Star Wars intensifies as the rebel alliance grows

How many defectors will it take to tip the balance? Have the PGA lost?

When does a drip become a torrent? When do we reach critical mass in golf’s great game of angels and demons?

With each week, the PGA Tour would seem to be absorbing ever harder lessons in what it means to no longer be the biggest boy in the yard.

Few will have been more bruising than this one, and within that we might in time trace the most concussive point in this civil war to 6.07pm on Wednesday evening.

There was no surprise in the confirmation by LIV Golf that they had signed Brooks Koepka — it was reported widely earlier in the week — but it was the Machiavellian seediness in how the message was timed that felt significant.

That is because it came in the minutes after Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, had taken his seat at a press conference to announce his counter-measures against a ‘foreign monarchy that is spending billions of dollars to buy golf’.

Greg norman’s rebels had waited for Monahan to get neck deep in outlining his plans before they hit the button to send, and in a stroke they celebrated that a massive name had jumped into the Saudi money pit (Koepka’s number was around $100million, if you must know).

To say the gloves came off with the scheduling of their release would mean overlooking that they were ditched for knives, swords, maces and axes by both sides weeks ago.

The real impact of the manoeuvre came in it dropping at the very moment Monahan was playing a trump card, which was the splashing of cash.

The key here is that Koepka almost certainly knew more money was heading to the PGA Tour. he had spoken to Monahan as recently as Monday and it is worth noting they are sufficiently friendly for the PGA boss to have attended the former world no1’s wedding less than three weeks ago.

For that reason it would be naive to think Koepka had no advance warning of what would be discussed with 100 PGA members at a meeting on Tuesday — that the Tour are pumping an extra $54m into prize funds for eight events and plan to throw a vast amount more at an autumn series that sounds eerily like the LIV formula.

With all that in mind, and in spite of assurances previously given, Koepka chose to leave anyway, without so much as a heads up to Monahan that it was a signed deal.

If it was brutally cold, then it also played somewhat to a point Monahan had made in his opening remarks: ‘If this is an arms race and if the only weapons here are dollar bills, the PGA Tour can’t compete.’

he tried to fight money with money and a tone of righteousness and succeeded in record time in proving his own argument that such battles with the Saudis are foolishly entered.

Which takes us back to critical mass. how many defectors is enough to tip the balance? At what point do LIV win?

Arguably, one answer to that is they won’t without Tiger Woods or Rory McIlroy, or at least a combination of Justin Thomas, Scottie Scheffler, Jon Rahm, Jordan Spieth or a select few others who might qualify as golf’s bigger names.

norman’s task will be immensely harder still if LIV don’t succeed in the political struggle to be eligible for the majors from 2023 onwards — without that platform, their men of immense wealth will wither into a competitive irrelevance. But perhaps a better question here is have the PGA Tour already lost?

Time will tell what happens around the huge unknowns of the majors and the Ryder Cup, and indeed what the DP World Tour might ever say on all this, but there is no doubt that Koepka leaves an awfully big hole and the PGA Tour is taking on critical volumes of water.

That first LIV field at Centurion was laughable, in its way, given some of the names that made up the numbers.

But it’s a serious bunch that will play in Portland at the end of the month — adding to Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Louis Oosthuizen, Charl Schwartzel, Sergio Garcia and the rest, they now have Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Patrick Reed and Abraham Ancer. In other words, LIV Golf players have accounted for nine of the past 21 majors.

Whether many or any golf fans will care to watch their LIV exhibition series is open to debate. What can be said with far greater certainty is that the PGA Tour, for all its legitimacy of competition and history, can ill afford to lose many more star attractions.