Greetings!
An exciting announcement today as we welcome Cobra to our collection of brand partners for the 2026 year.
As you can tell from Jason’s reimagined Brewers’ sausage race but with Cobra club heads to commemorate baseball’s opening day, we have loved working to incorporate such a cool brand into the weird and fun Normal Sport world that all of us play around in.
Garmin also re-signed for 2026, which means our official partner list for this year includes the following.
OGIO
Cobra
Garmin
Turtlebox
Seed Golf
Ship Sticks
Sap’s Original
Charlie Golf Co.
Holderness and Bourne
We have 2-3 others still in the queue, but this group will primarily be who you see on this newsletter and in our podcasts and social feeds for the rest of 2026.
Name drops today: Andy Weir, Mark Pope, Phil Mickelson, Joaquin Niemann, Steph Curry and Rickie Fowler.
This newsletter is brought to you by Cobra, whose new 3DP irons are … 3D printed using 2,600 layers of 316 stainless steel powder that are fused together using powerful lasers.
Everybody together now …
A natural follow up question: Uh, so what is the benefit of 3D printing irons?
There are many, but here’s one reason that stood out to me.
3D printing gives engineers complete design freedom to create the best combination of shaping the ball, feeling the shot and forgiveness that can't be achieved in cast or forged irons.
I admit, I’m probably not smart enough to understand why this is the case, but it does seem to be the case that this tech is a pretty cool next step in iron evolution.
I can also confidently say that we are going to have an absolute blast illustrating Cobra’s technology all year and cannot wait to get our hands on the 3DP clubs that Max is “obsessed with.”
OK, now onto the news.
1. This flew under the radar a bit, but Brian Rolapp talked recently about how the U.S. sports media market is $30 billion and how the NFL is aggressively pushing for more than its current 40 percent slice of that.
Couple of thoughts here.
1. For the last several years, I have been promoting the idea/theory that there is a lot of slack in the Tour’s media deal (currently $700M annually) because Tiger kept pushing those numbers up, and now he’s no longer involved. What that means for the future is surely one of the central questions all sides are asking.
2. Related: At some point, these numbers can’t keep going up, right? Tour players — the owners of the league — are probably going to have to either choose quality and scarcity (which could bring the total overall money down) or abundance for marginally more dollars for themselves, perhaps to the detriment of the long-term health of the league. Stay tuned!
3. Rolapp knows better than me, but I would say the $30 billion market number maybe undervalue the Netflixes and Apples of the world entering and stirring things up. Can’t that $30B number grow based on competition — Netflix, Apple and Amazon slinging money for rights — rather than growing simply based on increased inventory?
4. As Rolapp realized at the NFL, the best way for the league to make more money is to divide up its product into 100 pieces and sell them off individually to all these media giants (Peacock, Amazon, Netflix, ESPN).
That sounds like … one of golf’s primary problems over the last few years.
2. The WBC is baseball’s Ryder Cup, right?
Twitter tweet
It’s interesting to me that this doesn’t really work in golf for the President’s Cup. My working theory — outside of the lack of competitive matches — is that there hasn’t been a Rory- or Rahm-like personality that’s big enough to carry the International side recently against the U.S and make this event into a thing.
Adam Scott? Nah. Hideki? No. Joaquin Niemann? Please.
I think it would take another Greg Norman type — a larger-than-life superstar — and an upset or two to inject some juice into that event.
It will never be the Ryder Cup (obviously), but with the right personalities on the International side and the right venues (2019 at Melbourne was outrageously good!), I think the P Cup can still be a top eight (?) event of the year.
Or maybe the P Cup should be a team event between the top eight or 12 countries in the world (which is what the Olympics should be).
3. This is fascinating, and I think would be even more controversial than rolling the ball back or shrinking the driver head.
Do we think golf should be more like baseball where the equipment is varied (you can choose your own bat and glove) but heavily regulated and quite different from the amateur game (wood vs. metal).
OR do we think golf should be more like F1, where a lot of the way a league shakes out is purposefully rooted in which companies can make the best equipment.
Feel free to weigh in.
4. One thing I was thinking about this week is how odd it is that there’s not a Tier 1 Tour event between the Players Championship and the Masters.
It’s such a whiff that there’s a Tier 1 event after the Masters when the reality is that guys like Rory and Scottie are probably hungry to tee it up leading into the first major. It would be such an easier draw and attract so much more attention than Heritage the week after or Travelers the week after the U.S. Open. I’m sure there are reasons, but an easy one to fix in the revamped slate.
