Issue No. 204 | May 20, 2025 | Read Online

I played golf with a good friend at a great golf course on Monday morning after the PGA. It was part of a charity tournament where you play two net best balls from your group of four. The overall competition was great, but my buddy and I had a match going on as well. I don’t think I’ve stopped jawing at him since I closed him on the 16th hole. Just 24 hours of on and off abuse.

It hit me as I was driving on Tuesday morning: “Am I... a double digit handicap... legitimately talking more trash about my golf game than Scottie Scheffler does?”

I didn’t know whether to consider this a good or bad thing, but it definitely make me laugh to myself.

Speaking of things that delight me, today’s newsletter is presented by Erin Hills, which is hosting this year’s U.S. Women’s Open presented by Ally.

They say Erin Hills is a beautiful office for the day, and it definitely is.

On Friday, May 30 I would like to personally invite you to skip the office entirely. Celebrate Bring Your Daughter Not to Work Day at the U.S. Women’s Open — and watch the best in the game chase their dreams. As someone who has worked from home for the last 12 years and whose kids homeschooled for most of that time, I can confirm that bringing your kids not to work is preferred to bringing them to work.

Majors at Erin Hills are always special, but sharing that major experience with your daughter or son? It doesn’t get any better than that.

You can snag tickets right here.

OK, onto the news.

14 Final Thoughts on the 2025 PGA

1. I generally take the following disposition after major championships like this.

1. We shouldn’t read too much into how guys finished in the tournament when it comes to projecting things like the Ryder Cup and …

2. Whoever won is not going to win as much in the future as this present victory makes it seem like he will.

This one seems a bit … different though.

We have gotten the usual hyperbole from those caught up in the moment. But also, smart people that I respect a lot, like Joseph LaMagna and Soly Solomon seem to be looking around like, “Wait a second here ….”

I don’t know how many majors Scottie is going to end up with, but three is not the correct answer. A lot of people on Twitter were saying they think seven or eight.

Seven or eight!

You know how many golfers have eight?

Jack
Tiger
Hagen
Hogan
Player
Watson

That’s the entire list.

And if Jack and Gary did it against plumbers and firemen, then Hogan did it against street sweeps and Hagen may have been battling, not engagement farmers like Scottie is facing, but actual farmers.

I personally don’t think Scottie is going to get to eight, but also Soly noted on the NLU pod on Sunday that Fan Duel set its Scottie major over/under at … nine and a half.

This is crazy!

… Right?!

2. If Scottie is just going to hang out at 3.0 SG/round like he has been, then nine and a half actually is not that crazy. Reminder: Gaining 2.0 SG/round is top five player in the world status.

And Scottie’s baseline is 3.0.

Here’s a terrifying one for you. Scottie is gaining 3.15 strokes/round in the majors since Jan. 1, 2022. In that same timespan, he’s gaining 0.00 strokes putting. And he’s won three of them.

We have reached “there are only two answers” territory with Scottie’s career, and both are pretty great.

1. He is one of the ~20 best players ever experiencing the heater of his life.
2. He is one of the 5-10 best players in history and there’s more where that came from.

I think those are becoming our only two options here.

3. Which means we have also entered “every win is now historical” with Scottie. There was that weird period during his first PLAYERS victory when everybody was like “this is boring, I’m bored,” but that is now all gone.

And while the on-course play might actually be boring — although that is by design — the career from here on out will not be. Again … Tim Duncan.

Because if Scottie is currently one of the 25-30 best golfers ever, every major moves him up a handful of spots and every PGA Tour win solidifies the resume as well.

Rory is a good measuring stick.

Rory: 5 majors | 2 PLAYERS | ~45 pro wins
Scottie: 3 majors | 2 PLAYERS | ~20 pro wins

Rory is borderline top 10 ever, and Scottie has a ways to go to catch him. But again, if he’s going to live at 3.0 SG/round then he’s absolutely going to catch him over the next five years (though he’s going to have to catch Brooks before that).

