LIV players coming back to PGA Tour?
LAS VEGAS, Nevada: The video board at Las Vegas Country Club showed 4:29 as it counted down the time to when the range would close and LIV Golf Las Vegas could start. In the sky, a group of parachuters floated their way to the first fairway, adding to the spectacle.
A man approached and asked, “Where do I find Jon Rahm?” He was on the second hole, not unusual, except the tournament still had not started.
LIV Golf is different — and yes, louder, but only because of speakers set up near tees and grandstands for a constant beat of music throughout the day.
This is the life 54 players chose when they signed up for the Saudi-funded league, some of them for enormous signing bonuses. Rahm was the most recent when the Masters champion donned a black letterman’s jacket to pose with LIV Chief Executive Officer Greg Norman in December.
And they appear to like it — 54-hole tournaments, shotgun starts, no cuts, $20 million purses, $50,000 guaranteed for last place (down from $120,000 when the field was 48 players).
Golf has never been more fractured than
now. But even as the conversation turns to punishment — if any — for players who took the Saudi cash should they want to return starts with whether they even want to come back to the PGA Tour.
It’s hard to find many who are in a big rush.
The notion LIV was going away when the PGA Tour agreed to a commercial deal with the Saudi backers of the rival league has given way to the realization LIV isn’t going anywhere soon.
There’s also the question whether the tour, which last week signed Strategic Sports Group as a minority investor for as much as $3 billion, will ever strike a deal with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, the original partner in the June 6 framework agreement.
“We could throw around ideas here forever and not get to a really good outcome,” Adam Scott, one of six players on the PGA Tour board, said last week at Pebble Beach.
Scott was asked if unification was necessary to meet PGA Tour business goals.
And on it goes, LIV in Las Vegas during the Super Bowl, the PGA Tour in Phoenix, great players on both tours going about business in their own way, emotions driving each side.