Issue No. 227 | July 11, 2025 | Read Online

This run in July is one of my favorite 2-3 week stretches of the year. The Wimbledon-Open Championship double is undefeated from a viewing perspective for a lot of reasons, one of which is that it’s so nice to have it on early in the day while you’re in the office working on various things.

For me, this week, that has meant already (already!) working toward 2026 as it relates to Normal Sport. Making sure we have everything lined out when it comes to sponsor packages, what kind of content we’re producing and what our calendar looks like.

This is exciting, but as Jason and I noted to each other earlier in the week, it often feels unproductive. I’m ready to get back to cooking next week during Portrush instead of just chopping and dicing and mincing.

I say all of that to say that our north star in all of this is delighting you, the audience. Literally our mission statement.

Use humor and heart to make the daily fan’s personal experience of golf feel more meaningful.
NS Mission Statement

I go back to this often, and even though the form of what we’re doing may change some in the months ahead, this. mission — or some version of it — will always be what drives us.

Today’s newsletter is presented by Garmin and their Approach R50 simulator/launch monitor. I’m about to discuss some of my 2025 goals, and one way I could definitely start to make some inroads on those is by getting after it with the Approach R50.

We actually tried to give one of these away last week. I said I would buy one for a new member if we got to 1,000 before July 2. We only got to 950, but we did give away an Approach S70 watch instead to reader Ben D., which was a ton of fun.

Anyway, the Approach R50. The big boy. Here’s the best feature.

You can play directly on the device without an additional projector or anything like that. This makes setup and gameplay easy and seamless.

Here’s how Garmin says it.

Play virtual rounds — including putting — with up to four players on more than 43,000 courses through Home Tee Hero (active Garmin Golf membership required), all viewable from the Approach R50 display.

I’ve literally done this in the backyard with my kids, and it’s awesome. I hit a ball off a mat into a net, while playing a course on the device at my feet. It’s awesome.

OK, now onto the news.

Checking in on 2025 Predictions and Goals

I’m taking a page out of two books and looking at both my beginning of the year predictions (thank you, Fried Egg) as well as my beginning of the year golf goals (thank you, NLU).

You can read the entire predictions post right here, and below I’ll mock my January self for everything I wasn’t even close on.

1. Europe wins Bethpage: TBD here, but I actually have flipped on this. I think the U.S. has as strong of a team as Europe (or possibly a stronger team) and will leverage the home crowd to roll to its third consecutive win in the United States.

If you simply look at names names on paper, you will almost certainly be fooled by the two squads, but I sorted by SG over the last six months, and the U.S. is borderline dominant. Look at this!

You get to 12 U.S. players before you get to seven European players. That doesn’t guarantee anything, of course, but lose me with all the Rasmuses until we see one of them play as well as … you know … Denny McCarthy.

2. The PIF-PGA Tour deal goes through … and then nothing happens: I mean … whatever. It’s honestly just difficult to care about this anymore. Other than the fact that the Tour is getting a lot of private equity, which doesn’t exactly make me bullish on them creating a better product for fans (I actually wrote about this some on Tuesday).

3. Kyle breaks 80 twice: Here’s what I wrote as my full set of golf goals on our 2025 goals page.

My golf goals this year include.
Post 35 rounds.
Break 80 twice.
Go from a 11.1 to a 7.0
Those are the goals this year. I’ve broken 80 just twice in my life, but we are trending since August.
My biggest problems right now: I can get long and wild with driver (a bad combo), and I kick away 3-5 strokes every round around the greens.
Not 3 putts (an entirely different conversation) but fatted chips and duffed pitches. It’s gross, but if I can clean that up a bit, I feel pretty confident about getting a couple of rounds in the 70s this year.

Checking in after six months, and I haven’t played as much golf as I thought I would so far this year. Turns out, four kids and a dog and a new business require a lot of … care. So posting 35 rounds is going to take a herculean second-half-of-the-year effort.

