Issue No. 239 | August 15, 2025 | Read Online

Here’s a take I don’t think I’ve said out loud: I think right now is the worst time of the year for golf.

I mean that in a number of different ways. The professional game feels exhausting after all the majors (you’re telling me I need to now care about how FedEx is divvying up the GDP of Belize among its last three events?).

It’s mostly too miserably hot to play our own golf. And both the thrill of the Ryder Cup and the downtime of other fall golf feel fairly far away.

I’m not sure what to do with this information other than to call it out, acknowledge it and affirm you if you’re feeling similarly. I seem to experience it annually, and it always catches me a bit off guard even if it probably shouldn’t.

An encouragement: Hang in there! Bethpage is coming. Those cold fall evenings where you’re trying to squeeze in just three more holes, those are coming as well. This is the slog-iest part.

Today’s newsletter is presented by Turtlebox, which is how you should listen to our forthcoming show. I will be doing some episode testing next week for a probably September or October launch, which we are thrilled about.

I asked Turtlebox for a bit more of their story, which mirrors the Normal Sport story in a lot of ways! Here’s a tidbit.

The first Turtlebox was born out of necessity. After breaking every “loud” product on the market through routine outdoor use, the idea of the Turtlebox was born in our garage, not as a business but just for personal use.
Nothing else could get the job done. Most portable speakers aren’t actually meant for the outdoors and can’t withstand the elements, the ones that can aren’t loud enough to be heard.
When you’re at the beach or on an ATV, you need sound to carry in order to hear it over the wind, waves, and boat engines, you need a Turtlebox.
We soon realized that there was a huge need for the Turtlebox among likeminded adventurers and our journey began to set out to make the world’s loudest most rugged outdoor portable speaker.

I’m convinced that most (not all, but most) strong companies happen out of scratching your own itch. That is true in a lot of ways of Normal Sport, and it’s true of Turtlebox as well. Check them out right here.

OK, now onto the news.

8 Thoughts on the Last Week in Golf

Let’s get right to it.

1. I can’t believe I’m leading off with Rickie Fowler for the second newsletter in a row, but here we are. He had a great quote earlier this week at the BMW. He was asked about his struggles over the last few years compared to where he’s at now.

Here’s what he said.

I love the grind, so it's been fun. But like we talked about earlier, the struggles -- after I went through kind of the first bit of it, '21, '22 and then playing well in '23, looking back, sometimes the tough years or those downtimes, you enjoy those.
Maybe not necessarily in the moment because they do suck, but that's when I feel like you learn the most and you get the most satisfaction when you kind of overcome those hurdles or those times. So tough going through it, but looking back, they've been some of the most rewarding times to have gone through that.
Rickie Fowler

Life is golf, golf is life.

You could remove the following sentence from the context of Rickie Fowler’s professional golf career and probably apply it pretty adequately to your own life: So tough going through it, but looking back, they've been some of the most rewarding times to have gone through that.

I have found that the most difficult circumstances in life are (perhaps confusingly) also some of the most maturing and the ones I’m the most grateful for. An easy example for me is leaving CBS. That was an incredibly difficult, strange thing. Now, almost a year later? I could not be more grateful for it. Could not be more glad to be running my own business.

I have always wrestled with this sort of counterintuitive truth that the troughs of life are where the good stuff resides, but the older I get, the more and more I believe it.

2. Rory said this week that he’s been approached about being a playing captain but he turned it down because “I don’t think you can do it.”

Woah....
Rory admitted today he was approached by @RyderCupEurope about being a playing captain (likely in Ireland in 2027) 🇪🇺
He said no.
"Because I don't think you can do it..."
— Jamie Kennedy (@jamierkennedy)
3:24 PM • Aug 13, 2025

Here’s what I’ll say in defense of the U.S. side. I definitely don’t think you can do it if you’re the Europeans. But the Americans — again for better or worse (I would argue the latter!) — don’t pay attention to every detail in the same way the Euros do so I do think it’s more possible for them to do it than it would be for the Europeans.

Does that mean it’s a great idea? Probably not! But it’s also not an impossibility, which is probably just me trying to justify this year’s team and talking myself into Keegan (who I will be legit excited to see play if he does pick himself).

3. Speaking of the Ryder Cup. I was curious so I went back and added ‘em up. Since 2008, there have been 224 points available across eight Ryder Cups. Here’s how those points break down (this will anger many people who believe the Europeans have been just dominant even as underdogs).

🇺🇸: 113 points
🇪🇺: 111 points

Hate to see it.

It gets even crazier.

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

A wild (but very impressive) Tiger-Scottie comp.
My five easiest golfers to root for.
A dumb Justin Rose line that says a lot.

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. There are 1 million ways to quantify a season, but I think Data Golf does a pretty great job of summarizing the best ones from the past 40+ years (since 1983).

You can read more about their DG points formula right here, but the crux is that wins and good finishes are weighted throughout a year to arrive at DG points totals for individual players. This is somewhat similar to OWGR points, except that Data Golf includes LIV golfers, which makes it more accurate for the purposes of this exercise.

Here’s a more detailed formula.

Points are assigned based on how "difficult" it is to achieve a given result. For example, we estimate that a top five player would beat the field at the 2024 Players 4.9% of the time. The formula for DG points is 1/probability - 1, where "probability" is the top five player probability described above. Continuing with the same example, winning the 2024 Players received 19.5 points.
Data Golf

That formula is as follows: (1/.049) - 1 = 19.5.

