Special Edition | April 7, 2025 | Read Online 

Masters week.

Best week of the year.

And we kicked it off with my essay: What does the Masters mean to you?

We would love for you to go read that, and we have provided space for you to leave your own thoughts on what the Masters mean to you.

Check it out. Share it around with friends, family, TikTok followers. I’m appreciative of anything you can do to spread the normality, especially in a big week like this one.

Let’s get it.

Major Contest Update

Reminder: We are running a major championship pool this year — pick eight players, low score wins, things of that nature.

You can read more about that here (including a FAQ), but the short version is that it’s free for our Normal Club members, and there’s a $4,000 purse at stake.

If you’re a member, you should have received a link to the contest via email, but if not, we put it in your account page, which you can view if you’re logged into the site.

We also built out a Wikipedia-style winners page, which you can check out here. Here’s an example of what it will look like (if you’re logged in as a Normal Club member, you can find a link to this first contest there as well).

We’re really excited about this, and it looks like some of the sign-up issues from different states last week were resolved. Unfortunately, the contest is still not available outside the U.S. and Canada (we will work toward this in the future).

But if you needed a reason to become a Normal Club member, entrance into our four major contests with four-figure prizes is a pretty great one.

By the way, since the game is pick eight players, and the top seven count, I decided on my team for this year.

April Giveaway(s)

We have so much gear lined up to give away this month, that I had to make a spreadsheet to keep track of it all.

Here’s a quick overview.

• Five (5) green and white Turtlebox speakers ($450 value each).

• Five (5) Meridian putters (~$270 value each), all earned gold on the Golf Digest hot list.

• Five (5) OGIO travel bags (values vary).

• Five (5) Precision Pro range finders ($270 value each).

• Three (3) dozen Seed Golf balls with the Normal Sport logo.

• Three (3) boxes of Holderness and Bourne and other NS gear.*

*These won’t go out in the mail until we receive our first big shipment of NS gear later in April.

How do you enter?

Do nothing.

Be subscribed to the newsletter and you’re entered. That’s it. We’ll announce winners daily in the newsletter. We will also give away a few things on social, so go follow on Twitter here and Instagram here if you aren’t already.

Previous 2025 Winners

Media Appearances

I have been making the rounds in our weird little sliver of the internet, and in doing so I’ve discovered that going on other people’s podcasts and telling my story and the Normal Sport story is more enjoyable than I thought it would be.

Here’s a sampling of what I’ve been on in the last month or so.

• Fried Egg talking Rory.

• In Our Expert Opinion talking entrepreneurship.

• Heaven or Heisman talking youth sports (so many takes).

• Restoration Club talking faith and entrepreneurship.

Masters Schedule

We got a lot of feedback that folks wanted our newsletters to be delivered the morning after a round rather than immediately following.

The reason? You appreciate the time and thoughtfulness we put into what we’re writing and illustrating.

This blew me away! It’s what I always hope to get across, of course, but that people actually perceive that is really meaningful to me.

This schedule is great for us, too, because it allows Jason (who lives in Europe) to sleep after the final putt of a round and illustrate the next day rather than stay up until 3 a.m. wondering how to get the Fireballs logo onto every pebble in Rae’s Creek.

Anyway, here’s our plan.

Monday, April 7 — This update post
Tuesday, April 8 — Regular Normal Sport email (free)
Wednesday, April 9 — Pressers recap, picks (paid)
Thursday, April 10 — TBD
Friday, April 11 — Thoughts on R1 (paid)
Saturday, April 12 — Thoughts on R2 (paid)
Sunday, April 13 — Thoughts on R3 (paid)
Monday, April 14 — Thoughts on R4 (paid)
Tuesday, April 15 — Regular Normal Sport email (free)

As you can see — and as I have tried to note along the way — a lot of our coverage during Players, the four majors and the Ryder Cup will be for Normal Club members. Not all, but a lot. You can join right here and not miss a thing.

Three Reminders

1. You can gift memberships to friends, family and/or TikTok followers. You don’t have to be a member to do this. You can use this link right here. If you’re logged in as a member, you can skip ahead to here.

2. You may have noticed that I’m using the term “login” more often. That’s because we have been working hard to make our site more of a home base for the future. Our tech guy, Jeff — thank you for what you do online, Jeff — is amazing, and he’s been grinding tirelessly to get everything ready for this Masters week. Like my essay on what the Masters means to me.

3. We also recently published the story behind our logo, which I am still in love with six months into the business.

This post will continue for Normal Sport members below, and includes …

• My biggest business struggle heading into the Masters.

• How many subscribers and members we’re up to.

• How much runway we have as a business.

• A preview of our first Holderness and Bourne merch order.

If you are reading this, that means you are a Normal Sport member. I write a bit more in depth from here on out about our business because I view you as someone who is …

1. Helping us build that business and …
2. Probably interested in our story or entrepreneurship in general.

If you don’t have the link to the Masters contest, here it is.

One Recent Takeaway

Usually, I include three things here, but today I only have one.

1. I have found myself extremely stressed leading into the Masters: Like “we need to change the font size on tablet view!” levels of stress. Just trying to control anything I can get my hands on and constantly worried about things like “what if the business doesn’t grow during Masters week THAT SURELY MEANS WE’RE COOKED DOESN’T IT?!”

I realize how insane this sounds because I see how insane it looks on paper. But it still feels real, which means I have not really been enjoying the fact that, you know, this ridiculous company that I built out of a Twitter joke, is credentialed by the Augusta National Golf Club to cover the most meaningful golf tournament in the world.

So maybe that’s a confession. Maybe you run a business and you needed to hear that somebody else is crazy just like you are. I don’t know. What I do know is that tech guy, Jeff — who I mentioned above — said something to me last week that I have written down on my daily task list (yeah, I use paper/pen).

Here’s what he said: Prioritize having fun.

People are attracted to and compelled by other people having fun, and whatever fun you have at the Masters will be infectious, he added.

Jeff barely knows what the Masters is (see below), but I thought that was so insightful and helpful and something I will be attempting to remember often this week.

Business Traj

Here is our lifetime subscriber graph.

And here is our lifetime paid membership graph.

This is encouraging. Especially since our goal for the year was to get to 1,000.

I’m intrigued to see if we can hit 750-800 by the end of this Masters week. That would be, frankly, pretty incredible, a bit unexpected and also quite encouraging as it relates to the sustainability of our business.

Purse Size

One thing I care a lot about as it relates to the health of our business is how much runway we have. Here’s an estimate of what that looks like. This is money in the bank divided by monthly expenses.

If we stopped making any revenue tomorrow, this shows how many months we could stay in business.

No notes, really, other than that I would love to climb back above and stay above that 6 months threshold.

Merch update

We have an order in with Imperial for shirts, hoodies and hats. That should arrive just after Masters, and we will send it to you first.

We also recently submitted this order with Holderness and Bourne. Not sure if we’re going to be able to afford to order all of it, but pumped about how it turned out.

Will keep you guys updated.

We’re going to put that silly little sheep on everything we look at.

OK, that’s it for this month.

Hope you guys enjoy this kind of stuff. I certainly like thinking about and considering it.

Thank you for being a member of the Normal Club. I’m grateful for it.

Let’s have ourselves a Masters week.

Kyle Porter
Founder | Normal Sport