"Going out on your own is hard short term. Long term, it's going to pay dividends."

The TPF Q&A with golf writer and Normal Sport proprietor Kyle Porter

Four months ago, Kyle Porter took a leap. The longtime CBS Sports golf columnist left the corporate world for the freedom of the newsletter game, turning on paid subscriptions at his excellent Normal Sport. He writes about golf with wit and charm and insight, as a journalist who loves the game, the good parts and the frustrating ones. 

Porter is building a business along with his illustrator, Jason Page, and was kind enough to take 45 minutes to chat with Three Point Four Media. We talked about freedom versus risk, golf media’s growing pains, and why he reads fiction at The Masters.

The man of the hour

Three Point Four Media: This is maybe a bad place to start, but what has been the worst part of Normal Sport so far?

Kyle Porter: So much of it has been really fun and good. I honestly think the answer is making a lot less money than I made at a corporate job. That’s the reality of the situation. Maybe it'll always be the reality of the situation. I hope not. And I don't think it will be, but I don't know what the next year, five years, or 10 years hold.

I appreciate that honesty. I have always thought that people in creative fields should talk about money more. At the end of the day, if you're not making money, then it's just kind of an art project. I don’t want to minimize the importance of creativity and doing good work, but if you're not thinking about the financial side of it, you’re not going to last very long.

One of the quotes that I've considered quite a bit over the last six months is Ben Thompson of Stratechery talking about how newsletters scale infinitely on the back end. I put in the same level of effort to write a newsletter whether it’s going to one subscriber or a million. That’s the good news. The hard part is getting to a baseline level of sustainability. We're moving in that direction, which is nice, but we’re not there yet.

On one hand, leaving CBS to focus on Normal Sport full time is risky. At the same time, the corporate media world is a mess. For someone like you, who has a well-known name associated with quality content, a strong following on social, and some sense that there was an appetite for Normal Sport since you saw the free version gain traction when you launched it while you were still at CBS, I think there’s an argument that not going out on your own is more of a risk. At least now you control your own destiny.

Well, that was my pitch to my wife. She didn't necessarily receive it that way at first. [Laughs] But I agree with you, and I think she does, too, especially in the long term. In the short term, it's less true. 

When I first got to CBS Sports, which was an amazing 12-year experience, we barely had any ads on our articles. When I left, the site was covered with ads. This is the way of the internet. It’s so frustrating. I heard someone call it viewing a screen through the slit in a knight’s helmet. It’s a terrible consumer experience. It’s only going to get worse, and it’s going to be very difficult to maintain a long, lasting career within these ad-supported, SEO-focused publications. 

Going out on your own is hard in the short term, and maybe even in the medium term, but I think in the long term it's going to pay dividends.

When you thought about transitioning to Normal Sport full time, how did you see your revenue breaking down? How has that balance changed as you’ve started to build the actual business?

I don't really remember how I pictured it. We tried to attract some sponsors and partners. We did early on with an apparel company called Holderness & Bourne, but it felt weird because I was also at CBS Sports. I couldn’t turn on paid subscriptions at that point.

The way we think about driving revenue now is five buckets: people, partners, packages, products, and places. People are paid members. Partners are sponsors like Holderness & Bourne or Meridian Putters, and something like the Ireland giveaway we did with Seed Golf. Packages means merch. Products are books, like this one we made a couple years ago, or something else physical. Places are events. We frequently hear from people who want us to do something IRL. I think that’s correct, but it’s scary because what if like three people show up? There’s a risk there. We think it is one worth taking soon.

Of the five, we’ve only developed people and partners so far. We’ll start to build out the other three over the next year.

Golf is growing enormously. A lot of that growth and interest is in the YouTube and creator space rather than the pro game. How do you think about covering these less traditional spaces and how they interact with the pro game?

Jason and I talk about that all the time. We try to be good tastemakers, and we try to follow our noses. That’s what I’ve always done: write about what I’m interested in. There's an authenticity there. Sometimes that includes the creator and YouTube golf world.

Here’s an example: Good Good just raised $45 million. As a 40-year-old who started a business and covers golf, that’s a pretty interesting thing to me, right? I presume that most of the people who follow me are in that sphere, too, and will be interested as well. Sometimes I'm wrong. When I am, I hear the feedback. But for the most part, one of our skillsets is being a tastemaker and curator for the group of people that follow us. 

How have your work days changed since you went full time at Normal Sport?

The hours haven't changed. The thing I love about golf is that you can't play after dark. You’re done by dinner time. I'm very grateful for that schedule because we have four kids, and I like to play baseball with them and spend time with them.

