Issue No. 233 | July 19, 2025 | Read Online

What’s the point?

No, not what the field was asking after Scottie birdied the first on Sunday (although they probably should have been), but rather what Scottie the world and himself to start this Open week.

I went deep (like, really deep) on this on Wednesday about the importance of balancing both toil and tranquility for Scottie Scheffler — and all of us. After watching 50 hours of golf over the last four days, I think there are three pieces worth adding to the question of, “What’s the point?” in light of Scottie’s fourth major championship.

Today’s newsletter is presented by Turtlebox.

Jason and I listened to Open Radio all week, which is best heard on a Turtlebox speaker. The Ranger and the big boy (officially called the Original: Gen 3, but I call it the big boy) are both awesome.

In fact, anything Turtlebox produces is worth keeping in and around your house or taking with you to the golf course.

I’ve used mine throughout the week to listen to recap podcasts of what I cannot believe is the last major championship of 2025. 🥹 The durability, the quality of sound and the transportability are all world class, and I could not more highly recommend getting one so you can listen to Spieth’s Birkdale win (again) on Open Radio in 2026.

OK, now onto the news.

Every Good Endeavor

This morning, I threw on some headphones (because I don’t carry my Turtlebox on walks), and put on the Open Radio broadcast while I walked down the street to get a coffee. As Jason has been proselytizing all week, the Open Radio broadcast is everything you want it to be. Weird, funny, a little punch drunk and loads of golf.

Very much a reflection of this tournament itself.

At one point, an R&A historian was on the show talking about how folks used to drink claret (a type of wine) from the Claret Jug.

She was abruptly interrupted, though, because they had to throw it out to 18 for Shane Lowry’s final putt. And when they came back to her, the broadcasters apologized. She responded by saying something like, That’s OK. We don’t want to miss the important moments.

I thought that was such a perfect way to frame it.

One of my favorite things about major championships is how consequential every shot and every round is. In golf, we tend to get fixated on the last hour on Sunday and who’s holding a trophy. But major championships tend to create these mini celebratory moments throughout the week.

Padraig’s first tee shot.
Phil out in front at like 3 a.m. on Thursday.
Justin Leonard making the cut.
Westy’s back nine 29.
A literal monk leading the Open.
Rory’s eagle on 12 after hitting two balls on 11.
Justin Rose holing out after hitting two shanks in the same round.

These don’t result in Wikipedia boxes, but they matter.

This is more or less why I started this newsletter, to capture these moments and point to them. To be in awe of these tiny windows of time and to maybe transfer some of that awe to you, the reader. I don’t think any tournament is more perfectly constructed for this than the Open Championship.

Moments like Rory’s parents watching their son galvanize an entire country and wondering myself, as a parent, What must that feel like?

Their son collected something this week that a thousand major wins could never provide: The delightful reminder that being from somewhere matters.

Rory is a bit of a homeless billionaire. Many houses, yes, but constantly transient, never really at home. The cost of the extraordinary world he has inhabited.

Playing Portrush must feel as much like home as he ever feels. Not to go full on “championship of life,” on you, but that matters. At the end of it all — when Rory settles in as the eight or ninth best golfer of all time — I’m honestly not sure that he would look back on this week and think about his career any more fondly if he had won.

Some people revel in calling this a loser mentality. Enjoying a week in which you lost. Perhaps it is, but only if you believe that the wins are more lasting than the guy who’s doing all the winning says they are.

I know Scottie wasn’t questioning the point of tournaments themselves being played, but I think it’s important to remember that stars make events, and events are some of the best and most important gathering places we still have as people.

Humans remain storytellers.

We are not trophy tellers or Wikipedia tellers. And while we will talk about who won and who got T3 and what it means historically (and we should!), we are primarily a people that collects stories. Rory’s parents have one. Rory himself has a few new ones.

This kid has one.

And U.S. Open champion, J.J. Spaun has one, too.

Winning matters. Champions matter. All of that matters a lot.

But I’m not really sure it matters in the big picture as much as the fact that golf tournaments dole out 10,000 stories, and I think this tournament dishes maybe five times that.

That is very much the point of all of this.

As for Scottie?

