Since one pretty obviously doesn’t just stumble into writing a multiple-times-a-week newsletter about Cleeks and Fireballs and giraffes galloping down fairways, I figured I should share a bit more of my story.
Let’s go back to Christmas 1996. I’m not sure that’s where all of this starts, but it’s definitely a good starting point. My father’s father gifted me a magic set, and – I hope this isn’t overstating it – I think it may have changed my life.
I loved how all of it worked. I loved making people laugh and smile and delight in the world around them. It was one of the best presents I have ever received, and to this day I feel the effects of a gift that he almost certainly hasn’t thought about in decades.
My mom was an elite amateur player, and golf weaved its way in and out of our family during my childhood. But I was usually too preoccupied with my fledgling baseball career to notice. Outside of baseball, I knew I loved three things: Reading, writing and giving people a show.
I read everything I could get my hands on as a kid. I was the 13-year-old who stayed up until 3 a.m. during those forever summer nights because I had to get to the end of the book. Along the way, I fell in love with writing, too. I liked how other people’s writing made me feel and wondered if I could do that for people as well.
As a kid, there was no Matt Christopher book I did not read. Looking back, this probably had a profound effect on how I would eventually write. Here’s a clip from a Joe Posnanski (!!) profile of Christopher.
Christopher gets between 30 and 40 letters a week from children and teachers and librarians thanking him and telling him how much they enjoy his books. Christopher says those letters give him a lift. In children's books, the author must pour himself into the work.
It will take Christopher three months to finish a book - a mix of fun and the hardest work.
"I think of times when I get emotional writing books," Christopher said. "Sometimes I write, and there are tears in my eyes. It's very important. I know when I feel like that, the reader will feel that way." He smiles.
That is (and always has been) aspirational to me.
In college – following stalled attempts at playing baseball at Trinity University and Oklahoma State – I started what surely must have been the first newsletter about intramural sports. Recaps of co-ed flag football games. Softball statistics. Missives on the B League basketball brackets. All of it was absurd, but at the time we took it very seriously (this concept – taking goofy things seriously – was a bit of foreshadowing).
After college, I got a job in Stillwater, USA, where I lived for a year before moving to Dallas for my first truly professional job. It was while I was at this job – as a Very Important Analyst in an insurance and retirement company – that I started looking around at the 45-year-old version of me and thought, “Hmm … I don’t really think that’s what we’re going for here.”
Everyone was nice and fine and very kind to me, but it was just not the life or career I aspired to.
I was in my wife’s ear all the time about all of this.
I could start a sno-cone stand.
I could get into the oil and gas industry.
We could quit it all and move to Spain.
Eventually I settled on something that fit my skillset and didn’t involve international transportation. I started a website called Pistols Firing where I covered Oklahoma State football, basketball and recruiting. Directionally, it was TexAgs.com for OSU, though in reality it never really got there.
But I started it at a fortuitous time. OSU nearly played for the title in 2011, and even though my writing was bad and I didn’t really have any idea how to run a website covering a team from 250 miles away, it took off a little bit.
My theory when I started was that I would use that site as a resume to get a national sportswriting gig. That was naive, silly even. But then I met David Ubben one week at church, and he was covering Big 12 football for ESPN. And then I met Jonathan Wall, who lived in Dallas and was writing nationally about golf equipment. We messaged when his Aggies played mine.
I told both of them of my intention to be a sportswriter. When Shane Bacon left for Back Nine Network, both David and Jonathan had connections to the golf writing job Bacon left behind at CBSSports.com, and somehow all of that worked out for over a decade.
The truth when CBS Sports hired me was that I would have taken a national sportswriting job covering basically anything. You want me to write about the NL Central? I can do that. Cover the New York NFL teams? Sure, it is I, big Chad Pennington guy.
I will write about the NHL if you deem it necessary for me to get my foot in the door!
Looking back, I am grateful and quite glad that it was golf. I liked it then, but I love it now. And covering golf has provided inroads for me with many people, who are roughly my age that have fallen in love (or fallen back in love) with the game.
I continued running the OSU site until 2020 when I sold it for a really-nice-but-not-life-changing sum of money. I was itching for a new side project, and after the 2021 Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits, I messaged Jason Page, who is the artist behind everything we produce.
When I asked him if he was interested in writing and illustrating a book about the 2021 golf year, he sent me back the following on WhatsApp: Sure! What did you have in mind?
Surely, he must regret hitting “send” on that message.
This was our little side project for the next three years. We did three books and built over 100 newsletters together. Then in October of 2024, we launched it out into the world as my full-time job. I wrote about how that happened, why it happened and what it was like to leave a dream job at CBSSports.com right here.
The bio is the bio – 3+ million words about golf, three books, over 50 majors covered and six Ryder Cups. I’ve started two businesses now and congregated 200K followers across various social platforms. But like Scottie, this is what I do, it’s not who I am.
One of my good friends likes to say that who you are matters a lot more than what you accomplish. This is obviously true and it has been a guiding light for me across the years. In my world, you have to be imbued with some level of self delusion that other people are interested in what you have to say about this silly thing that they also happen to care about, and it is easy to allow that reality to lead to self inflation.
I love golf, I love this business we started, I love our logo, I love being an entrepreneur, I love getting to go to the Masters and the Ryder Cup and I really love getting to read and write for a job. I love that other people read what I write and care about what I have to say. I love giving people a show. It feels – even after over a decade of doing it – like someone is going to tap me on the shoulder and tell me to move along because this is not a real thing that people get to do as a profession.
And so there are days when it’s hard not to make an idol of it all. To give myself over to it completely and with abandon. Thankfully, I have a wife and friends and kids who remind me that this pursuit is not ultimate. That in addition to being a golf media entrepreneur, I am also a dad to four kids, a husband to a (this is painful to admit) a very funny and wonderful wife, someone who cares about his neighborhood and community, a baseball and flag football coach and someone who is involved in the thriving of our local church. And more than any of those, I am a Christ follower, someone who loves Jesus and His people.
Those things that make up who I am all spill over into this job and this work, for how could they not? The through line of it all – the part that sticks out in the way I write, think, view the world and participate in it all – is, without a doubt, wonder.I am the same person I once was as a kid when I was enamored with a magic set made of plastic, cotton and cheap fabric.
I am the same person I once was as a teenager who hungrily read everything he could get his hands on, amazed that he could just enter these worlds and exit them, all while laying on the couch.
I remain in awe of life and the world around me. Whatever that thing is that’s within me … it consistently renews my joy for work and for this particular work. The 27-year-old version of me would have thought that hitting “publish” would get tiring or that the thrill of doing so would evaporate. It just … hasn’t.
That is a gift, one I’m grateful for every single day as I work to accomplish our mission here at Normal Sport, one that I crafted when we began and think about all the time: To use humor and heart to make the daily fan’s personal experience of golf feel more meaningful.
Nothing is better than bringing about meaning to the life of another person. It’s an aspiration for me in my daily life and one I always labor to engender in this strange golf world we all currently inhabit.
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