Hello friends,
Last night I — a 41-year-old man with a mortgage, four kids and an elite flag football offensive playbook — had a dream about the Ryder Cup. Do I remember what happened? No. Is this normal behavior? No (although also not the first time it’s happened). All I remember is waking up in a panic over the fact that I desperately wanted to remember what took place and what I learned so I could relay it to the U.S. team for future Cups.
Normal stuff.
🆘
Name drops today: Joel Beall, Greg Norman, the NFL, Keith Mitchell and Tiger Woods.
Today’s newsletter is presented by OGIO.
While we don’t necessarily recommend you letting your kids go as OGIO bags for Halloween this year, we are also not formally or officially against it. And on the (really) off chance they choose to do so, we do have some inspiration for you.
Jason dreamed up these OGIO bags sprouting arms and holding other bags, which tbh, is perfect for a kids’ Halloween costume.
Strange, bizarre costume for neighborhood photo: ✅
Ability to hold a bag for candy dump: ✅
Perfect spot to hide adult bevvies: ✅
Here are our unofficial recs.
Costume: Alpha mid travel cover
Candy bag: Alpha venture backpack
Bevvies: Renegade vault or Renegade go bag
And now — with absolutely no segue whatsoever — onto the news.
Greg Norman was a horrible commissioner of LIV Golf. He thumped his chest after achieving next to nothing, disparaged everyone and everything he looked at and left LIV in a brutal spot as he exited stage left while everyone else cleaned up the very expensive mess that was made under his watch.
He did, however, accomplish the funniest possible feat in the midst of all of this. And I presume it was the exact opposite of what he intended to do. Because of the ill-conceived and ridiculous golf league that he helped birth, the PGA Tour got put into such a corner that it was forced to hire a world class executive to drag its own organization out of the stone age and into the modern era.
In attempting to upend the entire world of golf by first weakening the PGA Tour, Greg Norman’s business exploits seemed to do the opposite by emboldening the Tour into the best position it has ever been in with its future in the hands of someone (Brian Rolapp) who seems to be fully ready to not only crush the league that tried to upend his but also to push the Tour into places it has never been.
Brian Rolapp was probably going to become the next commissioner of the NFL someday. The next leader of the most powerful sports league in the world. A position that commands not only a salary that is greater than the on-field earnings of all but 12 athletes on the planet but also commands the attention of basically every powerful human in the United States. I can’t think of many phone calls outside of one from the literal president of the country that would elicit more attention than the commissioner of the NFL calling you up.
And then he left.
Not only did he leave, but he left to [checks notes] help run the Baycurrent Classic and Isco Championship. Why?
“To be honest, I was bored,” Rolapp told Joel Beall recently.
To be clear, it’s not as if Rolapp is ordering the big platter of nugs from CFA to save a few bucks on individual meals for his family. The Tour’s top position pays plenty, and he still has power — arguably more of it than he did when he was second in command at the National Football League.
And that’s not really the point anyway.
The point I’m making here is that if not for LIV, the PGA Tour likely would have continued doing what it was doing forever. There would have been tweaks here and there, but I suspect Jay Monahan would have continued at the helm for as long as he wanted as the Tour tried to ride the Tiger wave for as long as humanly possible.
This was its trajectory.
But then Norman started screaming (literally screaming) about global golf, and the oft-unimaginative and unchallenged PGA Tour started to teeter. Monahan was lost. The de facto commissioner was a player whose home tour was in Europe, and though I’m not sure the walls were never closing in, it became clear that the Tour had some capital-p Problems. And not necessarily just because of the threat of LIV …
There was always going to be a reckoning in a post-Tiger world for this league. Things got so cushy and went so well that, frankly, it may have been irresponsible for leadership to attempt to change at any point over the last few decades. Risk is the most difficult when cash is the most flush, and nobody over the last 20 years has had real reason to do things differently than they had always been done.
[sponsors call]
“Yes, Tiger is still playing golf.”
[networks call]
“Yes, Tiger is still playing golf.”
[fans call]
“Yes, Tiger is still playing golf.”
Rinse and repeat.
