Hello,
A confession: I really enjoyed building Wednesday’s Connections puzzle and have been trading puzzle building with friends throughout the week. Here’s another one for Friday. No prize this time. Just share it with friends if you’re inclined.
ALSO! Before we get to today’s newsletter, you will some notes on our new referrals program at the bottom of this email. Our hope is that it will encourage you to #GetInvolved, share the newsletter and properly reward you for helping us grow the game sheep meme brand. We tried a version of this two years ago but decided to wipe the slate clean for this iteration. Here are the prizes. Good luck to all!
Name drops today: Oliver Burkeman, Blades Brown, Snoop, Jon Rahm and Steve Bornstein.
Today’s newsletter is presented by Sap’s.
You know who could use some Sap’s? The guys grinding their faces off in Memphis where the temperature over the course of the tournament looks like a Misiorowski pitching log: 100, 101, 101, 103.
Where guys are putting with towels over their necks (of course it’s Spieth).
Anyway, they could use some Sap’s, which includes an ingredient stack of electrolytes for hydration, adaptogens for stress and balance and aminos to help your body recover faster (no word on what it does to tan pants).
I’ve been pounding these in the morning here in Dallas (where it’s a full Misiorowski as well) both before and after runs and workouts. Highly recommend the lemon lime, which you can get right here on Amazon.
And now, onto the news.
Get the boys some Sap's!
1. Hayden and I recorded a new podcast on Tuesday on a lot of what’s happened over the last few weeks. We talked about the young American stars suddenly popping, Bryson’s LIV circus and whether Jon Rahm is going to stay.
Oh, and also the cities that look like they’re going to be part of the championship circuit. I’m in favor of the Tour’s decisions, Hayden is a little less excited.
You can listen on Apple here or Spotify here.
Also, would love any feedback you have on the pod. You can vote below and leave written feedback as well.
The more honest, the better. There is nothing you can say that will come close to what I hear from the LIV stans on Twitter. Also, if you want to email me directly with any feedback, you can just hit reply and send over a note.
2. Speaking of Rahm! Turns out that he might not be willing to trade the $100M+ he’s owed for IOUs for a pink and black golf team whose other players include the second best player from Northern Ireland and an American who has never had a positive strokes gained season.
To be clear, Rahm proceeding with LIV 2.0 would be tantamount to Cam Young deciding to play on the Sunshine Tour in 2027. We don’t think of it like that because that’s not how we have thought about LIV over the last five years. But that’s what LIV 2.0 will be more like.
I think I have firmly landed in the “no single person can move the needle enough for it to matter for a golf league” camp, but this problem remains …
Bloomberg reported that 1) LIV is working on a deal with BC Partners and 2) while BC Partners and LIV Golf’s executive team may have agreed to broad terms, a term sheet has not yet been fully executed. The Financial Times then added more color after that, reporting that BC’s investment is contingent on LIV Golf retaining enough star players.
Huddle Up
So whether a player actually does move the needle might not matter as long as the company funding the league believes that he moves the needle.
Maybe that’s all that matters as it relates to LIV 2.0, and in that sense there is a dark amusement in the seeming reality that Rahm may once and for all reunite the world of professional golf. Just not in the way he originally intended to.
3. Gabby wrote quite well about all of this earlier in the week, and the whole thing is almost comical. Among my favorite parts.
• LIV is pitching its 2.0 version by touting how much money it loses and how that can benefit a business looking to save on paying taxes.
Me reading that …
• It is probably going to enter bankruptcy, which means that for Rahm and others to get the money they are owed, they will have to sue Saudia Arabia in an international court (!!). The thought of Bryson and his attorney taking on the crown prince in an extremely public trial is almost too much for me to handle.
• And she confirms that Rahm is a linchpin (maybe the linchpin) because of what he’s owed and how much the league needs him because its future funding depends on it.
A question: Is this what we want pro golf to be?
I honestly feel bad for … basically nobody involved here (at the highest level anyway). They all tried to microwave history and were not quiet about doing it. So now everyone is looking around saying, “Wait, where is the money and why isn’t this working?” when the entire premise from the beginning was that there was too much money involved to make it work!
This is startup failure 101. Happens all the time. Might happen to Normal Sport at some point! So my frustration and lack of compassion is not with the fact that it’s happening but rather with the chest thumping that went with it along the way.
4. I found this piece by Oliver Burkeman on AI and how he can’t stop thinking about it … mostly how I feel about AI right now as well. It has just permeated so much of my life and my thoughts to the point that I feel the need to adopt either a personal or business-wide formal stance on it. Or both.
