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Issue No. 168 | March 12, 2025
I have a confession.
This is actually a full email of confessions.
But here’s the first and most personal one.
I turn 40 this week. My family is making way too big of a deal out of this. I’m not a big fan of birthdays. I am mostly neutral. Birthdays are Torrey Pines to me. Fine. Nothing I’m going to lose my mind about. Just there and mostly OK.
Anyway, my family is salivating at the thought of an opportunity to poke some fun at me. Probably because for my 40th birthday I will be getting paid to write emails about adult men playing a game (which, to be clear, I’m actually pumped about!).
My mom — who you know from her Q&A here — collects old things. Stuff we wore growing up, art projects, even old emails.
Reminiscing on another trip around the sun for me, she forwarded one that I sent her when I was in college. It was 2006, and I was applying to grad school at UNC (you will be shocked to find out I did not get in).
Anyway, here’s what I said.
I attached my 3 essays and work experience, if you could look over them and offer any advice that would be FANtastic. I think my essay's are pathetic, I was tellin [redacted to protect the innocent] how sad it is that I can crank out Black Sox newsletters like it's nothing but when it comes to writing something imporant I just freak out and try too hard or something...
Kyle Porter, email to his mom in 2006
This is embarrassing on 400 different levels.
The spelling. The grammer. 🫢
Who talks (or writes) like this?
The Black Sox refers to my college intramural team.
That’s right.
I was writing a weekly newsletter about my intramural team in college. Am I ashamed of this? Of course. Did it foretell the fact that I would in fact still be writing a newsletter 20 years later, this time for a professional job? Also of course.
So there you go.
You can’t share anything more humiliating with me than I’ve just shared with you.
Let’s get to the news (and also to a pick).
We are giving away two Ranger speakers from Turtlebox this week. You have to do exactly nothing to enter the giveaway. We will just randomly draw two folks at the end of the week.
I walked into the kitchen today with the kids on spring break and my wife posted up and the Ranger blaring. The windows are open, the music is on and I’m holed up in my office listening to Andrew Novak go on about TPC Craig Ranch (more on that below).
The point is, the Ranger went from “oh this was nice of them to send over” to “YOU FORGOT TO CHARGE THE RANGER LAST NIGHT?!” faster than it took Soly to smother hook his first shot at the Creator Classic (if this is a sentence you understand, seek help).
And check out the terrific products from our friends at Turtlebox.
By the way … If it feels like we’re doing a lot of giveaway stuff recently, that’s because we are. It can be hard to keep track of sometimes! I think we’re all caught up, but if you won something over the last six months and have not received it or communicated with me personally yet, please just respond to this email and let me know. I will see it and respond asap.
Onto some thoughts.
1. Another confession: I love this event. I think it rocks. Scottie described one of the (many) reasons why that’s the case.
I think there's a lot of genius in the way the golf course is designed. It calls for different shots on each hole. You have to work the ball both ways. You have to play shots. If there's no conditions, you can play a little bit of robot golf, but at the end of the day, I think you got to show up, play shots, do things differently.
The golf course provides different challenges each year. If it's soft and windy, you got to really control your golf ball, hit a lot of chippy shots, control your spin around the greens, and then if it's firm and windy, you also got control your spin but a different way at a different height. And then if it's not windy and firm, you know you got to work the ball into the pins because the greens are firm, and I mean, the golf course can just challenge you in a variety of ways, and I think that's what makes it a great test.
Scott Scheffler, Mar. 11, 2025
I mean … what else is there to add?
There are a million versions of golf. All of them have have some good and some bad. You can take your pick. Virtual golf, Top Golf, putt putt, amateur competitions, match play, and on and on …
But championship golf on a golf course we are familiar with — a golf course that we feel like we almost have a relationship with — where players have to hit big boy golf shots to win a truly meaningful event is, to me, the very best version of the game.
2. Robot golf. I love that phrase.
Spieth said something similar at the Open several years ago.
Instead of just a driving-range shot in Palm Springs, there’s always some shot you have to play that gives you a little bit of an advantage. Certain club selections, based on if you hit a fade or a draw, they go 15 or 20 yards different distances. To sum that up, there’s just a lot of external factors over here, and I think that external is where I need to be living.
Jordan Spieth, 2021 Open
Tough look from Palm Springs, but the point is that the best version of pro golf …
Makes players think about consequences and outcomes.
Forces them to hit non-stock shots.
I don’t know that that is as true at TPC Sawgrass as it as at, say, a windy Augusta National or a wild Open Championship. But it’s certainly more true at TPC Sawgrass than it is most places on Tour.
3. Speaking of most places on Tour, if you have not yet seen Joseph LaMagna interview our guy Andrew Novak — another Normal Sport Q&A guest — about Joseph’s PGA Tour course rankings, it’s really good.
Novak gets into why some courses are better for fans than for players and vice versa. Really thoughtful, interesting information from somebody who actually plays on the PGA Tour.
