Issue No. 258 | September 28, 2025 | Read Online
A thank you to Meridian Putters for sending us to New York for boots on the ground coverage this week!
FARMINGDALE, N.Y. — Golf has a funny way of bring out both our very best and our very worst. The moments we’re most proud of and the ones that we would love to have back. The ones that make us laugh and the ones that make us cringe.
Nowhere is this more true than at the Ryder Cup.
From the Francesco Molinari-Ted Scott dustup (an incredible sentence!) to the Cam Young theater on Sunday that got the dominoes started. From a beer being thrown at Erica McIlroy on Saturday to her husband crying in front of his captain on Sunday.
From all the F yous Rory delivered on Friday and Saturday to this on Sunday night.
Twitter tweet
From Bryson hollering at a cameraman to JT, eyes red, explaining what trying to scale the mountain was like on Sunday. It’s just three days, but it encapsulates the entirety of the golf experience. The good, the bad, the full roller coaster of emotion.
It always discloses itself here at this event, whether you intended for it to or not.
Golf, as always — and especially on this week — reminds us that it is the most human game in the world.
Thank you to Precision Pro for sponsoring today’s newsletter. Their Titan Series rangefinders (our favorite) are known for their durability and dominate-every-approach mission.
For the Europeans this week, Tommy embodied this mantra. He led all players with 5.64 strokes gained on approach.
On the American side, Cam Young led everyone at 3.84 in his Ryder Cup debut.
Like this exercise, Precision Pro has a solid option for both sides, and you still have time to enter their Team USA vs. Team Europe giveaway, which closes tonight at midnight.
Run, don’t walk, to grab yours.
OK, now onto the news.
We will be dissecting and breaking down this event and this result for the next few weeks, but here are 10 thoughts I had on Sunday from Bethpage Black.
1. The singular moment I’ll remember from this Ryder Cup was at the European press conference on Sunday night.
Luke Donald — honestly, one of the great speakers in recent golf history — had a moment of poignancy and clarity about what his leader meant to this team, and what these teams mean to them all.
You can watch the entire thing right here. It’s amazing.
Ryder Cup weeks are the best weeks of our lives. We talk about this all the time. Those individual accolades are fun. Individually, we want to achieve as much as we can. Rory has achieved so much in the game. His place in history is set.
But I think those weeks we spend together are the ones we remember the most and the ones we cherish the most because of the time we get to spend with each other.
Luke Donald
At this point — right there in front of Donald — Rory was jabbing his fingers into his eyes and flicking away tears. At the end of the best (and in some ways worst and weirdest) year of his extraordinary golf life, it seemed to be hitting him all at once.
That's a big part of my captaincy is to create an environment where these guys are having the best weeks of their lives, honestly. We'll always remember this.
We'll always go down in history.
We talk about all the people that came before us that paved the way for us. Now future generations will talk about this team tonight and what they did and how they were able to overcome one of the toughest environments in all of sport.
And that is inspiring to me and that's what Rory gets and all these other 11 guys get, as well.
Luke Donald
Imagine captaining against that.
Imagine facing a team that not only preaches that but believes it. If Europe’s players are playing with any form at all, it’s so difficult to beat them because of how united they are, how much of a team they put forth. Especially with Donald at the helm.
2. I think you could argue that nobody in the last 25 years has had their golf legacy changed more by the Ryder Cup than Luke Donald.
Four years ago, he was a formerly terrific player who had never won a major but played well in some Ryder Cups and had been on four different winning teams.
Now? He’s a European legend. He must have the biggest shadow in the history of European golf of anybody who has never won a major (OK, maybe Monty … but other than that).
Now? Jon Rahm and Co. were pounding the dais here at Bethpage demanding two more years from somebody who has a chance to win three consecutive Ryder Cups.
I don’t know if he’ll do it. I don’t know if he should do it, but I do know that his place in golf history has shifted more than anyone else other than maybe Scottie and Rory over the last four years.
3. The resilience the U.S. team showed on Sunday was both extraordinary and made some of the early-week decisions all the more frustrating. Imagine telling yourself on Monday that Europe would win one (ONE!) singles match on Sunday and somewhat comfortably take home the Ryder Cup. That is insane! But it happened.
The 1-2-3 finish from Cam Young (birdie on 18 to win), JT (birdie on 18 to win) and Bryson (par on 18 to tie after being 5 down thru 7) was unbelievable.
Normally that Sunday Window of Optimism stays open for about 30 minutes before the leading team slams it shut. This time around, air just kept howling through as it opened wider and wider and made you think if the truly impossible was in play.
