I enjoyed this from Jamie Kennedy, who is one of my favorite people in golf.
It’s an extremely difficult question that, for me, has one no-brainer (Seve), one mostly no-brainer (Faldo) and then …… it depends on your taste. Do you want one of the founding fathers (Vardon, Braid, Taylor [gestures at the Morris family]), or do you go more modern with Langer, JMO, Monty or Woosie?
Do majors matter? Does the Ryder Cup matter? Where does Rory fit in? Where does Sergio fit in? Rahm is going to be on it eventually, so should we just put him on there now? Every question has another question.
If I have to choose — and I don’t, but I will — my Euro Rushmore would look like this.
Seve
Faldo
Vardon (he gets the nod over the other founding fathers because he won a U.S. Open in addition to a bucket of Opens)
Langer
To be clear, this is not a list of the best Euro players ever. I think Rory and Rahm are fundamentally better than probably everyone on this list. Instead, it’s a list of the most impactful.
Seve, Faldo and Langer were in the mix during a very formative, important time for European golf. And while you could argue that Rose, Sergio and Westy were more successful in terms of Ryder Cups, I’m not sure any of those guys would exist without Seve, Faldo and Langer going before them.
Rory is pretty close to taking Langer’s spot in my mind — another major would probably do it (definitely a Masters). I’ve argued (several years ago) that he’s already the best European golfer in history and given his involvement in the Tour-LIV brouhaha (among other things he’s been involved in), he’ll certainly go down as one of the most impactful.
It’s hard to see Seve getting upended here. Rahm could get Vardon or Faldo (or Rory), but for somebody to bump Seve on a Euro Rushmore, I’m not even sure what they would have to do. Win 10 majors? Win eight straight Ryder Cups? Win the Master while also broadcasting it?
Culturally, I’m just not even sure it’s possible anymore because the Euro Tour has become more or less a feeder into the PGA Tour. Its importance, its prominence is not what it once was and likely never will be again.
Lastly, this got me good.
“Be so good that you don't even have to think about algorithms.” -Matt D’Avella
Will be thinking about that one for a while.
👉️ The RBC Heritage got 4M viewers in the final round. You choose to believe in the Full Swing Corollary or the Elevated Events Effect. I choose to believe Jordan Spieth was in the mix and people just want to feel something.
👉️ What are you more surprised by in this Data Golf analysis of the 2022-23 PGA Tour season? That Tony Finau is playing better golf than Rory McIlroy. That Rickie Fowler is playing better golf than Cam Young. Or that Matt Kuchar is playing better golf than Sam Burns. According to DG’s true strokes gained metric, all of those statements are true this season.
👉️ Sean Zak on JT turning 30 is so good. This quote from JT definitely stood out: “I have zero sympathy for people who bitch about things they can do something about.”
👉️ Alan Shipnuck writes about Phil, LIV and what happened last summer and gets this incredible anonymous quote from another LIV player about Phil visiting Jeddah: “I’m pretty sure by the end of the week he could have been elected mayor of King Abdullah City, if they actually held elections over there.”
👉️ A good explanation of Tiger’s surgery by an actual doctor.
👉️ Matt Fitzpatrick says the quiet part out loud: Don’t point the finger at Cantlay and Co. Point it at the Tour.
Also worth remembering here.
True sicko behavior within the golf community.
Rick Gehman makes another appearance by noting that he definitely didn’t spend $1,000 on this ANGC hat on eBay but that he thought about it for longer than he should have.
This actually reminded me of the insane hat Gordon Sargent was wearing in a video I was watching of him on Friday night after I got the kids down.
Friday night in your 20s: Out with the boys.
Friday night in your 30s: Studying Gordon Sargent’s ludicrous transition at the top after getting the boys down.
74: In his last 89 rounds, Jon Rahm has gained strokes on the field in 74 of them. Given the caliber of tournaments he plays in, that just cannot happen. Also, think about how good Rahm has been over the last 12 months — seven wins in 24 starts — and then remember Tiger Woods once gained strokes on the field in 89 consecutive rounds from 1999-2000.
So he basically did what Rahm has done, except he didn’t shoot the 73 in the first round of the BMW Championship Rahm shot or the 76 in the third round at Bay Hill. He beat the average score from the best fields on the planet 89 times in a row.
Quotes worth thinking about.
“Opportunity can be luck, but you still have to nail the opportunity and you still have to put real thought into it. You still have to give a shit. The thing I’ve learned over everything is the people who give a shit are the ones who succeed.” -Bill Simmons talking about his journey on How I Built This
I feel fairly conflicted about Simmons’ view on luck vs. skill. Obviously he was talented, but he wasn’t talented enough to have influenced everyone who came up behind him to the degree that he did. A lot of that was marrying the right person at the right time in the right industry.
What I don’t feel conflicted is the part about how the ones who succeed are the ones who care. I’ve talked about that in this newsletter before with a nod to Roger Angell’s phrase about the business of caring. It’s a rarer trait than I naively (?) imagined when I was younger.
It’s a good business to be in, though, because people can tell when you care about something, and when people can tell when you care about something, you will have their attention for as long as you can keep it.
Ultimately that’s business, right? Getting people’s attention for as long as our skillset or talent will allow us to keep it and trying to solve their problems (however big or small they might be) while you have it.
Not sure this qualifies as a meme, but I enjoyed this from Claire highlighting the Baker’s Bay Boys running it back, this time as married men with two kids between them.
Here are the numbers by the way … if that Spieth putt had dropped at Harbour Town, it would have been perfect.
Total Tour wins before SB2K17: 17
Total Tour wins since SB2K17: 16
This one has been tweeted several times, and it will never not get me. It’s so stupid and hilarious and perfect.
Soly is obviously very good at Twitter, and one of the reasons for that is because his memory or his ability to search and find good analogies quickly is peerless.
This was a response to me when I tweeted the Chase Koepka hole in one from LIV Adelaide. It’s extremely my wheelhouse and made me laugh pretty hard.
You may or may not follow MKBHD on YouTube. If you do, great, if you don’t, you should. He’s a tech reviewer (who is also kinda into golf!), and I would say he and Ben Thompson are for sure on the post-2010 Online Creator Rushmore.
Anyway, he partnered with a company recently to make a shoe, which dropped this week. Shoes have [checks notes] nothing to do with technology, but because MKBHD has built up an audience that loves him and his work, he’s able to point them in the direction of cool stuff he’s making (even if it isn’t in the tech industry).
Perhaps this is obvious, but this is the future of commerce. It seems odd now that a tech YouTuber would sell a shoe on Twitter, but it won’t seem odd at all in 15 years.
In a world where you can aggregate attention with the click of a few buttons, those who build the most successful businesses will build businesses on top of the attention and/or fandom they have aggregated. If you don’t believe me, watch this interview with the woman who started Blogilates and then turned it into two (two!) eight-figure fashion businesses.
I’m going on vacation next week (nbd), and recently asked for book recommendations. If you have any, feel free to add to this thread or just reply to this email.
Thank you and talk to you next week right before I leave.
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