow is the last day to win our four-night OMNI giveaway.
Name drops today: The Morris family, Jude Bellingham, Christian Pulisic, Matt Rhule, Taylor Swift and Aaron Rai (very normal stuff).
Today’s newsletter is presented by our friends at Garmin.
The start of Coffee Golf™ in Europe always reminds us of the historic nature of the game there and the relative infancy of it over here (in the States). To wit … the first documented mention of golf in Scotland was in the 1450s.
That’s … three hundred years (nearly two Bryson lifetimes!) before the U.S. even became a country.
In light of that, it’s interesting to consider what the first version of Garmin’s S70 watch (we’re gonna call it the S1) may have looked like back in the 1400s or the 1600s or whenever the beta version was released.
Perhaps … like this?
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s where Garmin got their inspo for the S70 edition. As an aside: Can you imagine anyone from the Morris family feeling the urgency to track how many steps they took in a day? Alas, the wells in town have run dry and half the sheep have cholera, but I hit my daily goal of 10,000!
Anyway, we had fun envisioning the evolution of the Garmin S70 watch in light of the Tour’s return to Scotland and England. It’s a piece of tech I’ve been wearing for almost two years and one that is among my favorites when it comes to playing golf.
And now, onto the news.
1. The Open starts in less than a week, and I thought it would be a good time to take a look at the 2026 Best Aggregate Major Player Who Receives Absolutely Nothing Except a Hat Tip From a Very Niche Golf Newsletter Operator Award. One of my favorites. Here are the candidates going into next week at Birkdale. Remember: To qualify, you have to make the cut at every event (actual major winners in bold).
Scottie: -13
Burns: -12
Rose: -11
Rory: -10
Xander: -10
Ludvig: -5
Morikawa: -3
Rai: -2
Cam: -2
Fitz: -2
JT: E
It’s weird to see Rory at the top of this list but also in bold. He used to be in the top three every year and surrounded by bold but never highlighted with it.
Other thoughts.
• As co-host Hayden pointed out in our pod on Thursday, there is a lot of consternation about someone (Scottie) who has been the best overall major player of 2026. More on him after the jump.
• Burns has changed how I think about him maybe more than anyone else this year (probably over the last two). He’s become a really solid major championship player.
Alas, he won’t top this list as he’s a WD for The Open (baby). As first reported by Gabby in the Times.
• The world: Man, Rose seems close.
Spieth: No, I am close.
Me: Both wrong, Ludvig is close.
Similar to the discourse about Christian Pulisic, the discourse around Ludvig has gone too far the other way. Not a closer. Not clutch. Show me something etc. Some of those statements aren’t necessarily wrong, they just over-torque reality.
Here’s reality … Ludvig has been the worst putter among the best ball strikers at the first three majors. Look at this! It’s Scottie lapping the planet out in front in the ball striking, and then Ludvig dunking on Xander, Rose and Cam Young. That’s crazy!
And yeah, I included exactly eight for the reason you think. It gets even wilder when you flip it to SG tee to green. Maybe the beautiful boy actually is close.
Just not as close as Ludvig.
2. For someone who feeds his family based on how much other people read, this Atlantic article entitled The End of Reading was sobering. Of course people have been predicting the end of reading since reading began. But there were some statistics in the article that had me reeling. Here are three.
• Americans who read for pleasure: 28 percent in 2004, 16 percent in 2023.
• In a study of 236K American adults, only 2 percent read to a child on a given day.
• 13 year olds who say they rarely/never read for fun: 8 percent in 1984, 29 percent in 2025.
Seems bad!
And while I think some of these numbers are a bit manipulated to prove a point (i.e. how many of those 236K adults have a kid who is at an age that they would be read to?), it does have me questioning my choice to be one of a couple of golf outlets that is purposefully more focused on reading and writing than audio and video.
A real analysis of this article could be a whole other thing — and I promised today’s newsletter would be short — but I do think this idea also presents an opportunity.
(I know all of this is self-serving!)
But the people I know who still love reading and writing really love reading and writing. So yes, it’s an increasingly smaller audience, and many outlets (and sponsors) are running the other way toward audio and video. But I think the “we still read” crowd is also a more obsessed one that we can keep writing and drawing for. Maybe think should be replaced by hope. But either way, it’s a bet I want to make.
This post will continue below for Normal Club members (all 1,056 of them) and includes notes on new gear, a look at Scottie’s crazy streak and some fun World Cup comps (including, yes, Rickie and Neymar).
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I’ve always enjoyed your love for golf. So often I see favoritism showed to golfers in the social media world, but I enjoy reading you telling a situation how it is regardless of the person.
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Kyle is one of the best in the golf world at finding and synthesizing the absurd, the thoughtful and the fun things that make being a golf fan worthwhile.
It's a treasure trove of the important, the seemingly important, and — importantly! — the unimportant stuff. It's an asset in my inbox.
There’s been no one else in golf that has tickled my funny bone as often as Kyle Porter does. He’s been instrumental in ushering in a new era of golf coverage and it’s been a pleasure to be along for the ride in that.
Kyle is the best columnist in sports. That he has channeled those talents through strokes gained and Spieth memes is a blessing to golf.
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