[Jason here] I was planning on making illustrations based on “I BELIEVE THAT WE WILL WIN̶LT and ‘TRY HARDER’ or a Wizard of Oz style house falling on a pair of star spangled Footjoys, but the boys had other plans for me.
4. Shane Lowry making the winning (retaining … normal sport) putt on Sunday was awesome. Name somebody on that side that putt would have meant more to. You can’t.
I lost it a little bit when he walked off the green right into the arms of a father who was probably at least a little bit in disbelief that his boy had just made a Ryder Cup-winning (retaining) putt. I’m not sure why that moment got me, but I was overcome by what it meant to him, how it ended the week and what he said in the aftermath.
This is the best team in the world. I don't care what anyone says. This is the best tournament in the world. This is the only thing I want to do for the rest of my life.
Shane Lowry
[Jason here] KP wasn’t the only one misty-eyed at Bethpage. This was my first live event making illustrations. What an event to start with. I spent a lot of my time taking visual notes in my sketchbook [that you’ve been seeing here] squeezed between people I’ve seen on TV/the internet but never imagined a situation where we would cross paths. It all felt much more normal than I could have guessed.
The moments I’ll take away from this week, and the ones that made me tear up, were the moments I spent around Scottie and Rory’s parents. It wasn’t the chit-chats about good shots, obnoxious fans, or how us Euros can’t handle the American sun, but it was the moments when I saw them quietly watching and rooting on their kids that got me.
Two of the greatest golfers of their generation battling it out on the biggest stage in golf and still their parents’ kiddos. What a dream and what a gift to witness it up close.
5. [Kyle back] I promise we’ll get to the American struggles and some of my frustrations at some point. Today is not the day for it given how good they were on Sunday.
But I did want to offer this preview.
When Scottie was asked after the event why he and Russ Henley switched from Russ hitting off the first tee on Friday to Scottie doing it on Saturday in foursomes, he said there was a discussion among their caddies that led to the switch.
When we got done on Friday night, Teddy [Scott] and Andy [Sanders] … they were sitting at the table and they had brought up the idea of us switching. The more they looked at it, we felt pretty strongly that would give us a better chance, and I think it did. Most of that was just the nature of how much the golf course changed.
Scottie Scheffler
This is … odd? Bizarre? Caddies are suggesting switching which holes their players are playing (the correct choice, by the way) when this should have been obvious to a captain and his advisors. It is emblematic of some much more troubling issues on the U.S. side (which, again, I promise we’ll get to).
To contrast that, I asked Luke Donald to discuss some of the ways their group cares about the details of this event and how it helped them play better golf.
He talked about … bed sheets and shampoo.
My job is literally to give these guys a better chance to win. It can be as simple as some very small things. I'll give you an example. At the hotel rooms this week, the doors to our hotel rooms had a big crack that let in light. We brought things that covered the light. We put different shampoos that had a better smell.
Rory: Le Labo if anyone is wondering. Really, really nice.
We changed the bedding because the beds weren't very good, and they just had sheets, and we created much nicer beds so guys could sleep. They could have more energy. Those are just little things. I'm going into some really small details.
Luke Donald
I don’t know if I believe changing the shampoo scent does anything about how you perform in the Ryder Cup, but I do know that the European players believe it, which is all that matters. And I believe that if on one side you have caddies coming up with the order players should hit and on the other side, your organization is taking care of the shampoo, that the latter is — all things being equal — going to come out ahead much more often than the former.
Spoiler: Europe has won 11 of 15 now.
But we’ll get to the rest of that later on.
This post will continue below for Normal Club members and includes …
• Thoughts on Rory’s place in the pantheon.
• Why I like Keegan more than ever.
• And a bit on just how vile it was out here this week at Bethpage.
Welcome to the members-only portion of today’s newsletter. I hope you both enjoy it and find it to be valuable to your golf and/or personal life.
6. Rory will never be the most important European golfer of all time, but after this year, I think he’s probably the greatest European golfer who has ever lived. He walked off the slam and completed a two-year alley oop he threw himself from Rome to New York, which he proceeded to Vince-Carter-elbow-in-the-rim all over this U.S. team.
His 2024 ended with that crushing defeat to Bryson and an Open he ejected on. Then in 2025, he ripped off …
• Pebble early in the year
• His second Players in a playoff
• The most dramatic Slam imaginable
• The Irish Open with an eagle at the last
• A called shot away Ryder Cup win
He netted another 3.5 points this week to tie Phil at 21.5 for the seventh-most ever (since 1979). Only Sergio, Langer, Westy, Monty, Seve and Faldo are ahead of him.
