GHIN:

I don’t think I’m breaking new ground by saying this: I’m all set with pro golf through the end of the year. The good news is I am supposed to be. It’s the off-season, and I’m confident I’ll be fired up for The Sentry come January. The better news is I’ve never been more excited about my personal golf game. Going 1-under through 36 holes with no double bogeys at Sweetens Cove during the Roost Club Championship is heady stuff for me, but the 6-hole alt-shot, cross-country match after our formal event was the highlight of the year. These cross-country matches at Sweetens call for unique shots on-demand based on what routing the winner of the last hole calls out. Usually, these matches turn into hit and giggles after a full day looping my favorite 9 holes in golf. But every once in a while, there’s magic waiting for me in the Tennessee twilight, and I can ride a good swing feel and mood as long as the sun in the Sequatchie Valley will allow. The towering 238-yard cut 3-wood I hit from the mound behind 1 green to the front pin on 7 green stands out. From this distance and angle, the bulging 7th green looks like a stubby, golden caterpillar crawling away toward The Shed (the Sweetens “clubhouse”). My ball landed pin high and rolled off the back right (front right when played from a traditional angle), but it was executed perfectly.

There may be no better feeling in golf than the ability to call and execute a high-level shot after a long day of golf. As I get older, I’m less interested in playing all day, and 18 or even 36 is enough. Sweetens Cove is one of the few places where I still want to squeeze in every damn shot on a perfect, early October day.

I’d also say that goal and expectation setting have had a huge impact on my enjoyment of golf this year. I set a goal to play in at least two Metropolitan Golf Association events in 2024. I’ve played in four, and there’s no doubt that these competitive events spurred sincere investment in improving my golf swing, mobility, and game management. More to come next week, as we roll out a video detailing my visit to the Titleist Performance Institute to work with Dr. Greg Rose. Expectations are a curious thing. Back in January, my goal was to not get worse at golf this year. I wanted to manage my own expectations with the arrival of my son Peter in March. I expected my golf game to suffer, and my goal was to combat that. Instead, even with less time to practice and play, I’ve improved, and my handicap going from 3.7 to 1.9, and I truly believe my best golf is still ahead of me. There are not many activities in life where I can say my best is yet to come, so I’m excited to keep diving toward a 0.0 handicap. Exceeding sincere expectations is always a thrill!

Looking ahead, we have the fifth annual NIT this week in Arizona. I have never won my flight and competed in the championship round. What an opportunity to slay the dragon this week at Dobson Ranch.

TONIC:

Last Thursday and Friday, I binge-watched Mr. McMahon the Vince McMahon and WWE documentary on Netflix while running Daddy daycare with Little Pete.

I expected this documentary to be in what I’ll call the memoir genre, like pretty much every sports and entertainment documentary these days. Most of these high-profile documentaries now have the main subject co-producing them, and it makes sense. That is the only way the entire McMahon and WWE ‘family’ will sit down for interviews. There’s no way they would willingly give up control of the final edit, and that means this type of sports documentary now becomes a way for the subject to manipulate history in service of their legacy and perception, especially regarding the most recent history. The best example is the Derek Jeter documentary, The Captain, on ESPN. Jeter spends the final two episodes rewriting the history of his tenure as CEO of the Marlins as something other than a failure.

Knowing all this and my apathy toward pro wrestling, I had low expectations for Mr. McMahon, but again, low expectations are a powerful thing. I was rapt from beginning to end. From the start, the producers did a good job of letting McMahon craft his own reality in interviews while balancing that with diverse perspectives from inside and outside the wrestling world. Most of these documentaries are 1 to 17 episodes too long, but with all the gnarly legal stuff that’s come out about Vince McMahon, I thought the last episode was necessary and well done. I’m also going to assume that the final edit for this documentary was held by WWE, which McMahon lost control of in 2023 by merging with UFC. My guess is that Ari Emmanuel, Nick Khan, and Mark Shapiro at Endeavor (majority owner of WWE) collectively said “Let’s air out these skeletons in the WWE closest, so Vince can’t try and come back into the business a third time!” What a win for the documentary team, and my point in outlining this is to present the reality in which all these sports documentaries now have to be viewed. Are they fact-based, or are they memoirs steered by the main subject? In this case, I think it was one of the rare fact-based documentaries I’ve watched in a while that included all the characters in the story.

I am thrilled to say I was never interested in pro wrestling. Growing up, I watched one WrestleMania at a sleepover in 2005 and never understood the allure.

(Full disclosure: I do have a John Cena You Can't See Me shirt, pictured in the header, but that was an ironic thrift store purchase from long ago. I then lost that original John Cena shirt, and Cody sent me a new one earlier this year. It’s one of my favorites).

After watching this documentary, I feel vindicated for avoiding it throughout my childhood and into college. I had no role in making Vince McMahon — among the biggest megalomaniacs and scumbags of my lifetime — a billionaire. Also, as a side note, what is with billionaires and bad plastic surgery? By 2023, it looks like he gave the surgeon a picture of Adam Driver and came out looking like Muammar Gaddafi.


