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Issue No. 198 | May 13, 2025 | Read Online
Happy Blockie Week to all who celebrate!
You can get in the mix this week by becoming a Normal Club member, which gets you a free entry into our $2,500 PGA Championship fantasy contest (more details here).
I have promised a bonus of $500 to anyone who rosters Blockie this week and goes on to win the fantasy contest.
Once you sign up for Normal Club membership, you will receive a welcome email with a link to the contest (eligible locations include the entire U.S. other than Nevada and Washington).
Let’s get right to the news.
Speaking of Blockie, I hope he’s been grinding on his Garmin Approach R50 since the 2023 PGA Championship. We know he’s short, or at least shorter than Rory. He made that very clear in the aftermath. So approach shots into some of these monstrous holes at Quail Hollow will be paramount to contending.
And Garmin — which is presenting today’s newsletter — has put together a simulator and launch monitor that puts you on course to play your best game from tee to green.
I actually got a chance to test out the R50 recently in my backyard (a true home game), and it was awesome. Really awesome.
Immediate feedback on my high blocked irons and my twisty, quick left miss off the tee. The numbers weren’t necessarily pretty, but that was user error more than anything else. The product itself is tremendous, and you should check it out right here.
As always, we appreciate you supporting the businesses that support Normal Sport.
OK, now onto the news.
I legitimately cannot believe I’m doing this, but I think I have to lead off PGA Championship week with some news about Donald John Trump Al Bedminster and Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud.
It feels like this should have already received more run, but Eamon Lynch wrote about Trump’s tour of the Middle East for Golfweek this week. Two things stood out.
Here’s the first.
As the mandarins in Ponte Vedra understand things, the president is going to Saudi Arabia to tell its autocratic leader, Mohammed bin Salman, that any deal between the Tour and the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund will be on the Tour’s preferred terms, and those terms will not include a long-term future for LIV.
Eamon Lynch | Golfweek
He goes on to say that Tiger was at the White House last week working on Trump’s talking points. An incredible — almost unfathomable — sentence.
As an aside: Go back to 2013, and tell yourself that these two gentlemen would be fighting for the future of professional golf in the Middle East while someone playing in that week’s Puerto Rico Open (Spieth) would be trying to win the second consecutive career slam the second major of the year (which was somehow not the U.S. Open).
Anyway, Lynch continued.
But having involved Trump in the process, the Tour’s fate now rests in the hands of a man who is wholly transactional and loyal only to himself. Will he insist on deal terms that benefit the Tour over the investment fund that gave his son-in-law’s private equity company $2 billion? Will he alienate a strategic and economic ally just as the U.S. lurches toward recession? Will a greater grifting opportunity present itself in the shadows?
He might be a Tour guy more than a LIV guy, but he’s fundamentally a Trump guy.
Eamon Lynch | Golfweek
So the guy negotiating for the future on behalf of the PGA Tour is 1. Also doing personal business with the people he’s negotiating with (MBS) and the people he’s negotiating against (LIV) and 2. The father-in-law of someone (Jared Kushner) whose business received $2 billion from the Saudis.
How … uhh … how do we think this is going to go?
Amazing reporting and work by Lynch there, and I feel like the story is not being talked about enough (if at all?). The president of the United States is deciding where Dean Burmester plays golf in the near future.
Very, very normal stuff.
The official future Truist Winner’s Wedge.
Justin Thomas gets us in the major championship mood!
… I feel like a place like this, where it doesn't necessarily require a lot of thought or strategy off the tee, it's generally pulling out driver and just I need to hit this as far and straight as possible, and [Rory is] really, really good at that.
JT | 2025 PGA
Xander said something similar.
There's no sort of trick to play this golf course. A lot of people will hit it to the same spot. A lot of people will miss it to the same spot as well, and … it's not bad because it's like who can get up and down better when they're out of position, and who can capitalize when they're in a good position.