And he just turned 36.
Not just the best of his generation, but one of the best in the history of the game. He was again the centerpiece on Sunday.
When Scottie came out of the tunnel to the first tee, the cheers weren’t nearly as loud as the boos were when Rory waltzed in behind him. Think about that. Scottie is going to be one of the 15 best players of all time, in the middle of his prime on U.S. soil.
And Rory draws more attention.
Europe is defined by big team, little me, but Rory is the one they’re looking to when things get tense. He’s the one everyone wants to play with. The one they listen to. The one whose voice carries the most weight. And he went and did the thing he promised he was going to do in Rome.
A joy to watch him and a tremendous honor to cover his career.
One additional note here: Europe went for it all on Saturday afternoon by riding their horses, and it almost caught up to them. Rory, Rahm and Tommy all lost their singles matches after trying to play all five this week. They had (barely) built up a big enough lead, but I think one thing to keep an eye on in future Ryder Cups is whether guys keep going five in this era where everything is so intense.
7. Justin Rose. A lion and a king in that room. It makes no sense. He is 44 years old and out there just abusing the best players in the world. Rose finished third in SG this week behind only Tommy and Cam Young. These are just about the best 24 best players in the world, and Rose shone even among them.
When he was asked on Sunday evening how he is able to summon this kind of greatness even at his age, he pounded his chest and pointed at the team.
“The badge and the boys,” he hollered. “The badge and the boys!”
Nobody is cornier. Nobody is goofier. Nobody is more of a dad in either of these rooms than Justin Rose. But the thing I’ll say about him — the credit I give him — is that he’s willing to put himself out there, willing to look foolish for the sake of the team and the event and the win. You can roll your eyes at it all you want, and he’ll just flash five of those championship-winning badges back at you.
Justin Rose-bot at the 2090 Ryder Cup on Mars. You read it here first.
8. This tweet is pretty representative of why I started this dumb business.
Well, yes technically the U.S. won just as many points, but the Norwegian who is obsessed with UFOs can’t move his neck so … well the U.S. captain, yeah he has to put a name in an envelope. He’s only captain because of this Netflix thing and because this guy named Seth used to be at Deutsche Bank but then he moved over to the PGA … which is not the PGA of America, which runs this event.
Anyway, we should probably just talk football.
9. I like Keegan more now than I ever have before. I think the system around him is faulty and a bit broken and I think the way the pairings were managed was a bit off, but as far as Keegan as a person? I was in before the matches, and I’m in after the matches. He took full responsibility and blame for what went wrong and for the U.S. loss.
He made the most of what I thought at the time was actually a cool decision by Seth Waugh to go in a unique direction with the captaincy but in retrospect probably wasn’t the best call given the lack of U.S. infrastructure and the demands on a captain’s time and energy.
Here was Donald on Sunday.
It's just taking the time and having the care that you want to do everything you can to kind of give these guys the best opportunity. You want create an environment where they can succeed. These are 12 amazing players, we know that. You're just trying to, again, put them in a position where they feel comfortable.
Luke Donald
That’s such a tough thing to do when you’re also still playing as consistently as Keegan. And while I will probably remember this as a bit of a failed captaincy, I don’t pin the majority of that on Keegan. It goes a lot deeper than that (come back later in the week!).
10. The word that ran through the media center over the weekend about the fan behavior, which was incredibly vile and unrelenting was sadness. Just sadness over the fact that this is what a sporting event in 2025 looks like. Sadness over Rory and Erica hugging behind 18 on Saturday, near tears over some of what was said. Sadness over the fact that everybody saw this coming and it happened anyway.
Sadness over this.
All of it was awful. Rory addressed it on Sunday, and it was spot on.
I don't think we should ever accept that in golf. I think golf should be held to a higher standard than what was seen out there this week. Golf has the ability to you unite people. Golf teaches you very good life lessons. It teaches you etiquette. It teaches you how to play by the rules. It teaches you how to respect people.
Sometimes this week we didn't see that. So no, this should not be what is acceptable in the Ryder Cup. But you know, we will be making sure to say to our fans in Ireland in 2027 that what happened here this week is not acceptable, and for me, it's … come and support your home team. Come and support your team.
I think if I was an American, I would be annoyed that people -- I didn't hear a lot of shouts for Scottie today, but I heard a lot of shouts against me.
It's like, support your players. That's the thing.
Rory McIlroy
11. We’ll end here … for now.
I could not be more grateful for the opportunity to write down all these thoughts and ideas I have about this dumb game and send them all to you, our readers and our supporters. To end the first year of this business with Jason flying over from Amsterdam to take on a monstrous event was a professional thrill.
