Greetings!
Given that it is Wimbledon championship weekend, there are two World Cup games today, Rory leads the Scottish Open and of course the ISCO Championship is thumping over in Louisville, I promise — no really! — to keep this newsletter short. Just a couple of takes and (after the jump) an announcement about some new gear.
Also, tomorrow is the last day to win our four-night OMNI giveaway.
Name drops today: The Morris family, Jude Bellingham, Christian Pulisic, Matt Rhule, Taylor Swift and Aaron Rai (very normal stuff).
Today’s newsletter is presented by our friends at Garmin.
The start of Coffee Golf™ in Europe always reminds us of the historic nature of the game there and the relative infancy of it over here (in the States). To wit … the first documented mention of golf in Scotland was in the 1450s.
That’s … three hundred years (nearly two Bryson lifetimes!) before the U.S. even became a country.
In light of that, it’s interesting to consider what the first version of Garmin’s S70 watch (we’re gonna call it the S1) may have looked like back in the 1400s or the 1600s or whenever the beta version was released.
Perhaps … like this?
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s where Garmin got their inspo for the S70 edition. As an aside: Can you imagine anyone from the Morris family feeling the urgency to track how many steps they took in a day? Alas, the wells in town have run dry and half the sheep have cholera, but I hit my daily goal of 10,000!
Anyway, we had fun envisioning the evolution of the Garmin S70 watch in light of the Tour’s return to Scotland and England. It’s a piece of tech I’ve been wearing for almost two years and one that is among my favorites when it comes to playing golf.
And now, onto the news.
1. The Open starts in less than a week, and I thought it would be a good time to take a look at the 2026 Best Aggregate Major Player Who Receives Absolutely Nothing Except a Hat Tip From a Very Niche Golf Newsletter Operator Award. One of my favorites. Here are the candidates going into next week at Birkdale. Remember: To qualify, you have to make the cut at every event (actual major winners in bold).
Scottie: -13
Burns: -12
Rose: -11
Rory: -10
Xander: -10
Ludvig: -5
Morikawa: -3
Rai: -2
Cam: -2
Fitz: -2
JT: E
It’s weird to see Rory at the top of this list but also in bold. He used to be in the top three every year and surrounded by bold but never highlighted with it.
Other thoughts.
• As co-host Hayden pointed out in our pod on Thursday, there is a lot of consternation about someone (Scottie) who has been the best overall major player of 2026. More on him after the jump.
• Burns has changed how I think about him maybe more than anyone else this year (probably over the last two). He’s become a really solid major championship player.
Alas, he won’t top this list as he’s a WD for The Open (baby). As first reported by Gabby in the Times.
• The world: Man, Rose seems close.
Spieth: No, I am close.
Me: Both wrong, Ludvig is close.
Similar to the discourse about Christian Pulisic, the discourse around Ludvig has gone too far the other way. Not a closer. Not clutch. Show me something etc. Some of those statements aren’t necessarily wrong, they just over-torque reality.
Here’s reality … Ludvig has been the worst putter among the best ball strikers at the first three majors. Look at this! It’s Scottie lapping the planet out in front in the ball striking, and then Ludvig dunking on Xander, Rose and Cam Young. That’s crazy!
And yeah, I included exactly eight for the reason you think. It gets even wilder when you flip it to SG tee to green. Maybe the beautiful boy actually is close.
Just not as close as Ludvig.
2. For someone who feeds his family based on how much other people read, this Atlantic article entitled The End of Reading was sobering. Of course people have been predicting the end of reading since reading began. But there were some statistics in the article that had me reeling. Here are three.
• Americans who read for pleasure: 28 percent in 2004, 16 percent in 2023.
• In a study of 236K American adults, only 2 percent read to a child on a given day.
• 13 year olds who say they rarely/never read for fun: 8 percent in 1984, 29 percent in 2025.
Seems bad!
And while I think some of these numbers are a bit manipulated to prove a point (i.e. how many of those 236K adults have a kid who is at an age that they would be read to?), it does have me questioning my choice to be one of a couple of golf outlets that is purposefully more focused on reading and writing than audio and video.