Most of you probably also feel this because, well, if you have time to read a newsletter about golf on a Friday (or whenever you’re reading this), you probably work in a job that can, will be or has already been affected by AI.
To be clear, I don’t feel held hostage by AI or its tentacles, but I do feel like it continues to find me and my brain no matter what I’m thinking about or consuming.
5. I don’t have a spiky point or take on all of this (at least not quite yet), but I found both this conversation Colin and Samir had as well as this NYT article — which I think is the best thing I’ve ever read on AI? — to be helpful in the way that I think about it.
Here’s a wonderful quote from the NYT article (emphasis my own).
Language is not merely how we express ourselves; it is one of the ways we become ourselves. We write in order to find out what we think, we revise in order to discover whether or not we believe it, and we speak, stumble, clarify, retract and try again and again in order to understand the space between ideas and truth.
NYT
AI is the newest form of what people have been searching for forever, which is comfort. Or avoidance of pain. I have found in my own life, though, that it is often only through discomfort (or various forms of pain) that we become who we are meant to become. That is what is being missed in all of this. This is not just a matter of getting right or wrong answers but rather what the technology is doing to who we become as people.
It’s all very fascinating.
The obvious problem is cheating. But cheating is only the most visible and least interesting part of the problem. The more profound risk is that young people will use artificial intelligence to bypass the development of their interior lives and fail to hone their intelligence.
We need a similar caution now [with AI] not because artificial intelligence is mystical or sacred but because it enters us through language and language is the medium through which we know ourselves.
NYT
Me reading that …
6. Here’s a fun one I got from a friend this week …
Michael Brennan: 2 wins in 29 PGA Tour starts.
Thor, Koivun and Blades Brown combined: 2 wins in 109 PGA Tour starts.
It’s a great point, and we probably don’t think about Brennan enough. I loved this on him from Rick Gehman’s excellent newsletter this week.
Brennan has two wins on Tour — Sedgefield CC and Black Desert Resort. These are, statistically, two of the most demanding driving courses on the schedule. Sedgefield is tree-lined with thick rough and Black Desert has literal lava rocks that gobble up wayward shots.
There is a wide range of outcomes off-the-tee at both places which allows Brennan to separate even more than usual. That’s very different from courses that are simply long with thick rough everywhere.
Brennan isn’t a “bomb and gauge” guy as much as he is a true and complete driver. He’s exceedingly long, can work it in both directions, and is accurate enough to make a big difference.
Rick Run Good
I’m intrigued.
I still think the ceiling is still higher than the other three guys, but I might only be saying that because of their respective pedigrees. Regardless, it would be terrific to see any of them bust into a U.S. team room that feels like it has been trotting out the same team — or a facsimile of the same team — for the last 10 years.
7. This Joel Beall profile of Brian Rolapp is really good, worth your time. Equal parts a great articulation of the person and also a good look at the current men’s pro golf landscape. No new huge structural takeaways if you’ve been paying close attention, but there was definitely great insight into who Rolapp is.
“It’s a person that listens and doesn’t just talk,” [said Steve Bornstein]. “That’s his superpower. He listens, he synthesizes it, and then he asks intelligent, informed questions.”
Golf Digest
Such an underrated trait, and it stems from here. From these two qualities.
“I clearly didn’t know a lot of things: how the tour worked, how the sport was set up, what was on the players’ minds,” Rolapp says. “But it’s also part of my leadership style. I’ve always believed humility and self-awareness are underrated leadership attributes, because they let somebody know what they don’t know. When you lose sight of that, that’s when leaders get in trouble, or they surround themselves with people who tell them what they want to hear, the classic yes men.”
Golf Digest
I was already a fan and walked away an even bigger one than I was before. Don’t know how it’s all going to go, but I do believe that the person leading it is smart, capable and humble enough to steer it into a thriving new era.
8. This story from The Athletic on a playboy NFL agent who nearly became general manager of the Seahawks but then suddenly found himself on trial for murder is — and I overuse this but I promise this is an appropriate use of it — insane.
Thank you for supporting Normal Sport. As always, we remain an algorithm-free, handmade artifact in a world where it seems like there are — even digitally — fewer and fewer of those left.
Hello,
A confession: I really enjoyed building Wednesday’s Connections puzzle and have been trading puzzle building with friends throughout the week. Here’s another one for Friday. No prize this time. Just share it with friends if you’re inclined.