Well, there’s this clip from Secretariat’s famous win at Belmont that I love. Fitting for this week, I guess, since Scottie was looking back over his shoulder for the last 30+ holes.

The clip isn’t about Secretariat, though.

It’s about Jack Nicklaus.

It’s from the SportsCentury episode on the best racehorse of all time. You can watch it right here. Here’s Heywood Hale Broun, who was a CBS commentator for the event.

Gah, I think about that clip all the time. All the time!

Why?! Why do I think about that clip and that Nicklaus quote at least once a month? It makes no sense. Jack Nicklaus and two media members talking about a horse?

Here’s why.

Because I think the underlying reason Nicklaus cried while watching Secretariat is because, for just a few moments, he got a glimpse of what perfection does look like.

I believe — like Scottie believes — that we are eternal beings and that the world is broken in ways that it should not be broken. I believe that we were created for an unbroken world, a different world. And so, when we catch slivers of that perfection in this world, then it does something to our souls that is difficult to describe because it is difficult to understand.

In seeing perfection, we are seeing snippets of what the world should be. Of how things should work. Of a world that was created in the image of a perfect Creator. Of course Nicklaus cried!

And so I think one point for Scottie in all of this is that he’s accountable for stewarding those gifts, that creativity and that desire in a way that gives people little previews of what perfection looks like.

Perhaps that is too heavy a burden to put on a single person, but he is not alone. I believe all artists — and Scottie is very much an artist — are called to make the most amazing art imaginable for this reason.

Scottie’s lot in life is golf. It just is.

I know guys at that level sometimes wrestle with the spoils they have and the gifts they were given, and Scottie does not seem exempt from that. But whatever hand we were dealt, we all (myself included!) have a responsibility to engage that endeavor with all the creativity, delight and goodness we can muster.

And the third and final point gets at something Scottie said in his press conference on Sunday after winning the 153rd Open Championship.

It’s absolutely about trophies and wins and legacy, but it’s somehow also not about any of that stuff at all. In some ways, golf — maybe at every level, maybe even at this level — is about how it changes you as a person.

Something in life is going to shape us, for we are not static characters. There are a lot worse choices than golf.

Scottie has changed, even in the time since he started winning major championships. Golf has matured him, made him different. Maybe his time in the slammer did, too.

When it comes to the game, though, the same is true of me. The same is probably true of you. If you play — and I’m presuming if you’re reading a daily newsletter about a sporting event that happened in a field in Northern Ireland, that you probably also play golf — then you are not who you once were.

Golf affected the lives of people who went to Portrush this week. The fathers who took their daughters and the mothers who took their sons.

A point is Scottie winning, but the point is not Scottie winning. The culmination of winning has never satisfied, has never stayed around for as long as it feels like it should have. We all know this is true. We know it!

I sometimes may not believe it, but I do know it.

We are going to talk plenty about how many majors Scottie is going to get to and all the Tiger comps and all the absurd numbers, but on Sunday I was simply reflecting on none of that. I found myself thinking about how all of that matters, but that it pales in comparison to who we become as people and how much golf — at least for sickos like us — shapes that.

What’s the point?

The point has never been winning or legacy. The point has always been that the very nature of golf is, as Scottie has said so many times, “endlessly unsatisfying,” which is also the exact same reason it changes you.

How do you respond to its quirks and nuances and frustrations. Does its unsatisfying nature drive you to madness or to love? Does your obsession terminate with the numbers on your card, or does it roll into a delight in the places it takes you and the people it delivers?

Scottie is shifting the future of golf history. That much is obvious. But he may also be affecting how people think about it in the present. His ways are so curious, his symmetry aspirational.

To quote Jordan Spieth, who reflected for a long time on the player and person who now holds the trophy that Spieth once looked like he would hold several times.

“I don't think anybody is like him.”

The trophy room’s about to become a play room.

Thank you for reading our handcrafted, algorithm-free newsletter about golf. We put everything we have into every newsletter we write, which is why they are frequently 2,352 words long like this one.

While we do use digital tools that help us find information, everything you read and consumed was created from scratch by two humans who are absolutely obsessed with the game.

If you ever want to support our business, you can buy some Norman merch here or become a Normal Club member right here.