Subscribe now!
.svg){kind=spacer}
Your cart
Product Title
$0
$0
-
+
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
Coupon1
Coupon2
Cart note
Subtotal
$0
COUPON2
-$0
Order Discount
-$0
Cart Total
$0
Issue No. 208 | May 30, 2025 | Read Online
103
What I shot yesterday? Thankfully, no.
What someone at Memorial shot yesterday? Also no.
The consecutive number of times on Wednesday that the six members of our family kept a shuttlecock (normal sport) in the air, thus triggering the “if you hit 100 in a row, we’ll get ice cream” clause I implemented and nearly resulting in multiple injuries and one full-extension dive from the 11 year old? Absolutely.
Maybe the best moment of vacation this week.
Today’s newsletter is presented by Erin Hills, which is hosting this week’s U.S. Women’s Open presented by Ally. Erin was fabulous on Thursday (we are absolutely loving the picture in picture shots), and I expect two things to happen this weekend.
1. This course will finally shed its reputation as being too … easy (what?) that it got during the 2017 U.S. Open. An alternative way to shed it? Change par to 70 instead of 72. Brooks won at 272 in 2017. Bryson won at 274 last year at Pinehurst. I didn’t see anyone yelling about how easy Pinehurst was.
2. The course will start to lift and separate when it comes to identifying the best players in the world on the women’s side. It’s already beginning to. As I write this, Nelly is into the top five and two other former U.S. Women’s Open champs are in the top 10. This weekend should be must see stuff.
If you need tickets for the last two rounds, you can get them here.
OK, now onto the news.
Let’s get right to it.
1. In last week’s newsletter, I posed the following question: Who will end their career with the most majors between Rory (5), Brooks (5), Scottie (3) and anyone else that’s currently active (Bryson, Morikawa, Spieth etc.)
As an aside: It still feels strange to type that 5 next to Rory’s name.
The answers were almost 100 percent Scottie or Rory with Brooks receiving almost no votes (wild!) and the field not getting many either. I would vote Rory, if only because the difference in him and Scottie is Dustin Johnson’s career.
But like many of you, I would not feel great about it given the world Scottie is currently inhabiting and how well he’s set up for the future. It’s not really that infeasible — in fact, it’s almost likely given that he’s 3-1 to win the U.S. Open and 4-1 to win the Open — that Scottie pulls within one of Rory by the end of 2025.
2. The commentary on this poll was great. I learn from what you guys (our readers) write and always get energized hearing from you.
We make these newsletters, publish and send them to you, but we don’t have enough interaction around them yet. Having a better mechanism for congregating the community that we’re building around our content is something we think a lot about and are working on. Anyway, here are some good ones.
It's just a math game (between Rory and Scottie). Scottie has almost a decade advantage on Rory. And Brooks may never get another top 10 at a major.
Will G.
I think all of that is true.
[Scottie’s] mental perspective is much more Jack than Tiger - he doesn’t get too high or too low - which acclimates itself well to competing at a sustained high level over a long career.
Alex K.
Listen … I agree!
Scottie has to, as he will probably catch Rory within the next year and then have seven years of runway to pull ahead. I do think Rory probably gets to seven, but I also think Scottie’s floor at this point is eight so I have to go with Scheff.
Elias L.
His floor is eight?!?!
It's probably unfair, but I think I need to see Rory shine in another major before I bet him over Scottie. Scottie hasn't accrued any scar tissue yet, so maybe that changes some things for him downstream, but his course management excellence is such a separator between him and everyone else. It's hard to see him not getting at least two more, at which point he'd be even with Rory and eight years younger.
S.
I don’t think the part about needing to see it from Rory is that unfair. I would bet a lot of money that Rory either wins another or comes close, but there is definitely a non-zero chance that winning the Masters just completely closed out his career.
I don’t believe that, but it’s on the table.
I just voted for Rory without even thinking because of his two-major lead, but then I thought about it and I can't think of any reason Scottie won't win every Masters (horses) for the next 10 years + every PGA (just an elevated event) for the next 10 years. He doesn't even need the slam to get to 10 total! Low key "Will he win the UK British Open presented by His Majesty?" might be the only good remaining Scottie-related major question.
R.P.
I know this is an exaggeration, but Scottie winning 10 majors but never either Open would be wild!
