Issue No. 264 | October 22, 2025 | Read Online
Greetings!
We dropped a bunch of new gear in our pro shop today, and to honor the newsletter you are currently reading, almost none of the pieces are in any way related to any of the other pieces.
We have a sweet Norman YETI that I have been using constantly. A Johnson Wagner graphic t-shirt (imagine going back to 2012 and telling someone this was a thing).
And several iterations of our Outdoor Sport hat, to honor a phrase Scottie uttered at the U.S. Open earlier this year that we immediately fell in love with.
You can see it all above and buy any of it — or any of our other merch — right here. Remember, Normal Club members get 15 percent off everything for as long as they are members.
Today’s newsletter is sponsored by Ship Sticks, which assists you in your own Outdoor Sport activities. Ship Sticks offers white-glove shipping for golf clubs and luggage and delivers to 180 countries for a hassle-free, gear-free journey.
There’s a great quote from Raymond Joseph Teller (of Penn & Teller) about how magic is just “someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”
That is what the Ship Sticks experience feels like. Someone picks up your clubs from your front porch, and they somehow end up at the location where you’re staying or playing. This feels like magic, but it’s really just a company spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.
Normal Sport readers can get 20 percent off their first purchase right here.
OK, now onto the news.
Well this was a layup for me. Tommy won India last week and immediately talked about how his son told him he’d never been able to run on the green for one of dad’s victories. Honestly, you can keep your green jackets and Claret Jugs, I’ll take winning an October event with this as the result. ⤵️
Here’s what Tommy said afterward about the request.
Yeah, we were playing golf last week. I mean, to be honest, he never shuts up, so there's always something coming out of his mouth.
Tommy Fleetwood
Every parent has one (at least one).
He just happened to say randomly, he said, you know what you've never done. He said, you've never won a tournament and I've been able to run on to the 18th green.
He just said it as a passing comment. I didn't really say anything. I don't think I said anything back to him, but I thought I'm going to keep that -- I wrote it down when I got back, and I had it in my mind.
Tommy Fleetwood
🥹🥹🥹
One interesting aspect of professional golf to me is that we are able to (attempt to) mimic everything players do. Want to try and draw one 340 like Rory over a bend of trees to set up a 180 shot into a par 5? Sure, you can try that. Want to try and cut a 5 iron like Scottie over two greenside bunkers and have it roll out 227 but not 229 because 229 is short sided? Yeah, go for it.
But we can also mimic (actually mimic) this part.
Taking our kids to play. Finishing rounds with them. Hugging them on the 18th green. Yeah, maybe we just parred the last to shoot 87 instead of racking up a win in India, but one of the great fallacies of being an adult is that we believe our kids care about our achievements. Heck, we believe everyone cares about our achievements more than they actually do. No, my kid just cares about being with me. Hugging me after that 87. Getting a Pepsi afterward.
Golf is unusual because of all the Very Normal Moments, yeah, but it’s also unusual because it’s one of the few sports normies like us can participate in. Normies like our kids can participate in. That is beautiful, and Tommy’s moment with his boy was such a terrific reminder that golf, at its core, is just people spending time with other people.
Like probably many of you, I flipped on the TV on Friday evening after offensive coordinating a 41-0 rout in 5th/6th grade flag football and could not believe what I was seeing. A pitcher striking out 10 batters against the best team in baseball … and also hitting three home runs?! It felt like a hallucination. Surely ESPN.com had the numbers wrong.
There is no way a professional baseball player could strike out 10 on the bump and hit more home runs than he allowed hits in a game to go to the World Series. Surely.
It felt very Tiger-like, to be honest.
And many of us had the same thought or question: What is the best golf comp someone could come up with for what Shohei did on Friday evening.
The answers — quite predictably — were awesome.
Honestly, this one is pretty good. Not perfect, but as far as golf goes, solid.
That would be like 18 shots better than field average at ANGC. The greatest rounds of all time are in the ~12 shots better than field average range. Eighteen feels impossible, which is exactly how Ohtani’s game felt.
Sure.
This one made me laugh. It makes no sense, but it’s also somehow great.
😍😍😍
OK … that is the correct answer. Paging Mac O’Grady.
It’s the offseason so what could be better than a little Data Golf trivia?
And in honor of the new merch in our pro shop, the first person to email me back with the correct answer to whose profile this is will get a free Normal Sport (or Outdoor Sport) hat.
Good luck!
This conversation on writing and creating between David Perell and Morgan Housel was spectacular. I couldn’t wait for it to end because I couldn’t wait to hit play again.
Here’s the part I loved the most.
Perell: What is the single worst piece of writing advice that you often hear?
Housel: I think it's the very common know your reader. Because I think the speed at which know your reader becomes pander to your reader — the ease at which you can conflate those two things — is astounding.
I think it's true that virtually everybody everybody in the world, if they're writing a diary where where they think no one else is going to read this, is a good writer.
In that situation they would write good prose. They would write it well, they get to the point, they tell a good story about what happened today and the problems in their life.
It's as soon as you think someone else is going to read this that it clicks in your head, Well, who's reading this because I'm writing for them. What do they want to hear?
And in that situation, the good prose in the diary just falls apart and then you start getting structured. You're like, Oh, well, I need to explain that deeper because they probably don't understand it and whatnot.
How I Write
This reminded me of Ben Thompson’s piece on books and blogs.
Stratechery has become in many respects a journal of my own attempts to understand technology specifically and the way in which it is changing every aspect of society broadly.
And, it turns, out, the business model is even better: instead of taking on the risk of writing a book with the hope of one-time payment from customers at the end, Stratechery subscribers fund that intellectual exploration directly and on an ongoing basis; all they ask is that I send them my journals of said exploration every day in email form.
Ben Thompson
That is almost exactly how Jason and I think about Normal Sport. A journal of our thoughts and illustrations, made for ourselves but published for you (and at times, with you and your comments and feedback).
I agree wholeheartedly with Housel that once you start trying to write for the audience at large, you start chasing something that’s too elusive (pleasing a large group of people). What I would add to what he said, though, is that I do write to one person. I talked about this in my recent podcast with Jason.
I find this exercise to be helpful because I imagine trying to make this one friend laugh or think or feel something. So when I say I’m writing and creating for myself, I actually mean I’m writing and creating for my one friend. We are close enough (and likeminded enough), though, that I might as well be writing to myself.
And then I just let everyone else read what I wrote to him.
It’s a nice system. One that I enjoy and find to be sustainable. One that — like the ridiculous new products in our pro shop — we amuse ourselves with and hope there are enough people along the way who are amused as well. And if not? That’s OK too!
Because we can afford to lose many things along the path of building something, but the one thing we can’t lose — because it’s too difficult to get it back — is ourselves and the joy we have in creating.
Thank you 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 1,636 words. Everything you read and consume 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 or become a Normal Club member (we have over 1,000!) at this link.
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