Because of my cursory knowledge of the pro wrestling landscape, this documentary provided a much-needed overview of the history and business strategy of pro wrestling. I also love diving into passionate subcultures that I don’t understand. Valued at $6.8 billion, the WWE may be America’s most significant subculture and one that has never been more popular. My main takeaway is that pro wrestling makes much more sense when viewed as a stage play or real-life fantasy novel and less as a sporting event. Below are a few other takeaways as they relate to both our business at NLU and the business of pro golf:

Character development (and redevelopment) as a business model: Throughout its history, the WWE has been a “strong-link” organization. Like the NBA (and golf), it’s driven by 1 or 2 stars that can carry an average or even below-average team or organization to success. WWE's most significant competitive advantage over other sports is that they can create, develop, and redevelop characters (and decide the outcome of matches based on the strongest storylines). I found this most apparent when Dwayne Johnson comes on the scene as Rocky, a 3rd generation babyface wrestler. The crowds hate him. Within months, he changes his name to The Rock, becomes a heel, and his career takes off. We often talk about golf’s lack of star power and inability to create stars. The PGA Tour can’t recreate Scottie Scheffler’s or Patrick Cantlay’s personality, but I do think Bryson, GOOD GOOD, and some other golf YouTube channels are running this playbook. Toss in a bunch of ex-college golfers, let them go at each other in matches, and read and react to crowd feedback (comments in this case) regarding their personality and “Rizz.” Then, tweak, rinse, and repeat the characters and narratives moving forward. I don’t want to do this with our business because it isn’t rooted in authenticity and has a negative impact on the individuals in an organization (more on this below). Regardless, it’s the WWE’s core competitive advantage, and I think we will only see more of it with YouTube and digital creators.

The concept of Kayfabe: “Kayfabe” is a term I’ve never heard before, and by definition, it’s the practice of portraying staged events as reality. Kayfabe is the total commitment to the bit, and the unspoken agreement between both wrestlers in the ring and the audience to suspend disbelief and consider wrestling events, storylines, and characters as genuine. I’ve never been able to do this with wrestling, which is probably why I don’t like it, but Kayfabe is a concept we use at NLU. Is Tron’s love for the Cleeks real? Is his name really Tron Carter? Is Strapped dead because Neil and Randy spent over $500 and didn’t play three rounds of real golf in Season 11?

Kayfabe is a powerful and effective concept, but it’s one you have to balance with authenticity, and personally, authenticity is more important to me as both a fan and content creator. But, this is where the content around Vince McMahon and his character for WWE, the villainous Mr. McMahon, is so interesting. You don’t know where real life ends and the character begins. He spends a bunch of time in this documentary arguing that his character is not him, but I think the overarching message of the documentary is that at some point in the 1990s, he became the character, and there isn’t a difference anymore.

Setting aside the megalomania and rampant sexual assault allegations (I know, tough to do), I found a lot to relate to on this topic. I often meet people at events or off the golf course who are surprised I’m not always the “walking typhoon” you see on Strapped. It’s not that I’m acting or playing a fake character on Strapped. I’ve always felt it’s an environment and place where a particular part of my personality is allowed to get out and run. It’s an outlet that I feel privileged to have, and in another line of work, it’s a part of my personality that I would have to stifle more and more over time. McMahon speaks at length about this exact feeling, and I found myself nodding along at times. The challenging balance of this real-world character development is being sincere even when people want more of #TheKid in real-life interactions. I can see how a “permanent character” like the one McMahon played weekly for over twenty years on the wrestling circuit can take over his real personality. This is the danger of living your life and crafting content based on the feedback of an audience (shoutout to Bryson).

Another related observation is Vince McMahon is one of the few people in the upper echelon of traditional sports and entertainment who operate the business and participate in the content. The same is true for me and my partners at NLU; frankly, it gets harder to do as the operation grows, but it’s probably what I love most about my job: the combination of variety and control in my day-to-day work is intoxicating. This business/talent hybrid is becoming more prevalent with the rise of creators. Still, it is a complicated arrangement to navigate, and I find it interesting that whether you like him or hate him, Vince McMahon is probably the highest-profile and most successful example of this business/creative hybrid from traditional media. The downside is he became a sexual predator and now looks like a Libyan dictator. As I think about what I want to become and what I want NLU to look like in 5 years, I often feel like finding examples of the opposite can be a great starting point. So let’s leave this thread here for now: I don’t want to end up like Vince McMahon.

Alright, the last thing I have on Mr. McMahon: I was locked in during episode 3 of this documentary as it unpacked the schism in pro wrestling brought about by the Ted Turner and Turner-backed creation of WCW. It is eerily similar to what’s unfolding in professional golf. In the end, competition was good for the wrestling industry, and WWF fought off WCW, but it took about eight years to reunite the pro wrestling world, and one could argue that reunification led to a stale product in the mid-to-late 2000s. One other callout: I need to dig up a biography of Ted Turner. He was such an omnipresent name throughout my childhood growing up in Atlanta, but I don’t know much about him. Perhaps we need to do a special edition TrapDraw Owners episode on Ted!

Here are a few other content recommendations.

I’ve really enjoyed two new podcasts:

  • Who Killed College Football - The first two episodes of this series from Ryan Nanni and Stephen Godfrey have been fantastic. It’s a complicated issue, but I love the way these two have gone about structuring and researching the complexity of the college athletics landscape.
  • Real Dictators - I found this during my trip to Spain last month. I went on a short city tour of Spain with a local guide, and it became very clear that this guide (and older woman) did not want to talk about Spanish history from 1930 to 1980. I thought it might have something to do with Francisco Franco. It turns out I was right, and this 6 part series on Franco outlines a cultural amnesia (or Spanish societal Kayfabe) around Franco’s rule. I highly recommend this podcast if you’re into history.

What I’m reading:

  • When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management by Robert Lowenstein - This book is very much in the Barbarians at the Gate and Den of Thieves genre. I don’t know shit about the finance industry, but I find it easier for me to understand the concept of a hedge fund when it’s trojan horsed into engaging narrative history. I’ll probably stay in the finance genre for one more book and dive into The Missing Billionaires by Victor Haghani next. Haghani is one of the main characters in When Genius Failed, but since the collapse of LTCM, he’s focused on building wealth in the least risky way possible (seems like a complete 180, shout out to learning from your mistakes).