It seems every 20 years or so an absolute generational player comes along in golf. Scottie is that. Honestly, I’ve struggled to root for him because he lacks Tiger’s incredulity, Rory’s majesty, and Spieth’s artistry, but I’m jumping on the ride. Simply put, he’s an assassin. It’s quiet, it’s stealthy, it’s lethal. Yes, he’ll lose a few heartbreaks and he won’t win every single one by half a dozen but I truly believe he’ll continue to rack up majors at a near annual clip. Put me down for Oakmont. Put me down for the career Grand Slam (not at Portrush though!). Put me down for 12!
Dan K.
The wild part about Scottie is that we’re just throwing around 12 like it’s happened 25 times (it’s happened twice) and /whispers … it doesn’t really seem that crazy.
It took Rory 11 years of being a top five player to win one more. Obviously Tiger had his issues, but he went 11 years between major wins and had multiple stretches in there of being the best in the world. This just isn’t that easy even for all-time greats. To expect Scottie to finish with 6+ easily is just not likely despite the gravitational pull of recency bias.
Kamal Y.
I think this is a good, more rational take than most of the ones that happen in my head.
3. One of my favorite tweets of the year happened during the PGA Championship. Here it is.
Every time I looked at it, I just howled. Imagine thinking Corey Pavin — who was born in the 1950s! — was in the 2025 PGA Championship field.
Two things happened since the PGA.
Corey Pavin actually was in the field at Colonial — the week after the PGA — where he shot 73-78 to miss the cut.
And then this U.S. Open qualifying result took place at Walton Heath.
I cannot wait until Byron’s dad finds out that Corey Pavin’s daughter, Andrea, is playing in the men’s U.S. Open!
This post will continue below for Normal Club members and includes …
A great Ben Griffin moment.
What I would change about the Super Bowl of golf.
A couple of notes on OState’s NCAA win.
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. Shout out to Geoff Shackelford and his excellent Quadrilateral newsletter for finding this clip of Ben Griffin talking about his parents.
The original question was innocuous, and Griffin jokes at the end — after breaking down multiple times — that he didn’t imagine delivering an answer about his elite short game would lead to that kind of emotion, but such is golf.
I have mentioned this before and will almost certainly mention it again, but I view clips like this one more as the parent than as the child. My kids are old enough that this is a reality. And I have to say — maybe there are others out there, perhaps dozens of us! — that I often do not feel as sacrificial as many other parents are talked about.
Every time I see a clip like this, all I think is, Man, I actually feel pretty selfish with my time and my priorities. Maybe that’s just revisionist history on the part of the subject at hand or maybe — maybe! — I actually am more selfish than I would purport myself to be.
5. Speaking of ridiculous things happening in May. Imagine the NFL announcing on November 1 that the Super Bowl starting scores would be changed for the forthcoming Super Bowl. There would be multi-day riots!
And while I’m not necessarily against the PGA Tour’s changes to the Tour Championship system, and I applaud them for being willing to make changes immediately, I did find it amusing that they’re doing it mid-year, on the fly when the Tour Championship is less than 100 days away.
Also: Here’s a thought. Maybe the Tour Championship and FedEx Cup are just not fixable. Maybe it doesn’t matter what we do to it when you’re playing it in the wake of an Open at Portrush and just ahead of a Ryder Cup in New York.
Again, I tend to like the changes to the system where we’re no longer playing handicaps in a professional golf tournament, but at some point trying to “fix” all of this is just semantics. Something only the folks playing in it truly care about.
My fix (which may marginally move the needle for me)? Two days of stroke play down to the final eight and then match play for the championship. Match play often stunk because the matchups weren’t that good. In this instance, it would be difficult to have a bad final eight so the matchups would be great.
Here’s the top eight going into East Lake last year.
1. Scheffler vs. 8. Clark
4. Keegan vs. 5. Ludvig
2. Xander vs. 7. Morikawa
3. Hideki vs. 6. Rory
Put it in my veins.
6. Since August 15, 2022, Scottie Scheffler has more …
Arrests
Gold medals
Masters wins
PGA Championship wins
Children
And ER visits on account of ravioli …
… than he does missed cuts.
His percentages in that time.
Top 25: 93 percent
Top 10: 80 percent (Rory is only at 63 percent!)
Wins: 24 percent
Remarkable.
7. I thoroughly enjoyed watching Oklahoma State’s 12th NCAA title run on Tuesday and Wednesday at La Costa. It was a reminder of two things …
College golf is wonderful but the actual golf can be horrific.
