Greetings!
I think this might low-key be the best sports weekend of the year.
Western Conference Finals
Roland Garros
Men’s NCAAs start
Baseball regionals
LIV Korea
Pro golf isn’t adding much to the festivities, but we still have plenty to talk about this Friday as the U.S. Open starts to peek around the corner.
Name drops today: Andy Roddick, Hiroshi Tai, Turk Pettit, Scottie Scheffler and Blades Brown (again).
Today’s newsletter is presented by Saps’s. With the longest day in golf coming up next week and players and fans melting their faces off at Roland Garros in France, might I suggest an ice cold Sap’s (lemon lime is for sure the play).
Sap’s is the opposite of a stressful Jordan Spieth round — everything your body needs and nothing it doesn’t. No added sugar. No artificial ingredients. No filler or gimmicks.
Following Spieth, on the other hand, is nothing your body needs and everything it doesn’t. It’s certainly a choice. One I keep entering into against the wishes of my own self. Which is part of the reason I need Sap’s to recover.
OK, now onto the news.
1. On Friday, I was listening to Andy Roddick’s excellent Served podcast, and he was talking about the year 2003 in the tennis world. The last time the slams felt wide open. The year four different players won the four grand slams. The last time an American — Roddick himself — won a grand slam.
Wait a second, I thought.
That was a year when the four golf majors were won by four different players, too.
All of this got me wondering how many times — and perhaps (probably!) I am the only person in the world who cares about this — the eight tennis and golf majors have been won by eight distinct people on the men’s side.
Here are the three times it’s happened this century.
Couple of thoughts here.
• I thought this would have happened fewer than three times.
• Have there ever been U.S. Open winners in the same year who are less alike stylistically than Jim Furyk and Andy Roddick?
• 2003 had to be one of the weirdest golf/tennis years ever. It was nearly extra unique in that it was almost eight first-time major winners (Agassi was the only player on either side who had won a major before)
• After Roland Garros this year, we will be halfway home, with four different major winners in the first four events. Rory, Rai, Alcaraz and .. ?
• And with Sinner the favorite at Wimbledon and Scottie the favorite at Shinnecock, we will probably (?) get to six of six going into The Open in July.
• Again, I realize that I am one of the only humans who cares about this, but there is a good chance that all of the others who care about it are also subscribed to this newsletter.
2. Three amazing normal sport things emerged this week. The first was from the Byron Nelson where this fan ran on the green during one of the rounds (I believe Friday) just before Scottie putted and was arrested off to the side.
The part that made me laugh was that both officer and perpetrator waited for another man who is also intimately familiar with the inside of a jail cell to finish out the hole.
Bizarre — and honestly pretty scary — stuff.
Not quite “fan walks up to Rory’s bag and takes driver out” scary, but I’m with Martin Trainer. No desire to live the life of most of the top famous pros.
The second NS moment was less nefarious and more amusing.
At the Austrian Open this week, a car is serving as the range picker. Sure.
The video is somehow (?) even better.
Oh and you can throw this in as the third very normal sport thing as well.
3. A few thoughts on the men’s NCAAs going into this weekend of stroke play ahead of match play at the start of next week.
• This format absolutely rules. Does it definitively identify the best champion every year? Absolutely not. Do I care? Also, 100 percent no. Team match play is arguably the best form of golf when there are real stakes (sorry, LIV).
And while — like the PGA Championship at Aronimink — it may not be the best way to identify the best team (whatever that actually means), it is far and away the best mechanism for creating an entertaining and engaging product, which is what I think pretty much everyone involved actually wants anyway.
• The run of individual winners on the men’s side has been less than inspiring. Since Matt Wolff won at 10 under in 2019, these are your NCAA individual champions.
Pettit (who played on LIV) is on the Korn Ferry and outside the top 500 on Data Golf. Sargent is on the PGA Tour but ranked No. 158 in the FedEx Cup and has one top 10 in his last 25 starts.
Fred Biondi is No. 171 in the Race to Dubai. Hiroshi is ranked No. 76 in the world … among amateurs. And La Sasso is toiling away on LIV, though Brentley Romine noted that he may or may not have inquired about coming back to play for Ole Miss this year (which amuses me to no end).
• This run probably (?) ends this year with either Koivun, Preston Stout or Ben James winning it all. I think all three will be terrific pros. Although I also thought Sargent was going to win between 7-11 majors.
• I hope we get some variation of Florida, Auburn, Texas, Virginia and my O-State squad in the semifinals. Those teams are all tremendous, have all had success here, all have good future pros and are all loaded for a run. Pumped for it!
4. This is a thing I have been considering while watching Roland Garros this week ….
I’m … not sure which I prefer.
The golf major calendar is slightly too condensed, and tennis is probably a little too elongated. But I do like that the carrot of a major is out there for longer in tennis than in golf. I think I lean toward the tennis calendar, even though I don’t like that both have 11-month long seasons in general. End those seasons at the last major (they won’t) and let us have time off in the fall to start looking forward to the following year.
5. Speaking of Jackson Koivun! I recently went looking at strokes gained over the last 12 months, mostly as a Scottie exercise, and I found some very interesting things.