But that doesn’t work when, you know, Tiger isn’t playing golf anymore. And the Tour woke up to a problem that was decades in the making. Namely that it stopped caring enough about the product to continue to innovate. Monahan was good during peaceful times. But from the moment the Cleeks fired the first shot, he never really recovered.
Enter Rolapp.
A killer. A leader. A professional.
If you’re in deep — and I suspect you are given your subscription to this newsletter — I encourage you to go watch his press conference from Tuesday at the Tour Championship about 50 days ago. It’s a master class. A 301 performance.
One of the things that strikes me is that he is assertive enough to remind everyone, “Yeah, I’m the captain now,” but humble enough to admit that he doesn’t know golf as well as a lot of the people around him. It seems to be a lethal combination.
But it’s also part of my leadership style. I’ve always believed humility and self-awareness are underrated leadership attributes, because they let somebody know what they don’t know. When you lose sight of that, that’s when leaders get in trouble, or they surround themselves with people who tell them what they want to hear, the classic yes men.
Brian Rolapp | Golf Digest
Reading that …
In addition to those qualities listed above, it seems he has a real plan in place and the ability to execute on it. Consider this answer on how, if they have as many sponsors lined up as they say they do, why don’t they just create more Championship Series tournaments?
We want to make sure we get the competition right. We theoretically could do a tournament every weekend in the summer. But the reality is to have the level of competition we want, not every professional golfer is going to play every week. That's a lot to do, especially as we've condensed the schedule.
So for us it's about working backwards from what is the best schedule and the best competitive format for fans that stokes interest, that creates more storylines. That's our north star. How do you make it the best fan experience possible and display this great competition?
While we may not have landed perfectly on the number of events, I think it's in the ballpark. I don't think we're just interested in adding events here and there for money. I think for us, it's just let's make sure the competition is the best competition you can possibly engineer, and then as I've always said, if you get that right, the money will come.
Brian Rolapp | Tour Championship
He added to this when, in a recent appearance on Golf Channel, he kind of eviscerated the old model that included uneven fields and too many exemptions. This is what fans want to hear. Throw in this from the always-plugged-in Keith Mitchell on ESPN.com about postseason match play.
Keith Mitchell, one of six golfers on the tour's Future Competition Committee, said tour members weren't initially keen on the idea of incorporating match play into the postseason.
During a player advisory council meeting two years ago, Mitchell said golfers were "violently against" the idea.
"One 18-hole match does not determine a season-long champion in a fair and equitable way," Mitchell told ESPN. "Players basically just said, 'No.' We didn't want that much of our earnings and income of a season to come down to a potential 13-hole match at the end of the season. It's just not fair."
Keith Mitchell
But Rolapp pushed through the competitions committee which pushed through the idea of match play events disassociated from the season-long race. Would one of the past regimes have done that? I don’t know. Actually I think I do know.
Rolapp also cooked Good Good and took them off the Tour’s sponsorship list almost immediately after their ill-advised foray into parody. Whether you think this is right or wrong, it’s undeniable that it’s decisive.
This not complex stuff, but it is clear vision casting. And clarity is often the best attribute when it comes to leadership and communication that you can possibly provide.
What this does not mean is that the Tour is going to nail every decision in the near or long-term future. Because the majors exist, there is a cap on how much people care about regular season golf. Because the majors exist, there is a cap on how good a match play postseason is going to be.
But it is almost unquestionable that in trying extinguish the PGA Tour’s (at times) flickering flame, Greg Norman and LIV did nothing but add oxygen to it in the form of a regime change that may or may not have happened even if LIV never existed (I am betting it would not have).
It is deliciously ironic, of course, that the seething and sneering from Norman toward the Tour had the exact opposite effect he so desperately intended. Comical even.
I don’t know that the Tour should be glad for what LIV did to its existence — I still have a lot of questions about the $1.5 billion investment and whether that’s going to be a net good for fans as well as some eyebrow raising at how fragmented the NFL television product became under Rolapp — but it should consider itself lucky.
That it survived those years, escaped the Saudis and (mostly) that it eschewed several decades of what felt like back-slapping, clubby leadership in favor of someone poised to truly bring the greatest game in the world into the modern era.
