Greetings!
We got The Weight of Rory on Goodreads if you are the type of person who enjoys reading and then leaving reviews (I know there are still at least dozens of us!).
Name drops today: Blades Brown, Stan Wawrinka, Charles Howell III, Bill Simmons, Joan Didion, Charles Lindbergh and Curtis Strange.
Today’s newsletter is presented by OGIO.
How tough is the OGIO vault collection? Tough enough to handle 190 mph stingers from Dalton Joyce and Roger Steele. And also tough enough to avoid these real-life scenarios from last week’s Byron Nelson winner.
1. After a near-disaster shot at the PGA Championship by Wyndham Clark (begging you to click here if you haven’t seen it), I think it’s time that we officially recommend bringing an OGIO vault bag to future events for protection.
2. Speaking of …
We got to thinking …. what if Oakmont's lockers were made with OGIO vault technology that includes ultra-durable carbon fiber corner protectors and a high-impact shell built to take hits and keep moving instead of … whatever it is that they’re made of?
Maybe there wouldn’t have been an, ahem, incident there a year ago. Makes you think. Maybe all lockers should be made with OGIO’s vault technology. 🤔
TPC Craig Ranch in the hands of tour pros is like your stuff without an OGIO bag. Not protected, not safe and potentially at risk of being exposed at all times.
Check out their vault collection right here.
OK, now onto the news.
I suppose we could do a full breakdown of that Byron Nelson leaderboard … or we could take a look at the aggregate major standings for everyone who has made the cut at both the Masters and PGA Championship.
I know which one of those options sounds more compelling.
So here it is. Player name in column 1, total shots across the first two majors in column 2 and total score to par in column 3.
Couple of thoughts here.
• Justin Rose deserves another major. Feels like someone should finally point this out.
• Did not expect to see Sam Burns on this list. He’s in a weird spot. Some Charles Howell III in there. He’s made $37 million in his career, and nobody ever picks him to win majors. Not sure what to do with that. Good enough to win and make an outrageous amount of money, rarely great enough to be in a week-to-week convo about the best 10 or 15 players in the world. Kind of Matt Kuchar-y tbh. Maybe more Kuchar than CH3.
• Rory has two top 10s so far this year to bring his career total at the majors to … 35 out of 69 tournaments played. That is 51 percent. A crazy number. Also, there’s this.
Tiger did 17 years in a row (1997-2013). Remarkably, he’s had just three top 10s at majors since the start of 2014.
Jack did 24 years in a row (1960-1983). He missed out on a top 10 at the 1984 Masters by three shots before notching top 10s in the next three years, which would have made it 28 years in a row (which seems impossible?).
Phil’s longest streak was nine years, which he did twice.
• Back to the aggregate majors score this year … I’m desperate for more Haotong. As much Haotong as humanly possible.
• Xander remains underrated.
• That Spieth and Morikawa are tied with Fitz is hilarious to me. Three wildly different seasons and all three have taken exactly 562 strokes at the majors.
• Brian Campbell … I mean, that round on Saturday at The Mink was a work of art. He lost shots on 13 different holes on a golf course with very few penalty areas.
Paint, brother.
• On Sunday at The Open, The Worst Best Player Award should be given to whoever finishes last in this category. Rasmus and Campbell duking it out right now. Sure, you were good enough to make the cut at all four majors, but you also finished T52-T61-74-T39 at the end. Not sure that’s a W. Golf is weird because you’re chasing consistency, but it’s actually extreme variability that is rewarded.
See: Sandy Lyle’s career.
• I need to get some more literature on Chris Gotterup. I’m just not totally there yet, but I probably need to get myself there. I think some of it is just him not looking the part. I see him and then I see Ludvig, and it seems so obvious that one of them should be better than the other. And yet, they’re three shots apart at the majors this year.
Somebody on site at the PGA was texting me about Gotterup and how good he is. I do love how he shapes the ball. There’s some Bubba in there, I think. Maybe a little P. Just dudes hitting shots and not playing Trackman golf. I appreciate it, and I want to fall in love with it at some point.
