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. This one hasn’t been announced yet so it’s for members only for now, I suppose. But in addition to our show, we also launched … a blog. Launching a pod, a blog and watching Justin Rose play world class golf. Feels like 2013 all over again.

The blog — which we are calling The Infirmary — is mostly a place for me to get some takes off my chest and to alleviate some of the length of the newsletters by linking off to some of the longer things I write instead of you having to scroll until your thumb starts cramping. More on the “why” behind it in a future newsletter, but enjoy perusing for now. Oh, and comments are definitely coming!

5. An example of how the blog will work. Instead of spending 500 words in a newsletter writing about what I learned interviewing Alex Holderness and John Bourne, I will write 500 words on the blog, and you can decide whether you want to read them or not. This should make the newsletter easier to get through.

6. On this little trip, I’m reading Christopher Clarey’s new book on Nadal, entitled The Warrior. It’s awesome, not quite as wondrous as his book on Federer, but still amazing.

There is a quote on it from the first chapter that made me love Nadal even more than I already did. Here it is.

Nadal reiterates this in a quote later in the book about how there will always be someone with more money, more success and a more beautiful wife. He doesn’t worry himself with such things.

Rafa Scheffler is what I thought of. It is such a healthy way to live, and so amazing to me that it takes these incredibly successful people saying it over and over again for those of us who will never experience 1 percent of their success to even begin to believe it.

7. I am increasingly amused by the ways people are interpreting and analyzing this Ryder Cup. I get the phrase “statistics are meaningless!” quite a lot. Followed by some version of this …

What does the eye test say about Matt Fitzpatrick’s 1-7-0 record in the Ryder Cup? Or the fact that since the Masters, Ludvig Aberg has been Swedish Kurt Kitayama?

Is the U.S. going to win this year’s Ryder Cup? I have no idea. But we have to stop acting like it’s going to get blown off the field just because Europe has names that look sexier when you write them down than the U.S. does.

If this event has taught us anything over the last two decades, it’s that names mean almost nothing when it comes to these three days.

See you in the weekend newsletter with more on The Normal Sport Show.

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