Xander Schauffele | 2025 PGA
To be clear, none of this is necessarily a bad thing. It’s just not the best thing. When people criticize places like Quail Hollow, they aren’t necessarily saying they are bad courses or bad places (well, Tron might be).
Quail is fine. Charlotte is fine. All of it is fine. But it’s very difficult to square those two quotes above with championship level golf when most people who are deep into this world believe that championship level golf should test your thinking and your decision-making and your emotions as much as it tests your ability to swing a golf club.
This is not new for the PGA. They often go to courses like this, which is fine! To be clear, some of the courses the USGA and R&A go to have been so eradicated by advances in technology, that the same thing is true — the courses don’t ask a ton of you — if only for different reasons.
We will get a bunch of Torrey Pines-like discourse this week at Quail, and I think the root of most of it will be based on those JT and Xander quotes above. If styles make fights then variety makes majors championships.
Quail Hollow will be a good test of high level golf, but it won’t bring about the variety we love seeing at tournaments like these.
I could probably do 1,000 words on this alone but I’ll try to keep it short.
Here’s what our beautiful boy said on Tuesday.
For me, if I could only win one tournament for the rest of my life, I'd pick this one for that reason. Obviously watching Rory win after giving it a try for a number of years was inspiring. You could tell it was a harder win than … most of the time he makes it look a lot easier.
So that obviously was on the forefront of his mind. Something like that has not been done by many people, and there's a reason why. But I'd love to throw my hat in the ring and give it a chance come the weekend this week.
Jordan Spieth | 2025 PGA
There are some things that are working in his favor. Here they are in no particular order.
1. He’s playing really good golf. Spieth has now finished eight tournaments in a row in which he has gained strokes against the field. He hasn’t done that since 2021 when he gained in 15 tournaments in a row and won the Texas Open (and finished T3 at the Masters).
2. He’s driving it great. This was true last year when he couldn’t seem to hit an iron into a 190-foot radius. This year, that has (mostly) improved.
3. He actually played solidly at Quail Hollow a year ago but lost four strokes to the field on his approaches. That’s cleaner now than it was a year ago (see above).
4. He seems to be in a much better spot mentally. More confidence, less wrist talk.
When I'm golfing, I haven't really been thinking about it the last couple of months.
Spieth | 2025 PGA
5. (This is a stretch that I am trying to talk myself into, but …) he went 5-0-0 at the 2022 Presidents Cup at Quail Hollow.
I don’t think Spieth is going to win the PGA, but the idea of him doing so feels a little livelier this year than it has in the last few.
How wild would it be, too, if we had seen just one slam winner over the last 50 years and we ended up seeing two in consecutive major championships?
A Spieth fan is always prepared [to get hurt].
Some good ones this week, and we’re not even close to done with Trump!
1. Whatever you want to say about him, I find it pretty amazing and also hilarious that in the middle of a billion things going on at the White House, he’s out here quoting Sam Snead to justify accepting a $400 million plane from Qatar. What a sentence!
“They’re giving us a free jet,” he said. “I could say, ‘No, no, no, don’t give us, I want to pay you a billion, or $400 million,’ or whatever it is. Or, I could say, ‘Thank you very much.’”
…
“There was an old golfer named Sam Snead,” he said. “Did you ever hear of him?”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Dr. Mehmet Oz, the chief of staff Susie Wiles and a smattering of other presidential aides in the room looked up at their boss, perhaps unsure where he was heading.
Old Sam Snead “had a motto,” Mr. Trump continued. “When they give you a putt, you say, ‘Thank you very much.’ You pick up your ball, and you walk to the next hole. A lot of people are stupid. They say, ‘No, no, I insist on putting it.’ Then they putt it, they miss it, and their partner gets angry at them.”
NYT
Extremely normal sport stuff.
Oh, and it was all apocryphal anyway?
