Hello Spieth stans,
Today’s NS Connections. I might be more obsessed with making these than I am with completing them. So much fun. Hope you enjoy it.
Also, if you missed it on Thursday, we launched a referral program. Our hope is that — just like when Spieth starts pouring in 3s — we hope you spread the word far and wide about our newsletter, and — unlike what comes after all those 3s for Spieth — we want to reward you for doing so.
More deets at the bottom of the newsletter.
Name drops today: Roberto De Vicenzo, Baby Si Woo, Kevin O’Connell, Old Course and Tyrrell Hatton (multiple times).
Today’s newsletter is presented by Charlie Golf Co.
If you run a golf club or know someone who does, let’s help Tyler get his bags in 100 clubs (they’re currently in 86). This is a no brainer to me. Beautiful, not-stupid-expensive golf bags with a club’s sweet logo on them?
And in fact, Tyler will be taking my money because we’re going to be producing some Norman-themed kids bags over the next few months.
Whether you’re a dad (or mom!) with kids who love the game or someone who has an opportunity to buy at scale, I cannot recommend Tyler and Charlie Golf Co. highly enough. In a world where everything is mass produced with little care or thought, CGC is caring and thoughtful about how they produce their golf products. Exactly the kind of company we are also trying to be.
Alright, now on to the news.
The art of trying in Spieth's studio.
This quote from Brian Harman during the Memphis event really struck me. I thought about it a lot over the weekend.
Kind of wherever you are on Tour, you're on some kind of bubble. You're either trying to make the Tour Championship or you're trying to make the Presidents Cup or you're trying to make the top 50 or you're trying to keep your card or trying to win for the first time.
Yeah, I think that's what makes our game so great. I think that's what's super interesting about golf is there's 15 different golf tournaments going on out here, not just the guy trying to win.
Brian Harman
I think we — the corrupt golf media — have collectively done a bad job of explaining the other 14 tournaments within the larger tournament that everyone cares about.
However, even if we were better and more consistent about explaining these things, I don’t really believe we live in a sports culture that cares all that much about who finishes 15th in a week and what that means for the 2027 majors.
We care about who won and lost because our biggest sports are very binary (football, hoops, baseball and hockey). We then try to take those concepts and apply them to individual sports — or at least I do — in ways that they probably don’t really fit.
I view a PGA Tour event as the entirety of the NFL schedule in a given week. Yeah, there’s the one game you care about most. But there are all these other games that matter quite a bit, too. I think there are ways to highlight those — this often does happen during a Ryder Cup year — in ways that properly communicate the depth of meaning those tournaments within the tournament have to the players who play them.
It’s also an opportunity to shine a light on how truly unique golf is as a sport (which is … kinda what this entire newsletter is all about).
Scottie's Sunday scripting
The Scottie stuff gets either normalized or ignored completely, which is a bummer because I’m fully on the block of “we are watching one of the (at least!) 15 greatest careers of all time unfold in real time” block.
Two stats. The first is number of events it took the last six guys who won 21+ PGA Tour events to get there in order of slowest to fastest (this does not include Euro Tour).
Vijay -- 285
DJ -- 266
Phil -- 246
Rory -- 214
Scottie -- 168
Tiger -- 97
Tiger is either the best or second best player of all time. I think Rory and Phil are around 10th. Logically, this means that Scottie will land somewhere between Tiger and Phil/Rory. Doesn’t mean that’s how it’s going to play out (shout out to the beautiful, beleaguered boy), but is it crazy to wonder if Scottie is going to go down as, like, the 6th best player of all time?
Another stat (pointed out by a reader) ….
Tournaments it took to go from win No. 1 to win No. 21 …
Tiger: 79
Scottie: 98
It remains remarkable that Scottie didn’t win any of his first 70 starts, and now he’s won 21 of his last 98. They are the only two players to go from 1-21 wins in a span of fewer than 100 starts on the PGA Tour in at least the last 40 years.
1. What is the equivalent of this in another sport? Has to be a football, baseball or soccer ball hitting the camera wire in a big time stadium, right?
My short list of players I would be interested in seeing this happen to.
1. Hatton
2. Hatton
3. Hatton
4. Rahm
5. Not sure there’s anyone else.
2. This made me laugh.
Hush! But also get loud!
Golf but quieter (but louder)!
I’m not even sure what to do with this one, but it made me chuckle as I watched last weekend.
There’s definitely a “This is how Roberto De Vicenzo did it” joke in there somewhere. But regardless, I am desperate for more Si Woo content, even if it’s Baby Si Woo content.
Also, not sure if this is a meme, but wanted to point out how utterly ridiculous it is to have tournaments in Memphis and St. Louis in August. And truly, no offense meant toward the good and even great people of Memphis (especially Memphis) and St. Louis.
[Jason here] I would like to give Memphis some flowers for inspiring my first two Normal Sport illustrations from Normal Sport No. 21 ‘The Spieth Balance Beam’. 3 years later, that title still holds up and we're still talking about SWTY SZN. Thanks Memphis.
• Come for the Randy Moss story, stay for an NFL head coach accidentally saying “one of the greatest ball-strik … trackers of all time.” Me to Vikings ball knower KOC after hearing that.
• Nobody is better at these little short stories about different people, places and moments in golf than Sean Martin. This one on 1989 U.S. Amateur winner, Chris Patton, is wonderful.
• It would be pretty weird if this tweet below wasn’t the case, right?
Golf almost certainly (?) has the highest percentage of media members who also play the sport of any other Tier 1 or Tier 2 sport (I don’t include sports like pickleball as Tier 1 or Tier 2 sports). It definitely has the most media members who are also still active professionals (normal stuff). And because of both of these realities, I think there is a love and a joy — not always, but often — that doesn’t exist in other media circles.
Example: I covered college football for 10 years in conjunction with golf. I enjoyed it. It was fun. But I didn’t love the game, I think because it’s more difficult to love a thing you’re not also participating in yourself. That’s not universally true, but I think it’s mostly true for most people.
• I referenced this piece last week, but I’m not exaggerating when I say it might be the best thing on AI I’ve ever read.
• This on ordinary abundance is tremendous as well. I think often about how crazy it is that we have running water inside our homes as well as a trash system that just magically gets rid of all of our waste. Those two realities would have been unfathomable to 99 percent of humans who have ever lived, and yet I take them for granted every single day. Anyway, this piece takes that idea even further. If you, like me, are obsessed with thinking about stuff like this, you’ll love exploring the piece.
I really loved this video showing changes to the Old Course ahead of the 2027 Open Championship. It’s super interesting and frankly just really pleasant to watch.
I have recently found myself fairly deep in the chess world. Playing folks online — mostly friends but sometimes strangers — doing puzzles, the whole thing. I have been in and out of chess over the years, but I’ve never been as enamored as I am right now. The reason? I find the strategy and thoughtfulness about the game to be basically endless. There is no bottom to the well.
The same should be true of golf. However, every time I see a video like this where folks in charge of a golf course are moving bunkers around and subtly shifting the pieces on the board, my cynical voice says, Eh, none of it matters, players are just going to fly it all over the yard and past all the trouble.
It remains to be seen whether this is actually true, but I can think of some changes to equipment that would reinstate the myriad ways a sport that, like chess, should be strategically infinite. Instead, golf is being played right now with all queens and one king. That’s more powerful, sure, but it’s not more interesting.
This got me good …
And so did this one …
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