[PHOTO: Warren Little]
I’ve been holding onto this thought for a while, because it sounds rash and emotional and, really, who the hell knows. But here goes: the PGA Tour can’t be as important to the game as it used to be. The best of it came before LIV.
That doesn’t mean pro golf won’t get bigger and richer. It just won’t be as good.
What got me to pull the trigger on this idea was reading Shane Ryan’s entertaining and provocative column last week, in which he offered advice on how to deal with the dysfunction in pro golf. Mostly, he said to avoid all the angst and disappointment of the moment by focusing on the joys of the recreational game. But Shane also admitted that pro golf can be pretty seductive, and that he can’t quite quit it.
I’m with him, but to a greater extent, having spent a few more decades admiring the geniuses from Vardon to Scheffler. Pro golf and the skill and exploits of its players has always been the most interesting part of the game for me.
It’s part institutionalism. I respect the PGA Tour for the way it has lifted its niche sport every bit as impressively as the NFL, NBA and MLB have their mainstream team sports. Through shrewd management, the PGA Tour has consistently drawn the world’s best players to US venues, creating a historical standard that allows golfers from different eras to be credibly compared – although that continuum could be broken if the pro game is reshaped. Before the arrival of the LIV Golf League, the predominant assessment among players about the PGA Tour began with thanking Tiger Woods for being the catalyst to higher purses and other improvements, and ended with no serious complaints. Obviously, that’s no longer the case.
The other thing that’s made PGA Tour so compelling for me is the drama of the tour pro’s quest. The tour’s weekly instalments follow characters, rivalries, struggles, triumphs and artistry. Anyone who is good enough to get out there, and then shows devotion, resiliency, guts and grace, I’ve got admiration for and consider sources of inspiration and aspiration. The title of Al Barkow’s seminal history of the tour, Golf’s Golden Grind, got it right.
I emphasise the weekly tournament trail because it is distinct from the major championships and invaluable in its own right. Of course, the majors are golf’s most important events and rightfully draw the most interest. But just like the regular season in other sports, regular tournaments set the standard of measurement in pro golf, the broadest basis for the way players are sorted out. Their sheer volume gives us the right sample size, data and anecdotes to inform our impressions and opinions. And perhaps most importantly, it reminds us at regular intervals what great golf looks like.
For an example of a sport that suffers from lacking a solid “regular season”, consider professional tennis. While there are pro tennis events played nearly every week somewhere in the world, they do not form a cohesively connected tour and lack wide television coverage, creating confusion for followers of the sport. Clarity, and the sports world’s attention, only comes when the best all come together at the four major championships
In a different way, golf’s recent fragmentation through LIV’s poaching of top names has been responsible for an increase in stature among the men’s majors relative to regular weekly tour events. While defectors to LIV have been banned from PGA Tour events, they have remained eligible to play in all four majors, making those championships the only place where all the best players can come together.
Such an arrangement is bad for pro golf, which makes it bad for golf in general. It has ended the steady upward trajectory in importance that weekly pro golf has enjoyed since the 1950s, and especially since it officially became the PGA Tour in 1968. It’s been a shock to the system, but one that either from depression or denial has caused fans and even players to become apathetic even as the future becomes more fraught.
At the moment, it seems negotiations between the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s PIF and its governor, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, are enmeshed in anti-trust regulation hell, forcing a harrowing holding pattern in which all of golf’s lawyers and all the kingdom’s men can’t seem to put what’s left of the tour back together again. A crucial puzzle piece will involve possible ways, if any, in which LIV players can return to the PGA Tour.
The high stakes and secret negotiations have rendered players and officials basically mute, with the most substantive comment coming from McIlroy when he called the state of pro golf “a s–t show”. It’s estimated a US Department of Justice-vetted resolution is two years away, with history rendering its verdict on accountability well after that. In the meantime, here’s a pent-up but still premature one.
While LIV’s surrogates led by Greg Norman presented its challenge as one of overdue benign disruption, the “irrational threat” of the PIF’s billions has caused blatant destruction.
On the premise that the bigger the name, the deeper the wound, the main culprits have been defectors Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm. The cumulative effect of the trio’s jump, combined with DeChambeau’s dramatic victory at the US Open in June and his popular YouTube channel, has damaged the tour. Putting the moral considerations of taking Saudi money aside, all three undermined the institution that had given them the platform to make history and an albeit smaller fortune.
None of them has shown an ounce of contrition, nor has anyone else who went to LIV. At a 2022 LIV event at Trump Bedminister, I asked Charles Howell III and Paul Casey, two PGA Tour veterans who jumped, if they would feel any responsibility as defectors if the PGA Tour was ruined. Both very calmly and directly said, “No.” I’ve always understood when professional golfers say the demands of the game requires them to be selfish. But that selfish? It was chilling.
Underestimating selfishness and overestimating loyalty was Jay Monahan’s biggest mistake, one understandable for a golf romantic, but not a cold-eyed commissioner. Monahan might have been trying to channel 1994, when at a players’ meeting to discuss the offers Greg Norman was making to star players to jump to a new world league, Arnold Palmer stood up to say that he and Jack Nicklaus had years before received similar offers to start a series of lucrative exhibitions but decided that accepting would have hurt the game and the tour. “Greg, I don’t want any part of this,” he reportedly said and walked out of the room, taking any support for Norman’s proposal with him.
Woods and McIlroy tried to be similar oracles this time, but no revered elder was able to hold back defectors. Yes, the money was much greater and so perhaps is the current player’s sense of entitlement. But in the end, it was up to the players to stop LIV, and they didn’t.
I take issue with the assertion that everyone has the right to make the best “business decision” for themselves, damn the collateral damage. Or that no one should presume to know how they would react to an offer of generational wealth. Considering the chaos that’s ensued, and the way LIV has failed to work within golf’s ecosystem to get its players world-ranking points or have them play their home tours with impunity, it would have been a better business to say “no”.
Each player who said “yes” to LIV helped spoil the PGA Tour’s secret sauce – the unwritten but higher ethical code of honour that has been expected of pro golfers compared to athletes in other sports, as well as a meritocratic income system in which players earn prizemoney in direct proportion to the quality of their performance, as opposed to guaranteed salaries. The perception that pro golfers adhered to that code had much to do with why Corporate America lined up to sponsor PGA Tour events and otherwise be involved with golf.
But now players have jumped to LIV, and even those who didn’t have leveraged the PGA Tour to drastically raise its purses to match LIV money, even though it meant squeezing title sponsors of tournaments whose fields have fewer name stars than they used to. In addition, some 232 players will now split $US930 million in equity awards, with Tiger Woods receiving $100 million, from the for-profit PGA Tour Enterprises that has been formed, partly as a payoff for not leaving for LIV.
With all the new money, something has been lost. The former elevated image of pro golfers in the sports world has been knocked down a couple of notches. It’s safe to say that the PGA Tour’s former motto, the double entendre “These guys are good”, which ran from 1997 until 2018, wouldn’t work as well today.
It also means that the current indefinite delay facing the tour’s negotiations with the PIF comes at a bad time. The longer things drag on without clarity, the more a wounded tour is at risk at losing its crowd. Worse than being frustrated and angry, exhausted fans could simply stop caring and move on. When baseball players went on strike in 1994, causing the playoffs and World Series to be cancelled, many fans were embittered and attendance numbers stayed down for more than a decade.
The MLB has recovered, and I hope the PGA Tour will fully regain its former stature and prove my rash prediction wrong. But for that to happen, LIV will have to go away. Until then, pro golfers can keep playing for more, but it will mean less.
