Greetings!
Happy low-key most intense day of the golf year with NCAA match play running throughout the day. I think today is representative of what LIV thought it was going to be. It never got there (or got close, really), but you can see why the aim was aspirational.
Name drops today: Andy Roddick, Donald Ross, Katie Miller (sure), Brett McCracken, Danny Go (sure), David Attenborough, and Blayne Barber.
Today’s newsletter is presented by Turtlebox.
[David Attenborough voice]
In bunkers all across the globe, eggs of the Original (Gen 3) that were laid at the start of the season are beginning to hatch.
Most hatchings happen at night. Now in the light of day the young Rangers are extremely vulnerable. Many (actually most) will be snatched up by golfers.
During their lifetimes these Rangers will inevitably be attached to golf carts, boats, thrown in water, mud and sand. And they will still be expected to hold a tune.
Which they will do, impeccably.
This season of hatchings is an annual pilgrimage. Out of every Original (Gen 3), many Rangers of all kinds of colors are born.
They are hunting for a home as much as their homes are hunting for them. Don’t let their desires — their very ambitions! — go to waste.
Not this summer, while the sun is pumping and the air is just calling to be interrupted with your favorite music (or your favorite podcast).
OK, now onto the news.
Crushers powered by Claude [Harmon IV]
Let’s play a game of how many words until you can guess who said the following quote.
I was slamming the club in the ground trying to figure out what to do. I was frustrated. Been trying everything in my body. I didn't actually figure it out on the range. I went back and started talking to Gemini and trying to figure out just what it could be to passively make the club turn over.
Hands just felt like they were moving forward like this and I couldn't get the club to turn over. Even if I tried to stop it here, it still wouldn't turn over.
So I left kind of frustrated and learned later that night that I just needed to relax my grip pressure and let the thing just fold over naturally.
I'm still working it out. I don't have the answer.
The High King of Content
A couple of weeks ago, an interview of Bryson DeChambeau dropped on The Katie Miller Podcast (normal stuff). Within the interview, she asked him the following question.
I joked that after that question, Bryson probably thought, “Hey, I actually should let AI decide my club selection.” And now here we are.
All of this is — of course — an activation. Bryson is a Google partner and he recently was part of a group that bought an AI company that is supposed to help you with your swing, which is powered by, you guessed it.
Hogan: “Dig it out of the dirt.”
Bryson: “You can actually find it in the cloud.”
These are strange times, to be sure. And they don’t seem to be going anywhere.
In our last podcast, Brentley Romine came on to talk NCAAs, and he discussed how USC women’s coach, Justin Silverstein, was using Claude in real time to help make up matchups against Stanford. You can see that clip right here.
This is obviously related to the Bryson bit above, and I have two thoughts on it.
1. My first reaction to both Bryson tweaking his swing using a machine called Gemini and the USC women’s golf coach punching names into a box and getting feedback in real time is that I’m completely exhausted. Does this make me old? Curmudgeonly?
And I get it. I would likely be doing the same thing if I was in their shoes. But I find the search for a 1 percent advantage in the age of these machines to be quite tiring. I find the optimization-ification of everything to often be fool’s gold. A promise that cannot be fulfilled. A carrot that never gets caught. Sometimes (though not always) representative of an unwillingness to find contentment in life.
These are maybe two bad examples of what I’m talking about because I, too, am always working to improve and why not use all the tools at my disposal?
But they are also two examples that are emblematic of a world that has become completely obsessed with efficiency and self-improvement. Almost like we are aspiring to actually become the machines that we keep believing will make us better.
2. I have also been turned on to the idea that sport is one of the last places you can’t optimize your way out of. Brett McCracken wrote about this during the Olympics.
In the dawning AI age, distinctly embodied phenomena will increasingly stand out as displays that can’t be artificially reproduced, even by the most sophisticated LLMs. I expect that as movies, music, and other written works become more and more AI-rendered or AI-enhanced, athletic competitions and live sporting events will become dearer to us as refreshingly unenhanced displays of purely human prowess.
Brett McCracken
When Jannik Sinner is naked in front of the entire country of France with nowhere to hide and no one to help, that is beautiful because it’s real. When Shai is running around with no lane to enter and no Plan B and Wemby waving his arms like lightpoles in front of the basket, that is dramatic because it’s real.
When you hit one 30 yards short in a playoff with match play on the line …
… that is compelling (and horrible and wonderful) because it’s real.
I did not mean for this entire newsletter to become an anti-AI rant. I am certainly not anti-AI. But I am most definitely anti-stripping humans of their humanity, and I am concerned that — as a society — we are veering in that direction in the name of … progress (?) or success (?) or something in that realm.
Sport, somewhat strangely, seems to be a salve for this.
On the field, anyway, which remains refreshingly Claude- and Gemini-free. Though we are just a couple of decisions away from Bryson sticking a microphone on his bag and chatting with Perplexity throughout a round. Can you imagine the R&A old heads having to gather and decide what to do about a rule adjustment for this exact situation? 😂😂😂
• This excellent piece on the founder of Danny Go is both devastating and great. I don’t know Danny Go — my kids seem to be a few years ahead of his emergence — but I presume a lot of you do know about him, and you will appreciate his work much more after you read that piece.
• I stumbled into this podcast by Blayne Barber, who played at Auburn and on the PGA Tour for a long time. He tells his entire golf story, and it’s pretty mesmerizing. I knew bits and pieces, but it’s a sobering deep dive into what pro golf is actually like for everyone not named Rory, Xander and Scottie.
