Game saturated with greed in danger of losing viewers
With money now so easy to come by in a game divided by the LIV breakaway, entitlement is off the scale as this year’s US Masters arrives, writes Oliver Brown.
Jon Rahm cuts a tortured figure at this Masters, dripping in unimaginable wealth and yet racked with the first signs of regret. “I understood it could be a step towards some kind of agreement,” he says of the move that has brought him £450 million (NZ$944.4m) and an ostentatious branded bomber jacket, while doing nothing to heal golf’s great schism. “I still did what I thought was best for myself.”
Nowhere is the Spaniard’s inner conflict more vivid than here at Augusta. Inside the clubhouse library, he can play the perfect host, the defending champion treating his fellow Masters winners to a dinner of cured Iberian pork, Basque ribeye and Mama Rahm’s classic lentil stew. Out on the course, he is reduced to crude product placement, wearing a cap emblazoned with the LIV logo and that of his Legion XIII team. It is about as subtle an advert as when Gary Player’s son Wayne decided, in 2021, to stand behind Lee Elder for the ceremonial start and hold up a sleeve of his favourite golf balls for TV.
A year is the longest time in a sport in tumult. Rahm, having seen his popularity peak after his triumph here 12 months ago, has returned to this slice of paradise with his reputation shredded.
“He went from being viewed as his own man to somebody who could be bought,” said former tour player Brandel Chamblee, a vehement critic of the Saudi Arabiabacked breakaway.
“He went from someone who stated his principles clearly to one who turned his back on those principles for money. You can’t pretend that the motive to take the money is good when it’s so heavily fertilised in greed.”
Greed: it is the word with which every facet of professional golf is now synonymous.
It was grim enough back in 2007, when FedEx started offering PGA Tour players a £7 million end-of-season bonus. But today, Rory McIlroy collects almost twice that amount for finishing top of the tour’s Player Impact Programme, a trumpedup popularity contest gauged by such metrics as Google search data and “general population awareness”.
Some of the sport’s veteran journalists reflect on how little depresses them more than receiving a press release each year to confirm that 20 multimillionaires have received millions more for doing nothing.
With money so easy, entitlement is off the scale. The pressure to match the LIV bounties means that prize pools for middling tour events in Connecticut and South Carolina have swelled to £16m apiece.
Against this backdrop, Patrick Cantlay, who has collected zero major titles but £55m in career earnings, still considers himself underpaid, to the point that he allegedly refused to wear a Team USA cap at last year’s Ryder Cup in protest at the lack of recompense. Cantlay denied the claims, but the damage was done, with European supporters in Rome striking up a chant of “Hats off for your bank account”.
On the surface, this is just classic baiting of an unpopular opponent. But it also suggests a deeper rupture between the players swimming in cash and those who pay to watch them. Fans recognise the obscenity of what is happening: they see how absurd it is for Cantlay, a man who would not even be deemed famous in his own living room, to be demanding Cristiano Ronaldo levels of remuneration.
Increasingly, they are voting with their remote controls. Viewing figures for all PGA Tour events are down this year, by as much as 20%, and even McIlroy is worried. “That’s a fifth,” he says. “That’s big.”
Fred Ridley, chairman of Augusta National, is not downplaying his alarm either, acknowledging that his sport is suffering from an LIV-induced shortage of match-ups between its finest talents.
“The fact that the best players in the world are not convening very often is not helpful,” he argues.
It is why this year’s Masters assumes profound magnitude for golf’s future. Augusta represents life in a bubble: people inside the gates are either in a reverential daze at the azaleas or eating their own body weight in pimento cheese sandwiches, oblivious to the world beyond.
But the powerbrokers and TV executives will be watching the numbers more closely than ever.
If even the Masters, one of the most coveted TV properties in all sport, mirrors the recent decline in popular interest, it will be irrefutable proof that the game has a serious problem.
The issue, essentially, is that golf feels as though it has been denuded of its wider meaning. When the sport is at its purest, it can be transcendent: think of Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson and their Duel in the Sun at Turnberry, or Ben Hogan coming back from a horrific car crash to win six of his nine majors, or Tiger Woods rebounding from scandal and arrest to seize his fifth Green Jacket. Where are sequels to these soul-stirring narratives?
Instead, all we see today is an endless parade of vulgar self-enrichment, with Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth flipping cards on their private jet for Netflix, or Ian Poulter enthusing about his LIV team’s latest cryptocurrency deal.
It makes Eddie Pepperell, twice a winner on the DP World Tour, believe that the game he used to adore is going to hell in a handcart. “Pro golf is on a one-way street to nowhere,” he said recently. “Lost its mind, and I’ve lost my love and respect for it.”
It was a salutary illustration of the harm that golf’s heedless lurch towards Monopoly money has inflicted.
The impression is that many players care far more about themselves than about the integrity or the sanctity or their sport. It is little wonder, amid their egocentric orgy, that their public feels so alienated.