5. I feel this deeply. Every night I feel this.
You simply want to listen to the Boxcar Children, and I am handing you this rectangle piece of glass with access to every vice ever invented sure hope it goes well.
I know there are solutions to this, and I need to seek them out. But I needed a moment to vent as a parent.
6. I went on Ethan Strauss’ podcast this week to talk about some Steph-Rickie parallels (personality-wise) as well as whether golf has an opportunity to wriggle its way in as the popularity of the NBA (maybe?) declines.
My answer: No, mostly because I think we are heading for (already in?) the nichefication of everything that isn’t football. Nothing is mainstream anymore. The downside of the internet is the disruption of monoculture, but at the same time this is the power and beauty of the internet as well. That you can find other psychos reading a golf newsletter with club head covers in place of sausage costumes and holler, There are dozens of us!
We also talked about this chart, which is … interesting.
I hadn’t seen it until we discussed on the pod, but after studying it for a while afterward, I think it’s a little out of whack. Example: Yeah, CBS averaged 3 million viewers per golf broadcast in 2025, but how many broadcasts did it produce vs. how many broadcasts were produced in the NFL.
Regardless of context, those NBA numbers are insane … I don’t know if this is a good sign for the PGA Tour (networks are desperate for live sports content) or a bad one (all the money is already gone).
Anyway, I always like talking to Ethan. He is brilliant and has good stories, and we had a lot of fun chatting. If you’re not a subscriber to Ethan’s newsletter, you can still listen to the first 40 minutes of the pod.
7. I promise this is going to be a golf take, but let’s start with this tweet.
Weir wrote The Martian (amazing book), Artemis (not an amazing book) and Project Hail Mary (amazing book though not quite as amazing as The Martian but has turned into an apparently amazing movie).
Anyway, the central complaint above is that the book is too technical, which if you’ve read anything Weir has written, is true-ish. His books are technical. Part of their appeal is that you can tell he’s smitten with things like orbital mechanics. There is a joy and an obsession in the writing about extremely nuanced things that is almost magnetic.
It reminded me a bit of the LeBron-JJ Redick pod before Redick became the Lakers’ coach. Just dudes nerding out as maniacally as possible. This is, perhaps strangely … infectious. And there is a lesson in it for the Tour (and all sports leagues).
And that lesson is: Double down on appealing to your most sicko fan. Be as inside golf as is reasonable. Even beyond what is considered reasonable.
This will be appealing. People will be curious. And maybe most counterintuitively, those fans will become proselytizers for you and your product. Their enthusiasm will attract others that you could not have reached on your own with vapid animal content or “what club would you hit on this par 3” tweets.
We are curious about obsession, and Weir’s books are absolutely proof of that idea.
8. Are we ready to have this conversation?
Here’s a take I might believe: Jon Rahm is the most consistently underrated player of the last 15 years. I know SG isn’t everything, but Rahm has been better than Phil — who is a top 12 player of all time — at nearly every age of his career.
Look at this!
Rahm is green, Phil is blue.
This is why I wrote about how infuriating it is that Rahm is debasing himself on a weekly basis by globetrotting with this … sideshow when he is very specifically the main event and should be a foil for Scottie over the next 10 years.
As an enormous fan of golf history, this drives me crazy.
Also, he might win two majors this year.
9. I started reading through this article recently. You don’t need to read it. It was slop-adjacent, even though there were some good points in there. The premise was about how to go viral on LinkedIn or something ridiculous like that.
Anyway, my big takeaway was this.
The most powerful emotional trigger on LinkedIn is making someone feel seen. When you articulate something they've thought but never said out loud, something they've experienced but never had language for, they feel a rush of recognition that's almost impossible not to respond to.
This is why "unpopular opinion" posts work so well. they give people permission to agree with something they've secretly believed, and that validation feels amazing.
It made me realize that I am very much in the business of trying to get folks to see things differently and shocking people with takes that are rooted in validity or truth.
So for example, if you’re a content creator who says things like, You know Tiger … he’s pretty good at golf, that is just ridiculous. It offers no value. And tbh this is what a lot of people in this industry (and many others) do. Including me at times.
If instead you offer an opinion that other people have thought but never found someone else who felt the same way, and that opinion is rooted in some truth, well, that’s a powerful thing. It reminds me of what the great philosopher, Kentucky basketball coach Mark Pope said recently.
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
This is fun for me because it makes me stretch my mind and hopefully fun for you because you connect with something I wrote or because you had no idea that someone else thought Rory’s 2025 Masters win was a lot better than Tiger’s in 2019 anyway.
