When will we see another Tiger, and who will it be?
My sons and I were flipping back and forth between the LSU-Wake game on Wednesday night to the final round of the 2000 Open at the Old Course.* My oldest son’s first question was, “Dad, why are Tiger’s sleeves so long?” which made me howl.
As we watched, though, the thought that kept scratching the back of my brain was whether I would get to cover the next Tiger Woods.
It never feels like there will be another, but there always is. I don’t believe it’s anyone currently playing professional golf right now, but there will come along someone so singular, so driven, so preternaturally long off the tee, with the perfect golf body, the ideal upbringing and all the outlier factors. He will be so great that the doubt we all had that Tiger would ever have a successor will seem almost unreasonable to so many people in the future.
We will have legitimate arguments about whether this player is the same caliber as Tiger, and it will feel like a real — not manufactured — conversation. This always happens (always!). It’s happening right now with LeBron and Mike Trout, and it will happen again in golf. The question is when, not if. The question is who, not whether. The question is at what point will we know, not whether we will ever know at all.
*Padraig Harrington — who finished T27 at the U.S. Open last week — finished T20 at that Open Championship, which I find to be completely and totally incredible.
I love feeling nervous at the end of a major. It is extremely stupid that I, a lowly member of the crooked media, would feel anything at all, but there is truly nothing like the last few hours of a close major. So much history is just hanging out there, and it is buoyed by so little oxygen.
It shouldn’t mean as much as it does, but that doesn’t change the fact that it does mean so much.
I love that it only happens (at most!) four times a year and fewer in years where there are blowouts. In a culture that truly seems to believe that more is almost always better, the scarcity of truly meaningful moments in golf — the type that unfold in 60 minutes but will be discussed for 60 years — is as nerve-wracking as it is refreshing.
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👉️ Bryan Curtis wrote a really good piece on what it’s like to cover golf right now. I was interviewed for it. So were a lot of the folks you probably follow and read.
👉️ Sean Martin wrote a great Max Homa profile that’s fun to read whether he missed the U.S. Open cut or not (he did).
👉️ Joel Beall on why the U.S. Open was so quiet was probably the best reporting of the week.
👉️ KVV’s thread on working yourself into a logic pickle over rolling the ball back and easy U.S. Open setups was great.
👉️ This story on Rickie sending champagne to a lowly social media intern after winning the Deutsche Bank is really good.
👉️ Dylan Dethier on Rickie “not leaving LACC fully satisfied but going out of his way to make sure everyone else did” was awesome.
👉️ Andy Johnson helps everyone understand what par means and why a lot of golf courses should be par 68 or 69.
👉️ LKD hollering about how Rory played the 14th and then getting steep on why he was so frustrated is the good (and sociopathic but mostly good) stuff.
👉️ I was very proud of the piece I wrote on Sunday following Wyndham Clark’s win: Rory McIlroy, a fool who still dreams. The ones I’m most proud of are almost always the hardest to write either because the level of clarity of mind you have to get to or because the line between cheesy and beautiful is thinner than Chesson Hadley.
👉️ I wrote a long thread two weeks ago about envy, contentment and how bad of a job I’ve been doing at letting what others say and think about both my work and the work of those around me dictate all of my joy. It was less a cry for help and more of (hopefully) an encouragement to those of you who oftentimes feel the same way. Watch the Dax Shepard video twice.
👉️ Speaking of Rory, we put my essay about him from last year’s Normal Sport 2 on the website for free. You can read it here.
True sicko behavior within the golf community.
I’m proud of this man who got ahead of a potentially hazardous situation by stepping forward to disclose his illness. I told him so and asked him to go see someone immediately.
63: In 14 tournaments in 2023, Scottie Scheffler has lost to 63 golfers. To put that in perspective, Jon Rahm (who has four wins this year) has lost to 74 in his last four starts alone.
There was a lot of golf course talk last weekend at the U.S. Open, most of which I’m unqualified to discuss.
