Today’s newsletter is presented by Holderness and Bourne.

H&B embodies this idea of taking its customers seriously and treating them as if they’re smart. It’s one of the things I love most about them.

If you are looking for something for the dad in your life (like the possibly not-very-discerning fellow you’re going to hear about shortly), I would recommend the Springer shirt in liberty red. It’s awesome.

Oh and we may or may not have just received our first H&B Normal Sport shirts (will drop over the next two weeks for Normal Club members).

OK, onto some reader thoughts.

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Emergency Nine

This is a DM I got recently that made me laugh …

I have a simulator in my garage. Last night my neighbor came across the street to join me for some golf. Shortly into our play, he shared that his pregnant wife was sitting across the street in labor and they had actually already gone to the hospital but were sent home for a bit on account of the spacing of contractions.

Instead of sitting with her, he came to get some last minute pre-baby swings in. Also, unbeknownst to me until shared, it was their anniversary.

We are on hole eight, and his in-laws pulled up to stay overnight with their other two grandkids. They arrive to see their son-in-law not inside with their daughter, who is in labor, but instead coming out of the neighbor’s garage, golf glove on. He then proceeds to help them get their things and get inside and returns to complete his nine.

Been laughing about this all morning.

My wife was texting with his wife this morning and shared how funny I found all of this. She laughed and said “I was in so much pain. I gave him s*** for it afterwards.”

Scottie was prepared to leave the Masters if his wife went into labor, and my legend of a neighbor needed to still ensure he got nine holes at Sand Valley on a screen in a garage.

They are not the same.

They proceeded to welcome their newest child overnight. What a wife!

-Joe K.

Beginning Again

For those who don’t know, I got into sports media by starting an Oklahoma State website, which I ran for nine years and then sold in 2020. I started it in fall of 2010, wrote 100 posts before publishing anything or announcing that I had started it. I wrote for two months in secret before publishing at the beginning of 2011.

The newsletter part in the question above is simply the distribution vehicle (like how NLU and FEG have newsletter for the different media they create) so I am taking this question to mean, “How would you start a media business in 2025?”

I think reps (maybe especially without public expectation) are invaluable so I would pick one medium — audio, video or writing — and practice it as much as humanly possible.

Part of the reason reps matter is because you’re learning how to do the thing — talk into a mic, write onto a screen, get in front of a camera — but the other part is that you’re gaining so much knowledge about whatever topic you’re covering or building.

My theory on working out is that there’s really only one thing that needs to happen for it to be a good workout. I have to start the car. That’s it. Once I start the car, I will have a good workout because once I start the car, I’m going to drive to the gym and once I’m at the gym, what, I’m just going to sit around? No, I’m going to get in a good workout.

The same thing is true in media. Once I type one sentence in the newsletter, I’ve already written a the newsletter. This doesn’t mean all of them are exceptional, but as you do more of them, they should get better.

In other words, the gap between 0 and 1 is way way way bigger than between 1 and 8.

So yeah, if I was starting over, I actually do think I would write 100 newsletters or record 25 pods or make 15 videos before releasing anything to the world. Doing that helps you 1. Learn if you actually love the thing or just love the idea of thing and 2. Get a lot better at it in a short amount of time.

You won’t get to where you eventually want to be. But after making 25 pods, you will be almost unrecognizable from where you were at in the beginning. I think it’s a good strategy and the right way to view building a media business from scratch. Maybe a good strategy for building anything. You can't cross the ocean by standing on the shore. Things of that nature.

On Scottie’s Presence

I wrote about this idea here, and I loved this reader email on it …

He’s always fully where he is. Calmly putting the ball where it needs to be. Fist pumping and f***-yeah-ing on the final green. Holding his kid and walking with his wife to the scoring tent. Even as he was receiving the trophy [at the PGA], it looked as though he had to keep reminding himself to wave to the crowd.

It’s like his visual/mental/emotional radar has a five-foot radius around him and he gives 100% to everything in that circle and 0% to the rest. 

He occasionally allows himself to look up and out and see the bigger picture (these are his emotional moments), but they are flickers of something unusual for an otherwise fully focused and at peace person. Aspirational stuff. 

