Greetings!
Our Rory book is officially in production and will be shipped out starting in ~3 weeks. I’m hoping that somebody like Sam Stevens or Carlos Ortiz wins the Masters*, which makes everyone exasperated with this year’s event and long for something psychotic like what we got last year with a best ball 59 and worst ball 80 from the eventual 2025 playoff participants.
In other words, go buy the book!
We put a ton into framing all of our dispatches from on the grounds as well as some tremendous illustrations (some from last year but a few new ones). The real MVP is Greig Anderson, who designed the entire thing and made it all flow. A top bloke, as they say. And somebody it has been a joy to work with.
*I don’t actually hope this.
Name drops today:
This newsletter is brought to you by the good folks at Holderness and Bourne.
Here’s a fun game: Color of H&B shirt from their new spring line or hole name at Augusta National?
• Maidstone
• Juniper
• Nectarine
• Camellia
• Tudor
• Pampas
• Redbud
• Harbor
Answers at bottom of newsletter. But if you want to cheat, you can check out the H&B spring line right here.
OK, now onto the news.
1. This was not a big one — nobody tagged me into it — but it did make me laugh that one of the first things Valspar Championship winner, Matt Fitzpatrick, did was run over and hug a man in an orange hat wearing a vest that said Wee Lad on the back of it.
The idea of caddies in general is pretty normal sport. Folks who carry stuff around a large field and are closer to the action than pretty much anyone else but also not allowed to hit a shot. It would be like if NBA games had rebounders feeding shooters but during the actual game.
2. I stumbled into this tweet over the weekend, and it just made me laugh so hard.
What a stupid and insane sport.
This led to an outpouring of other folks who played junior golf sharing similar stories. Could read these for hours and hours and hours.
This one is for the monkey.
3. Thomas Pieters honestly looks like he’s been served a few too many transfusions on a Friday afternoon, but instead he was playing for [checks Wikipedia] $30 million.
Aside: Pieters took home $1.5 million for his solo third, which was the entire purse for the 1992 Masters and more than two-time U.S. Open champion, Andy North, made in his career.
Related: What are we doing?
4. Sure.
Matt Fitzpatrick is such a professional. This is perhaps an obvious thing given that has played professional golf for over a decade now. But there is a difference between being a professional golfer and being a professional.
I think about Steven Pressfield on his book, The War of Art.
A professional does not take success or failure personally. A professional really knows how to manage his or her emotions.
If an amateur … you write, let’s say a piece . . . it’s put out for review one way or another, and people trash it. An amateur will go into a total tailspin over that. And I used to too.
But once you just sort of turn that key in your head and you just say, “I’m a professional.” You know, you go, oh, okay, that was a crappy review on Amazon or wherever it was, but those things are gonna come in.
The blows, they’re gonna come in. A pro doesn’t leave the arena. A pro suits up and does her job.
Steven Pressfield
That’s Matt Fitzpatrick.
Consider the following question: Did Fitzpatrick improve his strokes gained from the previous season in …
2012: Yes
2013: Yes
2014: Yes
2015: Yes
2016: Yes
2017: Yes
2018: No
2019: Yes
2020: Yes
2021: Yes
2022: Yes (won major)
2023: No
2024: No
2025: Yes
2026: Yes (best number of career so far)
In 12 of 15 seasons he’s been better than he was the season before. That is what being a professional looks like. Is he my favorite golfer aesthetically?
Absolutely not (see below).
But also, I agree with KVV that Fitz is someone who grows on you over time. Some Justin Rose in there, probably, even if Rose has more pure talent than Fitzpatrick does.
Also, if you haven’t seen this four drives piece Jamie Kennedy posted, it’s so cool. The stock, the bomb, the second serve and the [Porath voice making fun of the South African LIV team] stinger.
A professional.
Maybe the professional so far in 2026.
The Masters released two things over the last week.
The first is this hype video entitled, It Never Gets Old.
The second is this AI-generated search bar on its website where you can search any final round shot over the last 57 years just by typing in a name, year, type of shot or whatever.
Sick, sick, sick stuff.
And this gets at something that I think about often as it relates to the Masters (and also to the European Ryder Cup team): They create and uphold a culture of excellence.
The Masters has been Disney-fied in a lot of ways in the last few decades. Some of those ways I have liked, others feel a little manufactured and are not quite as appealing. But what is undeniable is that they always take high-level rips at ambitious things. They add one or two moves to their repertoire every offseason, and those moves are normally pretty awesome.
