Greetings!
As with any major championship, there is still so, so much to discuss. We recorded a lively and fun Normal Sport show episode (Apple | Spotify) with some of our takeaways from one of the weirder major championships I’ve ever watched, but I need to get the rest down on paper here as we enter into the second half (!!) of major season.
I try to only do something like this 1-2 times a year, but because this newsletter list is literally the best network I have (or can imagine having), here is this year’s request: My family is traveling to Telluride, CO this summer for a youth baseball tournament at the end of July and is currently looking for both a place to stay and things to do around there.
If you are a person that has a place there or knows of one or has recommendations for that area, please reach out! I can pay in either American dollars or Holderness and Bourne sheep gear.
Thank you!
Today’s newsletter is presented by Ship Sticks.
Not only are we entering the second half of major championship season, but we’re also entering the beginning of golf travel season for the rest of us normies who don’t play well enough to complain about the greens at Aronimink (but probably would anyway).
If that’s you — going on a buddies’ trip, traveling with your clubs etc. — you should absolutely check out Ship Sticks. Their white gloves service (two, not one) and on-time guarantee make traveling with your golf clubs a much less stressful experience than it otherwise would be.
You can claim a 20 percent Normal Sport-ified offer for your first order with Ship Sticks at the link below simply by putting in your email address.
OK, now onto the news.
1. First, as a follow up to what I wrote about Aaron Rai and hope on Sunday evening, I thought this tweet from Michael Kim was validating. Look at what he said here about working hard and believing that the Aaron Rais and Michael Kims of the world can go out and win major championships.
Massive congrats to Aaron Rai. Such a nice guy and a hard worker. Makes me want to work harder and a greater belief that I can win majors as well.
Michael Kim
That is why I wrote what I wrote. Exactly that, right there.
Major championship golf is perfectly meritocratic right now. I don’t know that it has always been that way. Sometimes the scales tip too far in one direction (superstars winning all the time) or the other (superstars not winning enough). But right now, that equilibrium rocks and is one of my favorite things about covering the sport.
2. Three brief course notes, partly because I’m a dumb when it comes to architecture and setting a golf course up, and partly because the discourse all week had me like …
1. I think it’s very, very difficult to set up a 7,000-yard golf course that both A. Plays extremely difficult and B. Identifies and separates out the best hitters of the golf ball. Augusta can do it (when it gets weather), but it’s tough for the Minks of the world to follow suit.
Why? Well, because the golf ball goes (way) too far, guys are going to have wedges in their hands all day. If you want it to play difficult, you have to hide pins. If you hide pins, it is seemingly going to be impossible to proportionally reward great golf shots.
But if you don’t hide pins, guys are still hitting wedges, and it’s open season. It’s an untenable situation. Ultimately, every course setup complaint has an equipment solution (as outlined here by JLM). It infuriates me that these solutions are continuously ignored and it gets more and more difficult to set up golf courses, but that’s where we are.
2. Also, it’s fine that this tournament tested a skill other than ball striking! I think we have decided that all majors should reward the best flushers, and I generally agree with this idea. But hitting only makes up ~60 percent of the game, and there’s no rule that says a major has to identify the guy swinging it best in that week. I agree that golf would become stinkier if we moved toward identifying the best lag putters or most patient golfers every major, but for one a year or one every three years? I’m fine with that.
I was so impressed with the course - how it managed to test both our discipline and precision all week. It begged us to challenge pins and play aggressively, and we found out early we’d be punished if we didn’t execute.
Which in my opinion, are just as major championships should be.
JT | 2026 PGA
3. I did love how easy it was to see that angles still matter. Take the 7th hole on Sunday. Rory torched a drive, but had the most atrocious angle into that pin.
Ludvig, meanwhile, laid back and had a beautiful angle in. Of course, Ludvig made bogey because he overcooked his approach and Rory made par because his short game was tremendous. But you get the point.
This is the opposite of bomb and gouge, and if equipment was reduced would be the type of thing we could get far more frequently.
