Issue No. 247 | September 7, 2025 | Read Online

As soon as I parted ways with CBS Sports last year — which is coming up on a year ago now — I was asked two main questions. The first was, “What are you going to do next?”

When I answered that I was going to see if I could make my own golf media business work, the obvious next question was, “Oh, so when does the podcast start?”

Podcasts and shows have obviously become synonymous with media businesses in 2025, but I never saw things as unambiguously as those who were on the outside looking in.

As an art form, I am in love with reading and writing. Always have been. Probably always will be. They are my professional joy, and that I get to participate in them as a profession at all feels — even after 13 years — pretty surreal.

So I weighed all of these ideas and thoughts and, despite numerous people behind the scenes pushing me toward having a show, I juggled the pros and cons of adding anything to the newsletter for most of the last 12 months.

There were two things, though, that eventually pushed me over the edge and into starting The Normal Sport Show, which we launched on Wednesday.

TODAY’S SPONSOR

We will get to those two things in a moment, but first a thank you to the presenter of today’s newsletter, Turtlebox.

I’m not saying you have to listen to our show on a Turtlebox, but I am saying that if you choose to listen to our show on a Turtlebox, it’s going to sound wonderful.

My fam has been absolutely abusing the Turtlebox Ranger, and it’s been a fabulous addition do our daily rotation around the house.

The Ranger is the most portable, lightweight Turtlebox yet. They took everything you love about durability, performance, and sound quality, and packed it in a smaller, adventure-ready design.

Still waterproof, drop-proof, and built to handle the elements—just in a size that you can take everywhere. Toss it in your bag, clip it to your pack, carry it with you, or mount it to metal, this speaker is made to move.

And trust me, we have tested the limits of its waterproof-ness and drop-proof-ness with four kids running around our place. You can check it out right here.

OK now onto the news.

Two Reasons We Started a Show

Before we get into this, I would love for you to subscribe to our show at any (or all!) of the following places.

YouTube
Spotify
Apple

Here are my two reasons.

1. After the Masters, I was desperate to just talk to somebody about what I had just experienced. Anybody. And while I did go on a few shows hosted by other folks, I longed for my own outlet to discuss what in the world had just happened. 

How, in the year 2025, I thought, do I not have an outlet to distribute my thoughts on a podcast or show?!

Sure, I wrote (and wrote and wrote and wrote) on the newsletter, and that was a nice release for me, but it wasn’t quite the same as getting to talk about what I had seen and felt walking around that place for what felt like the best Masters of my lifetime.

2. And the second reason is that earlier this year, my internet pal, CJ Chilvers, wrote the following on his newsletter about media consumption.

I responded via email by asking him about this statement.

His answer to that question rocked my professional world a little bit.

This whole time, I had thought I was betting on the oldest medium of communication — reading and writing. But the truth is that podcasting is (kind of) an even older medium of communication because if you look at podcasting from a certain angle, it really is just people gathering around a hearth to talk and tell stories.

The modernity of technology allows anyone to sidle up to that hearth and listen, which is different than the last 5,000 years but also kind of the beauty of it.

So those are my two reasons for jumping into this, which begs the question of what exactly this show is going to be or what it’s going to look like. Aside: I keep using the word show because we are thinking of it as a show that you watch first and a podcast that you listen to second because 1. YouTube’s distribution is wild and 2. It gives us freedom of variety in the future.

The irony, though, is that for all the thought I’ve put into this, I’m still not totally sure what it’s going to look like. I also feel fine about this.

This is what one of our first newsletter headers and illustrations looked like.

This is very much not what the newsletter headers and illustrations look like now.

Things change. They evolve. Things typically find the equilibrium of what the market demands and what the people making the stuff enjoy outputting and are able to sustain.

I do know what I don’t want the show to be.

I don’t want it to be similar to Shotgun Start or the NLU recaps of events. Both of those entities are already covering the day-to-day of golf far better than I ever could, even if I had a show for 1,000 years. I enjoy what they do, but I don’t aspire to usurp them.

Why We Started the Normal Sport Show (and Why It Took So Long)

The Normal Sport Show · Episode

open.spotify.com/episode/4y5J6HFKft66mkIiCftNCB

And while those shows often zoom out to the bigger picture and historical context, I think I probably want to start there, at 30,000 feet. There are some different formats I envision that taking on.

1. Lists with friends: Ali Abdaal has a great quote that I believe about how “everything is a list.” He goes on: “Fundamentally, every non-fiction book is a listicle.” Again, this is definitely true.

And while the Buzzfeedification and Bleacher Reportification of the entire internet gave lists a bad name (just because everything can be a list, it doesn’t mean everything should be a list), when done well, they can still be wonderful. Again, I don’t know the specifics of what this will look like on our show, but I’m intrigued by the idea of it.

I’ve been into Andy Roddick’s show recently, and I think a version of this could work really nicely in golf. You could do it with anything. Top 20 players of all time (something I’m desperate to explore), 10 best majors of this century, 304 wildest moments from Rory’s last nine holes at the Masters. Really anything.

2. Song Exploder but for golf: If you have ever heard the Song Exploder show, you have heard a group of people breaking down a song or even a part of a song to its most granular details. I think this would be an interesting exercise for golf. You take a moment (Rory-Cantlay in Rome) or a person (Pablo Martin) or something specific and get as steep on it as possible.

Again, some of this might not work, but we’re going to try it and see.

3. One question, many answers: This is the form our first show takes on. I took a question I had been considering — How do you even make a good show? — and went and asked four people who have done it. Four small interviews combined into one show.

There are options. What’s your favorite Tiger moment? Which major since 2000 has meant the most to you personally? What is one thing the PGA Tour could steal from the NFL to make its product better? 

These are all episodes that could take place in the future.

4. One on ones: I would like to do some one on one interviews as well, with the added twist that many of them would not be with players but rather with the media personalities and other people in golf that you follow.

Example: Who do you have more of a relationship with when it comes to golf — Joe Highsmith or Geoff Shackelford? Jacob Bridgeman or D.J. Piehowski?

That’s not to say I’ll never try to do one on ones with players, but only to say that I’m going to explore some other people in and around golf as well. The dream is to do these in person tantamount to the Colin and Samir Show, which has been a big inspiration for me.

And while things certainly won’t start that way, I’m hopeful that this is how they will eventually go.

So yeah, those are my thoughts. If you have other ideas or formats you would like for us to try, please let me know by responding to this newsletter.

The two things that keep me up at night as it relates to this show.

1. Most of the shows I enjoy are just two or three personalities who fire up the mics and talk, not a rotating list of guests and people that a single host has on (like I’m laying out above). Should I just strive for the former instead of the latter? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I’m constantly thinking about it.

2. There are a LOT of shows … why would anyone listen to this particular one? Here’s Scott Galloway on the topic.

So that’s it. My hopes, my fears, my vision for this show. As with the newsletter, I have no idea if it’s going to work, no idea if we can make it through a month or a season or a year. No idea if people will even care.

But also like the newsletter, you will get my care and my heart.

And the most surprising thing to me after recording the first three episodes (which will drop over the next several weeks), it’s been a lot of fun, a lot more fun than I even thought it would be.

I hope that comes through on the show, and I hope — as always — that it makes your personal experience of golf feel at least a little bit more meaningful.

Thank you for reading our handcrafted, algorithm-free newsletter about golf. We put everything we have into every newsletter we write, which is why they are frequently 1,946 words long like this one.

While we do use digital tools that help us find information, everything you read and consumed was created from scratch by two humans who are absolutely obsessed with the game.

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