Issue No. 251 | September 16, 2025 | Read Online

Greetings!

The Ryder Cup is next week. Jason is flying to the U.S. as I type this, and we will have a meetup with Normal Club members in Dallas later this week (Thursday evening). We would love for you to join the Normal Club, and we will send out details on the meetup on Wednesday.

TODAY’S SPONSOR

Thank you to OGIO for presenting today’s newsletter and helping us get to Bethpage next week. We’ll be rocking their Alpha Venture Backpack — which I have been using throughout my travel this year as well as a surprise drop they have coming next week.

Keep an eye out on their Instagram and on this newsletter. We will feature their new travel product extensively and do a giveaway around it as well. Excited to show it to you and excited, as always, to be repping OGIO on the road.

If you’re traveling with something that carries stuff you really care about, OGIO makes a premium version of it (and that will be even more true starting next week). 

OK, now onto the news.

One Thing I Loved

What if the Scottie-Tiger comparison hyperbole not only hasn’t gone too far. What if it … hasn’t gone far enough? I was thinking about that when I saw this question on Twitter over the weekend following Scottie’s sixth win in his last 12 starts (not a typo).

The word I keep coming back to with Scottie is helplessness. There is a helplessness among other players that is very Tiger-like. Did you hear Lanto Griffin after losing to Scottie on Sunday?

If you played a round of golf with Lanto Griffin, he would be (probably by a wide margin) the best player you have ever seen. You would leave wondering how Lanto Griffin is not a 7-time major champion. He’s one of the best in his profession in the world. And Scottie makes him feel feeble. Without agency. Powerless.

That’s extraordinary. And now Scottie — as I wrote about on The Infirmary — has put together yet another of the 10 best seasons of the last 40 years and dunked on Phil Mickelson’s amusing prediction from March in the process.

He’s also at least hanging out in Tiger’s neighborhood when it comes to how good his seasons have been. Tiger is the green line, Scottie is blue.

Normal Sport

1. This made me chuckle a bit. Although maybe it’s not very normal sport-y since Jayden Daniels has been doing it for a long time now. Also, a tepid take: I think the NY crowds will be about 1/20th as bad as everyone is purporting. It’s difficult to imagine it being worse than Hazeltine.

2. It’s true that this happens in other sports. Fans catch foul balls all the time. Except that, you know, they aren’t still in play when they do!

[Jason here] Is golf the only sport where fans explicitly don’t want to catch the ball?

[Kyle back] Has to be!

3. A question.

Yes, yes it absolutely does. Reminds me of the sand brushers at Augusta National. Long poles that look like the devices pitchers use to build shoulder strength, but instead there are maintenance folks just whipping the sand off those perfectly cut greens.

4. Mr. Pork looks like he could be buddies with Norman.

Take of the Week

There are actually three this week, and none of them are mine, although I agree with all three.

1. The first is one reader’s theory on why there are so many more top American golfers compared to tennis pros. I posted in The Infirmary this reader’s thoughts on why this is the case — specifically in the tennis world — and dropped my reaction on how things could shift away from American dominance in golf.

2. The second is this one, which I agree with. One look at Ben Griffin, and it’s easy to write him off as a golf dork (who could be a finance dork) who wears weird glasses and has a funky-but-certainly-not-beautiful move.

And yet … he’s kind of electric? I’m not totally sure why, although I suspect the pod Soly did with him recently has something to do with it. He’s one of the storylines I’m most fascinated by next week at Bethpage.

3. As I have been yelling about for the last few years, there are 10,000 problems with players being in charge of the PGA Tour, and this one is right up there near the top for me.

What self-respecting established professional is going to vote to make it easier (via PGA Tour U) for a young star like Jackson Koivun (or Luke Clanton or any of those guys) to take the very job that is making that player millions and millions of dollars.

Maybe the most misaligned incentive on the entire Tour.

Corrupt Golf Media

• It’s honestly a bit too easy to reel in angsty Europeans who are already too hyped on the Ryder Cup. I did it here by noting that none of the poor Euro team could even beat one of their coaches at Wentworth last week. I don’t know if people were more mad about the idea or the fact that I called a vice captain a coach. And then Shane followed up here with one of his own.

• KVV joined Fried Egg Golf and wrote wonderfully on Monday about the serious and the absurd.

• Agree here. One of the great golf logos in a sea of them.

In the pantheon of underrated golf tour logos, this one is near the top.

— Jonathan Wall (@jonathanrwall)
2:04 PM • Sep 13, 2025

• Somebody tell LIV about Nielsen’s change in how they do ratings. Their LIV Indianapolis number will move from an average of 42,000 viewers per round to 43,000. Also, this got me good when it came across my timeline. Truly, who could forget?

• I felt this line so deeply. I yell to anyone who will listen that good comedians are the last truth tellers. And while that is probably a bit hyperbolic, it’s not that hyperbolic. But the underlying reason — that they make it about the listener more than they do about themselves — is not something I had considered. Brilliant stuff.

How is this app free?

• As a social media native, I felt this.

• Patrick is low-key one of the funniest people in golf. Follow him if you’re not.

• As would I.

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 1,097 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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