A real analysis of this article could be a whole other thing — and I promised today’s newsletter would be short — but I do think this idea also presents an opportunity.
(I know all of this is self-serving!)
But the people I know who still love reading and writing really love reading and writing. So yes, it’s an increasingly smaller audience, and many outlets (and sponsors) are running the other way toward audio and video. But I think the “we still read” crowd is also a more obsessed one that we can keep writing and drawing for. Maybe think should be replaced by hope. But either way, it’s a bet I want to make.
3. We just dropped some new gear in the pro shop as well as a refresh on some hoodies and our Norman journals. We are telling you, Normal Club member, before we drop it on everybody next week ahead of The Open.
If you click on any of the pieces below, you will be taken directly to the page where you can purchase.
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4. It’s not Winter Olympics time, but I decided to get way out over my skis on our podcast on Thursday and make some World Cup-golf crossover comps. I know almost nothing about soccer so I presume they are mostly ridiculous. You can listen to the whole segment on the pod, but here are three of the ~10 we talked about.
Bellingham-Ludvig — Seems like an obvious one. If you watch either player for the right 30 seconds, you may presume that not only are they the best in the world in their respective sports but that they are probably among the best players who have ever existed. The game seems to come easier to them than to anyone else.
Rickie-Neymar — Garbage time scoring, outrageously marketable, may not have ever ascended to what they portended when they were 21 years old. Both make you wonder how their careers evaporated this quickly and how it’s possible they can be on their final few holes at the pro level. Rickie is much more likable. Neymar is (relatively) much better. But I think this comp mostly works.
Haaland-Hovland — It’s almost … too easy? Affable Norwegian who flushes the ball and somehow becomes more lovable (not less) over time. Just a couple of Norwegian cowboys doing work in the northeast United States over the last few weeks.
5. As you may have heard, Scottie missed his first cut this week since August 2022. Things that were true when he last sat out a weekend.
• Taylor Swift was dating something called Joe Alwyn.
• Tom Brady was still married and still on the Bucs.
• The World Cup had not yet started. The Qatar one.
• Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz had 0 slams (they have 11 now).
• Matt Rhule was coaching the Panthers.
What’s crazy — given that a lot of these were no-cut events — is not that Scottie played 78 weekends in a row. What’s actually nuts is that in those 78 events, his finishes include …
• Top 25: 95 percent of the time (next closest is Rory at 82 percent)
• Top 10: 80 percent (Rahm at 72 percent)
• Top 5: 64 percent (Rahm at 46 percent)
• Wins: 23 percent (Rory at 15 percent)
The 23 percent is impressive, but the 64 percent top fives is stupid, stupid stuff. Again, it’s amusing to say that Scottie has been shakier this year given how good he’s been at that majors. But I think the “doesn’t look great!” conversation around him in 2026 shines a light not on what his year has been like but on how good he was during everything that came before it.
Thank you for reading and participating in all of this (but mostly reading 😃).
Go grab some of the new gear. Can confirm that it’s awesome, and also a great way to support Normal Sport.
Greetings!
Given that it is Wimbledon championship weekend, there are two World Cup games today, Rory leads the Scottish Open and of course the ISCO Championship is thumping over in Louisville, I promise — no really! — to keep this newsletter short. Just a couple of takes and (after the jump) an announcement about some new gear.
Also, tomorrow is the last day to win our four-night OMNI giveaway.
Name drops today: The Morris family, Jude Bellingham, Christian Pulisic, Matt Rhule, Taylor Swift and Aaron Rai (very normal stuff).
Today’s newsletter is presented by our friends at Garmin.
The start of Coffee Golf™ in Europe always reminds us of the historic nature of the game there and the relative infancy of it over here (in the States). To wit … the first documented mention of golf in Scotland was in the 1450s.
That’s … three hundred years (nearly two Bryson lifetimes!) before the U.S. even became a country.