4. This one is a deep cut, but somehow somebody named Tron yelling about Matt Kuchar into an iPhone has led to Soly Solomon playing in an event at TPC Sawgrass that 45,000 people are watching on YouTube.
This post will continue for Normal Sport members below, and includes …
Why a six-time major winner is tweeting at me.
Some thoughts on Big Jay’s presser.
My pick for this week.
If you aren’t yet a Normal Sport member — we’re nearing six hundy! — you can sign up at the link below. If you are, keep reading!
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.
5. I watched most of Jay Monahan’s press conference on Tuesday. I thought he was way better than normal, but two things stood out. The first is that he is not a tremendous talker. This is … OK … except that he is paid well into the eight figures to be very good at talking. Talking to sponsors, talking to players, talking to the president.
He’s not bad at it — I would be way worse! — but he’s not great at it, which seems like a big miss for somebody in that position.
The second is the exhaustion I have from hearing a constant version of We care about the PGA Tour and are in favor of reunification and want what’s best for everyone and care about our fans even though we are on Month 21 since the framework deal was announced.
I do believe they’re invested in working on something now. The first 17 months? Idk.
6. Here’s what Monahan said about how LIV has changed the Tour.
Bottom line, we're better for it. Disruption has generated momentum, growth and real action. We have seen that momentum on television, online, at our tournaments, and with our partners.
Jay Monahan, 2025 Players
Implicit in this — and something Tron pointed out — is that the Tour got complacent. This is, as has been discussed, unquestionably true. And this was mostly fine because Tiger carried the whole golf world for two decades.
I tweeted out that Monahan quote above, and Phil Mickelson responded: 🤔 interesting.
Which is wild. Phil believes that Phil believed that this was the plan all along. Force the Tour’s hand and give the players what they deserve.
Three things.
1. Does the Tour even have momentum? Maybe?
2. Even if it does, the cost of that momentum was not quite “1994 baseball strike” high, but it was up there.
3. Was this the way it had to be?
I don’t think anybody was ever arguing that the Tour was just killing it from 2010-2020. But — and I’ve said this many times now — I refuse to believe that if Tiger and Phil had united and gone to Tour leadership and the other players, they could have accomplished 120 percent of what has been accomplished since LIV started with 1 percent of the social cost.
7. One thing I don’t really understand is how adamant Monahan is about reunification and then you watch Brooks nervously get through an answer about his future, and you think How are these two opposing sides still at odds?!
Does this look like a man who’s making demands for his side?!
8. I watched a bit of the Creator Classic on Wednesday. It was good, and if I didn’t have to finish up this newsletter, I would have watched most or all of it.
Here’s what it looked like on YouTube.
Tons of potential takeaways, but my top one was this: Why didn’t the Saudis throw $50 million at the creators instead of several billion at the players? I know that doesn’t satisfy their goals of actually getting money in the real infrastructure, but this ridiculous little exhibition generated more views and probably more people on site than LIV will at its Singapore stop this weekend.
Forgotten history of TPC Sawgrass No. 17
[Jason here] Watching Soly par the Creator Classic to death to make Kyle eat his words from earlier is what’s keeping me up to finish this newsletter. That and the inflatable tree illustration you’re about to see.
9. We got tons of great merch feedback this week. Thank you for that! Also, we added this hoodie from Imperial. And don’t worry, Holderness and Bourne fans. That order is next. We’re hoping to be stocked up pre-first major.
And we’ve even got merch for those looking for the TPC Sawgrass tree home experience.
10. I was reading this great Fried Egg newsletter today, and I could not get over how different 17 at TPC Sawgrass used to be. I could not stop staring at this, wondering if this was the same golf course!
11. I have no real pace of play take other than I am amused by the fact that it is considered big golf news that organizations are now tracking publishing how fast hundreds of adult men are walking around various fields in the United States.
Me reacting to that ⬇️
12. My pick.
IYKYK
Thank you for reading until the end.
You’re a complete and total sicko for reading a golf newsletter that is 2,084 words long. It has been so gratifying to cover our first monster event this week, and we can’t wait to watch the next few days.
See you Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday morning, at the very least.
Thank you for all of your support.
Issue No. 168 | March 12, 2025
I have a confession.
This is actually a full email of confessions.
But here’s the first and most personal one.
I turn 40 this week. My family is making way too big of a deal out of this. I’m not a big fan of birthdays. I am mostly neutral. Birthdays are Torrey Pines to me. Fine. Nothing I’m going to lose my mind about. Just there and mostly OK.
Anyway, my family is salivating at the thought of an opportunity to poke some fun at me. Probably because for my 40th birthday I will be getting paid to write emails about adult men playing a game (which, to be clear, I’m actually pumped about!).
My mom — who you know from her Q&A here — collects old things. Stuff we wore growing up, art projects, even old emails.
Reminiscing on another trip around the sun for me, she forwarded one that I sent her when I was in college. It was 2006, and I was applying to grad school at UNC (you will be shocked to find out I did not get in).
Anyway, here’s what I said.