Thank you for reading our outrageous golf newsletter that is sometimes (but often barely) about golf. Every edition is handcrafted by me (Kyle) and Jason.
We put probably a combined 20 hours into each newsletter, which is a ridiculous amount of time. But as long as you keep showing up and we still have money in our bank account, we will keep handcrafting and delivering this thing to you with all the Weir-like obsession we can muster.
Greetings!
An exciting announcement today as we welcome Cobra to our collection of brand partners for the 2026 year.
As you can tell from Jason’s reimagined Brewers’ sausage race but with Cobra club heads to commemorate baseball’s opening day, we have loved working to incorporate such a cool brand into the weird and fun Normal Sport world that all of us play around in.
Garmin also re-signed for 2026, which means our official partner list for this year includes the following.
OGIO
Cobra
Garmin
Turtlebox
Seed Golf
Ship Sticks
Sap’s Original
Charlie Golf Co.
Holderness and Bourne
We have 2-3 others still in the queue, but this group will primarily be who you see on this newsletter and in our podcasts and social feeds for the rest of 2026.
Name drops today: Andy Weir, Mark Pope, Phil Mickelson, Joaquin Niemann, Steph Curry and Rickie Fowler.
This newsletter is brought to you by Cobra, whose new 3DP irons are … 3D printed using 2,600 layers of 316 stainless steel powder that are fused together using powerful lasers.
Everybody together now …
A natural follow up question: Uh, so what is the benefit of 3D printing irons?
There are many, but here’s one reason that stood out to me.
3D printing gives engineers complete design freedom to create the best combination of shaping the ball, feeling the shot and forgiveness that can't be achieved in cast or forged irons.
I admit, I’m probably not smart enough to understand why this is the case, but it does seem to be the case that this tech is a pretty cool next step in iron evolution.
I can also confidently say that we are going to have an absolute blast illustrating Cobra’s technology all year and cannot wait to get our hands on the 3DP clubs that Max is “obsessed with.”
OK, now onto the news.
1. This flew under the radar a bit, but Brian Rolapp talked recently about how the U.S. sports media market is $30 billion and how the NFL is aggressively pushing for more than its current 40 percent slice of that.
Couple of thoughts here.
1. For the last several years, I have been promoting the idea/theory that there is a lot of slack in the Tour’s media deal (currently $700M annually) because Tiger kept pushing those numbers up, and now he’s no longer involved. What that means for the future is surely one of the central questions all sides are asking.
2. Related: At some point, these numbers can’t keep going up, right? Tour players — the owners of the league — are probably going to have to either choose quality and scarcity (which could bring the total overall money down) or abundance for marginally more dollars for themselves, perhaps to the detriment of the long-term health of the league. Stay tuned!
3. Rolapp knows better than me, but I would say the $30 billion market number maybe undervalue the Netflixes and Apples of the world entering and stirring things up. Can’t that $30B number grow based on competition — Netflix, Apple and Amazon slinging money for rights — rather than growing simply based on increased inventory?
4. As Rolapp realized at the NFL, the best way for the league to make more money is to divide up its product into 100 pieces and sell them off individually to all these media giants (Peacock, Amazon, Netflix, ESPN).
That sounds like … one of golf’s primary problems over the last few years.
2. The WBC is baseball’s Ryder Cup, right?
Twitter tweet
It’s interesting to me that this doesn’t really work in golf for the President’s Cup. My working theory — outside of the lack of competitive matches — is that there hasn’t been a Rory- or Rahm-like personality that’s big enough to carry the International side recently against the U.S and make this event into a thing.
Adam Scott? Nah. Hideki? No. Joaquin Niemann? Please.
I think it would take another Greg Norman type — a larger-than-life superstar — and an upset or two to inject some juice into that event.
It will never be the Ryder Cup (obviously), but with the right personalities on the International side and the right venues (2019 at Melbourne was outrageously good!), I think the P Cup can still be a top eight (?) event of the year.
Or maybe the P Cup should be a team event between the top eight or 12 countries in the world (which is what the Olympics should be).
3. This is fascinating, and I think would be even more controversial than rolling the ball back or shrinking the driver head.
Do we think golf should be more like baseball where the equipment is varied (you can choose your own bat and glove) but heavily regulated and quite different from the amateur game (wood vs. metal).
OR do we think golf should be more like F1, where a lot of the way a league shakes out is purposefully rooted in which companies can make the best equipment.
Feel free to weigh in.
This post will continue below for Normal Club members and includes thoughts on …
The Martian (sure).
How Jon Rahm is better than Scottie.
The business of delivering #takes
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