4. The last sentence in this excellent Dylan Dethier feature on Scottie is why all of it feasibly could continue.

I was texting with a golf person a few weeks ago during the Byron Nelson, and this person remarked how unusual it is that golf both means nothing to him but also it means everything to him. He is somehow able to hold that tension very well in ways that less adjusted people could not.

Here’s what Scottie said on Sunday.

But if you get him outside the arena, he also knows it doesn’t complete him. His makeup and his worldview are perfect for major championship golf, which I wrote about after he won his 2024 Masters.

Scottie is no Tiger, but he is set up better for the long haul — mentally, emotionally and spiritually — than Tiger ever was. So while he won’t ever win at the rate at which Tiger won, he could win at a lesser rate for a longer time and still find a similar overall level of achievement.

Sounds like I’m talking myself into nine and a half.

5. I’m always punch drunk by major Sundays, but the 1-2 combination of 1. Rory sailing one into the water on 14 in the final round and this marshal peering at the horizon in the other direction with 2. A different marshal nearly submerging himself in the water to retrieve a personal souvenir after Rory finished the hole just had me howling.

6. Speaking of Rory!

I don’t have a ton to add to what I said on Sunday about his failed driver test (which makes it sound like the DMV was involved — maybe a CBS activation?) and him skipping media all four days, but in case you missed any of that, here it is …

The only thing I would add to all that (which people had plenty of comments on!) is that you sort of open yourself up to a lot of other people’s nonsense re: the driver (which was not a big deal!) by not talking.

He knows this!

Which makes all of it make even less sense than it already did.

I think part of the reasoning here — and this is a fairly charitable view — might be that Rory knows that he can’t do the Tiger thing where he just gives canned answers to questions. He knows that his demeanor just won’t let him do that and that when he’s asked questions, he won’t be able to help himself from giving thoughtful, long answers that have sometimes gotten him into trouble in the past.

So instead, he just skips altogether. Which isn’t really better.

It would be a strange decision for anyone in that spot, but for someone who just won the grand slam, that people want to hear from as one of the premier voices in golf history (!) … who also could have quelled unnecessary chatter about his equipment by answering three questions?

It felt like an own goal.

7. And to all of that, many might say, He doesn’t owe you stupid media members anything. Which is true. He does not! Nobody does.

But players know that the way they are viewed by everyone is shaped in large part by the way they are talked about on the NLU pod and by Shackelford’s newsletter and what Gabby and Brody write on the Athletic and by what Brendan and Andy say on SGS.

The way so many fans in golf perceive players is filtered through media characters like Tron and DJ. This has always been the case, even if it hasn’t always looked the exact way it does right now. You may not agree with this or like it, but it is definitely true.

And it would be silly of players who care about the way they are perceived (which is all of them!) to not at least try and engender goodwill with those characters. Rory has done this, perhaps better than anyone in golf, over the last 10 years.

It is something a lot of his peers do not understand or willfully ignore (a lot of the time because of their agents or managers). Rory has given a master class over the last decade in this arena, which is part of what makes his choices last week all the more strange.

8. We’ve said it before, but majors are when we put out our best work (no disrespect to The Sanderson). Thank you again for your continued patronage of this odd newsletter and congrats to the winners of our giveaways last weekend.

R1 (Seed Golf balls with NS logo): A.D.
R2 (Precision Pro Titan Range Finder): Eric M.
R3 (Turtlebox speaker): Landon J.
R4 (Meridian putter): D.L.

And also to Justin W. for winning our PGA Championship fantasy contest and the $1,500 that went with it. Here’s Justin’s winning team.

And here’s what Justin — who is a Normal Club member — said about winning.

We will absolutely run this contest back for the U.S. Open and Open Championship and will similarly pay out to the top six like we did this time around.

9. Quail grew on me as a major venue as the week wore on. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But there is at least some real variance in scoring, especially on the back nine. Last year at Valhalla, it felt like bogey was the worst score you could ever make!

This year, there were at least doubles in play and the occasional triple.

It’s not exactly golf Twitter’s jam [raises hand], and there are small things that could be done to make it so much more interesting (where interesting = high risk/high reward shots).

