LIV Golf has cash, but not PGA Tour’s cachet
At some point, if the moral outrage subsides (it shouldn’t) and the eye-popping payouts fade into the background, this will become mostly about golf. The players. The actual competition.
And that doesn’t shape up as especially appetizing, either.
The LIV Golf Invitational Series makes its United States debut Thursday outside Portland, Ore. Three weeks ago, when the inaugural event was held near London, Charl Schwartzel held off Hennie du Plessis to win.
Boy, that was riveting. Oh, wait, you don’t remember?
Greg Norman and his rogue tour obviously can’t claim the ethical high ground. Not when its funding comes from Saudi Arabia, widely known for rampant human-rights abuses. Not when this looks, feels and smells like a blatant attempt at “sportswashing.”
Norman’s bold, distasteful venture also can’t claim any sort of golf high ground. Not when its highest-profile player is Phil Mickelson, whose age (52) and world ranking (84) suggest he’s not terribly relevant anymore.
And not when LIV’s other big-name players — Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Patrick Reed — are, well, not terribly likable.
Koepka, Reed and Pat Perez held a news conference Tuesday at Pumpkin Ridge, the suburban Portland course hosting this week’s tournament. One journalist on site, Golf Digest’s Dan Rapaport, described the session as “borderline combative … like, ‘Screw you, I have the money. I don’t care what you think.’ ”
That sounds like a great way to persuade people to pay attention.
Some fans will ignore the money behind LIV, no doubt. They will set aside Saudi Arabia’s criminalization of homosexuality and the 2018 murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent government critic. They conveniently will separate golf and real life.
Other fans will consider the wider-lens view and stay away. The sports landscape is crowded enough.
But many fans fall somewhere in between. They need a good reason to start caring about a shady upstart league. They need compelling competition to overlook all the questionable motives.
They want to watch the best golfers, in other words, and those men stayed on the PGA Tour. None of the top 15 players in the world ranking took the LIV money, no matter how tempting it might have been.
Not coincidentally, this includes the most popular players. Jon Rahm, Rory McIlroy, Collin Morikawa, Justin
Thomas and Jordan Spieth resonate with fans — not only because of their success, but also because they come off as engaging, genuine and, yes, likable.
McIlroy’s candor is especially refreshing. He hasn’t wavered from his LIV opposition, including an insightful quote about how decisions made “purely for money” seldom work out.
McIlroy also took a not-sosubtle shot at players such as Koepka, who fled after pledging loyalty to the PGA Tour.
“I’m surprised at a lot of these guys because they say one thing and then they do another,” McIlroy said last week. “I don’t understand that, and I don’t know if that’s for legal reasons or … I have no idea. But it’s pretty duplicitous on their part to say one thing and then do another thing.”
Some of this traces to the fantasy world elite golfers inhabit. They travel the globe, often in private jets. They rarely field tough questions. They dodge controversy as reliably as they make 4-foot putts.
They play an individual sport, so they think mostly about their own interests. That’s understandable, but it also hasn’t stopped golfers such as McIlroy from seeing the bigger picture.
If there’s one positive coming from LIV’s emergence, it’s forcing PGA Tour officials — who crave total control — to become more flexible. They magically increased purses and reshaped their schedule, to give top players more time off.
That should have happened years ago. The tour needs to listen to its top players, as Reed contended Tuesday.
The next challenge will be keeping the game’s most promising young players from joining LIV. The PGA Tour took a smart step two years ago, creating a direct path for the best college players to join the Korn Ferry Tour.
Now, as Rapaport argued on golfdigest.com, it’s time to create a similarly direct path from the college game to the “big tour.” That’s more important than ever, with Norman lurking around the corner waving piles of Saudi cash.
The moral element of this whole saga might wane eventually, but not yet. Several mayors in the Portland area wrote a letter to Pumpkin Ridge’s owners protesting the decision to host this week’s tournament. Also, a group of survivors and families who lost loved ones in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis — plan to criticize the LIV series Thursday. That will keep scrutiny on Mickelson, Johnson and Koepka, among others.
Their next stop, next month: Trump National Bedminster. How fitting.