Match play absolutely, unequivocally, almost universally rules.
I watched some bad, bad, bad golf from guys in the OSU-Ole Miss semifinal matchup that OSU somehow sneaked out of with a victory but the entire thing was transfixing because of match play.
Literally anything can (and did) happen. Ballooned 3 woods into penalty areas, shanked pitches, missed 5 footer after 5 footer. It was incredible. These are the best players in the country? Which is exactly what that environment engenders.
Also, is this the closest a playing partner has ever stood next to someone hitting a tee shot in the history of this sport?
Feels illegal!
Two other notes.
1. You can’t buy any more Preston Stout stock. I already own all of it. I was told this OSU team has at least three future pros, and he is definitely one of them.
2. Here are the most titles in men’s team sports in NCAA history (OSU just hit 12 in men’s golf), according to this excellent site.
Baseball: USC (12)
Basketball: UCLA (11)
Football: Alabama (3 … but kinda more?)
Golf: Houston (16)
Indoor track: Arkansas (21)
Outdoor track: USC (25)
Wrestling: Oklahoma State (31)*
*OSU says 34 so idk. All the ones up for debate were from 100 years ago 🤷.
8. I identify with every word of this.
I can’t quit it, even though I desperately want to. This is not a cry for help as much as it is an admission that I do not know what to do with something so insidious and yet so magical. I owe so much of my career to it, and yet it has taken so much of the time of my career away from me. Is that just the cost of its existence or is there a better way?
To tie this back to the beginning, it would be a delight to have only the healthy criticism and the kind challenges from folks who are invested in the ideas and worldview that I am espousing. Our little community. But in creating a walled off garden like that, I think you necessarily blockade some of the magic of, say, Andrew Novak popping me after Torrey Pines or Eddie Taubensee’s wife relaying that her husband enjoyed my comp of him to an injured Brooks Koepka at the 2021 PGA (a real sentence).
Maybe the answer is that you have both. I’m not sure. That feels somewhat tiring. But it’s a question worth asking that I won’t stop considering as we plunge ahead into what should be a wild summer of professional golf.
The lures my sons and I are working on getting into production (not really … but maybe?).
Thank you for reading until the end.
You’re a complete and total sicko for reading a newsletter about golf that is 2,396 words (!!) long, and we are grateful for your support of this business.
Issue No. 208 | May 30, 2025 | Read Online
103
What I shot yesterday? Thankfully, no.
What someone at Memorial shot yesterday? Also no.
The consecutive number of times on Wednesday that the six members of our family kept a shuttlecock (normal sport) in the air, thus triggering the “if you hit 100 in a row, we’ll get ice cream” clause I implemented and nearly resulting in multiple injuries and one full-extension dive from the 11 year old? Absolutely.
Maybe the best moment of vacation this week.
Today’s newsletter is presented by Erin Hills, which is hosting this week’s U.S. Women’s Open presented by Ally. Erin was fabulous on Thursday (we are absolutely loving the picture in picture shots), and I expect two things to happen this weekend.
1. This course will finally shed its reputation as being too … easy (what?) that it got during the 2017 U.S. Open. An alternative way to shed it? Change par to 70 instead of 72. Brooks won at 272 in 2017. Bryson won at 274 last year at Pinehurst. I didn’t see anyone yelling about how easy Pinehurst was.
2. The course will start to lift and separate when it comes to identifying the best players in the world on the women’s side. It’s already beginning to. As I write this, Nelly is into the top five and two other former U.S. Women’s Open champs are in the top 10. This weekend should be must see stuff.
If you need tickets for the last two rounds, you can get them here.
OK, now onto the news.
Let’s get right to it.
1. In last week’s newsletter, I posed the following question: Who will end their career with the most majors between Rory (5), Brooks (5), Scottie (3) and anyone else that’s currently active (Bryson, Morikawa, Spieth etc.)
As an aside: It still feels strange to type that 5 next to Rory’s name.
The answers were almost 100 percent Scottie or Rory with Brooks receiving almost no votes (wild!) and the field not getting many either. I would vote Rory, if only because the difference in him and Scottie is Dustin Johnson’s career.