In the context of all major venues, it has to be considered a bad one (Portrush, Oakmont and ANGC is not a fair fight). In the context of PGA Championship venues, though? I don’t think it’s terrible and would at least consider another major there if given a few concessions by the agronomists and the course set up squad (normal sport).

10. There were at least three dangerous and genuinely scary moments over the weekend.

Here they are.

1. Rahm domes a fan.
2. Aaron Rai nearly took a girl’s face off with a shot.
3. Wyndham Clark flinging his driver against a sign on Sunday.

Here’s the aftermath.

This is obviously ridiculous and something Wyndham apologized for on Monday. Here’s the thing, though … what exactly is the punishment? If this was the NFL or NBA, they would be dishing out fines like Joey Crawford dishes out Ts.

But because there is zero institutional uniformity within pro golf, it leads to very little responsibility (is the PGA of America going to fine Wyndham to dissuade players from doing stuff like this?) and even less transparency (and even if they do, is anyone ever going to know about it?).

Porath made this point last week about the driver testing fiasco, but if you’re actually a legitimate sport with billions of dollars behind it now (and you are!), then there has to be a lot more transparency about what goes on than there currently is.

Also, if this was an elaborate T Mobile activation, forget everything I said.

11. Speaking of the driver fiasco! If you want to read a good explainer of drivers failing a CT test earlier in the week, this is the best one I’ve seen. The easiest explanation is that over a long period of time, a driver face that is hit a lot gets thinner and more trampoline-like, thus rendering it illegal. But you don’t really know when this is going to happen because it could happen on any given strike.

I can’t say it better than that article. Although I will say that talking about a test that measures how long a metal ball sticks to a piece of carbon in milliseconds is about as normal sport as it gets.

[Jason here] What’s the big deal about back up clubs? We’re not talking about Tom Morris repairing a mashie mid-round. What if Ohtani said he was in a slump because he couldn’t hit his gamer bat. Get your bat guy to get you another bat, my guy! [/Jason out]

That Scottie’s driver also failed should end any of the nonsensical social media stuff about Rory trying to cheat. This is just … what happens. Often.

Here’s what Scottie said on Sunday.

He went on to argue that testing needs to be more evenly and uniformly applied.

I yelled about this for a bit on Saturday evening, which you can see here. TL;DR is that testing with no punishment incentivizes no name players (apparently 10 guys failed this week!) to try and potentially get away with hot drivers and big name players not to, because it’s more embarrassing for them and their manufacturer.

This is — as with many things in golf — completely nonsensical. I stand with Scottie and others: Test everybody. Or have actual punishments in place. Or both!

Encouraging news, the USGA & R&A will now test 50% of all drivers on tour.

12. LKD nailed it here after the PGA of America released a statement about all of this.

Yes, agree. Test everybody. Release names. It’s not 1925 anymore.

13. These two guys playing in the final pairing of a major together. Normal stuff.

14. How many iterations of Bryson have we witnessed? Off the top of my head.

1. Sidesaddle Putting Bryson
2. Compass Bryson
3. Science Bryson
4. One-Length Clubs Will Change the World Bryson
5. Big Boy Bryson
6. 130-year-old Bryson
7. Living Room Ball Speed Bryson
8. Beefing with Brooks Bryson
9. Littler (But Still Pretty Big) Boy Bryson
10. Augusta Par is 67 Bryson
11. Long Drive Bryson
12. 3D Printed Irons Bryson
13. YouTube Bryson
14. Manufacturer Bryson

Dude is 31, and he’s lived like seven careers!

I also count at least two invented words in there, which is one of his specialities.

It’s all up to manufacturing!

Two things here.

1. He is the greatest character.
2. He has turned into a major championship menace.

Imagine golf without him. Golf — heck, this newsletter! — is only as good as its characters, and I’m so glad for him as one. Love him or hate, him, there is no denying him as a planet unto himself in the golf space.

I’m already thrilled for what we’re going to get at the U.S. Open.

Thank you for reading a golf newsletter that is 3,458 words long.

We are sustained in part (in large part) by readers who are fans that decide to join the Normal Club. If you’re interested in supporting us by becoming a member, you can do so right here.