As for the other two, here are all my posted rounds (correct, I don’t think I played for the first four months of 2025?). I’m down under 10 — barely at 9.9 — but I only had one real shot at something in the 70s over the first half of the year.

I would like to confess that I have the full on chipping yips. There’s just no other way to say it. So I don’t really think I can break 80 unless I’m playing at a course like Trinity Forest, where you literally don’t have to chip. You can just putt from pretty much anywhere. It’s so bad that Jason, who has never seen me play, suggested that I try chipping one handed.

I also may need to get myself over to Scotland right now. I’d thrive over there with the way I’m playing right now. Optimism remains high about breaking 80 two times because I’m hitting it as well as I ever have, but I’m going to have to get some more rounds in the queue to have a real chance.

[Jason here] I also haven’t played as much as I had hoped to this year. My goal of one round per week could have been more realistically set as one round per month. It has shifted my golf goals a bit. Now my goal is to enjoy any time on the course as much as possible by swinging “whatever swing shows up.” That goal has been buoyed by …

1. Coffee golf.

2. Reading Moe and Me by Lorne Rubenstein. It’s chock full of sad and inspiring Moe Norman anecdotes like this one:

3. The two world No. 1s, Scottie and U.S. Adaptive Open champion Kipp Popert, dominating with their unique (and also surprisingly similar) moves.

Golfers dance and celebrate themselves.

This post will continue below for Normal Club members and includes …

Scottie thoughts.
A horrific Morikawa prediction.
Why Jon Rahm is going to win The Open.

If you aren’t yet a Normal Club member, you can sign up right here.

If you are, keep reading!

Welcome to the members-only portion of today’s newsletter.

I hope you both enjoy it and find it to be valuable to your golf and/or personal life.

4. PGA Tour buys Golf Channel: This seems like it will (obviously?) still happen, and the outcome is going to be fascinating. At that point, the Tour will have a mechanism for keeping all of its content in house and taking it directly to the customer.

It’s a fascinating future decision for its new media-savvy CEO, Brian Rolapp.

Here’s an interesting take I read recently not about the PGA Tour but that could be applied to the PGA Tour.

I think it's only a matter of time before major sports leagues decide to forgo licensing their broadcast rights so they can go 100% direct to consumer via their own streaming apps.
Not only are sports fans growing increasingly weary of subscribing to multiple apps to watch their favorite leagues, but the collapse of the cable bundle is quickly making it impossible for most of the major TV networks to afford the exorbitant prices the leagues have grown used to.
Simon Owen

Lots of questions. Can the Tour get another $700M (or more) per year from the big networks in its next media deal? Even if it does, could it make more by streaming all of its own stuff? If it does decide to go more global, how does all of that play in?

I still think the Tour buys Golf Channel, but I will say the big ratings the Tour put up in the first half of the year has me less convinced that the path to retain all of its rights and go direct to consumer is a viable one.

5. Bryson breaks 50 (but not twice): OK, this was a dumb one. But technically, it did happen. Bryson shot 48 with Grant Horvat and Garrett Clark at PGA Frisco. I haven’t watched as much of Bryson’s stuff this year, although I expect to get back to it in the fall after the Tour’s season is (kind of) over. Still, I think it remains one of the most compelling formats in all of media. Truly.

6. YouTube golf takes over tour golf: This one came to a head early on when I wrote this during Torrey Pines.

I think I may have been wrong about this one in general though. This is solely based on how I feel — I should note that a match between Phil, Grant Horvat, Bryson and Garrett Clark posted three days ago has 2.2M views.

Some of the reason I feel this way is because it seems like YT golf has lost a bit of its scarcity (does Good Good post a new round every day?) and some of it is that the Tour has been pretty compelling. I’m going to write this prediction off as something I was feeling during the non-Tour season that could still be true from October-December, but I’m not all that sure is true the other nine months.

7. Rahm wins a major: There’s still time!

Let’s check in on the large Spanish man and his major performances so far this year.

OK, that makes me feel better.

He was never really in the mix at ANGC, but he could have won the PGA before he was Joey Crawford levels of ejected (see below).

