Greetings!
A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled into the news that TBPN — which, you guys know I have a media crush on — bought a Super Bowl ad. They proceeded to put the logos of all of their sponsors as well as the companies of the folks they interviewed into that commercial (which is amazing).
One of the comments I saw on that particular piece of news was this from Sahil Bloom.
Fun as a competitive advantage.
All of this — talking about golf, watching grown men throw umbrellas at nets, $20 million in weekly rewards for doing fewer movements with metal sticks than other humans — all of it — is so so dumb.
Which is why we’re trying to lean into the silliness and have as much fun as possible by doing ridiculous things like supporting Shane Ryan’s rigamarole quest. What in the world is Shane Ryan’s Rigamarole quest? I’m glad you asked. You can see the ridiculousness right here, which Normal Sport is now somehow … sponsoring?
Shane is a friend, his quest is outrageous (even by Normal Sport standards), but it’s also quite fun, which is the entire point. Data Golf got involved in the festivities, too, and their analysis — that it’s going to take Shane 10+ years to go 5/5 in rigamarole — makes me feel like the money we paid for this sponsorship is the best money we have ever spent (or will ever spend).
Fun as a competitive advantage.
Let’s get to work.
Name drops today: Jordan Stolz’s dad, UFOs, Kawahi Leonard, the archbishop of San Francisco and Don Draper.
Today’s newsletter is sponsored by Seed Golf.
Seed has been a wonderful partner over the last year-plus.
But even more than that, they make a great product. Here’s how one recent customer wrote it (more eloquently than I could have).
Plays like a [manufacturer of a very famous golf ball] at a little more than half the cost. More importantly, I like the way it feels off my driver, irons and putter.
James S.
We hear this story time and time again from friends and in our own experience with Seed’s golf balls. When you're playing, the performance is what you think about and the price just feels like a massive bonus.
Also, we absolutely need to get Shane into a sleeve with Norman’s face on them after his ghastly performance with driver today. Get that Wilson that Gene Sarazen probably used out of here, Shane!
Anyway, check out Seed right here.
OK, now onto the news.
Alyssa Liu — a strange place to start a take about Jacob Bridgeman! — talked about something after winning gold that caught my attention. I don’t know enough about her story to verify how authentic this particular attitude is to her overall ethos, but as a standalone quote, it absolutely rules.
“I don’t need this,” she said, cupping the gold medal dangling around her neck. “But what I needed was a stage, and I got that. So I was all good, no matter what. If I fell on every jump, I would still be wearing this dress, so it’s all good.”
The Athletic
What I needed was a stage is all time.
What that stage does to us is so fascinating, often so telling. What you do in private, the worst ball 61s, the triple axels, the success — it says something about your gifts. The Stage? It so often — not always, but so often — says something about who you are (at least at that moment in time). Look no further than Rory at the 2011 Masters compared to the 2025 Masters. The Stage said something about who he was in 2011. It said something very different about who he was in 2025.
I’m far more interested in that idea than I am in who does or does not have the gifts.
Being gifted says very little about the person, which is the part I’m actually into.
The quad god (not my quad god but nevertheless) stood at center ice during the finale of the men’s figure skating competition, basically just needing to make a bogey at No. 12 to win easily. He hit it in the water twice. Maybe three times.
His commentary in the aftermath was instructive.
“All the traumatic moments of my life really just started flooding my head, and there were just so many negative thoughts that flooded in there,” Malinin said. “And I just did not handle it. People only realize the pressure and the nerves that actually happen on the inside. It was really just something that overwhelmed me,” he said. “I just felt like I had no control.”
The Athletic
What The Stage does to you is, to me, the most interesting thing in all of sports.
Which brings us back to Jacob Bridgeman and what he did at Riviera on Sunday. Limping to the finish line, willing himself to play the last three in 1 over to somehow hold off Rory and Co.
Here’s what he told Amanda after the dust settled on his first Tour win.