In light of that, it’s interesting to consider what the first version of Garmin’s S70 watch (we’re gonna call it the S1) may have looked like back in the 1400s or the 1600s or whenever the beta version was released.
Perhaps … like this?
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s where Garmin got their inspo for the S70 edition. As an aside: Can you imagine anyone from the Morris family feeling the urgency to track how many steps they took in a day? Alas, the wells in town have run dry and half the sheep have cholera, but I hit my daily goal of 10,000!
Anyway, we had fun envisioning the evolution of the Garmin S70 watch in light of the Tour’s return to Scotland and England. It’s a piece of tech I’ve been wearing for almost two years and one that is among my favorites when it comes to playing golf.
And now, onto the news.
1. The Open starts in less than a week, and I thought it would be a good time to take a look at the 2026 Best Aggregate Major Player Who Receives Absolutely Nothing Except a Hat Tip From a Very Niche Golf Newsletter Operator Award. One of my favorites. Here are the candidates going into next week at Birkdale. Remember: To qualify, you have to make the cut at every event (actual major winners in bold).
Scottie: -13
Burns: -12
Rose: -11
Rory: -10
Xander: -10
Ludvig: -5
Morikawa: -3
Rai: -2
Cam: -2
Fitz: -2
JT: E
It’s weird to see Rory at the top of this list but also in bold. He used to be in the top three every year and surrounded by bold but never highlighted with it.
Other thoughts.
• As co-host Hayden pointed out in our pod on Thursday, there is a lot of consternation about someone (Scottie) who has been the best overall major player of 2026. More on him after the jump.
• Burns has changed how I think about him maybe more than anyone else this year (probably over the last two). He’s become a really solid major championship player.
Alas, he won’t top this list as he’s a WD for The Open (baby). As first reported by Gabby in the Times.
• The world: Man, Rose seems close.
Spieth: No, I am close.
Me: Both wrong, Ludvig is close.
Similar to the discourse about Christian Pulisic, the discourse around Ludvig has gone too far the other way. Not a closer. Not clutch. Show me something etc. Some of those statements aren’t necessarily wrong, they just over-torque reality.
Here’s reality … Ludvig has been the worst putter among the best ball strikers at the first three majors. Look at this! It’s Scottie lapping the planet out in front in the ball striking, and then Ludvig dunking on Xander, Rose and Cam Young. That’s crazy!
And yeah, I included exactly eight for the reason you think. It gets even wilder when you flip it to SG tee to green. Maybe the beautiful boy actually is close.
Just not as close as Ludvig.
2. For someone who feeds his family based on how much other people read, this Atlantic article entitled The End of Reading was sobering. Of course people have been predicting the end of reading since reading began. But there were some statistics in the article that had me reeling. Here are three.
• Americans who read for pleasure: 28 percent in 2004, 16 percent in 2023.
• In a study of 236K American adults, only 2 percent read to a child on a given day.
• 13 year olds who say they rarely/never read for fun: 8 percent in 1984, 29 percent in 2025.
Seems bad!
And while I think some of these numbers are a bit manipulated to prove a point (i.e. how many of those 236K adults have a kid who is at an age that they would be read to?), it does have me questioning my choice to be one of a couple of golf outlets that is purposefully more focused on reading and writing than audio and video.
A real analysis of this article could be a whole other thing — and I promised today’s newsletter would be short — but I do think this idea also presents an opportunity.
(I know all of this is self-serving!)
But the people I know who still love reading and writing really love reading and writing. So yes, it’s an increasingly smaller audience, and many outlets (and sponsors) are running the other way toward audio and video. But I think the “we still read” crowd is also a more obsessed one that we can keep writing and drawing for. Maybe think should be replaced by hope. But either way, it’s a bet I want to make.
This post will continue below for Normal Club members (all 1,056 of them) and includes notes on new gear, a look at Scottie’s crazy streak and some fun World Cup comps (including, yes, Rickie and Neymar).
By becoming a member, you will receive the following …
• Access to 100 percent of our content this week.
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• A free digital copy of our Rory book.
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