ALSO! Before we get to today’s newsletter, you will some notes on our new referrals program at the bottom of this email. Our hope is that it will encourage you to #GetInvolved, share the newsletter and properly reward you for helping us grow the game sheep meme brand. We tried a version of this two years ago but decided to wipe the slate clean for this iteration. Here are the prizes. Good luck to all!
Name drops today: Oliver Burkeman, Blades Brown, Snoop, Jon Rahm and Steve Bornstein.
Today’s newsletter is presented by Sap’s.
You know who could use some Sap’s? The guys grinding their faces off in Memphis where the temperature over the course of the tournament looks like a Misiorowski pitching log: 100, 101, 101, 103.
Where guys are putting with towels over their necks (of course it’s Spieth).
Anyway, they could use some Sap’s, which includes an ingredient stack of electrolytes for hydration, adaptogens for stress and balance and aminos to help your body recover faster (no word on what it does to tan pants).
I’ve been pounding these in the morning here in Dallas (where it’s a full Misiorowski as well) both before and after runs and workouts. Highly recommend the lemon lime, which you can get right here on Amazon.
And now, onto the news.
Get the boys some Sap's!
1. Hayden and I recorded a new podcast on Tuesday on a lot of what’s happened over the last few weeks. We talked about the young American stars suddenly popping, Bryson’s LIV circus and whether Jon Rahm is going to stay.
Oh, and also the cities that look like they’re going to be part of the championship circuit. I’m in favor of the Tour’s decisions, Hayden is a little less excited.
You can listen on Apple here or Spotify here.
Also, would love any feedback you have on the pod. You can vote below and leave written feedback as well.
The more honest, the better. There is nothing you can say that will come close to what I hear from the LIV stans on Twitter. Also, if you want to email me directly with any feedback, you can just hit reply and send over a note.
2. Speaking of Rahm! Turns out that he might not be willing to trade the $100M+ he’s owed for IOUs for a pink and black golf team whose other players include the second best player from Northern Ireland and an American who has never had a positive strokes gained season.
To be clear, Rahm proceeding with LIV 2.0 would be tantamount to Cam Young deciding to play on the Sunshine Tour in 2027. We don’t think of it like that because that’s not how we have thought about LIV over the last five years. But that’s what LIV 2.0 will be more like.
I think I have firmly landed in the “no single person can move the needle enough for it to matter for a golf league” camp, but this problem remains …
Bloomberg reported that 1) LIV is working on a deal with BC Partners and 2) while BC Partners and LIV Golf’s executive team may have agreed to broad terms, a term sheet has not yet been fully executed. The Financial Times then added more color after that, reporting that BC’s investment is contingent on LIV Golf retaining enough star players.
Huddle Up
So whether a player actually does move the needle might not matter as long as the company funding the league believes that he moves the needle.
Maybe that’s all that matters as it relates to LIV 2.0, and in that sense there is a dark amusement in the seeming reality that Rahm may once and for all reunite the world of professional golf. Just not in the way he originally intended to.
3. Gabby wrote quite well about all of this earlier in the week, and the whole thing is almost comical. Among my favorite parts.
• LIV is pitching its 2.0 version by touting how much money it loses and how that can benefit a business looking to save on paying taxes.
Me reading that …
• It is probably going to enter bankruptcy, which means that for Rahm and others to get the money they are owed, they will have to sue Saudia Arabia in an international court (!!). The thought of Bryson and his attorney taking on the crown prince in an extremely public trial is almost too much for me to handle.
• And she confirms that Rahm is a linchpin (maybe the linchpin) because of what he’s owed and how much the league needs him because its future funding depends on it.
A question: Is this what we want pro golf to be?
I honestly feel bad for … basically nobody involved here (at the highest level anyway). They all tried to microwave history and were not quiet about doing it. So now everyone is looking around saying, “Wait, where is the money and why isn’t this working?” when the entire premise from the beginning was that there was too much money involved to make it work!
This is startup failure 101. Happens all the time. Might happen to Normal Sport at some point! So my frustration and lack of compassion is not with the fact that it’s happening but rather with the chest thumping that went with it along the way.
This post will continue below for Normal Club members (all 1,056 of them) and includes some follow-up AI thoughts, a good Michael Brennan take and a couple of amazing profiles from this week.
By becoming a member, you will receive the following …
• Access to 100 percent of our content this week.
• An invite to our Slack channel where we watch and talk golf together.
• A free digital copy of our Rory book.
• 15% off to our pro shop.
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