OK enough of me talking golf courses.
3. This was Scottie’s tournament to lose … and he went out and lost it. I was yelling on Thursday and Friday that Scottie is built for a place like The Mink, and Max echoed some of that on the NLU live show on Saturday evening.
That’s why I can see Scottie going bananas if it’s nice out because it requires such precision.
Max Homa | NLU pod
We don’t need to re-litigate every putt. Just know that it was a lot (like a LOT) of this.
He finished 5th from tee to green and 71st (of 82) in putting.
It happens. It’s happened to him before. It will happen to him again. What’s crazy is not that it happened to him this week but how few times it has happened to him in his career. The T14 was just his second finish outside the top 8 in his last 10 major championships played. A sick, sick Wiki page.
His top five percentage at majors is now 37 percent (10-for-27), which is also comically good. That number is tied with Brooks (and comfortably ahead of Rory and Rahm) through their first 27 major starts.
I have no sweeping conclusions from this major for Scottie other than it felt like an opportunity that he could have capitalized on. While there will almost certainly be more, there are also only a finite amount throughout your career, and he will look back on this one in the “could have won it but never got anything to fall” bucket.
4. Around the Masters, a Person in Golf Media texted me about Rahm and how it wasn’t so much about the lack of preparation or any of the usual detractions listed when people talk about why Rahm won’t play well at a major.
For this person, it was about the amount of shame Rahm shows up with at the four biggest events and how that’s the thing that keeps him from playing well.
I … think there’s probably some truth to that?
I don’t know how much truth, but I do know that Rahm is extremely self-aware and cares a lot about how others view him. So he cannot possibly be showing up to these majors with no cares in the world. And when the margins are so thin to begin with, it’s easy to see how he has unraveled at majors of late.
All of that being said, I loved seeing him play (and act?) with more freedom this week. I will go down on the “he’s generationally good” ship, but at some point he has to actually win more majors.
This was probably his best opportunity since leaving for LIV (seems maybe too coincidental that it’s also his first major since LIV effectively collapsed!) and a week in which he simply got beat by a historic finish from someone who had the week of his life.
That happens. Brian Harman happens. So do Wyndham Clark and J.J. Spaun. Rahm was hunting again, though, which is the part I care about and the piece that has been missing a bit from major championship golf over the last several years.
5. I watched and listened to Aaron Rai’s presser on Sunday evening. It was fairly blasé, which is to be expected I suppose, but I did have this takeaway about his junior upbringing.
Up until the age of around 12 years old, I used to play off basically a customized course length, which gradually got longer and longer every year from the age of kind of 7 to 12.
Twelve years old was the first time that I actually played off ladies tees. Before that, I was playing off the fairways and trying to make the course short enough for me to score par or better even as an 8, 9, 10 year old.
I thought it was a great idea. My dad thought it was a great idea. But naturally that kind of kept me away from club golf. I would still play in junior events, but only in my age group, just to really protect myself and what we were trying to work on and what we were trying to kind of build toward.
Then when I was about 13 or 14, I was long enough to be able to play off the men's tees, and that's when I started to play a little bit of club golf.
By that age, I'd gotten so used to practicing a certain way -- again, me and my dad would pretty much be out on the course most days, and that started to feel really comfortable. So even though I was maybe good enough and long enough to compete at club golf, I didn't play a huge amount of it.
Aaron Rai | 2026 PGA
There are probably some lessons in there about not burning out at age 13 or 15. I think about what Scottie said before winning the 2024 Masters.
I remember being 15, 16 years old and not winning as many times as I felt like I should, and [coach] Randy [Smith] would always say, It's not about who is the best when you're 14 years old, it's about who can be the best when you're 25 years old. And he's like, It's a long journey. He did a good job of keeping me patient for a number of years when I wasn't performing as well as I felt like should have.
Scottie Scheffler | 2024 Masters
Man, I have thought about that quote a lot since Scheffler said it.