But like many of you, I would not feel great about it given the world Scottie is currently inhabiting and how well he’s set up for the future. It’s not really that infeasible — in fact, it’s almost likely given that he’s 3-1 to win the U.S. Open and 4-1 to win the Open — that Scottie pulls within one of Rory by the end of 2025.
2. The commentary on this poll was great. I learn from what you guys (our readers) write and always get energized hearing from you.
We make these newsletters, publish and send them to you, but we don’t have enough interaction around them yet. Having a better mechanism for congregating the community that we’re building around our content is something we think a lot about and are working on. Anyway, here are some good ones.
It's just a math game (between Rory and Scottie). Scottie has almost a decade advantage on Rory. And Brooks may never get another top 10 at a major.
Will G.
I think all of that is true.
[Scottie’s] mental perspective is much more Jack than Tiger - he doesn’t get too high or too low - which acclimates itself well to competing at a sustained high level over a long career.
Alex K.
Listen … I agree!
Scottie has to, as he will probably catch Rory within the next year and then have seven years of runway to pull ahead. I do think Rory probably gets to seven, but I also think Scottie’s floor at this point is eight so I have to go with Scheff.
Elias L.
His floor is eight?!?!
It's probably unfair, but I think I need to see Rory shine in another major before I bet him over Scottie. Scottie hasn't accrued any scar tissue yet, so maybe that changes some things for him downstream, but his course management excellence is such a separator between him and everyone else. It's hard to see him not getting at least two more, at which point he'd be even with Rory and eight years younger.
S.
I don’t think the part about needing to see it from Rory is that unfair. I would bet a lot of money that Rory either wins another or comes close, but there is definitely a non-zero chance that winning the Masters just completely closed out his career.
I don’t believe that, but it’s on the table.
I just voted for Rory without even thinking because of his two-major lead, but then I thought about it and I can't think of any reason Scottie won't win every Masters (horses) for the next 10 years + every PGA (just an elevated event) for the next 10 years. He doesn't even need the slam to get to 10 total! Low key "Will he win the UK British Open presented by His Majesty?" might be the only good remaining Scottie-related major question.
R.P.
I know this is an exaggeration, but Scottie winning 10 majors but never either Open would be wild!
It seems every 20 years or so an absolute generational player comes along in golf. Scottie is that. Honestly, I’ve struggled to root for him because he lacks Tiger’s incredulity, Rory’s majesty, and Spieth’s artistry, but I’m jumping on the ride. Simply put, he’s an assassin. It’s quiet, it’s stealthy, it’s lethal. Yes, he’ll lose a few heartbreaks and he won’t win every single one by half a dozen but I truly believe he’ll continue to rack up majors at a near annual clip. Put me down for Oakmont. Put me down for the career Grand Slam (not at Portrush though!). Put me down for 12!
Dan K.
The wild part about Scottie is that we’re just throwing around 12 like it’s happened 25 times (it’s happened twice) and /whispers … it doesn’t really seem that crazy.
It took Rory 11 years of being a top five player to win one more. Obviously Tiger had his issues, but he went 11 years between major wins and had multiple stretches in there of being the best in the world. This just isn’t that easy even for all-time greats. To expect Scottie to finish with 6+ easily is just not likely despite the gravitational pull of recency bias.
Kamal Y.
I think this is a good, more rational take than most of the ones that happen in my head.
3. One of my favorite tweets of the year happened during the PGA Championship. Here it is.
Every time I looked at it, I just howled. Imagine thinking Corey Pavin — who was born in the 1950s! — was in the 2025 PGA Championship field.
Two things happened since the PGA.
Corey Pavin actually was in the field at Colonial — the week after the PGA — where he shot 73-78 to miss the cut.
And then this U.S. Open qualifying result took place at Walton Heath.
I cannot wait until Byron’s dad finds out that Corey Pavin’s daughter, Andrea, is playing in the men’s U.S. Open!
This post will continue below for Normal Club members and includes …
A great Ben Griffin moment.
What I would change about the Super Bowl of golf.
A couple of notes on OState’s NCAA win.
If you aren’t yet a Normal Club member, you can sign up right here.
If you are, keep reading!
Normal Sport is supported by exactly 849 deranged individuals. By becoming a member, you will receive the following …
• Our very best stuff during majors.
• First access to future merch drops.
• The delight of helping us establish this business.
By clicking below to join the Normal Club, you will also be eligible for our 2025 U.S. Open fantasy contest where someone will win at least $1,500.