The Masters’ superpower is taking a long-term view. Knowing that the compound interest of adding one awesome thing every offseason will — in 10 or 30 years — put them so far ahead that the entities that took a short-term view will have a difficult time catching up.
One of my favorites is as follows: 11 of the last 13 Masters winners have been at 1.7 SG tee to green or better in the three months leading into the Masters. The only ones who were not were Hideki in 2021 and Reed in 2018. Neither of them were bad at all, but everybody else who won was flushing it.
Here are your current qualifiers (I will update after Houston).
Morikawa: 2.2
Fitz: 2.1
Si Woo: 2.1
Rahm: 2.1
Rory: 2.0
Scheffler: 1.9
Cam Young: 1.8
Ludvig: 1.7
Straka: 1.7
Gotterup: 1.7
This normally gets a response of, Yeah dude, of course. But what it does is whittle down the pool of possible winners from 20-25 to 5-10. The Masters champ will probably be one of these 10 guys, which is extremely fun to consider.
• Jason and I loved this interview with the creator of Art but Make it Sports. This excerpt is not exactly how we operate, but definitely a version of it. It resonated with us.
I’m not classically trained. The best way is just going to museums and reading, so I amassed a significant amount of knowledge. I’m lucky in that I don’t have a true photographic memory but have a strong memory for pattern recognition and storing things. Ask me how to pronounce certain artists’ names, that’s not my forte, but I can look at a painting and know what artists might have inspired that.
The Athletic
• This thread between James Colgan and KVV on influencers in media is fascinating. I agree with KVV that the influencer era — and even the longer-lasting endorser era — feels very flimsy right now.
I believe (maybe I just hope) that in the future people will be drawn to …
Brands that have real relationship with content creators and not just one night stands.
Content creators who just make their own products.
We are attempting both, and I think No. 1 is the most intriguing because it requires trust from the brand. Trust that you, reader of Normal Sport, is going to say, Whoa, if Turtlebox understands that NS is amazing content and supports it for three or five years then Turtlebox must get it. They must be awesome, too.
This is why we don’t do one-time ads for brands and ask that all of our partners sign up for one year (at minimum).
• I enjoyed this podcast with Webb, Ben Crane and Will Kane interviewing Tyler Toney. Good stuff on golf, Dude Perfect and what it means to be a Christian in the media world.
I had a conversation with a friend the other day about Claude and business and probably a lot of the very things you, dear reader, are discussing with friends and colleagues. It’s a fascinating time to work in the digital world and (obviously?) an inflection point in history for small and large businesses.
And while there are a million things I can and probably should use Claude or Chat or Perplexity or whatever for, I find a strange and almost beautiful solace in the friction of how many hours and hours and hours it takes to handcraft this newsletter.
I have a lot of theories about AI and the future of content, but foremost among them is this: That in a world where content becomes commoditized, the premium placed on handmade podcasts or newsletters or tweets will only increase.
Why?
Because machine-generated content says, I made this for as many people as will consume it. But human-generated content says, I made this (this SG chart or this hot dog leaderboard) for you.
That is something that I think about a lot. When it comes to content, we do not develop a relationship with words, phrases and information. We develop a relationship with the creator of those words, phrases and information.
I wrote about this in the Rory book, but it’s the same reason you can watch Viktor Hovland and Iron Byron both hit the exact same shot and have a connection to one and not the other.
Not sure why this particular thing was on my mind as I put this newsletter together, but my hope is that it helps you as you think through AI implications. And if not, that’s OK, too, because I know it helped me as I do the same.
[Jason here] Full disclosure, I use an image generator called Chat JTP. Basically, I prompt myself with ridiculous ideas and then try to draw them. Why let AI have all the fun?
• Maidstone — H&B
• Juniper — Masters
• Nectarine — H&B
• Camellia — Masters
• Tudor — H&B
• Pampas — Masters
• Redbud — Masters
• Harbor — H&B
Thank you for reading our outrageous golf newsletter that is sometimes — but often barely — about golf. As stated above (!), every edition is handcrafted by me (Kyle) and Jason.
We put probably a combined 20 hours into each newsletter, which is a ridiculous amount of time to think about Wee Lads and shoeless Belgians. But we love doing it and hope you love reading it just as much.
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