Also, back to Rai — and not to take away from what he did last week — but I’m over here cackling thinking about the gymnastics Luke Donald will do to keep him out of the lads club at Adare Manor for a third Hojgaard brother that we don’t even know about yet.
Sad.
Even worse, they’ll destroy us whether they have him, don’t have him or simply choose to up the degree of difficulty by playing with 11 Englishmen and Monty.
6. Me returning to Spieth Island after this week …
He pulled the Scottie. Third from tee to green and 79th in putting.
Might be time to try something different. A mallet. Closing his eyes. Looking not at the hole but at a different hole. Idk, something.
It was just this on repeat all week.
I will say I’m back in on the idea that he can win a PGA. He still probably won’t, but for the past eight years I haven’t even considered it as a possibility. He hit it so good. I cannot believe how good he looked off the tee. He and Scottie (and Chandler Blanchet) finished T1 in driving accuracy, all with 39 fairways hit.
I am all the way back in. Just sucked back to the island by a rip tide of hope and belief. It will end badly! I already know this. But I cannot quit it. I’m sorry for even trying.
Oh, and he absolutely hit the shot of this tournament the year his entire life.
I am still not even close to getting over it.
7. Normal spooooooooooort!
8. I asked this on Twitter on Saturday, but I’ll pose it here with my answer: Who is the best player playing right now that you would confidently bet money on will end their career with zero majors?
My answer is Corey Conners (and has been for a while).
I don’t have a great reason for it. I’m sure Conners is a lovely guy. But his disposition doesn’t scream, Gonna slam the door on the best players in the world! Doesn’t scream that he’s a dog.
(Of course the exact same thing could have been written about Aaron Rai this time last week! He clung to the hope that he could though).
I was thinking about this whenever, like, 25 guys without a major touched the top of the board on Saturday afternoon. While there are better current players without a major — Tommy Fleetwood, Ludvig Aberg, Viktor Hovland among them — I wouldn’t be able to confidently bet money on any of them like I would with Conners.
9. Cam Smith had a quote that I didn’t want to get lost. It gets at what I love about competition and major championships.
It was good. I love that stuff. That's why we compete. We compete to win, and it was nice to get the heart rate up and, you know, feel your hands and your legs get a little bit jelly. It was cool.
Cam Smith | 2026 PGA
Also not sure what to make of the fact that he lost strokes on every single ball he hit off a tee on the back nine and still shot 36.
10. There was a moment on I believe it was either Friday or Saturday when someone on the broadcast was talking about how Maverick McNealy said he was really uncomfortable being in the lead.
This is not uncommon. In fact, I would say it’s actually quite common.
And it should serve to give a greater appreciation for how comfortable the top tier guys look with the lead. The Brooks-Rory-Scottie-Rahm crew in particular. It is terrifying to look up and not see anyone ahead of you. And those guys — whether through repetition or simply because of their makeup — have normalized making it look easy.
11. Max brought this up on the aforementioned NLU pod when he talked about how big Ludvig’s advantage is from distance than it is with a wedge.
So I went and looked it up.
Here are Ludvig’s Data Golf numbers over the last two years from 200+ …
And from 50-100 yards …
He’s still solid from 50-100, but the advantage is not quite there like it is from deep.
We can (and should) point to the putting (he was 1st from tee to green and 64th in putting), but this is also something to keep an eye on. A bit of a Rory from six years ago situation, it seems. One that should actually not be that difficult for him to solve.
I’m buying stock if anyone is selling.
Thank you for reading and participating in all of this nonsense. The nonsense being me offering to buy fake shares in a man who has called both Sweden and Lubbock, Texas home. Jason and I pride ourselves on putting together multiple algorithm-free newsletters every single week, and we hope reading them delights you as much creating them delights us.
Greetings!
As with any major championship, there is still so, so much to discuss. We recorded a lively and fun Normal Sport show episode (Apple | Spotify) with some of our takeaways from one of the weirder major championships I’ve ever watched, but I need to get the rest down on paper here as we enter into the second half (!!) of major season.