Related! I talked to Blayne for over an hour on Tuesday about golf, life, being a dad and a million other things.
Proud of our convo, and I hope you love it. Podcast edition here: Spotify | Apple.
• Speaking of AI! This is a sobering read on the future of writing that got passed around in our members only Slack channel. This part in particular rattled me a bit as I think about the future of Normal Sport and what I (and we) want it to be.
Humans only have so many hours in the day, and only some subset of those hours can be spent on social media. If the internet is producing 10x more content than it was 4 years ago, and we’re spending the same amount of time online, your content is now 10x less likely to be seen, absent other variables such as improved engagement hacks or higher volume.
The result: “making it” as a content creator (or, at least, a content creator who makes a living strictly from the monetization of content itself) is a total slogfest.
If you’re trying to make it as an indie creator living off brand deals or subscriptions in 2026, you’re putting yourself on a treadmill against well-funded “teams” working behind the scenes for big-name creators, “influencers” who take increasingly extreme actions to capture increasingly-fleeting attention, and a proliferation of AI slop and clipping farms.
Jack Raines
Me after reading that …
Russ Henley won Colonial last weekend, and my guy Patrick McDonald sent this tweet out in the aftermath.
It got me thinking about a game we have played before and surely will again. Who is your starting five of this prototype? The Charles Howell IIII Memorial “I made a billion dollars in my career and only the sickos know who I am” team?
Or, as I am now calling it, the All-Grocery Store Team.
Here’s mine right now (active players only).
Russ Henley ($51M)
Brian Harman ($45M)
Harris English ($43M)
Sam Burns ($37M)
Si Woo Kim ($37M)
6th man: Chris Kirk ($36M)
Those six people could walk in a Whole Foods together (and possibly have done this), and nobody would notice a single one of them. The All-Grocery Store Team.
Of course the flip side of this is that it means you have one major combined between the six of you. That’s the entire reason you’re on the AGST to begin with. Which is a bummer.
I think Harman is kind of the goal. Won a non-U.S. major that many people probably didn’t pay attention to, has brought in $45M, doesn’t lose his card, wins a handful of times, can hunt and fish in peace and go anywhere he wants. Dream stuff.
I loved this from Kate Smith-Stroh, who co-owns the excellent GUR Design, and had this great thought over the weekend.
Elite, Tier S logo here, and she’s right … it wouldn’t get made today. It’s too weird and not safe enough to make it through the four committees necessary to get it out in to the wild. You can (and should) just make stuff, which is what we did with Norman.
[Jason here] Claude had Kyle call me in from the bullpen to close out this section. As a contemporary of Kate's in the “drawing golf things biz” I agree that the golf world could use more handmade character. And there are a lot of us fighting the good fight!
Having said that, I wonder if we [gestures broadly to golf artists] are always the right ones for the jobs. Or if we're going about it the right way. The reason we love the Dooks frog or Stanwich witch is because they weren't made by a Donald Ross passing through town designing logos, they were made by a Mike Strantz in the moment.
Someone — often a random someone — just did it.
Designing things is hard. It took us what felt like 100 rounds of sketches and experimenting to not even get the Norman logo. That happened one night in a stroke of desperation.
There's an authentic energy to putting something on paper and then sending it. Less optimization. More send. The opposite happens when a design is worked to death, which some committees are good at.
Maybe what I'm getting at is what Alistair Mackenzie said about bunkers. If you want a natural logo, give a pen to the village idiot and tell them to draw it clean.
I could, and should go more in depth about the creative process behind golf stuff, but for now I wanted to offer a golf version of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies in case you or your club are tasked with coming up with a new logo.
No sketches allowed.
Don't think about golf.
Draw it with your eyes closed.
Let your kid design it.
Don't use a computer for any part of the process.
Make it out of clay, wire or papier mache, dirt.
Make the committee laugh or cry.
Many are saying that Chet Holmgren is the new Phil Mickelson.
Original tweet said “Chet” and “France” not “Phil” and “Earl.”
Nobody is saying this, but it did get me thinking about how we’ve seen guys come along that appear early on as if they’re going to be world class players in their era, and they get completely outclassed and overshadowed by true all time greats.
The two that come to mind …
Ernie and Phil —> Tiger
Roddick —> [stares at big three]
It’s maddening that not only do you have to be blessed with genetics, a wild work ethic, a deep love for the game and the right situation around you at the right time, you also have to avoid the minefield that’s always lurking that someone out there is just you but way, way better. This is especially true in golf where you cannot affect the outcome by playing defense in any way against your opponent. And there are always a handful of players in every generation who it will be true of.
I am learning the following lesson daily …
Writing this newsletter is (usually) easy and fun for me. Unfortunately I am finding out that writing this newsletter is about 35 percent of running a successful business. It is the other 65 percent that I find to be difficult and taxing.
As someone who (normally) enjoys swimming around in my own thoughts, the temptation is to just try and think my way out of situations or problems. But that is not reality. Reality looks more like thoughtfully considering a handful of different business options, testing them out, seeing what works, getting 10 percent clarity, trying some more, showing up every day, getting less clarity for a week, finding a breakthrough, moving a few steps forward, typing some things into Claude and Gemini 😃, hoping it’s the right path and doing this again and again and again until it starts working.
That is the action part. It’s difficult.
If it was easy, more people would be doing it because — and this is the important part — it’s also quite a lot of fun.
Thank you for reading and participating in all of this. Our promise to you is to put together the best Claude- and Gemini-free newsletter (and podcast!) we can, multiple times a week and to do so with as much heart and humor as we can muster.
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