Hello friends,
Last night I — a 41-year-old man with a mortgage, four kids and an elite flag football offensive playbook — had a dream about the Ryder Cup. Do I remember what happened? No. Is this normal behavior? No (although also not the first time it’s happened). All I remember is waking up in a panic over the fact that I desperately wanted to remember what took place and what I learned so I could relay it to the U.S. team for future Cups.
Normal stuff.
🆘
Name drops today: Joel Beall, Greg Norman, the NFL, Keith Mitchell and Tiger Woods.
Today’s newsletter is presented by OGIO.
While we don’t necessarily recommend you letting your kids go as OGIO bags for Halloween this year, we are also not formally or officially against it. And on the (really) off chance they choose to do so, we do have some inspiration for you.
Jason dreamed up these OGIO bags sprouting arms and holding other bags, which tbh, is perfect for a kids’ Halloween costume.
Strange, bizarre costume for neighborhood photo: ✅
Ability to hold a bag for candy dump: ✅
Perfect spot to hide adult bevvies: ✅
Here are our unofficial recs.
Costume: Alpha mid travel cover
Candy bag: Alpha venture backpack
Bevvies: Renegade vault or Renegade go bag
And now — with absolutely no segue whatsoever — onto the news.
Greg Norman was a horrible commissioner of LIV Golf. He thumped his chest after achieving next to nothing, disparaged everyone and everything he looked at and left LIV in a brutal spot as he exited stage left while everyone else cleaned up the very expensive mess that was made under his watch.
He did, however, accomplish the funniest possible feat in the midst of all of this. And I presume it was the exact opposite of what he intended to do. Because of the ill-conceived and ridiculous golf league that he helped birth, the PGA Tour got put into such a corner that it was forced to hire a world class executive to drag its own organization out of the stone age and into the modern era.
In attempting to upend the entire world of golf by first weakening the PGA Tour, Greg Norman’s business exploits seemed to do the opposite by emboldening the Tour into the best position it has ever been in with its future in the hands of someone (Brian Rolapp) who seems to be fully ready to not only crush the league that tried to upend his but also to push the Tour into places it has never been.
Brian Rolapp was probably going to become the next commissioner of the NFL someday. The next leader of the most powerful sports league in the world. A position that commands not only a salary that is greater than the on-field earnings of all but 12 athletes on the planet but also commands the attention of basically every powerful human in the United States. I can’t think of many phone calls outside of one from the literal president of the country that would elicit more attention than the commissioner of the NFL calling you up.
And then he left.
Not only did he leave, but he left to [checks notes] help run the Baycurrent Classic and Isco Championship. Why?
“To be honest, I was bored,” Rolapp told Joel Beall recently.
To be clear, it’s not as if Rolapp is ordering the big platter of nugs from CFA to save a few bucks on individual meals for his family. The Tour’s top position pays plenty, and he still has power — arguably more of it than he did when he was second in command at the National Football League.
And that’s not really the point anyway.
The point I’m making here is that if not for LIV, the PGA Tour likely would have continued doing what it was doing forever. There would have been tweaks here and there, but I suspect Jay Monahan would have continued at the helm for as long as he wanted as the Tour tried to ride the Tiger wave for as long as humanly possible.
This was its trajectory.
But then Norman started screaming (literally screaming) about global golf, and the oft-unimaginative and unchallenged PGA Tour started to teeter. Monahan was lost. The de facto commissioner was a player whose home tour was in Europe, and though I’m not sure the walls were never closing in, it became clear that the Tour had some capital-p Problems. And not necessarily just because of the threat of LIV …
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The way Kyle has been able to mold a silly Twitter joke (normal sport) into a must-read newsletter on the weekly happenings in our silly game gives a great look into why he's one of the smartest people in golf.
Kyle is a perfect curator of the necessary moments of levity that accent a sport that will drive most of us insane.
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.
It's a treasure trove of the important, the seemingly important, and — importantly! — the unimportant stuff. It's an asset in my inbox.
Kyle's content is a product of a sick sense of humour, a clear passion for golf and unquestionable dedication to hard work. That's not normal!
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.
Few make the sport feel as fun and as thought provoking.
Normal Sport is exploratory, sometimes emotional, always entertaining. It also has one of my favorite writers in the biz at its foundation.
Kyle sees golf in a way that no one else does—and we're all fortunate to get to share in that view through Normal Sport!
Kyle is the best columnist in sports. That he has channeled those talents through strokes gained and Spieth memes is a blessing to golf.
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.
Kyle approaches coverage of the game with both conviction and curiosity
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