Thank you for supporting Normal Sport. As always, we remain an algorithm-free, handmade artifact in a world where it seems like there are — even digitally — fewer and fewer of those left.
Hello friends,
Last night I — a 41-year-old man with a mortgage, four kids and an elite flag football offensive playbook — had a dream about the Ryder Cup. Do I remember what happened? No. Is this normal behavior? No (although also not the first time it’s happened). All I remember is waking up in a panic over the fact that I desperately wanted to remember what took place and what I learned so I could relay it to the U.S. team for future Cups.
Normal stuff.
🆘
Name drops today: Joel Beall, Greg Norman, the NFL, Keith Mitchell and Tiger Woods.
Today’s newsletter is presented by OGIO.
While we don’t necessarily recommend you letting your kids go as OGIO bags for Halloween this year, we are also not formally or officially against it. And on the (really) off chance they choose to do so, we do have some inspiration for you.
Jason dreamed up these OGIO bags sprouting arms and holding other bags, which tbh, is perfect for a kids’ Halloween costume.
Strange, bizarre costume for neighborhood photo: ✅
Ability to hold a bag for candy dump: ✅
Perfect spot to hide adult bevvies: ✅
Here are our unofficial recs.
Costume: Alpha mid travel cover
Candy bag: Alpha venture backpack
Bevvies: Renegade vault or Renegade go bag
And now — with absolutely no segue whatsoever — onto the news.
Greg Norman was a horrible commissioner of LIV Golf. He thumped his chest after achieving next to nothing, disparaged everyone and everything he looked at and left LIV in a brutal spot as he exited stage left while everyone else cleaned up the very expensive mess that was made under his watch.
He did, however, accomplish the funniest possible feat in the midst of all of this. And I presume it was the exact opposite of what he intended to do. Because of the ill-conceived and ridiculous golf league that he helped birth, the PGA Tour got put into such a corner that it was forced to hire a world class executive to drag its own organization out of the stone age and into the modern era.
In attempting to upend the entire world of golf by first weakening the PGA Tour, Greg Norman’s business exploits seemed to do the opposite by emboldening the Tour into the best position it has ever been in with its future in the hands of someone (Brian Rolapp) who seems to be fully ready to not only crush the league that tried to upend his but also to push the Tour into places it has never been.
Brian Rolapp was probably going to become the next commissioner of the NFL someday. The next leader of the most powerful sports league in the world. A position that commands not only a salary that is greater than the on-field earnings of all but 12 athletes on the planet but also commands the attention of basically every powerful human in the United States. I can’t think of many phone calls outside of one from the literal president of the country that would elicit more attention than the commissioner of the NFL calling you up.
And then he left.
Not only did he leave, but he left to [checks notes] help run the Baycurrent Classic and Isco Championship. Why?
“To be honest, I was bored,” Rolapp told Joel Beall recently.
To be clear, it’s not as if Rolapp is ordering the big platter of nugs from CFA to save a few bucks on individual meals for his family. The Tour’s top position pays plenty, and he still has power — arguably more of it than he did when he was second in command at the National Football League.
And that’s not really the point anyway.
The point I’m making here is that if not for LIV, the PGA Tour likely would have continued doing what it was doing forever. There would have been tweaks here and there, but I suspect Jay Monahan would have continued at the helm for as long as he wanted as the Tour tried to ride the Tiger wave for as long as humanly possible.
This was its trajectory.
But then Norman started screaming (literally screaming) about global golf, and the oft-unimaginative and unchallenged PGA Tour started to teeter. Monahan was lost. The de facto commissioner was a player whose home tour was in Europe, and though I’m not sure the walls were never closing in, it became clear that the Tour had some capital-p Problems. And not necessarily just because of the threat of LIV …
This post will continue below for Normal Club members (all 1,056 of them) and includes the rest of this essay.
By becoming a member, you will receive the following …
• Access to 100 percent of our content this week.
• An invite to our Slack channel where we watch and talk golf together.
• A free digital copy of our Rory book.
• 15% off to our pro shop.
.svg){kind=spacer}
