Issue No. 241 | August 21, 2025 | Read Online

New uniforms, new CEO and Ricky Barnes somehow got himself involved in today’s newsletter. We have a lot to discuss. Let’s get right to it.

Today’s newsletter is presented by Precision Pro. There are a lot of products I’m about to show you that, ahem, could have been designed a bit better. Precision Pro’s Titan Slope rangefinder, however, is not one of them.

In fact, one of its features is an unbreakable design. Whether you dropped it out of your golf cart or threw it against a tree after catching a flyer out of the rough, the Titan Slope is protected by a precision aluminum shell that can take any impact.

Plus, it just looks absolutely gorgeous, which I believe is the last time that sentence will be written throughout this newsletter.

OK, now onto the news.

11 Thoughts on the Last Week in Golf

1. The Ryder Cup uniforms … I have some thoughts. The first is that everyone is focused on the tops (which we will get to), but the real abomination is the hats. Look at this!

I just … don’t know who looked at that and thought, “Yeah … we nailed it.”

They are somehow (?) worse from up close.

It looks as if Ricky Barnes was heavily involved in the design here.

This is what they designed to try and get Patrick Cantlay to put something on his head? I think they may have flipped me onto his side!

Aside: I don’t think everyone will be forced to wear the above hats. I think there are variations of them. Which makes you wonder why anyone would choose to wear them in the first place.

2. The shirts are just doing way too much. Like 1990s MLS kits levels of too much.

I guess I can get behind this one in an ironic way, but the problem is that it wasn’t made ironically. In the same way that a meddling editor jumps into a piece of writing and changes superfluous things just to remind you that they can, that’s what this shirt looks like. A group of designers thinking, “Well, we have to let them know that we did something.” Not good.

[Jason here]: What Kyle is trying to say is that when he’s hired as fashion consultant for the USA Ryder Cup team, he will be go full Paul Rudd surf instructor mode from Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

3. Shirts that are flawed but fine …

The no buttons thing is goofy to me. And I’m sure as a 40-year-old white male who wears Hokas and has four kids, I understand fashion the least of any human on the planet, but we don’t have to go button-less, do we?

Lastly on this year’s shirt, I think the Sunday version just kind of sums it all up.

Yeah, do two stripes at the top, that will look good.

[it looks good]

Now do 17 more and make them varying heights. Do as many stripes as our machines will allow us to do.

4. There just needs to be … less going on. Coming from someone who is completely biased and very much sponsored by the following business, you know what would be a much better option … ?

Here’s the Holderness and Bourne Springer polo, which is one of my favorites.

Oh, what do you know, it does look awesome in the Ryder Cup store.

Obviously I am a moron when it comes to this stuff and incredibly biased about the above. But favoring loud noises over even the subtle touches of the past (both of the below slapped) is just not my speed when it comes to the U.S. team uniforms.

To be fair here, it does look like the Sunday sweaters rule.

5. I’m also absolutely in awe of this jacket from Ralph Lauren. In awe that it was made. In awe that it costs $598. In awe that players may (?) wear it.

I think it might be so bad it’s good. Might be my official stance on it.

The Adirondack Mtns. (!!) on a golf jacket! Normal stuff!

This post will continue for Normal Sport members below, and includes …

Thoughts on Brian Rolapp’s first presser.
A potential revamped PGA Tour postseason.
An invite to submit questions for Keegan’s presser next week.

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.

6. I am planning to be at Keegan’s Ryder Cup press conference next Wednesday. If you have a legit question you want me to consider asking, by all means let me know.

You can put those questions right here.

7. The big news this week from new PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp (who was previously Roger Goodell’s right-hand man at the NFL) was the announcement of the PGA Tour’s future competition committee, which sounds ridiculous but could actually turn out to provide meaningful change.

Here’s Rolapp.

The purpose of this committee is pretty simple. We're going to design the best professional golf competitive model in the world for the benefit of PGA Tour fans, players and their partners. It is aimed at a holistic relook of how we compete on the Tour. That is inclusive of regular season, postseason and offseason.
We're going to focus on the evolution of our competitive model and the corresponding media products and sponsorship elements and model of the entire sport. The goal is not incremental change. The goal is significant change.
Brian Rolapp

He added that the three principles would be …

1. Competitive parity
2. Simplicity
3. Scarcity

This is NFL language, through and through. On the three principles.

1. I don’t disagree with the need for competitive parity, but it’s also an amusing time to be talking about it when Scottie is winning everything he looks at it. Truly a missed opportunity to add Competitive PARity to the golf lexicon.