And then I thought he was going to win the U.S. Open even though he finished about two hours before the leaders. He didn’t, but with Portrush on deck, I should note that few have been better at the last five Open Championships.

He’s going to be my pick next week.

8. Collin Morikawa, PGA Tour Player of the Year: Me looking at this one.

Morikawa has been sixth in the world in SG since January 1, but he has unfortunately also led everyone in …

Number of caddies employed.
Times he’s said something about his relationship with the media that I (and most humans) did not understand at all.

I think with this pick I was (maybe?) trying to replicate how I felt about Scottie from summer 2023 when his numbers were way outpacing his wins, and you knew the latter was going to catch up at some point. That obviously hasn’t happened with Morikawa, and while I still think he’s being underrated, I’m also starting to wonder if he’s just rebranded Rickie? I don’t say that derogatorily because Rickie has had a really good career. But that’s not who we thought Morikawa was going to be after he won two majors in two years.

Worldwide wins since the 2021 Open ended (per Data Golf).

Scheffler: 19
Rory: 13
Rahm: 9
Niemann: 9
Hovland: 8
Xander: 6
Brooks: 6
Finau: 5
Homa: 5
Matt McCarty: 4
Marco Penge: 3
Matteo Manassero: 3
Collin Morikawa: 2

And I bet you couldn’t even tell me which ones they were.

9. Scottie wins five more times: Even more confusing is how I thought Scottie was going to win five times but Morikawa was going to win POY.

You probably don’t need a Scottie update, but if you do, this one is telling.

The numbers are since January 1, 2025. Wins on the bottom axis. Aggregate strokes gained on the left axis. Rory has gained over 300 strokes across a year and a half and won seven times, and Scottie is just stunting all over him.

Look at this!

10. The role of golf media shifts: Here’s what I wrote in January.

Anecdotally, I had a friend tell me recently that he listens to Shotgun Start far more than he actually watches golf. I think we are entering a golf era where the consumption of pro (and even amateur) golf content will happen not through watching events or even highlights of those events but almost vicariously through NLU, Fried Egg and hopefully even this newsletter.
That makes our jobs a little more complex but the long tail of golf being played so many different places can serve as a bit of a moat for us. You don’t have time to find fun golf stories for eight hours a day, but we do and then we can deliver them in one or two newsletters or a podcast throughout the week.
People will still mostly watch the majors, but ratings for almost everything else will decline — especially the legacy stuff (ratings for new stuff like TGL can’t decline).
However, I don’t think people will be less interested in golf broadly, which means they will start leaning even more on independent golf media to help them understand and contextualize what’s happening in preparation for the weeks in which they actually tune in.
Normal Sport

Even if I was wrong about the ratings part (in the short term), I am doubling tripling quadrupling down on this take. The modern sports media person essentially falls into one of two buckets.

Reporter
Curator (guide for all the content)

Joel Beall is No. 1, and he’s excellent at it.

I am No. 2.

Fried Egg is No. 2.

NLU is mostly No. 2 but some of No. 1. Same for Shackelford.

And while there is concern that there aren’t going to be enough No. 1s in the future, I do think the importance of No. 2s increases no matter what. There’s not going to be less content, and you need a guide to help you figure out what matters.

Here’s what David Perell said recently. He was talking about AI, but I think these two skills — taste and a spiky POV — are paramount for the future of sports media.

Whether you’re writing with AI or you’re writing without AI, the core skills you need to succeed as a writer are the same. What are those core skills? Taste. The ability to discern what’s worth keeping and what’s not worth keeping. So much of it is taste and discernment.
The second thing is a spiky point of view. A unique insight, a unique belief about what you believe to be true about the world. If you can have that, something that is like, This is my bold take … This is the famous Peter Thiel interview question: What do you believe about the world that’s true that very few people would agree with you on? Those will continue to be valuable.
David Perell

Quintupling down.

Thank you for reading until the end.

You’re a complete and total sicko for reading a newsletter that is 2,698 words (!!) long, and we are grateful for your support of this business.