I try to only do something like this 1-2 times a year, but because this newsletter list is literally the best network I have (or can imagine having), here is this year’s request: My family is traveling to Telluride, CO this summer for a youth baseball tournament at the end of July and is currently looking for both a place to stay and things to do around there.
If you are a person that has a place there or knows of one or has recommendations for that area, please reach out! I can pay in either American dollars or Holderness and Bourne sheep gear.
Thank you!
Today’s newsletter is presented by Ship Sticks.
Not only are we entering the second half of major championship season, but we’re also entering the beginning of golf travel season for the rest of us normies who don’t play well enough to complain about the greens at Aronimink (but probably would anyway).
If that’s you — going on a buddies’ trip, traveling with your clubs etc. — you should absolutely check out Ship Sticks. Their white gloves service (two, not one) and on-time guarantee make traveling with your golf clubs a much less stressful experience than it otherwise would be.
You can claim a 20 percent Normal Sport-ified offer for your first order with Ship Sticks at the link below simply by putting in your email address.
OK, now onto the news.
1. First, as a follow up to what I wrote about Aaron Rai and hope on Sunday evening, I thought this tweet from Michael Kim was validating. Look at what he said here about working hard and believing that the Aaron Rais and Michael Kims of the world can go out and win major championships.
Massive congrats to Aaron Rai. Such a nice guy and a hard worker. Makes me want to work harder and a greater belief that I can win majors as well.
Michael Kim
That is why I wrote what I wrote. Exactly that, right there.
Major championship golf is perfectly meritocratic right now. I don’t know that it has always been that way. Sometimes the scales tip too far in one direction (superstars winning all the time) or the other (superstars not winning enough). But right now, that equilibrium rocks and is one of my favorite things about covering the sport.
2. Three brief course notes, partly because I’m a dumb when it comes to architecture and setting a golf course up, and partly because the discourse all week had me like …
1. I think it’s very, very difficult to set up a 7,000-yard golf course that both A. Plays extremely difficult and B. Identifies and separates out the best hitters of the golf ball. Augusta can do it (when it gets weather), but it’s tough for the Minks of the world to follow suit.
Why? Well, because the golf ball goes (way) too far, guys are going to have wedges in their hands all day. If you want it to play difficult, you have to hide pins. If you hide pins, it is seemingly going to be impossible to proportionally reward great golf shots.
But if you don’t hide pins, guys are still hitting wedges, and it’s open season. It’s an untenable situation. Ultimately, every course setup complaint has an equipment solution (as outlined here by JLM). It infuriates me that these solutions are continuously ignored and it gets more and more difficult to set up golf courses, but that’s where we are.
2. Also, it’s fine that this tournament tested a skill other than ball striking! I think we have decided that all majors should reward the best flushers, and I generally agree with this idea. But hitting only makes up ~60 percent of the game, and there’s no rule that says a major has to identify the guy swinging it best in that week. I agree that golf would become stinkier if we moved toward identifying the best lag putters or most patient golfers every major, but for one a year or one every three years? I’m fine with that.
I was so impressed with the course - how it managed to test both our discipline and precision all week. It begged us to challenge pins and play aggressively, and we found out early we’d be punished if we didn’t execute.
Which in my opinion, are just as major championships should be.
JT | 2026 PGA
3. I did love how easy it was to see that angles still matter. Take the 7th hole on Sunday. Rory torched a drive, but had the most atrocious angle into that pin.
Ludvig, meanwhile, laid back and had a beautiful angle in. Of course, Ludvig made bogey because he overcooked his approach and Rory made par because his short game was tremendous. But you get the point.
This is the opposite of bomb and gouge, and if equipment was reduced would be the type of thing we could get far more frequently.
OK enough of me talking golf courses.
This post will continue below for Normal Club members (all 1,050 of them) and includes thoughts on Scottie kicking away a great chance, Rahm’s return and an announcement from me about Jordan Spieth.
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