What I do agree with, however, is something that was voiced by Andy and KVV, which is that we’ve entered a space in time where, as the organization setting the golf course up, you can protect low scoring by setting up courses that have high shot values in manufactured ways. OR you can accept that modern technology has erased some of the shot value that used to exist, set up the course the way it was meant to be played and in a way that encourages the highest feasible shot value and realize that scoring is going to be low (this is another way of saying what KVV said below).
Those have, somewhat sadly, become the two options. The USGA is in such a no-win situation. If they set it up difficult, and it howls and bakes then all the players hate them and shot value gets erased. If they set it up a little easier and it doesn’t howl or bake then everyone who wants carnage hates them. Modern equipment has erased so much of the middle ground.
But nobody has ever shot 62 at Augusta! That’s true, but it’s also true that Augusta just spent like $1M per yard it moved No. 13 back, and it’s equally true that a day is coming and probably soon where someone will shoot 62 at Augusta if nothing is done about equipment.
More than anything, the tornado of scoring at LACC made me sad that technology is what it is and we don’t get to see the best ball-strikers, best strategists and best thinkers perform at the apex of their powers. We get to see a lot of performance, but not the peak of it, which is a huge bummer from both an historical and modern perspective.
These are three terrific, logical, smart thoughts on the subject.
Garrett Morrison may have dropped the meme of the year on everybody at the beginning of last week. It could not have been more timely or perfect.
These four also amused and delighted me, and I will be saving them for future use.
The Fried Egg
I don’t know how I stumbled across this video (OK, I do, I was diving into a former Texas A&M golfer’s Twitter profile, which is completely and totally normal and reasonable), but — and I don’t want to overstate this — this might be the funniest video I have ever seen.
These tweets from LACC were tremendous. The person who runs the Art but Sports account is, I hope I’m not underselling this, a genius if in fact he or she is not using AI to run the account (I was told he or she is not).
A 46!
Deep Fried is in the pantheon with Antifaldo and ANGC Burner of parody accounts. This is terrific stuff.
I think this was my favorite tweet of the week. It’s so perfect.
Wonder if he could have used that stroke later in the week.
[Sigh]
This slayed me. The fact that it’s the Butterfield Bermuda and not just the Bermuda makes the entire thing work.
This was about Wyndham Clark’s drive on 18.
Speaking of pantheons, this one is in it. One of the all-time great early Golf Twitter moments.
8 years ago today, Gary Player gave us one of the most epic answers ever to the simple question of:
“How are you?”
— No Laying Up (@NoLayingUp)
Jun 20, 2023
This got me good … and might be true.
Working theory that Hovland is wearing the exact same shirt as yesterday, only it’s a reversible and he’s turned it inside out:
— ANTIFAldo (@ANTIFAldo)
Jun 16, 2023
I get questions every once in a while about how folks can get into media, golf or golf media. One of the ideas I almost always propose is finding a niche — and if you think you have a niche, dig two more levels down, then that’s your actual niche — and owning it. One that somebody should go all in on in a humorous, helpful way is breaking down the rules of the game.
Is that a business? I don’t know. But there’s definitely an opportunity for someone to really own that sliver of golf. If you can dice up the rules in clever, irreverent but informative pieces and help me learn while making me laugh, I would find real value in that given that I’m 11 years into this and still am not totally 100 percent sure of almost any rule.
This newsletter has been even more fun to write than I thought it would be. It is quite a thing to get to travel the country thinking, writing and talking about golf. It is a thrill to write those thoughts down in hopefully humorous and heartfelt ways to all of you. And it is a terrific joy to develop deep friendship in the middle of it all.
The kind of friendship for which you wake up at 4:15 a.m. to get 18 holes in before the third round of the U.S. Open, not because you care about the 18 holes but because you want to compete against and talk to the people you’re in the mix with. The content is good, yes, but the delight of great friends is so much better.
Left to right: KVV, me (Kyle Porter), Joel Beall, Sean Martin
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