And while that was difficult at times this week, I just want you to know how much I appreciate you making this job possible for me and for Jason. In a week where money was talked about a lot, we have discussed often how we only care about making enough to support our families and continue doing exactly what we are doing.
Thank you for making that possible. It remains a joy to press publish.
Thank you also for reading our handcrafted, algorithm-free newsletter about golf. We put everything we have into every newsletter we write, which is why they are frequently 3,333 words long like this one.
While we do use digital tools that help us find information, everything you read and consumed was created from scratch by two humans who are absolutely obsessed with the game. If you ever want to support our business, you can buy merch here.
Issue No. 258 | September 28, 2025 | Read Online
A thank you to Meridian Putters for sending us to New York for boots on the ground coverage this week!
FARMINGDALE, N.Y. — Golf has a funny way of bring out both our very best and our very worst. The moments we’re most proud of and the ones that we would love to have back. The ones that make us laugh and the ones that make us cringe.
Nowhere is this more true than at the Ryder Cup.
From the Francesco Molinari-Ted Scott dustup (an incredible sentence!) to the Cam Young theater on Sunday that got the dominoes started. From a beer being thrown at Erica McIlroy on Saturday to her husband crying in front of his captain on Sunday.
From all the F yous Rory delivered on Friday and Saturday to this on Sunday night.
Twitter tweet
From Bryson hollering at a cameraman to JT, eyes red, explaining what trying to scale the mountain was like on Sunday. It’s just three days, but it encapsulates the entirety of the golf experience. The good, the bad, the full roller coaster of emotion.
It always discloses itself here at this event, whether you intended for it to or not.
Golf, as always — and especially on this week — reminds us that it is the most human game in the world.
Thank you to Precision Pro for sponsoring today’s newsletter. Their Titan Series rangefinders (our favorite) are known for their durability and dominate-every-approach mission.
For the Europeans this week, Tommy embodied this mantra. He led all players with 5.64 strokes gained on approach.
On the American side, Cam Young led everyone at 3.84 in his Ryder Cup debut.
Like this exercise, Precision Pro has a solid option for both sides, and you still have time to enter their Team USA vs. Team Europe giveaway, which closes tonight at midnight.
Run, don’t walk, to grab yours.
OK, now onto the news.
We will be dissecting and breaking down this event and this result for the next few weeks, but here are 10 thoughts I had on Sunday from Bethpage Black.
1. The singular moment I’ll remember from this Ryder Cup was at the European press conference on Sunday night.
Luke Donald — honestly, one of the great speakers in recent golf history — had a moment of poignancy and clarity about what his leader meant to this team, and what these teams mean to them all.
You can watch the entire thing right here. It’s amazing.
Ryder Cup weeks are the best weeks of our lives. We talk about this all the time. Those individual accolades are fun. Individually, we want to achieve as much as we can. Rory has achieved so much in the game. His place in history is set.
But I think those weeks we spend together are the ones we remember the most and the ones we cherish the most because of the time we get to spend with each other.
Luke Donald
At this point — right there in front of Donald — Rory was jabbing his fingers into his eyes and flicking away tears. At the end of the best (and in some ways worst and weirdest) year of his extraordinary golf life, it seemed to be hitting him all at once.
That's a big part of my captaincy is to create an environment where these guys are having the best weeks of their lives, honestly. We'll always remember this.
We'll always go down in history.
We talk about all the people that came before us that paved the way for us. Now future generations will talk about this team tonight and what they did and how they were able to overcome one of the toughest environments in all of sport.
And that is inspiring to me and that's what Rory gets and all these other 11 guys get, as well.
Luke Donald
Imagine captaining against that.
Imagine facing a team that not only preaches that but believes it. If Europe’s players are playing with any form at all, it’s so difficult to beat them because of how united they are, how much of a team they put forth. Especially with Donald at the helm.
2. I think you could argue that nobody in the last 25 years has had their golf legacy changed more by the Ryder Cup than Luke Donald.
Four years ago, he was a formerly terrific player who had never won a major but played well in some Ryder Cups and had been on four different winning teams.
Now? He’s a European legend. He must have the biggest shadow in the history of European golf of anybody who has never won a major (OK, maybe Monty … but other than that).
Now? Jon Rahm and Co. were pounding the dais here at Bethpage demanding two more years from somebody who has a chance to win three consecutive Ryder Cups.
I don’t know if he’ll do it. I don’t know if he should do it, but I do know that his place in golf history has shifted more than anyone else other than maybe Scottie and Rory over the last four years.