I try to divvy up my days between business and creative. I didn’t do the business side before. What that means is that I have to take time away from other things. That's been a lot less time on Twitter, a lot less time reading, and generally a lot less time in different places. Eventually, I want to give some of that time back. I've started to do so. We sold out our ad inventory for 2025, for which I'm very grateful. I’m trying to read during the time I was using to have conversations with potential partners. 

Another change is that I’m not paying as much attention on the weekends during non-big tournament weeks. We don't produce any content on the weekends. I'm writing mostly on Mondays and Wednesdays to send out on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That's been a good gift for our family. I’ll watch the last hour or two of every tournament, and for a big event like the Players Championship, I’ll cover the whole thing. But I’m giving some time back to my family. That's been a shift in the right direction.

You mentioned the Players Championship. You produced a whole week of content, and it was awesome, even though the Monday playoff messed up the cadence a bit. Do you see a bump in subscriptions during a big event or is it more steady growth?

If you pull back, it looks pretty steady. We’ve only had paid membership turned on for four months now, so it's hard to tell, but we did see a spike during the Players. And something like the Ireland giveaway compels people to sign up. 

The thing I've been thinking more about are the free subscribers. We have around 15,000, but growth has slowed. It will go up a bit during majors, but one of my frustrations is how do I transition some of my 180,000 Twitter followers into Normal Sports subs? Clearly, they like what they see there, and I think about the newsletter as an extension of what I’m doing on Twitter. Elon doesn't make it super easy, but we've been trying to think more about how to get those people onto the newsletter.

Prepping for this interview no doubt. Photo credit: Jeff Marsh

He certainly does not make that super easy. One thing I like about Normal Sport is the range of references you cite. A while back, you dropped a Brent Beshore mention. That guy is the next Warren Buffett, but I have to say I did not expect to see his name pop up in a newsletter ostensibly about golf. What does your media consumption look like?

I have tried to listen to less golf stuff. I love that content and I’m friends with a lot of those creators, but I don’t want to cross-pollinate the takes. I don’t want to get confused about whether something is my idea or if I’m regurgitating it from someone else. I find myself gravitating toward the world of entrepreneurship and business, like the Acquired Podcast, or My First Million. Those can get a little tech bro-y, but that world has been really fun to explore for me.

I have an RSS feed, but a lot of recommendations come through Twitter. I’ll see something and make a note to read it. My Goodreads list is 1,500 books long. It’s a repository to sift through when I am looking for something to read. I find that reading outside of my category informs and helps what I'm writing within my category. You can connect dots within your writing that surprise people. Surprising readers can be very compelling. 

I always try to read a fiction book during major weeks. I’ll take a fiction book to Augusta. During the Players, I was reading American Kingpin about Silk Road. That’s not fiction, obviously, but it reads like fiction. It gets your mind off the thing that you're thinking about all the time. That’s so valuable.

Okay, lightning round: What happens with LIV?

I've made this call so many times and been wrong pretty much at every turn so I'm hesitant to give an answer. It would seem advantageous for the PGA to wait LIV out, but do you really want to get into a game of chicken with MBS and Saudi Arabia? I think eventually the PGA Tour and LIV will strike a deal. The Public Investment Fund invests a billion dollars or something along those lines. LIV will slowly die out. Jon Rahm, Brooks Koepka, and the other LIV guys know it's unserious, and they're ashamed of what they've done.

Thoughts on TGL? I watched a surprising amount of it and thought it was fun and silly and compelling and needs work. 

Full disclosure, I've done some contract work for TGL, so I’m biased toward it. There are 1,000 things they need to work out in terms of the technology. They changed a rule during the middle of the year, and I think they deserve credit for doing stuff like that and not just saying, “oh, we nailed it.” 

I think the thing that I was most surprised by is how into it the players were. And the players were surprised by how into it they were, too. Shane Lowry talked about how desperate he was to win. Tom Kim, too. 

I'm interested to see how it goes over the next year or two, but there's something there. My kids loved it. They don't watch the Sony Open, but they'll watch an hour of TGL and be really intrigued by it. 

Final questions: Does Tiger play again? Does he finish in the top 5?

Top five, no. I think he'll play another tournament. He'll play at least another Masters. But I've thought this since it happened that the 2019 Masters was kind of it.

I think he knew it. He said as much a couple of times, not directly, but if you're paying close attention, he hinted. He knows his body well. I think he knew that was the last one. And it was an amazing one. It was the most surreal feeling I've ever had at a golf tournament. I walked the last five or six holes, and it felt like those old videos of Bobby Jones doing a ticker tape parade in New York. It didn't feel very real. It was extraordinary, one of the all-time great sports achievements.

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