-Jonny W.

Aspirational stuff, indeed, no matter the profession, circumstance or situation.

Taking the Under

I didn’t really want to engage you on this topic directly because nobody knows anything and predictions are a [fool’s] game to begin with. But after reading your readers’ comments, I feel like someone has to provide a voice of rebuttal.

So let me try to do this in true Normal Sport fashion.

For the record, I really like Scottie and I want to see him win more majors. Rory is my guy, but Scottie is pure class — he’s Roger Federer with a bit more jail time.

But there comes a time in every great golfer’s life when he stops playing like a great golfer, and for most of them, that time comes sooner than you think.

Consider this, of golfers who won their first major after World War II, here are the men who have won more majors than Scottie, and the span of years in which they won them:

• Jack Nicklaus: 18 in 25 years (1962-86) – but 17 in 19 years (1962-80)

• Tiger Woods: 15 in 23 years (1997-2019) – but 14 in 12 years (1997-2008)

• Ben Hogan: 9 in 8 years (1946-53)

• Gary Player: 9 in 20 years (1959-78)

• Tom Watson: 8 in 9 years (1975-83)

• Arnold Palmer: 7 in 7 years (1958-64)

• Lee Trevino: 6 in 17 years (1968-84) – but 5 in 7 years (1968-74)

• Nick Faldo: 6 in 10 years (1987-96) – but 5 in 6 years (1987-92)

• Phil Mickelson: 6 in 18 years (2004-21) – but 5 in 10 years (2004-13)

• Rory McIlroy: 5 in 15 years (2011-25) – but 4 in 4 years (2011-14)

• Peter Thomson: 5 in 12 years (1954-65) – but 4 in 5 years (1954-58)

• Seve Ballesteros: 5 in 10 years (1979-88) – but 4 in 6 years (1979-84)

• Brooks Koepka: 5 in 7 years (2017-23) – but 4 in 3 years (2017-19)

• Bobby Locke: 4 in 9 years (1949-57) – but 3 in 4 years (1949-52)

• Raymond Floyd: 4 in 18 years (1969-86)

• Ernie Els: 4 in 19 years (1994-2012) – but 3 in 9 years (1994-2002)

What conclusions would I draw from these figures? Two in particular jump out at me:

1. To begin at the end: 11 of these 16 golfers won their final major significantly later than their penultimate major. You can call this the “one last ride” major, and when you look at it like this, maybe the 2025 Masters was Rory’s “one last ride” major, and he’s not going to win another one? That’s not where I expected my research to lead me, but that’s quite an eye-opening realization, isn’t it?

2. Apart from Nicklaus, whose peak was extraordinarily long, the real anomalies on this list are Gary Player and Ray Floyd, both of whom spaced their majors out surprisingly evenly. Everyone else on this list bunched their major wins pretty close together.

Excluding the “one last ride” majors noted above, the other 13 golfers here (not counting Nicklaus/Player/Floyd, but including Tiger) won a combined total of 75 majors in 90 seasons during their peak years, which is an average of 5.7 majors in a 6.9-year span (or 5 majors in 6.5 years if you exclude Tiger).

Great golfers’ prime major-winning peaks are shorter than most people think they are. And there’s no obvious trend toward their peaks increasing as we move closer to the present, either. So the numbers would suggest that Scottie is likely to win most of his remaining majors by the end of 2028.  

What about the other golfers with three major victories? Well…using the same post-war criteria outlined above, we have:

• Cary Middlecoff: 3 in 8 years (49-55-56)

• Julius Boros: 3 in 17 years (52-63-68)

• Billy Casper: 3 in 12 years (59-66-70)

• Larry Nelson: 3 in 7 years (81-83-87)

• Hale Irwin: 3 in 17 years (74-79-90)

• Nick Price: 3 in 3 years (92-94-94)

• Payne Stewart: 3 in 11 years (89-91-99)

• Vijay Singh: 3 in 7 years (98-00-04)

• Padraig Harrington: 3 in 2 years (07-08-08)

• Jordan Spieth: 3 in 3 years (15-15-17)

• Scottie Scheffler: 3 in 4 years (22-24-25)

It’s hard to identify any trends here, but numerically,  there are three triple-major winners with profiles that look vaguely close to Scottie’s here. I’d discount Padraig Harrington. He never reached world No. 1 despite winning three majors in a six-major span (how is that possible, by the way?). And Scottie seems much more consistent than Spieth, who was the world No. 1 for 26 weeks. Scottie is at 141 weeks at No. 1 and counting.