I attached my 3 essays and work experience, if you could look over them and offer any advice that would be FANtastic. I think my essay's are pathetic, I was tellin [redacted to protect the innocent] how sad it is that I can crank out Black Sox newsletters like it's nothing but when it comes to writing something imporant I just freak out and try too hard or something...
Kyle Porter, email to his mom in 2006
This is embarrassing on 400 different levels.
The spelling. The grammer. 🫢
Who talks (or writes) like this?
The Black Sox refers to my college intramural team.
That’s right.
I was writing a weekly newsletter about my intramural team in college. Am I ashamed of this? Of course. Did it foretell the fact that I would in fact still be writing a newsletter 20 years later, this time for a professional job? Also of course.
So there you go.
You can’t share anything more humiliating with me than I’ve just shared with you.
Let’s get to the news (and also to a pick).
We are giving away two Ranger speakers from Turtlebox this week. You have to do exactly nothing to enter the giveaway. We will just randomly draw two folks at the end of the week.
I walked into the kitchen today with the kids on spring break and my wife posted up and the Ranger blaring. The windows are open, the music is on and I’m holed up in my office listening to Andrew Novak go on about TPC Craig Ranch (more on that below).
The point is, the Ranger went from “oh this was nice of them to send over” to “YOU FORGOT TO CHARGE THE RANGER LAST NIGHT?!” faster than it took Soly to smother hook his first shot at the Creator Classic (if this is a sentence you understand, seek help).
And check out the terrific products from our friends at Turtlebox.
By the way … If it feels like we’re doing a lot of giveaway stuff recently, that’s because we are. It can be hard to keep track of sometimes! I think we’re all caught up, but if you won something over the last six months and have not received it or communicated with me personally yet, please just respond to this email and let me know. I will see it and respond asap.
Onto some thoughts.
1. Another confession: I love this event. I think it rocks. Scottie described one of the (many) reasons why that’s the case.
I think there's a lot of genius in the way the golf course is designed. It calls for different shots on each hole. You have to work the ball both ways. You have to play shots. If there's no conditions, you can play a little bit of robot golf, but at the end of the day, I think you got to show up, play shots, do things differently.
The golf course provides different challenges each year. If it's soft and windy, you got to really control your golf ball, hit a lot of chippy shots, control your spin around the greens, and then if it's firm and windy, you also got control your spin but a different way at a different height. And then if it's not windy and firm, you know you got to work the ball into the pins because the greens are firm, and I mean, the golf course can just challenge you in a variety of ways, and I think that's what makes it a great test.
Scott Scheffler, Mar. 11, 2025
I mean … what else is there to add?
There are a million versions of golf. All of them have have some good and some bad. You can take your pick. Virtual golf, Top Golf, putt putt, amateur competitions, match play, and on and on …
But championship golf on a golf course we are familiar with — a golf course that we feel like we almost have a relationship with — where players have to hit big boy golf shots to win a truly meaningful event is, to me, the very best version of the game.
2. Robot golf. I love that phrase.
Spieth said something similar at the Open several years ago.
Instead of just a driving-range shot in Palm Springs, there’s always some shot you have to play that gives you a little bit of an advantage. Certain club selections, based on if you hit a fade or a draw, they go 15 or 20 yards different distances. To sum that up, there’s just a lot of external factors over here, and I think that external is where I need to be living.
Jordan Spieth, 2021 Open
Tough look from Palm Springs, but the point is that the best version of pro golf …
Makes players think about consequences and outcomes.
Forces them to hit non-stock shots.
I don’t know that that is as true at TPC Sawgrass as it as at, say, a windy Augusta National or a wild Open Championship. But it’s certainly more true at TPC Sawgrass than it is most places on Tour.
3. Speaking of most places on Tour, if you have not yet seen Joseph LaMagna interview our guy Andrew Novak — another Normal Sport Q&A guest — about Joseph’s PGA Tour course rankings, it’s really good.
Novak gets into why some courses are better for fans than for players and vice versa. Really thoughtful, interesting information from somebody who actually plays on the PGA Tour.
4. This one is a deep cut, but somehow somebody named Tron yelling about Matt Kuchar into an iPhone has led to Soly Solomon playing in an event at TPC Sawgrass that 45,000 people are watching on YouTube.
This post will continue for Normal Sport members below, and includes …
Why a six-time major winner is tweeting at me.
Some thoughts on Big Jay’s presser.
My pick for this week.
If you aren’t yet a Normal Sport member — we’re nearing six hundy! — you can sign up at the link below. If you are, keep reading!
Normal Sport is supported by nearly 600 sickos who can’t get enough. By becoming a member, you will receive the following.
• The satisfaction of helping us establish our business.
• The entirety of our behind-the-paywall major (and PLAYERS) coverage.
• A first look at future merch drops.
By clicking below to join the Normie Club, you will have a front row seat to what we’re building. Like a Spieth round, it won’t always be pretty, but — unlike a Reed round — we promise it will always be honest and earnest.
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