Greetings!
I don’t know if you are experiencing this, but the start of summer is always such a strange time for content — what I watch and what I read online seems to change significantly. I am moving around more, participating in more activities, going on more trips and just generally at my desk less often.
Outside of both Opens, this seems to lead to less opportunity for consumption of golf, which is part confession and part wondering aloud if Brian Rolapp should factor that into his calculus when putting together the 2028 schedule. Maybe I’m alone in that. But I suspect I’m not.
Summer is a fun and wonderful time — all seasons are magical in their own unique ways — but I just feel a bit less invested in the golf than I do in January-May. So of course … here is a newsletter about everything going on in the golf world but really just about what went on with Scottie at Memorial this week.
Name drops today: Jaxon Smith-Njigba, Steph Curry, Jon Rahm, Jalen Brunson and Ted Scott.
Today’s newsletter is presented by Sap’s Original.
Sap’s is perfect for any summer activity. On the course. After a long run. During travel. Or doing absolutely nothing on a Sunday while watching the No. 1 player in the world hoot and holler at an event he’s won twice in a row.
Sap’s is light, crushable, and refreshing in a can. We played some golf at Wild Spring Dunes earlier this week, and they had some cans of those, uh, drinks started at the University of Florida. If you’ve never had that drink out of a can, you’ll never go back to the plastic bottle. That’s exactly what Sap’s out of a can reminds me of.
Plus, you don’t even have to travel to a resort course to find it because you can buy it on Amazon or at your local HEB.
OK, now onto the news.
1. Scottie. Let’s talk about it. It’s all anyone is talking about. If you haven’t seen it yet, he hit a ball into someone’s milkshake with his training aid grip on Thursday. It was wild.
Ok I’m kidding, he actually just hit a ball in the water on No. 16 but then unloaded for two minutes, talking generally in Ted Scott’s direction and voicing his anger with Scott’s reading of the wind but also seemingly talking toward anyone who would listen to him.
The entire episode provided us with memes for weeks, possibly months.
Scottie’s frustration will literally feed families.
And of course people had many, many, many opinions about this outburst from the best golfer in the world.
Here’s mine.
Right around the PGA Championship, our tiny Normal Sport team had some backend technical problems that didn’t affect very many people but kept popping up. It made me extremely frustrated because I want everyone’s experience of Normal Sport to be a great one. I went to Jeff, who runs all of our tech stack, and said — and this is a direct quote — This just can't be happening, which sounds a lot like what Scottie said to Ted Scott.
Jeff probably wasn’t my biggest fan in that moment, and I was probably a bit harsher than I needed to be. But I say that to say that these things happen when you’re trying to build something, when you’re pursuing something meaningful. When you’re in the mix and working toward a goal.
I just cannot get worked up about this particular Scottie-Ted Scott interaction. If this was Wemby and Mitch Johnson or Jalen Brunson and Mike Brown I think we would be talking about what dogged competitors those guys are. Honestly, this seemed kind of mild to me as far as high-level athlete interactions go.
2. That having been said!
When Scottie plays poorly — the 2025 Players comes to mind for me — he does seem to get incredibly whiny in a way that is both unbecoming and unappealing to the general golf public. Both of these things — both No. 1 and No. 2 — can be true.
His anger can be both fairly tame by professional athlete standards and also incredibly annoying as a spectator.
Here’s the problem: When you see Jaxon Smith-Njigba yelling about how Sam Darnold never hits him at the right moment on his route — I’m making up scenarios — it is completely unrelatable to almost everyone watching so it’s easy to presume that this anger is justified.
But when you see someone whining and being sarcastic and getting worked up about a bad shot on the golf course, almost everyone watching has either played with that person or been that person [raises hand for both], and it is the most relatable — and unattractive — thing in the world.
Because we have all been in that situation, have all played with that person, it is easy and natural to formulate a negative opinion of Scottie. Easy to find it annoying.
This post will continue below for Normal Club members (all 1,055 of them) and includes where I land on all of this and why I’m buying stock if you’re selling any.
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.
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It's a treasure trove of the important, the seemingly important, and — importantly! — the unimportant stuff. It's an asset in my inbox.
There’s been no one else in golf that has tickled my funny bone as often as Kyle Porter does. He’s been instrumental in ushering in a new era of golf coverage and it’s been a pleasure to be along for the ride in that.
I’ve always enjoyed your love for golf. So often I see favoritism showed to golfers in the social media world, but I enjoy reading you telling a situation how it is regardless of the person.
Kyle is one of the best in the golf world at finding and synthesizing the absurd, the thoughtful and the fun things that make being a golf fan worthwhile.
Kyle is the best columnist in sports. That he has channeled those talents through strokes gained and Spieth memes is a blessing to golf.
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