But what about Nick Price? He was dominant in that spell from 1992-94 — I was there, literally, insofar as I had a chance to talk with Price at Bay Hill when I was interning at Golf Digest in 1995 and everyone wanted a piece of him (note my postscript below!). He finished T6 or better in all four majors at least once (and six times in total) across that three-year period. What if Scheffler’s current peak is more Price-like than Tiger-like? Isn’t that at least possible?

In summary: everyone wants to crown Scottie as the closest thing to Tiger since Tiger, and possibly the second-best golfer since Nicklaus. And maybe that will yet prove to be the case. But as things stand, he’s won three majors in 3+ years. Of those 13 golfers, excluding Nicklaus/Player/Floyd, that’s behind the starting major-winning pace of Hogan and Palmer. It’s slightly behind Watson. It’s in line with Trevino. It’s behind Faldo, Mickelson and McIlroy. It’s behind Peter Thomson, and it’s well behind Koepka.

I think Scottie’s peak is already demonstrably better than the peaks of a lot of the guys I just mentioned, and those numbers aren’t age-adjusted (Scottie won his first major at a relatively young age). That said, winning majors is HARD even if you stay healthy and never lose your golf swing or your putting stroke. I think the preponderance of evidence suggests that the smart money would be on Scottie winning 1-2 more majors at his peak plus maybe one other “one last ride” major, for a total of 5-6. And that’s way below what seems to be the current consensus.

For the record, I do feel slightly silly for having emailed this to you just before Scottie won by four at The Memorial … but again, in the 25 months from August 1992 to September 1994, Nick Price won 12 PGA Tour events — including three majors (by a combined 10 strokes) and a Players (by 5 strokes) — and that’s not too far out of line from where Scottie is now. And then Price didn’t win again after that period until April 1997 at Harbour Town. All hot streaks do end eventually!

I was thinking about the Rory part earlier today, and just how unlikely it would be in historical terms for him to win multiple majors after a gap of 11 years without winning any at all. The only other player in the post-war era to do that is Julius Boros, and he’d only won one before the 11-year gap prior to winning his second, and he waited another five years to win his third and final major.

Many of the greats and near-greats had long gaps between their penultimate and final majors — Nicklaus 6 years, Tiger 11, Trevino 10, Mickelson 8, Thomson 7, Els 10, Irwin 11, Stewart 8 (and almost Watson 26!) — and some of them remained competitive after their final victories, but it truly would be unprecedented for Rory to win another major now, let alone go on a tear after having (allegedly) vanquished his demons at Augusta.

I wonder if in a funny sort of way, the best Rory comp is actually his bête noire.

Greg Norman of course only won two majors, but in many ways his 1993 Open Championship victory — seven years after his previous win in 1986 — feels similar to Rory’s this April, in that he finally got over the hump at age 38 after so many letdowns and near-misses and borderline chokes to win again, and he still seemed to have plenty in the tank (he’d record another eight major top 10s by the end of 1996, and two more in 1999). But not only did Norman never win again, his choke at Augusta in 1996 was as spectacular as any major collapse until, well, Rory’s in 2011.

If you just take away the miracle hole-outs of Bob Tway and Larry Mize, to say nothing of his many other near-misses in the 1980s, it really is a striking comparison.

And yes, I love thinking about and writing about this stuff as much as you seem to. So Normal Sport really is a perfect match for me!

-Darren K. (author of A Golfer’s Education)

Please continue sending me your thoughts, stories and disagreements with my own writing. I love reading all of it, learn a lot and always try to respond. You can email me at kyle at normalsport dot com or just respond to this email.