It was easy until I got to 16, and then it got really hard.
Jacob Bridgeman
That’s The Stage challenging you as a person.
I couldn’t even feel my hands on the last couple greens. I just hit the putt hoping it would get somewhere near the hole, and both of them I left a mile short.
I’m glad it’s done now.
Jacob Bridgeman
As Soly perfectly put it with a single meme, Bridgeman was bloodied and bruised coming home, but still the champion.
But bloodied and bruised and holding the stuffed animal trophy is kinda the reason we watch, right? What the stage and the spotlight does to humans is half (more than half!) the fun. I don’t know if Bridgeman, like Liu, needed this win or was indifferent to it. But I do know that I needed the stage to see what it did to him, what he’s all about.
If there was no stage, you’d have a bunch of Trackman heroes out there collecting medals and rising in the Data Golf rankings. It would be mind-numbingly boring. Thankfully, though, there is a stage, which is most of what draws us in to watch and care in the first place.
It’s once again time for me to start pumping my Masters stat of the day on Twitter.
Monday’s was as follows: Jack Nicklaus played his first Masters as an amateur in 1959, when he missed the cut (he wouldn’t miss another cut until 1994, which is insane and also a tangent).
In that first Masters Jack played, Jock Hutchison was in the field. Jock was born in 1884 in St. Andrews (naturally). Nicklaus’ last Masters came in 2005 when he played in a field that included Luke List, who was born in 1985. That’s 101 years after Jock.
Anyway, my trivia question today is what year Jock (not Jack) won at Augusta National.
First three to correctly respond will get a free copy of our Rory book.
1. I actually made a video of this one in a new little feature we’re trying out, but it’s worth dropping in here as well.
Ben Griffin threw his umbrella at his ball — second consecutive week this has happened by the way — to try and identify it before he got someone running a camera to do it for him. Normal stuff.
2. Somebody tagged me into this one about Olympic. It’s a dispensation from the archbishop of San Francisco that allows burgerdogs to be eaten at the turn on Fridays despite the requirement to abstain from meat on Fridays during Lent.
Normal sport.
This is a real thing, too.
Here’s SFGate.
Soon after [owner] Candy’s arrival, the rest of the golf world started to know about Hot Dog Bills, too. All because Lent threatened to shutter the stand for a day during a golf tournament in the 1950s.
“The Archbishop of San Francisco was a member out here, and he knew how popular the Burgerdogs were,” Candy says. “So there was a tournament going on during Lent, and, you know, you’re not supposed to eat meat on Fridays, so he granted a dispensation, which they posted all around the snack stands around the course that said: ‘Catholics may eat meat on Fridays.’”
SFGate
It somehow gets better!
The story and signs acknowledging the dispensation became the stuff of legend. At some point, one of the official dispensations was signed by Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Ben Hogan, Tony Lema and Gary Player.
SFGate
Amazing, amazing stuff.
3. Viktor Hovland is back at it. Up to his usual stuff.
We have normalized all of this too!
Here’s the question he got after R1 at Riviera.
Q: You're first right now in strokes gained tee to green. You mentioned trying to find a feel on the range. What do you feel like you maybe figured out these last few days?
Hovland: Well, I mean, you might have seen the band drill that I was messing around with now. It's still trying to serve the same purpose, but I feel like that actually made it easier for me to find something tangible that I could take out on the golf course. Trying to just get a little bit wider in the downswing, not trying to pull my arms as close to me.
That's what the floaties were for, trying to get some space in the downswing.
[pause]
[resume]
Hovland: It was just hard to feel that when I took the floaties away. But the band really, because it forces your body to push against the tension and then when you take it away, it's like wow, that's what it's supposed to feel like.
We're not quite all there yet even though this is a great round of golf, but that was a huge step in the right direction.
Q: With the floaties you're pushing in and the band you're pushing out?
Hovland: Exactly, yeah.