3. The resilience the U.S. team showed on Sunday was both extraordinary and made some of the early-week decisions all the more frustrating. Imagine telling yourself on Monday that Europe would win one (ONE!) singles match on Sunday and somewhat comfortably take home the Ryder Cup. That is insane! But it happened.
The 1-2-3 finish from Cam Young (birdie on 18 to win), JT (birdie on 18 to win) and Bryson (par on 18 to tie after being 5 down thru 7) was unbelievable.
Normally that Sunday Window of Optimism stays open for about 30 minutes before the leading team slams it shut. This time around, air just kept howling through as it opened wider and wider and made you think if the truly impossible was in play.
[Jason here] I was planning on making illustrations based on “I BELIEVE THAT WE WILL WIN̶LT and ‘TRY HARDER’ or a Wizard of Oz style house falling on a pair of star spangled Footjoys, but the boys had other plans for me.
4. Shane Lowry making the winning (retaining … normal sport) putt on Sunday was awesome. Name somebody on that side that putt would have meant more to. You can’t.
I lost it a little bit when he walked off the green right into the arms of a father who was probably at least a little bit in disbelief that his boy had just made a Ryder Cup-winning (retaining) putt. I’m not sure why that moment got me, but I was overcome by what it meant to him, how it ended the week and what he said in the aftermath.
This is the best team in the world. I don't care what anyone says. This is the best tournament in the world. This is the only thing I want to do for the rest of my life.
Shane Lowry
[Jason here] KP wasn’t the only one misty-eyed at Bethpage. This was my first live event making illustrations. What an event to start with. I spent a lot of my time taking visual notes in my sketchbook [that you’ve been seeing here] squeezed between people I’ve seen on TV/the internet but never imagined a situation where we would cross paths. It all felt much more normal than I could have guessed.
The moments I’ll take away from this week, and the ones that made me tear up, were the moments I spent around Scottie and Rory’s parents. It wasn’t the chit-chats about good shots, obnoxious fans, or how us Euros can’t handle the American sun, but it was the moments when I saw them quietly watching and rooting on their kids that got me.
Two of the greatest golfers of their generation battling it out on the biggest stage in golf and still their parents’ kiddos. What a dream and what a gift to witness it up close.
5. [Kyle back] I promise we’ll get to the American struggles and some of my frustrations at some point. Today is not the day for it given how good they were on Sunday.
But I did want to offer this preview.
When Scottie was asked after the event why he and Russ Henley switched from Russ hitting off the first tee on Friday to Scottie doing it on Saturday in foursomes, he said there was a discussion among their caddies that led to the switch.
When we got done on Friday night, Teddy [Scott] and Andy [Sanders] … they were sitting at the table and they had brought up the idea of us switching. The more they looked at it, we felt pretty strongly that would give us a better chance, and I think it did. Most of that was just the nature of how much the golf course changed.
Scottie Scheffler
This is … odd? Bizarre? Caddies are suggesting switching which holes their players are playing (the correct choice, by the way) when this should have been obvious to a captain and his advisors. It is emblematic of some much more troubling issues on the U.S. side (which, again, I promise we’ll get to).
To contrast that, I asked Luke Donald to discuss some of the ways their group cares about the details of this event and how it helped them play better golf.
He talked about … bed sheets and shampoo.
My job is literally to give these guys a better chance to win. It can be as simple as some very small things. I'll give you an example. At the hotel rooms this week, the doors to our hotel rooms had a big crack that let in light. We brought things that covered the light. We put different shampoos that had a better smell.
Rory: Le Labo if anyone is wondering. Really, really nice.
We changed the bedding because the beds weren't very good, and they just had sheets, and we created much nicer beds so guys could sleep. They could have more energy. Those are just little things. I'm going into some really small details.
Luke Donald
I don’t know if I believe changing the shampoo scent does anything about how you perform in the Ryder Cup, but I do know that the European players believe it, which is all that matters. And I believe that if on one side you have caddies coming up with the order players should hit and on the other side, your organization is taking care of the shampoo, that the latter is — all things being equal — going to come out ahead much more often than the former.
Spoiler: Europe has won 11 of 15 now.
But we’ll get to the rest of that later on.
This post will continue below for Normal Club members and includes …
• Thoughts on Rory’s place in the pantheon.
• Why I like Keegan more than ever.
• And a bit on just how vile it was out here this week at Bethpage.
Normal Sport is supported by exactly 1,005 (!!!!) crazed individuals. By becoming a member, you will receive the following …
• A vote for trusted, independent media.
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