Issue No. 271 | November 18 2025 | Read Online

Greetings!

I did not realize that so many of you would get our apparently too easy Wordle puzzle last week. The responses were such a delight to read, though, and congrats to reader, Danny L. from Iowa who was the first to get it correct. He gets $50 off at the Normal Sport pro shop.

I’m sorry I didn’t have time to respond to everyone individually, but I did want to post a few of the paths you all took to get to the answer, including the one Danny L. took (up first).

Here are the rest.

Nandina, by the way, is perhaps best known as the hole at ANGC where Rory made the last of his 18 birdies in regulation this year.

It is, uh, also known for the Eisenhower tree, which used to be a thorn in the side of our 34th president, but was lost in a 2014 winter storm before being cloned through grafting. Normal sport.

Let’s get to work on this week’s newsletter.

TODAY’S SPONSOR

First, today’s newsletter is sponsored by Seed Golf.

The NYT has brought the brilliance of Wordle to puzzle makers of all intelligence levels (clearly, they let me build one). In the same way, today’s newsletter sponsor, Seed Golf, aims to bring premium performance golf products to golfers of all abilities, for less.

Their mantra is, Same performance, half the price.

This is a remarkable aspiration and one what they have found a ton of success in. Seed’s golf balls feel great to 10 handicaps like myself, are not prohibitively expensive and have become the darlings of the YouTube golf ball reviewer world (see here).

And for Normal Sport readers, their mantra could be, Same performance, half the price plus another 20 percent off your first box. Just use the code NORMALSPORT at checkout right here and get your first box of Seed golf balls for ~$30.

OK, now onto the news.

Greatest Euro Ever

I’m not sure we needed another Race to Dubai outcome to solidify Rory’s legacy on the European Tour, but this one was certainly symbolic.

After making an insane eagle at the 72nd hole to get into a playoff with Matty Fitzpatty, Rory lost the Euro Tour finale in extra holes. But none of that affected his claim to a fourth consecutive Harry Vardon trophy, which is probably best described as the European version of the FedEx Cup.

Is this something that should be taken as seriously as a major championship? No. What about the Players or what happens at Ryder Cups? Probably not. Or even his win at Pebble? Eh. In modern times, I would probably lean toward, No.

However, this season-long award is a measuring stick that spans generations, that tells us who the most consistently great Europeans were at different periods of time.

Here are your multi-time winners.

Rory was, unsurprisingly, emotional about it all. Emotional about Seve. Emotional about splitting the difference between Seve and Monty. Emotional about the entirety of what is undoubtedly the greatest year of his amazing career.

And while normally I would give you another 1,000 words on those emotions, we have visited those plenty this year and will do so even more in our upcoming book.

I’m more interested at this moment, though, about his place as the greatest European ever. I think it’s indisputable. Not the most important (Seve) but the most accomplished and the very best. What usurps this resume?

• Five majors

• The grand slam

• 29 PGA Tour wins

• 20 European Tour wins

• Six Ryder Cups

• 21.5 Ryder Cup points (3.0 points from being second all time)

• Seven Harry Vardons

• Three FedEx Cups

• 777 weeks in OWGR top 10 (third most ever)

The seventh Race to Dubai is fine and OK in a vacuum, but when you marry it with everything else above, the resume becomes unassailable.

Weeks in OWGR top 10

Best Euro ever is an arbitrary thing that doesn’t matter all that much other than giving the rest of us something to talk about in November and December.

It’s probably another of the, “Who goes out first on Sunday at Ryder Cups?” things that maybe elicit an eye roll or even a scoff from the rest of us. But, as is the case with a lot of European golf, it matters more than you would probably think to the players who are in the mix for it.

And if global golf matters, then continents matter.

And this is probably your list of the best men’s pro golfers from them all.

North America — Tiger or Jack
South America — Roberto De Vicenzo (?) … Angel Cabrera (?!)
Europe — Rory
Asia — Hideki
Australia — Greg Norman or Peter Thomson
Africa — Gary Player

The two places where golf has arguably been the most competitive in its history are North America and Europe. Tiger or Jack on one side. Rory alone on the other. That’s remarkable, even if it gets lost a bit at times just how much he has accomplished.

A Great What If

Speaking of greatest Euro ever!

In last week’s Normal Sport Show with LKD, we talked at the very end about his boy, Nick Faldo, and about how close Justin Rose (!!!) is to the conversation about greatest Euro of all time.

Here’s what LKD said.

This is not something I had thought much about. Justin Rose as a top three Euro ever? But LKD is right, and this is kinda true. Here are some numbers.

So it’s not that close, but it’s close enough that if you squint and Scott Hoch and Greg Norman don’t kick a pair of Masters to Faldo and Rose touches off two of the following …

• 2017 Masters (playoff loss to Sergio)

• 2018 Open (lost by two to Molinari)

• 2024 Open (lost by two to Xander)

• 2025 Masters (playoff loss to Rory)

Then we are having a very different conversation.

This is not what happened of course, which matters, but the thought exercise is an interesting one.

Golf-ish Links

• Dylan on the Internet Invitational was terrific (so was next week’s Normal Sport Show guest, James Colgan). I didn’t really pay attention to the event itself, but its success — to the tune of 2.7M views on the finale alone — dovetails with one of my predictions from the start of 2025.

Here’s that prediction.

My general theory on this is that pro golf is the most susceptible to YouTube disruption because the difference between how good the pros are compared to how good YT personalities are is the toughest to discern in golf compared to all the other sports.

In other words, it’s very easy to tell how much better Dak Prescott is at football than a YouTube creator is at football. But it’s tougher to tell how much better Xander Schauffele is at golf than Brad Dalke is at golf. Schauffele is in fact standard deviations better, but you just can’t tell as easily on camera.

Combine that with the fact that the pool of people who play golf is much bigger than any other sport, which means it’s easier to find somebody you really gravitate toward or fall in love with watching and following, and pro golf is begging to be disrupted.

• Possibly related! Jay Monahan made $19 million in 2024. I have no problem with big salaries for important CEOs. Your leadership is (theoretically) creating 10x multiples of that number in revenue for the league. I don’t even really have a problem with Monahan, who hasn’t been great, making that much money. It’s not like fans can or should be able to vote on, Oh I don’t really like this guy so let’s only pay him $500K this year. 

What I have a problem with is that we still have two more years of Monahan making this money. I think everyone has basically arrived at, Good dude, worked hard, maybe not the best wartime CEO, and yet he is somehow still there, somehow still being paid for both 2025 and 2026 as his contract ends. I guess you could talk me into the reasons that is a good thing, but it would probably take a while.

Love Your Work

I loved these notes from Patrick O’Shaughnessy on why Colossus started … a magazine (?) in 2025.

The best opportunities seem like bad ideas but are good ideas [because] seemingly bad ideas have very little competition.

This is often how I feel about Normal Sport! You’re writing a newsletter and building books? Isn’t that … really time intensive and difficult? Yes! Yes it is! But that’s kind of the entire point from a business perspective.

It takes a long, long time to put all of this together, to make Wordle puzzles and put together ads that don’t suck. To plan a good show and write with thoughtfulness. All of that takes so, so long.

But 1. We love it and 2. We believe you do, too. So the question is not, Why would you do something that’s so difficult?, but rather, like O’Shaughnessy pointed out, What else can we do that’s even harder than this?

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 1,701 words. Everything you read and consume was created from scratch by two humans who are absolutely obsessed with the game.

If you ever want to support our business, you can buy merch here or become a Normal Club member (we have over 1,000!) at this link.