2. Simplicity will be difficult in the context Rolapp was discussing because the majors overshadow any kind of simplistic link between the regular season and postseason on the PGA Tour.

Regardless, I appreciate where Rolapp is coming from here on the simplicity portion of things. Look at this nonsense from a recent FedEx Cup explanation!

The Tour is a piece of old software whose code has been edited and forked 1,000 times, but what really needs to happen is that it needs to be rebuilt from the ground up altogether.

3. Scarcity will be the most difficult of all. Shareholders always want more, and when you have 150 of them in the form of players, a CEO pushing for less — which is the right move!! — will be extremely difficult to pull off.

8. The one quote that really juiced me up — in addition to “the goal is not incremental change, the goal is significant change” — was as follows.

I don't think fans should expect anything we're doing now to exist in perpetuity in general. I think that gets back to my earlier comments that if we're doing our job, we're going to constantly innovate and get better. So we're going to do that.
Brian Rolapp

I broadly think the Tour sat on its hands in the Tiger era because why fix what isn’t broken is making you so much money you don’t even know where to put it all?

I don’t know that I would have done anything different.

But they (obviously?) got complacent with the product, and there’s no such thing as stasis in businesses like this. You’re either moving forward or going backwards, and as soon as the Tiger-shaped vacuum presented itself, the Tour realized it was still operating in 2005.

Monahan has tried to band-aid all that up with, well, incremental changes, which is fine and some of which have been good. But wholesale change for the Tour will benefit it in the long term even if it’s a bit painful in the short.

9. Related: This quote is excellent.

The sports business is not that complicated. You get the product right, you get the right partners, your fans will reward you with their time because they're telling you it's good and they want more of it, and then the commercial and the business part will take care of itself. Then you just have to constantly innovate.
I think if there's anything I learned at the NFL, it's that. We did not sit still, changed rules every March. We changed the kickoff rule. That's what I mean by honoring tradition but not being bound by it. I think that level of innovation is what we're going to do here, and I think that's one lesson I've learned.
Brian Rolapp

The product, the product, the product. That’s all you’re going to hear, and I think what previous regimes have ignored or made superfluous changes to that sounded good in emails but didn’t affect how fans view the sport.

In the same ways that NLU and Fried Egg have disrupted golf media because the incumbents weren’t innovating, I think it’s probably a good thing that Rolapp is an outsider who will care about “the way things have always been done” but not feel shackled by it.

10. Here’s one take I have on Rolapp as it relates to Monahan. Both have experience as advocates for their shareholders. In the NFL, Rolapp was accustomed to being an advocate for the NFL owners. On the PGA Tour, Monahan has been (and Rolapp will be) an advocate for the players. It is probably more ideal for fans for a league to be in cahoots with owners rather than players, but that’s a different conversation.

My point here is that Monahan always seemed like a reactive advocate. It always seemed like he would look around at the players and be like, Well, what do you guys want to do? I’m not saying that always happened, but it did seem to happen somewhat often. This is one way to galvanize a collection of folks you are representing, but it’s not the best way.

Rolapp, on the other hand, seems like someone who is — like a parent presenting either peas or carrots or spinach at dinner — giving three options that he has already approved and thought through and then talking players into one of them. This is an oversimplification of the process and a lot of reading between the lines on my part, but this would better serve fans and therefore the league in the long run.

11. Jamie Kennedy’s match play idea for the Tour Championship is good. The only thing I would add is that the problem with the previous PGA Tour match play event is that 64 players leads to some odd matchups that are not that intriguing.

This would not be the case with just 30 players. The matchups would almost universally rock. Here are the first round matchups this year under Jamie’s format.

That means your second round could be …

Scheffler-Morikawa
Fleetwood-JT
Cam Young-Straka
Ludvig-Rose
Rory-Mav
Harris-Ben Griffin
Henley-Novak
Keegan-Spaun

Those are good! And they get better.

Scheffler-Fleetwood
Cam-Ludvig
Rory-Griffin
Henley-Keegan

If 1.4 million people watch Grant Horvat and Adam Scott play a match, I’m convinced you could get more (if it’s filmed and presented the right way!) for Scheffler-Fleetwood and Ludvig-Rose.

More of the right kind of match play is a good thing, and I’m convinced that — if you’re going to keep having a “postseason” — pushing into match play with big names is a good path. As long as they don’t have to wear those hats.

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 2,112 words long like this one.

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Let's Talk About Those Uniforms

11 Thoughts on the Last Week in Golf

11 Thoughts on the Last Week in Golf

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