The first is that Scottie has been better over the last year than he was the year before that … Here are his numbers from from May 24-May 24.
2024-2025: 3.14 SG
2025-2026: 3.24 SG
He’s also been nearly as good YoY.
Jan. 1-May 25 (2025): 3.01 SG
Jan. 1-May 25 (2026): 2.94 SG
So that was a little unexpected.
But what really caught me off guard was the top 10 SG players over the last 12 months.
Yes, it’s a small sample size. Yes, he putted his face off. Yes, he will regress over a longer window of time. But also yes, he can be a top 25 player in the world almost immediately once he leaves Auburn. And finally, yes, he can (and maybe should?) be on this year’s President’s Cup team.
DG has him as a top 25 U.S. player, and he hasn’t played a PGA Tour event this year!
6. I wrote about Blades Brown a bit in Tuesday’s newsletter, and got this lovely email from a follower/reader. I thought it was illuminating and interesting.
Saw your comments on Blades, we played with him in the pro-am here at the Korn Ferry event in Savannah. I walked off the course that day and said “I'm putting his major wins over-under at 1.5” which I know is a Tron-level ridiculous thing to say, but he is amazingly poised and mature at his age.
Obviously his game is great, but they all are at that level. It was his complete awareness of the situation that I was so impressed with -- he remembered all of our names, asked insightful questions, gave thoughtful answers, while also preparing for a competition that he would end up finishing third!
We've been following him really closely since April and he continues to impress both on and off the course and was excited to read your take.
Anonymous Reader
Again, he turned 19 (nineteen!) last week!
Who knows — see Sargent comment above — but it is somewhat curious that Blades hasn’t gotten more attention than he has up until now (or maybe I’ll just keep writing about him in every newsletter and manifest this thing into existence).
In a world where it’s easier than ever to maximize efficiency, we labor instead to optimize humanity in everything we write, draw and publish. Thank you for reading and participating, and don’t forget that you can annotate everything we write on the website right here.
Greetings!
I think this might low-key be the best sports weekend of the year.
Western Conference Finals
Roland Garros
Men’s NCAAs start
Baseball regionals
LIV Korea
Pro golf isn’t adding much to the festivities, but we still have plenty to talk about this Friday as the U.S. Open starts to peek around the corner.
Name drops today: Andy Roddick, Hiroshi Tai, Turk Pettit, Scottie Scheffler and Blades Brown (again).
Today’s newsletter is presented by Saps’s. With the longest day in golf coming up next week and players and fans melting their faces off at Roland Garros in France, might I suggest an ice cold Sap’s (lemon lime is for sure the play).
Sap’s is the opposite of a stressful Jordan Spieth round — everything your body needs and nothing it doesn’t. No added sugar. No artificial ingredients. No filler or gimmicks.
Following Spieth, on the other hand, is nothing your body needs and everything it doesn’t. It’s certainly a choice. One I keep entering into against the wishes of my own self. Which is part of the reason I need Sap’s to recover.
OK, now onto the news.
1. On Friday, I was listening to Andy Roddick’s excellent Served podcast, and he was talking about the year 2003 in the tennis world. The last time the slams felt wide open. The year four different players won the four grand slams. The last time an American — Roddick himself — won a grand slam.
Wait a second, I thought.
That was a year when the four golf majors were won by four different players, too.
All of this got me wondering how many times — and perhaps (probably!) I am the only person in the world who cares about this — the eight tennis and golf majors have been won by eight distinct people on the men’s side.
Here are the three times it’s happened this century.
Couple of thoughts here.
• I thought this would have happened fewer than three times.
• Have there ever been U.S. Open winners in the same year who are less alike stylistically than Jim Furyk and Andy Roddick?
• 2003 had to be one of the weirdest golf/tennis years ever. It was nearly extra unique in that it was almost eight first-time major winners (Agassi was the only player on either side who had won a major before)
• After Roland Garros this year, we will be halfway home, with four different major winners in the first four events. Rory, Rai, Alcaraz and .. ?
• And with Sinner the favorite at Wimbledon and Scottie the favorite at Shinnecock, we will probably (?) get to six of six going into The Open in July.
• Again, I realize that I am one of the only humans who cares about this, but there is a good chance that all of the others who care about it are also subscribed to this newsletter.
2. Three amazing normal sport things emerged this week. The first was from the Byron Nelson where this fan ran on the green during one of the rounds (I believe Friday) just before Scottie putted and was arrested off to the side.
The part that made me laugh was that both officer and perpetrator waited for another man who is also intimately familiar with the inside of a jail cell to finish out the hole.
Bizarre — and honestly pretty scary — stuff.
Not quite “fan walks up to Rory’s bag and takes driver out” scary, but I’m with Martin Trainer. No desire to live the life of most of the top famous pros.
The second NS moment was less nefarious and more amusing.
At the Austrian Open this week, a car is serving as the range picker. Sure.
The video is somehow (?) even better.
Oh and you can throw this in as the third very normal sport thing as well.
This post will continue below for Normal Club members (all 1,055 of them) and includes thoughts on Jackson Koivun, the NCAAs and why Blades Brown continues to rock.
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.
.svg){kind=spacer}