After Blades Brown finished T14 at the Nelson to earn his special temporary membership (a hilarious and very normal sport name, by the way), I was thinking about how little he is hyped compared to similar players at similar ages in other sports.
Blades turned 19 (nineteen!) last week and is now No. 97 in the Data Golf rankings, ahead of Cam Smith, Dustin Johnson, Tony Finau, Tom Kim, Max Homa and all but 96 other male golfers you can think of.
He was not alive when the Red Sox broke their curse. He did not see any of Phil’s first three majors nor Vince Young beat SC in the Rose Bowl.
And in other sports, all of the above would be fueling a constantly-humming hype machine. Two names come to mind.
Konnor Griffin — Pirates
Dylan Harper — Spurs
Both are older than Brown, both are arguably worse than Brown in their respective sports and both have received far more attention from people within those sports.
Golf is a little odd. If Brown played hoops, Bill Simmons would have constructed a six-part documentary and sold it to Apple TV. In golf, we’re like, Oh we’ll see how he does at the Memorial.
Things have … always been like this?
And who knows, Blades might flame out and end up as the next Norman Xiong or Matt Wolff or whatever. But in a world where we have been begging for someone who’s 1. Electric and 2. Under age 25 to come along and light it up a little bit, there is a glimmer there from someone who probably doesn’t get the attention he deserves.
• This on Stan Wawrinka and a career into his 40s is excellent. Not sure who his comp is in golf, but maybe some Padraig in there. Gets by on hard work, good talker, born in a tough era for winning majors (Tiger, Phil — Nadal, Djokovic and Fed) and so on.
• An alternate angle of the Spieth shot from Aronimink has emerged. This is my Zapruder film. Replete with grassy knoll and all! Also, these two tweets on Spieth from the Nelson really got me.
After Gabby posted her 88 at The Mink following the PGA, it made me think about how there should be a group of good golfers from the media [bows out quickly] who play the golf course on the Monday-Wednesday of tournament week and report back on what they find and how it played.
It’s cool to get to play the course a month before or in the days after the tournament, but it’s helpful for the sake of storytelling to get to play in the days leading into the event. Think about how much more informed the way Gabby writes or Soly talks or Jamie Kennedy tweets or LKD discusses the event if they have all played The Mink on Tuesday alongside Rahm, Rory and Scottie.
Yeah, this is extremely normal sport behavior, but I think majors — maybe specifically the PGA — should consider it for the future.
Some absolute gems over this last week from the residents of both Twitter and Golf Twitter.
• Perfect summation of what happened at TPC Craig T. Nelson James Ranch.
• Ah, that made me laugh. I think the French Open-Roland-Garros discourse is the new “Is it The Open Championship or the British Open?” debate.
• 👌👌👌
David Perell did this interview with poet David Whyte, and one of the quotes that came out of it was this one.
Good writing is the act of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. Because you're at that frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you, someone else is speaking.
David Whyte
I find this to be true so often.
It’s the Joan Didion idea that I write to figure out what I am thinking. So often when I’m writing something about Scottie or The Open or the Tour or whatever, I will look back and say, Hmm, I didn’t know I thought that. Or, perhaps more often, Hmm, I’ve never thought about this in that particular way.
That is the fun for me and Jason in all of this and hopefully for you, too.
We are often not even sure what we think about the setup at The Mink or Rory’s career or any of the 1,000 other things going on in golf in a given week. We have to work those things out in real time with this newsletter and on the podcast.
My hope is that there are others in the same boat that come along for the ride with us. Others (like you!) that are trying to figure out what they think about a thing as well. Who know they will never get it exactly right but who aren’t afraid to think and to try anyway.
So thank you for reading and participating in all of this. Our promise to you is to put together the best algorithm-free newsletter (and podcast!) we can, multiple times a week and to do so with as much heart and humor as we can muster.
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