Issue No. 227 | July 11, 2025 | Read Online

This run in July is one of my favorite 2-3 week stretches of the year. The Wimbledon-Open Championship double is undefeated from a viewing perspective for a lot of reasons, one of which is that it’s so nice to have it on early in the day while you’re in the office working on various things.

For me, this week, that has meant already (already!) working toward 2026 as it relates to Normal Sport. Making sure we have everything lined out when it comes to sponsor packages, what kind of content we’re producing and what our calendar looks like.

This is exciting, but as Jason and I noted to each other earlier in the week, it often feels unproductive. I’m ready to get back to cooking next week during Portrush instead of just chopping and dicing and mincing.

I say all of that to say that our north star in all of this is delighting you, the audience. Literally our mission statement.

I go back to this often, and even though the form of what we’re doing may change some in the months ahead, this. mission — or some version of it — will always be what drives us.

Today’s newsletter is presented by Garmin and their Approach R50 simulator/launch monitor. I’m about to discuss some of my 2025 goals, and one way I could definitely start to make some inroads on those is by getting after it with the Approach R50.

We actually tried to give one of these away last week. I said I would buy one for a new member if we got to 1,000 before July 2. We only got to 950, but we did give away an Approach S70 watch instead to reader Ben D., which was a ton of fun.

Anyway, the Approach R50. The big boy. Here’s the best feature.

You can play directly on the device without an additional projector or anything like that. This makes setup and gameplay easy and seamless.

Here’s how Garmin says it.

I’ve literally done this in the backyard with my kids, and it’s awesome. I hit a ball off a mat into a net, while playing a course on the device at my feet. It’s awesome.

OK, now onto the news.

Checking in on 2025 Predictions and Goals

I’m taking a page out of two books and looking at both my beginning of the year predictions (thank you, Fried Egg) as well as my beginning of the year golf goals (thank you, NLU).

You can read the entire predictions post right here, and below I’ll mock my January self for everything I wasn’t even close on.

1. Europe wins Bethpage: TBD here, but I actually have flipped on this. I think the U.S. has as strong of a team as Europe (or possibly a stronger team) and will leverage the home crowd to roll to its third consecutive win in the United States.

If you simply look at names names on paper, you will almost certainly be fooled by the two squads, but I sorted by SG over the last six months, and the U.S. is borderline dominant. Look at this!

You get to 12 U.S. players before you get to seven European players. That doesn’t guarantee anything, of course, but lose me with all the Rasmuses until we see one of them play as well as … you know … Denny McCarthy.

2. The PIF-PGA Tour deal goes through … and then nothing happens: I mean … whatever. It’s honestly just difficult to care about this anymore. Other than the fact that the Tour is getting a lot of private equity, which doesn’t exactly make me bullish on them creating a better product for fans (I actually wrote about this some on Tuesday).

3. Kyle breaks 80 twice: Here’s what I wrote as my full set of golf goals on our 2025 goals page.

Checking in after six months, and I haven’t played as much golf as I thought I would so far this year. Turns out, four kids and a dog and a new business require a lot of … care. So posting 35 rounds is going to take a herculean second-half-of-the-year effort.

As for the other two, here are all my posted rounds (correct, I don’t think I played for the first four months of 2025?). I’m down under 10 — barely at 9.9 — but I only had one real shot at something in the 70s over the first half of the year.

I would like to confess that I have the full on chipping yips. There’s just no other way to say it. So I don’t really think I can break 80 unless I’m playing at a course like Trinity Forest, where you literally don’t have to chip. You can just putt from pretty much anywhere. It’s so bad that Jason, who has never seen me play, suggested that I try chipping one handed.

I also may need to get myself over to Scotland right now. I’d thrive over there with the way I’m playing right now. Optimism remains high about breaking 80 two times because I’m hitting it as well as I ever have, but I’m going to have to get some more rounds in the queue to have a real chance.

[Jason here] I also haven’t played as much as I had hoped to this year. My goal of one round per week could have been more realistically set as one round per month. It has shifted my golf goals a bit. Now my goal is to enjoy any time on the course as much as possible by swinging “whatever swing shows up.” That goal has been buoyed by …

1. Coffee golf.

2. Reading Moe and Me by Lorne Rubenstein. It’s chock full of sad and inspiring Moe Norman anecdotes like this one:

3. The two world No. 1s, Scottie and U.S. Adaptive Open champion Kipp Popert, dominating with their unique (and also surprisingly similar) moves.

Golfers dance and celebrate themselves.

This post will continue below for Normal Club members and includes …

• Scottie thoughts.

• A horrific Morikawa prediction.

• Why Jon Rahm is going to win The Open.

If you aren’t yet a Normal Club member, you can sign up right here.

If you are, keep reading!

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