It was a bit of a stretch, comparing a gimme in golf to accepting a luxury jet from a foreign government. And there is doubt about whether Mr. Snead ever even uttered those words.
“Sam never said any of that,” said Al Barkow, a prominent golf writer who wrote “Sam: The One and Only Snead.”
NYT
Even better.
2. This is also perfect, no notes.
3. OK, the 1938 Gemini Cryptocurrency Classic got me good.
👉️ This piece from Alan Shipnuck on Rory’s history and what he wants is really good.
This Brad Faxon quote at the end … 😍
Says Faxon, “Jack [Nicklaus] always said one of the hardest things to do is keep playing well after you win. That’s not a classic definition of resilience but it’s a function of how much a player burns to win, how bad they want it. Are they willing to pay the price even when they’ve already achieved one dream after another?”
Faxon chuckles and then offers an ominous thought for McIlroy’s competition: “He’s not slowing down. He’s hungry for more. Rory is a student of history and that’s why he was so overwhelmed with the Masters win—he knows how much it means. And he wants to keep going. He wants to make more history.
He knows it won’t be easy and, honestly, I think he kind of likes it that way."
Alan Shipnuck | Skratch
👉️ This piece from Dottie Pepper on what the final round of the Masters was like is incredible. An amazing read from one of the five or six people who were closest to history.
👉️ Shout to Normal Sport sponsor, Ship Sticks, for going out of their way to help Claire Rogers get her clubs back.
Something for those of us with Augusta still on the mind this week.
👉️ This video from Pat Reed is 10 of 10. It’s older, but Patrick McDonald resurfaced it, and I have watched it several times.
Here are your best major championship golfers — according to Data Golf — since January 1, 2022. I picked this date because it more or less represents ~50 rounds at majors for the top players.
Player | True SG | Wins |
|---|---|---|
Scottie | 3.04 | 2 |
Rory | 2.96 | 1 |
Xander | 2.73 | 2 |
Ludvig | 2.31 | 0 |
Morikawa | 2.29 | 0 |
Fleetwood | 2.09 | 0 |
Rahm | 2.00 | 1 |
Rose | 1.94 | 0 |
Hovland | 1.93 | 0 |
Lowry | 1.91 | 0 |
Zalatoris | 1.86 | 0 |
Cam Smith | 1.85 | 1 |
Bryson | 1.84 | 1 |
That’s a very clear top three with a very clear drop after that.
Also …
I was shocked to see Bryson at just 1.84, but he’s had some really bad Opens and Masters appearances.
Let’s limit it to just PGA Championships instead and take it back even further to 2021.
Player | True SG | Wins |
|---|---|---|
Bryson | 3.12 | 0 |
Hovland | 2.84 | 0 |
Casey (!) | 2.77 | 0 |
Rose | 2.72 | 0 |
Xander | 2.68 | 1 |
Scottie | 2.65 | 0 |
Lowry | 2.59 | 0 |
Brooks | 2.59 | 1 |
Zalatoris | 2.41 | 0 |
Rory | 2.40 | 0 |
This is a much noisier subset of data, but it’s also more interesting. Paul Casey, by the way, is dealing with just four rounds so we can toss that out.
Bryson, though, Bryson is who I’m fixated on. He’s had a great year and has been extraordinary at PGAs over the last few seasons.
2024: 2nd
2023: T4
2022: WD
2021: T38
2020: T4
He very much intrigues me at a championship where he’s thrived on a golf course that asks little of you off the tee other than to wail away.
Also, here are your best overall golfers in the last 24 months (not including Philly Cricket last week).
Some absolute gems this week.
Not sure there’s a better Twitter than [big social thing that everyone is paying attention to happened] Twitter. This last week, it was pope central.
• This got me so good. And the video is way better.
• I’m here for Tron’s war on Charlotte.
• Me. I’m the target audience here.
• I’m just glad to have Blockie back in our lives.
Thank you for reading a golf newsletter that is 2,420 words long.
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