Exactly. Yeah.
Possibly related. Incredible stuff.
1. The Fried Egg Golf men’s pro golf survey is excellent and a throwback to something SI would have done (and did) back in the day.
Couple of quick takeaways after digging in a bit.
I was surprised Ludvig was a Tier 2 player. There are some Tier 3 guys I’d have ahead of him. SG isn’t everything, but since Jan. 1, 2023, he’s behind Henley and Hatton in overall SG (12th overall). He’s great, but I don’t think he’s Tier 2 great.
Bryson getting votes as overrated surprised me. If anything, I think he’s a bit underrated.
70 percent of respondents said Scottie would end with over 8.5 majors. Whew boy. That is a lot. He’s still going to have Rory’s career (or Brooks’ career) at the majors? I mean … maybe!
Also, these two anonymous answers from current or former players about how they would fix things were tremendous. I agree with both!
Roll back the ball 10%, shrink the driver head to 360cc max, max driver length of 44 inches, only 10 clubs in the bag, no tapping down spikemarks and imperfections.”
Fried Egg
One global tour with a unified points system. The Tour has elite players with 14-18 events outside of the majors. Have PGA Tour and DPWT developmental tours in each respective continent. Zero conditional categories. You're on the Tour or you aren't.
Fried Egg
Hell yes! Been clamoring for this for over a decade.
2. Shane Ryan remains — for my money — the best pure writer in golf. This sentence is somehow related to how he feels about Anthony Kim and LIV.
If Josef Stalin came back to life and won the Masters—truly, a nightmare scenario for Augusta—there would be a contingent that yelled at you on X for bringing up Stalin's political history at such a positive moment.
Shane Ryan
3. This answer from Mark Pope (yes, the Kentucky basketball coach) about how modern journalism should work is excellent. TL;DR you’re graded on clicks, but try not to give in to the short-term temptation of producing cheap headlines. Become a great storyteller. It’s much more difficult, but — like Andy said — far more enduring.
I also think there’s something he says at the end that is incredibly important …
In this space where facts can get skewed, it’s storytellers that have the power. But it comes with immense responsibility. If you can become a great, authentic, hard-hitting storyteller that is really searching for the truth — the greatness of stories is actually in the truth — rather than search for clicks, I think it will serve you well.
Mark Pope
The greatness of stories is actually in the truth, and so is the humor of stories. There’s a reason the phrase “it’s funny because it’s true” is a phrase. I think one thing I always try to get at — sometimes more successfully than other times — is asking questions, cutting through the BS and taking (sometimes nonsensical and amusing) angles at what is actually true (namely that golf is a dumb, dumb sport but that it’s OK to care so much about it).
It’s easy to forget this and important to remember.
Me every day reminding myself of this.
This stat is fascinating to me.
In a vacuum, it doesn’t say much, does it.
But when you dig in, you’re really only left with two options.
1. Scottie is roughly as good at scoring as Tiger, which makes him roughly as good at golf as Tiger even if he doesn’t win quite as much because other players have gotten better over time.
2. Scottie is not quite as good at scoring as Tiger because courses and technology have made scoring quite a bit easier (despite harder course setups), which means it's tougher to gain strokes on the field and separate from the pack. And yet ...
Scottie continues to separate from the pack over and over again (see SG column above) in an era where, if you believe No. 2, it’s seemingly tougher to do so.
If you see a third option here, I would love to hear it.
When wood beats metal.
Some absolute gems this week.
Porath is the 🐐 when it comes to stuff like this.
Deep in the sauce.
I’ll have more Olympics thoughts later in the week, but this was an awesome tweet in a sea of them on Sunday after the U.S. sneaked by Canada.
That one made me laugh. Also, this by Bob Harig on Rahm refusing to pay the Euro Tour fines and fulfill his tournament obligations is a good read. Technical and a bit nuanced but great if you want to get deep in the 2027 Ryder Cup weeds.
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