That’s way too much math for a newsletter about golf, but I do find the calculation interesting and also nice that for most events it changes based on strength of field (as determined by where a top five player would finish in the field).

Anyway, show your work, and there it is.

But the following list also passes the eye test. It’s not a list of who had the best strokes gained numbers but rather who was able to cash in those SG for actual wins, which is still, you know, the point of golf.

Tiger in 2000. Tiger in 2006. More Tiger everywhere. And some Vijay and Rory and that one Nick Price season. But pay attention to Scottie, who is loosening Tiger’s grip on this list.

Let’s take a look.

Here are a few takeaways.

• I find it curious that so many of the great seasons of the last 40+ years have actually happened in the last 25 years. Top 20 seasons from 1983-1999: 3. Top 20 seasons from 2000-2025: 17.

• This obviously highlights Tiger, but I think it should also serve to highlight Scottie, Rory and Vijay, all of whom have 2+ seasons on the list.

• No Phil. JT, Luke Donald, Xander and Jon Rahm all have seasons before Phil is listed. Spieth has two. Tiger has nine. Phil’s superpower is obviously his longevity — he just did it at a nearly-No. 1-in-the-world level for longer than almost anyone has done anything in golf. But it’s still shocking to not see him until No. 32 on this list (his 2004 season).

• You can’t fake this list. You can’t just throw strokes gained at it. Only one player in the top 25 has fewer than three wins, and it was Xander (No. 25) last year when he won two majors. 😂

• It’s jarring to me that Tiger and Scottie make up 12 of the top 20. Scottie is not Tiger — nobody who knows ball is claiming that — but the level at which he is winning and consistency at which he is doing so is stunning when you start to realize that we are just a couple of years from Tiger and Scottie making up 75 percent of this list.

• How high can Scottie go in 2025? I have him slated for four more tournaments: BMW, Tour Championship, Napa and the Hero. Let’s say he wins one and finishes top 10 in the other three (seems like a safe-ish bet?). I think he can grab 15-20 more DG points, which would put him right around 10th.

• Spieth’s 2015 season is probably out of reach.

• I know some of the Scottie stuff gets old, but context is important and history is important. We get numb to 1. Anything that’s of the moment and 2. Anything that includes Tiger as a comp.

But what he’s been doing for the last three years is truly one of the most remarkable feats in modern golf and one I hope we don’t miss out on enjoying.

5. This is extremely stupid, but I also thought it was emblematic of what I love about the Europeans. In conjunction with the announcement that he made the Euro Ryder Cup team, Rose tweeted the phrase: “Reporting for duty, Captain.”

It’s silly and, in one context an almost patronizing phrase from a 45-year-old man. But here’s the thing … Rose believes it, which is not silly or patronizing and also why Europe wins Ryder Cups. He believes in the importance of the captaincy and the power of the team and all that stuff that the Americans struggle so much with.

Here are the two team mantras.

America: Remember who you are!
Europe: Forget who you were.

But, you know, they probably just make more putts.

6. I posed the following question on Twitter earlier this week: Who are the five easiest men's golfers to root for right now? It turns out that it’s very difficult to scrape Twitter responses like this. I used ChatGPT with an incomplete list, and the top five answers were as follows …

1. Scottie
2. Fleetwood
3. Rose
4. Bryson
5. Tiger

This surprised me. A lot actually. Rose? Scottie? Bryson?!?

I like Scottie a lot, but is he easy to root for? I probably wouldn’t make that argument. There is obviously some recency bias playing in here with Fleetwood and Rose having just been involved in last week’s Memphis tournament.

7. In lieu of simply listing the Euro Ryder Cup team (immensely likable), here are my unofficial five in no particular order. To be clear, these are not the five I like the most, just the five I deem the easiest to like (or maybe the hardest to dislike).

That latter definition excludes players like Rory and Bryson for me because they generate intense feelings on both sides (both like and dislike). I think people participating in the exercise were (obviously) just listing players they like, not objectively listing who is the easiest to like.

Anyway, my five.

• Tommy: I don’t think I know another human who dislikes Tommy?
• Viktor: Ditto for Viktor.
• Sahith: Is Sahith the easiest American golfer in the world to like?
• Adam Scott: The ceiling of affection for him is lower than, say, Rory, but the floor is almost as high as the ceiling.
• Ludvig: The new Scott.

And my second five.

• Day: I thought he was a bit annoying early in his career, but I’ve come around.
• Akshay: Fun, delightful, almost like a big kid out on Tour.
• Sepp: He might be who everyone thinks Lowry is?
• Finau: One hiccup (albeit a big one), but he has broadly been very lovable.
• Min Woo: Debated putting Max in this spot, but I think there are more anti-Max people than there are anti-Min Woo. Again, the ceilings for how much these 10 guys are beloved are lower than a lot of people who didn’t make the list, but they also may be the 10 players who have the fewest detractors/haters in the world.

[Jason here] My list is Fleetwood, Bryson, Hovland, Neal Shipley, Gary Woodland.

8. We will end with this, which is an idea that has me reeling a bit.

Me reading that …

Which then led to this brilliant response from Derek Thompson.

That’s a great, great way to think about it. And while our kernel would often seem to be “look at this preposterous thing that happened in golf!” I think the kernel under the kernel for us is “yeah, that was funny and I’m glad you’re reading now so I can get you to look at this other thing about the beauty of life that I actually want you to look at.” Aka: See point No. 1 above.

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